Cee Shanty

Sea shanties and other work songs seem to be natural for filking. A good example is "White Collar Holler". I've been setting some of my own own CeeFaring adventures to my favorite shanties. I'll update this page as the lyrics become more fully baked. Feel free to contribute suggestions; that's what folk singing is all about! -- IanOsgood

White Collar Holler -- Stan Rogers (written by Nigel Russell)

 Well, I rise up every morning at a quarter to eight
 Some woman who's my wife tells me not to be late
 I kiss the kids goodbye, I can't remember their names
 And week after week, it's always the same

   And it's Ho, boys, can't you code it, [huunh] and program it right
   Nothing ever happens in the life of mine
   I'm hauling up the data on the Xerox line

 Then it's code in the data, give the keyboard a punch
 Then cross-correlate and break for some lunch
 Correlate, tabulate, process and screen
 Program, printout, regress to the mean

   [Chorus]

 Then it's home again, eat again, watch some TV
 Make love to my woman at ten-fifty-three
 I dream the same dream when I'm sleeping at night
 I'm soaring over hills like an eagle in flight

   [Chorus]

 Someday I'm gonna give up all the buttons and things
 I'll punch that time clock till it can't ring
 Burn up my necktie and set myself free
 Cause no'one's gonna fold, bend or mutilate me

   [Chorus, replacing huunh with ooooo]
   [Chorus]

(to the tune of "Paddy Lay Back")

 'Twas a cold and rainy morining in December   [December...]
 And all of me money it was spent.  [spent... spent...]
 And where the hell it went I don't remember  [remember...]
 So off to Monster.com I went.  [went... went...]

   Paddy lay back  [Paddy lay back...]
   Code up a hack  [code up a hack...]
   Take a turn around the code base, fix a bug.
   About script syntax, boys, be handy  [be handy...]
   We're bound to ship at MacWorld? in a month.

 [To be continued]

The Last Extensis Engineer (a [fictional!] DotCom disaster sung to the tune of "Barrett's Privateers")

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See PoemsParodyAndFilkRoadMap

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CategoryWhimsy