Lost childhood media: "Mon ami, mon ami" song

 I have a song stuck in my head, and the only lyrics I can remember are "Mon ami" repeated over and over.

 

Mon ami, mon ami

Mon ami, mon ami

Mon ami, mon ami

Mon ami, mon a-mi 

The tune of this "mon ami" song can be heard here.

 

I am confident I've gotten the tune right, but less than 100% confident that the words I remember are "mon ami", or that "mon ami" are the only words. When I sing it to myself in my head it's in an anglo accent, which suggests, I first heard it before I started learning French in Grade 4.

 

Ring a bell for anyone? 

The girl mice have bows on their tails - that's how you tell that they're girls

I have a memory of being a preschooler looking at a picture book that included cartoonish/anthropomorphicish mice, and noticing the girl mice have bows on their tails - that's how you tell they're girls!

 

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

 

The mice wouldn't be out of place in Disney's Cinderella or in Richard Scarry, but it isn't Cinderella or Richard Scarry. (Also, in those books, the mice are wearing full outfits of clothing that you can use to tell their gender.)

 

They were less anthropomorphic than Mickey Mouse, but they almost certainly walked on two legs instead of four. They likely lived in houses, cooked food in kitchens, went to school, etc., but I remember them as living in "the olden days" rather than modern times. Their tails were very skinny - you could draw the tail with a single line.

 

I don't think the book explicitly stated that bows on the tails meant the mouse was a girl - I remember the emotion of figuring that out for myself.

 

Anyone happen to know the exact thing I'm talking about?

"Birds and animals, lots of different kinds"

I have this song stuck in my head that I remember from a childhood TV show, and I can find no evidence of it on the internet.

The lyrics:

Birds and animals, lots of different kinds

Wild ones and tame ones

On the farm and in the jungle

In your home and at the zoo

In the pet store too

Even dinosaurs from long ago

The tune is here.

 

I remember it being sung on close harmony by both male and female voices in a way that made me first think it was Sharon, Lois & Bram, but I can find no evidence that Sharon, Lois & Bram sang it. (Although as I replay the song in my head, I can only place two voices, one male and one female. However, that aspect of my memory isn't necessarily reliable.)

 

I'm nearly certain it's from a TV show, so it would have been a TV show available by antenna in Southern Ontario in the 1980s. 

It's highly unlikely that I imagined this or wrote it myself (it wouldn't have occurred to me to write a song like this without a rhymier rhyme scheme). Anyone have any idea where it did come from?

 

Hotel Hollywood (elementary school play)

When I was in elementary school (so sometime between 1985 and 1990), my school put on a school play called Hotel Hollywood.

I wasn't in the play, but it really stuck with me - I even mentally wrote what I didn't yet know was called fanfiction about it.

However, I'm not able to find any evidence of its existence on the recorded internet.

So here is everything I can remember about the elementary school play called Hotel Hollywood, which I encountered in the 1980s, but might be older than that.

- There was a character called Quiggley and a character called Quiggy. I remember them as being unaffiliated with each other, although in retrospect that seems less likely. (Although I also remember experiencing the emotion of being surprised that Quiggley and Quiggy were unaffiliated with each other, so perhaps it was a deliberate red herring.)

- One of the characters was a Shirley Temple expy with her hair in ringlets.

- One of the characters was a girl whose father made her dress up as a boy so she could be a partner in his business. (The play was set in the non-specific (to my child self) Olden Days when a girl couldn't be a partner in a business.)

- When the girl dressed as a boy comes out as a girl, she sings a song that starts with "I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm a girl, I'm gonna let my hair flow free."

- The only other song I remember from the play:

We're gonna be in the movies

We're gonna be in the movies

A Hollywood motion picture show

We're gonna be in the movies

We're gonna be in the movies

A Hollywood star that everyone will know

I want to sing the latest love song

Step the latest dance

Be a hero! Be a clown!

Comedy or romance

We're gonna be in the movies

The glitter glamour movies

A Hollywood motion picture show!

"Movie star, gonna drive around in a fancy car"

 I have a song in my head and the internet is failing me. 

The line I remember is something very similar to "I'm gonna be a movie star, gonna drive around in a fancy car"

I've made an approximate rendering of the tune here, although it doesn't make sense from a music theory perspective so one or both of the higher notes might be a semitone off.

I remember first hearing this song in childhood (so sometime between 1980 and 1990, although it's possible it's older). I remember the singer as being female. It may have been a song in a cartoon.

I have a vague impression that it's from Jem and the Holograms, but none of the titles on Wikipedia's list of songs from Jem and the Holograms match this song.

 

It is not "Drive my Car" by The Beatles or "I’m Stoned in Love with You" by The Stylistics (or any cover thereof).

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

The mysterious missing verses of The Tottenham Toad

Some snippets of a children's song popped into my head recently, starting with "The Tottingham Toad went hopping down the road..."

So I googled around, and the internet is unanimous about the lyrics:

The Tottenham Toad came trotting down the road 

With his feet all swimming in the sea 

Pretty little squirrel with your tail in curl 

They’ve all got a wife but me.

Here's the weird part: the internet says that this is the whole song, but I clearly remember it has having three verses! I distinctly remember other lines from the song, and there is no record of them on the internet.

I remember the following lines:

- "The Wimbledon Whale he stood upon his tail" 

- "The Canterbury Crow said 'Now I have to go'"

- "As he drank three cups of bread and tea"

- "It's so sad it fills me full of glee" 

- "Lazy little lynx she just sits and winks"

And zero of these lines appear on the googleable (or duckduckgoable or bingable) internet!

I'm particularly confident about the "lynx" line because Child!Me had never heard of a lynx, so I wouldn't have made up or misremembered in the direction of something I'd never heard of. Wimbledon might be wrong, because Child!Me had heard of Wimbledon and therefore might have interpolated it into the lyrics.

 

Has any other human being in the world heard these verses, or are they completely lost to history?

A tale of two Google searches

1.  I had a song stuck in my head, but I didn't know the words.  It dated back to childhood, most likely from Sharon, Lois & Bram, and the lyrics as I remembered them were "My mother need to tell me that you omungowah."

Clearly, I had misheard it or was misremembering it, and was jamming a bunch of phonemes together to make "omungowah".  And whatever the omungowah really was, it was probably the crucial word in googling up this song.

Expecting nothing, I started typing my mother need to tell me that you omungowah into Google, and before I even got to the omungowah, the suggestion feature gave me "My mother didn't tell me that you go mango walk".  Which is exactly the song I was looking for!   Well done Google!

 (Here's an example of the song, although I have no idea what the source is.)

2.  In 2009, they had a public art project where people could stand on an empty plinth in London's Trafalgar Square and do whatever they wanted for the audience of whoever happened to be in Trafalgar Square and as a live real-time webcast audience.  In the middle of one of these plinth performances, Eddie Izzard finished his marathons, also in Trafalgar Square, and the crowd and cheering of his marathon finish interrupted one of the performances and distracted the camera operator.

I was looking for this video, so I googled eddie izzard plinth. Not only did Google not find the video, but it gave me one of those despised "Results for similar searches."  And the "similar search" that it proposed was eddy izzard!

Yes, they not only eliminated the key search term, they introduced a spelling error!  (Interestingly, the results for eddy izzard were Eddie Izzard's website, IMDB page and wikipedia entry, all of which spelled his name correctly.)

It seems like Google's algorithms missed a few crucial points. First of all, "Eddie" is a far more common spelling than "Eddy". How do they end up "correcting" away from the more common (and correct) spelling?

Second, Eddie is a celebrity with an unusual surname, which means that a disproportionate number of instances of the word "Izzard" on the recorded internet will have the word "Eddie" next to them.  Surely their concordance function should have figured this out - at least enough not to change what I entered!

And third, if your search contains something general (a celebrity's name) and something specific (the word "plinth"), the specific thing is probably there for a reason.  It is in no way helpful to completely eliminate the specific and give the user only general information about the celebrity!  If Google is going to insist on using this "Results for similar searches" function, they should use synonyms of the most specific search term, or use words that correlate with the specific search term ("Trafalgar" might have been helpful, for example.)

How is it possible that Google could fuck up this badly while still being capable of finding my "omungowah"?

(The video of Eddie Izzard finishing this marathons in Trafalgar Square and interrupting the plinth performance can be found at 31 minutes here.)