Comme d’Habitude

My fascination with all things David Bowie is well documented. (Thanks, Dawn, for the Flight of the Conchords link!) I once dedicated an entire post to the evolution of the Bowie song, “Life on Mars”. You may recall that “Life on Mars” was supposedly Bowie’s response to not having had his version of the Sinatra classic “My Way” picked up by the big labels.

See, there was a great French song called “Comme d’Habitude” that had a hypnotic and powerful melody, and there was great interest in creating an English version of it. Bowie wrote his version, called “Even A Fool Learns to Love”, the lyrics for which are here. But Paul Anka managed to buy the rights to the melody, and turned it into “My Way“, which he promptly gave to Frank Sinatra, and history was made.

I thought you might be curious to hear the original French version. The lyrics to this original song are here and, trust me, they’re a lot more interesting and poetic than the Sinatra version. The originator, Claude Francois, had a powerful voice but looked kind of freakish. Dig the waxed eyebrows. I think he may have been the godfather of the modern guido:

And because we’re all about circularity, here’s Paul Anka trying to recapture some of that pop magic by covering Duran Duran’s “Ordinary World”:

To complete the circle, here’s Simon Le Bon getting pwned by Pavarotti, doing the same song:

In Other News:

You will note, I hope, a few changes to this site. The archives are a bit more tidy, and there’s a new widget on the side, from feedjit.com, that I hope is showing us the geographical location of recent visitors. Cool, huh? (Now I can finally see where these people are who keep googling “dog fucking stories” and ending up here. Actually, I already just found one of them: he’s Acton, Massachusetts. Hi, fella! Thanks, Feedjit.com!)

Meanwhile, there’s a new article up on Skiffy.ca about the great, overlooked Canadian series, Odyssey 5.

“Brad Parker” sends us arvindguptatoys.com, a site that popularizes educational toys.

Brother Bhash sends us this new search engine, Cuil.com, which is supposed to be a competitor for google. See, “cuil” is supposed to sound like “kewl” or “cool” or something. (Actually, it means “wisdom” in Gaelic.) So far, I’m not too impressed. Neither is Time.

Finally, further to my so-far failed attempts to migrate to Ubuntu, Nasty Nicky B sends us this from here:

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