The day after my post on how to find healthy veggies, Mary and I decided to grab some burgers for lunch.

As we sat down, I noticed “Heart of Stone,” from the Rolling Stones’s first album, playing in the background.  I was contemplating impermanence – how quickly the songs of youth wind up on the oldies station – when the song ended, and “Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer” came on.

I looked at Mary.  I muttered an expletive and said, “I thought we were done with all that!”

Our food came, and the music shifted to “Chain of Fools,” a good old Motown classic.  I sighed with relief.  Life was good.  January was good.  January means months and months without “holiday music.”

Or so I thought…

Until “Holly Jolly Christmas” began to play…

More than any other song, “Holly Jolly Christmas” reminds me of pre-transformation Scrooge and the wisdom of his comments concerning boiling certain people in their own Christmas puddings.

“Maybe they just want to hurry us out the door,” Mary said.

I slugged down the rest of my drink.  “It’s working,” I said.

The question I’m left with is, who put together that playlist?  I’m ruling out computer generation, since in my experience, the algorithms, (like iTunes’s “Genius” function) are too sophisticated to create such a mishmash.  I’m left with two theories:

1. In an effort to save money, satellite radio stations now use institutionalized sociopaths to assemble their playlists.
2. In an effort to save money, satellite radio stations now use chimps.

I kind of hope it’s the latter, although chimps-in-charge is not a trend that bodes well for things like TV schedules or mid-term election advertising, which will probably start up next week.

If you have any other ideas on who is to blame for Burl Ives in January, please let us know so we can free the poor chimpanzees from blame!

photo by Will Brenner, CC BY-ND 2.0