Lost in Cyberspace

Today The Dagley Dagley Daily sadly notes the loss of at least one of our recent posts, the one headlined "Triage" posted April 11. While we believe with all our hearts that it's always, always good to have backups, backups, and more backups of things that are important to us, we have learned from this experience that backups do no good if they are backups of things that were already gone. In backing up the entire blog during our recent technical difficulties, and backing up that backup just to be sure, we failed to note that the posts from April 12 and April 11 had been replaced with a cryptic two-word message from Blogger: "Big Body." Obviously Blogger has never met me, or they would have replaced my words with "Short Body" instead. In any case, while we did have a separate copy of the April 12 post, it appears our only surviving backup (in 3 places) of the April 11 post is the "Big Body" message. Oh well. Shikata ga nai (Japanese for "it couldn't be helped" or "unfortunate thing happened; we must go on," or as Donald Rumsfeld would put it, "Stuff happens").

Elsewhere on the disappearance front, a cartoon by Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial cartoonist Mike Luckovich that was pulled from publication got circulated on the Internet anyway, though most of the publicly posted copies have now been pulled as well. For those who didn't see it, the cartoon featured a spoof of the new Georgia flag, with the proposed flag slogan "In God We Trust" replaced with another popular phrase, "I'm with Stupid," captioned: "A flag Georgians of all races could unite around."

Elsewhere in the Southeastern Conference, Felice Bryant, the surviving co-author of "Rocky Top," has died in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, at the age of 77. She and her husband Boudleaux Bryant, who died in 1987, wrote many better known and more popular songs such as "Bye Bye Love" (recorded by the Everly Brothers) and "Raining in My Heart" (recorded by Buddy Holly), but only "Rocky Top" became a sports anthem, a rallying cry for University of Tennessee sports teams, whether football or basketball, male or female. "Rocky Top" was written in 10 minutes in 1968, Mrs. Bryant told interviewers years later, and the mountain in question is fictitious (but not the "corn from a jar"). It was first popularized by a couple of Kentuckians, the Osborne Brothers, and has been played and played and played and played and played by the University of Tennessee marching band at sporting events since 1972. The Bryants wrote more than 800 songs together, recorded by more than 500 artists. "Rocky Top" works much better as a sports rallying cry than the "Tennessee" song they taught us in school, "Dear Hearts and Gentle People", made popular (if it ever was) by Tennessean Dinah Shore as well as Bing Crosby and Gordon MacRae. The version we learned in elementary school began, "There's a place I'd like to be, and it's back in Tennessee," while other versions were localized for other areas ("There's a place I'd like to go and it's Batten, Idaho"), but apparently there is no version for New Jersey or Hoboken, which is just as well. Local songs should be local, not local-ized, and while football players may have "dear hearts," they can't be "gentle people" on the field.