“Pilots come out of the sky and stand there” and other misheard things

The last time I left you, I was talking about more things that make you go hmmm…and then WTF?!*@$*! Today, I think specifically of things that make my wife or me go, “WTF?” when we think we hear one thing and it’s actually something else entirely being said. And for those of you mommy-bloggers surfing past this, that “F” stands for “Fahrvenugen,” nothing else. I know that it doesn’t make any sense, since Fahrevenugen means joy of driving in German, but ach, well.

A few years ago, somehow in the course of a conversation, I mentioned to my wife that I liked listening to Sibelius. That he was so sublime. Or something silly to that effect. She said she thought I was making the name up. I told her no, I wasn’t. “Jean Sibelius or Johan Julius Christian Jean Sibelius was a Finnish composer of the later Romantic period and one of the most notable composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His music played an important role in the formation of the Finnish national identity,” according to Wikipedia, that great wealth of online information (ha).

So now every time we hear something about Sibelius on NPR, which is really so often since we listen to it all the time (okay, we don’t, but our doppelgangers do in that alternate universe where we are cool uber-intellectual-types — who, by the way, know synonyms for “cool uber-intellectual” that sound much more erudite than this), she says to me, “Ah, Sibelius, I love his work.”

Which brings me to today, in which this is what I heard from the bedroom while we were getting ready for a graduation party we were attending for a neighbor who had just graduated from high school:

“We keep missing Harzog.”

Or I should say, this is what I thought I heard as that clearly made no sense, since I don’t know Harzog. But my mind in its normal stream-of-consciousness way jumped to a name I had heard in the past: Herzog, the title character of a novel by Saul Bellow. You probably remember Bellow from some of his other novels, Dangling Man, The Victim, Seize the Day and Henderson the Rain King — at which point, now you should be saying: “Ah, Bellow, I love his work.” Regardless, according to an introduction to the book in this handy reading guide from Penguin Books for the book:

Winner of the National Book Award when it was first published in 1964, Herzog traces five days in the life of a failed academic whose wife has recently left him for his best friend. Through the device of letter writing, Herzog movingly portrays both the internal life of its eponymous hero and the complexity of modern consciousness.

One word: yaaaaaaawwwwwn.

No, I’ve never read the novel, but then I told her it was part of a trilogy, with “Son of Herzog” and “Grandson of Herzog” being the sequels.

“You’re just making up that, aren’t you?”

According to the aforementioned work, and vast research done with the help of Wikipedia, yes, I did make that up.

Which leads me in a roundabout way to that very song by Yes.

For years, my wife said she thought the lyrics were as follows:

In and around the lake
Pilots come out of the sky and stand there

I told her that no, the lyrics were as follows:

In and around the lake
Mountains come out of the sky and stand there

Which I’ll be honest, I am not that much of a prog rocker that I knew the lyrics off the top of my head. It’s just that for some reason, I used the above video in a post recently (I don’t remember where, but I did).

Aside: If you think those lyrics don’t make any sense, in context, the rest don’t help any:

One mile over we’ll be there and we’ll see you
Ten true summers we’ll be there and laughing too
Twenty four before my love you’ll see I’ll be there with you

At least, they didn’t help me. I don’t know about you. If you’re some twisted f (again, that stands for Fahrvenugen or in this case Fahrvenugener, which even though I had four years of German in high school, I’m not really sure if that’s correct, although somehow I doubt it) and you understand what this means, then more power to ya.

So what exactly was my wife saying that I misheard when I thought she said:

“We keep missing Harzog.”

It was this:

“We keep missing Car Talk.”

Many a Saturday morning, we listen to Car Talk and this morning in our busyness, we forgot (okay, we do listen to NPR all the time, even listening to Garrison Keillor sometimes, even though we don’t know the synonyms for “cool uber-intellectual” that sound much more erudite than that and as people who listen to NPR, hell, we should know those words and use them regularly and not use words like hell in casual conversation or blogging, unless we think we’re like Ira Glass in This American Life and we have some miserable story to share about how much some aspect of our life is like hell).