Monday, May 20, 2013

Speee* (for Speed*, etc.)

Have you ever seen that Trojans commercial called "The New Apartment" in which a female singer can be heard in the background softly crooning the Elvis Presley classic "All Shook Up"? All shook up, that is, and all slowed down. As a matter of fact—and apart from the fact that anything in the erotic realm that encourages people to slow down and take their time is to be highly recommended—somehow it seems like the exact right tempo at which to sing this song. It's only a short clip, and they wisely decided to leave out the cryptic lyric "I'm itching like a man on a fuzzy tree," which when you stop to think about it probably isn't the best imagery to employ in an ad about lovemaking. A friend thinks it might be a reference to Spanish moss, but others have suggested a rose tree or a peach tree. Regardless, it's really a rather haunting rendition and I'm happy to have heard it, albeit in a condoms commercial. So who do you thank when you have such luck? The singer, it turns out, is a young woman named Eva Avila, who enjoyed a speedy rise to fame after winning the fourth season of Canadian Idol in 2006. (Just "hours after her victory," she signed with a major record label.) At any rate, don't rush through today's typo, which was found five times in OhioLINK and 115 times in WorldCat.

(The Lovers Tango, La Boca, Argentina, 4 October 2009, from Wikimedia Commons.)

Carol Reid

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