I always find music a fun thing to do: musical instruments are ‘played’, and the word ‘music’ lends itself to other words like ‘amuse’, ‘amusing’ and ‘amusement’. If ones looks up the meaning of ‘amusement’ on OED.com, one would find that one of the definitions says ‘the pleasurable occupation of the attention, or diversion of the mind (from serious duties, etc.)’. Such a parenthetical comment is just the excuse for playing!

Whenever my serious duties call for a diversion of the mind, a never failing solution is to submerge myself in the world of Victor Borge, ‘The Clown Prince of Denmark’. A Google video search would provide plenty of entertainment by Borge and quite possibly lots of distraction from what one is supposed to be doing! To me, he is simply the best musician-comedian of the 20th century. On occasion his pacing might be a little slow, but his rendition of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody is hilarious without parallel, his interpretation of Mozart’s opera caustically awesome, and his recomposition of ‘Happy Birthday’ ingenious. One only needs to watch to experience, and there are plenty of YouTube clips available online. Among his famous routines is the ‘Inflationary Language’, whereby numbers embedded in words are inflated: ‘wonderful’ would become ‘twoderful’, ‘create’ would become ‘crenine’, etc. I always wonder why he did not inflate language musically such that ‘radiate’ would become ‘mediate’, and ‘a cup of tea’ would become ‘a cup of dough’, la on and la forth…

So, without further ado, I leave you to the pleasurable distraction of Victor Borge.