I’ll Take Geography For $500, Leonard
Welcome to the Heck of a Guy Blog. This is how we play our game - all you have to do is read the copy shown below and answer one simple question:
Is it …
A. A newspaper story about the Leonard Cohen 2008 Tour
OR
B. DrHGuy’s spoof lampooning the Leonard Cohen 2008 Tour?
The Context
To maintain a level playing field, those players unfamiliar with DrHGuy’s parodies may wish to review a sample or two, such as Wedding Protection1 or, keeping the focus on Leonard Cohen, 10 Fake Items About Leonard Cohen.2
For players unfamiliar with the the pertinent events, the real life context of the copy follows: Leonard Cohen, at age 73, is launching a world tour, his first in 15 years. After some delays, the schedule and location of the concerts are being made public this week. The first announcements on Marc 11th listed concerts in Toronto, Montreal, Dublin, Manchester, Glastonbury, Helsingborg, London, Lisbon, Athens, Istanbul, Vienna, and several other major European cities, but none in the US. Two days later, a second group of concerts has been added to the tour. The copy below is - actually or supposedly - about this second set of concert dates and locations.
Got that? OK, here’s …
The Copy
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The Glace Bay Gleaner
Now Updated Daily
Leonard Cohen Coming To Glace Bay
The Glace Bay Gleaner has confirmed that Candian music legend Leonard Cohen will be performing at The Savoy Theatre on May 20th, 2008. The Glace Bay show is just one of five Atlantic Canada stops Cohen will make on his world tour. He will also be performing in Halifax, Charlottetown, Moncton and St. John’s.
_____________________
The Question
Is the copy real or a DrHGuy-concocted fake?
The Answer
Believe it or not, Glace Bay, the “Now Updated Daily” Glace Bay Gleaner, and the schedule showing that city hosting a concert by Leonard Cohen are real.3 Check out the entire story at Leonard Cohen Coming To Glace Bay.
The Explanation
I blame myself. Heck of a Guy posts about the Atlantic provinces clearly made this area too attractive for the Cohen caravan to pass by. See what I mean at DrHGuy’s Happy Newfie Year Celebration and The Perspective Of and On The Best Pole Dancing Ad In Halifax
While this and the other Atlantic Canada concerts are too far removed from northern Illinois for DrHGuy to attend, this turn of events is not exclusively bad news for DrHGuy; there is still reason to hope. After all, as the classic Leonard Cohen song goes,
Then we take selected communities in McHenry County Illinois4
Footnotes
- Excerpt from Wedding Protection:
I admit that I’m perfectly content as and prefer to remain a member of the unmarried, but I will also point out that I certainly have the potential for getting married. Heck, if one takes a look at my first marriage, it’s clear that I am capable of marrying the wrong spouse at the wrong time for the wrong reason in the face of all kinds of warnings and signals. I am the proverbial loose cannon. And I figure that’s gotta be worth something. The bargain I’m offering to strike is a simple one: friends, family, and anyone else that I might find a reasonable premise to invite to my wedding, reception, showers, bachelor and bachelorette parties, etc (and I can be pretty darn clever when it comes to such rationalizations; if your name can be approximated with the English alphabet, you are in jeopardy) can either make a modest contribution (calculated at approximately half the value of an appropriate wedding present) in commemoration of my unwed status OR those same individuals can risk the pains, inconvenience, and fiscal cost of involvement in my matrimonial bliss. Now, I’m not saying I will definitely get married if you all don’t pay off. Maybe I’m just bluffing; maybe I’m not. But before you decide whether to call that bluff, … ↩ - Excerpt from 10 Fake Items About Leonard Cohen follows: 2. Frustrated by his difficulty in learning to dance and embarrassed by the jokes made at his expense (e.g., “I guess you won’t be dancing anyone to the end of anything”), Cohen responded by composing an embittered bit of doggerel called Take This Waltz and Shove It. It was only years later, after Cohen was hired to write an advertising jingle for Arthur Murray Dance Studios, that he recalled his earlier sardonic verse and revised it into the song now known as Take This Waltz.↩
- Sometimes, it appears, one really can’t make this stuff up.↩
- This line, alas, is a zany DrHGuy parody, not part of the real Leonard Cohen 2008 Tour Schedule↩
