Your host was worried he might have a hard time coming up with an idea for Valentine's Day this year. Not for Mrs. SC, mind you -- those plans are always taken care of well in advance ([where by "well", he means multiple whole seconds prior to the order cutoff on the 13th -- FTD]). No, Valentine's Day demands something special for SC's long-suffering readers. Fortunately, a post by Neal Whitman got your host thinking about Weird Al Yankovic, which in turn has inspired today's effort. To celebrate Valentine's Day, we're going to go through a rigorous analysis of the metaphors in Weird Al's unique ode to love, One More Minute.
The song begins with a straightforward accounting of recent events:
Well, I heard that you're leavin'
Gonna leave me far behind
'Cause you found a brand new lover
You decided that I'm not your kindSo I pulled your name out of my Rolodex
And I tore all your pictures in two
And I burned down the malt shop where we used to go
Just because it reminds me of you.
Poor Al seems to be going to fairly great lengths to suffer for this relationship. As a California resident, his act of arson is subject to between three and eight years in jail. But there's no metaphor at issue yet.
That's right, you ain't gonna see me cryin'
I'm glad that you found somebody new
'Cause I'd rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass
Than spend one more minute with you
Now things get more interesting. Obviously, Al isn't going to live forever, but we can reasonably interpret "eternity" to mean "the rest of his life". So how much glass would Al eat in his lifetime?
The average American lifespan is around 78 years, and the song came out when Al was 26, so we're looking at 52 years of eating glass. Typical human stomachs range in capacity from 1.5 to 4 liters. If we assume that Al eats three square meals of broken glass each day, and that each meal comes in at the low end of capacity, that's 4.5 liters per day, or 256,230 liters of glass in his lifetime. How many bottles would Al have to smash to get that glass? Let's figure that a 16-oz. bottle (roughly 0.57 liters) can be shattered into glass representing about half as much volume, or 0.285 liters, meaning that Al will need 899,052 typical soda bottles to meet his commitment. Let's hope he can buy them wholesale!
I guess I might seem kinda bitter
You got me feelin' down in the dumps
'Cause I'm stranded all alone in the Gas Station of Love
And I have to use the self-service pumps
If Al is stranded at the self-service pumps, assuming he drives a car with about 20 mpg fuel economy, and does about 15,000 miles per year, with an 18 gallon gas tank (assuming he fills up every time he hits 16 gallons), he'll fill up 46.9 (call it 47) times. Assuming he saves about $0.30/gallon by not using the full-service pumps, he'll pocket $281. So this doesn't work out badly for him -- actually, it's just about perfect, as we'll see in a moment.
Oh, so honey, let me help you with that suitcase
You ain't gonna break my heart in two
'Cause I'd rather get a hundred thousand paper cuts on my face
Than spend one more minute with you
This sounds pretty horrible, but it's a lot less of a sacrifice on Al's part than you might think at first glance. How much blood do we get out of a paper cut? This proved hard to estimate, but one site promises that you'll get more blood from a papercut than from a particular diabetic test kit. Since it draws about 0.3 microliters, we'll guess a paper cut comes in at about 0.5 microliters. If Al gets 100,000 paper cuts on his face, and each one bleeds out .5 microliters, he'll bleed about .05 liters. A standard unit of blood for transfusion is 495 mL, so since Al has only lost about 1/10 the amount of blood needed for a transfusion, the odds are good he'll live through this one.
I'd rather rip out my intestines with a fork
Than watch you going out with other men
I'd rather slam my fingers in a door
Again and again and again and again and again
As for ripping out his intestines with a fork, the procedure for seppuku involves a sword called a wakizashi, which has a blade about 20 inches long, rougly three times the length of typical forks (as measured by several found in SC's kitchen). The tines of said forks are about 1 1/2 inches long, so if Al tries to commit seppuku with a fork -- even one specially serrated along the tines for the occasion -- he's in a lot of trouble. This may be his intent -- since Al doesn't mention having a second, he's probably trying to commit jumonji-giri (see the article on seppuku), which is an enhanced version that's even more painful than the standard version.
I'd rather have my blood sucked out by leeches
Shove an ice pick under a toenail or two
The leech issue is complicated, because your host found two fairly divergent measurements of how much blood a leech can suck out. An article from the Journal of Rehabilitation Research and Development indicates that a leech can suck about 4.7 mL over 3 hours, or roughly 1.6 mL/hour. But another article, admittedly a more popular-science treatment of leeches in medicine, suggests that the correct figure is more like 15-30 mL over a period ranging from 20 minutes to an hour. We'll go with an estimate of 15 mL/hour for the remaining calculations.
At an average of 14-18 pints of blood per human adult, it would take one leech (working on 16 pints, or 7.5 liters), about 4687 hours to completely drain Al. Assuming Al doesn't eat or drink anything, since loss of 30% of blood volume can lead to irreversible shock, it will take the leech about 1406 hours, or 58 days, to finish Al off. He'd die of thirst in just 15 days, though, so 4 leeches would be needed for the job. To do it in one day, he'd need 60 leeches, and at $4.75 a pop, that would mean Al would need to add just $4 to the money he saved from using the self-service pumps at the Gas Station of Love. So he shouldn't act on this for at least a year.
Actually, once the leech gorges itself (according to the pop-science article), it's done eating for up to 18 months while it digests, slowly. Assuming reasonably quick changing of leeches by a wholly unscrupulous attending physician, that 30% of blood volume works out to 2,250 mL, or 150 leeches. Which means he'll really need to spend about 2 1/2 years at the gas station to save up the money for his irrational act, during which time he might reconsider.
I'd rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue
Than spend one more minute with you
This always sounded to SC like the second-most impressive claim in the song (trailing only the grand finale), but the truth appears to be far more depressing -- it's actually not nearly that much of a sacrifice. According to this article on toilets at Grand Central Terminal (station is apparently a misnomer), there are only 32 ladies' stalls, and 6 men's stalls, in the public area, plus 4 more of each in private areas which can be hired out for receptions according to a FAQ at the GCT website. Another caveat is in order, however, regarding the sourcing of what follows: while the author of the cited article, Donna Porstner, really does write for a paper called the Stamford Advocate, which seems like a reasonable source (being a Connecticut newspaper), the provenance of the article is a newsgroup -- the article doesn't turn up in a search on the paper's website. Having said that, the only bathroom listings shown in the GCT website's directory are on the lower dining concourse, just like the article said was the case prior to the remodeling job it discusses, so it's entirely possible that these figures are accurate. Admittedly, 46 toilets is 46 more than SC is willing to clean with his own tongue, but the lyrics make it sound like we're talking about several hundred.
Yes, I'd rather jump naked on a huge pile of thumbtacks
Or stick my nostrils together with Krazy Glue
I'd rather dive into a swimming pool filled with double-edged razor blades
Than spend one more minute with you
How many thumbtacks could get stuck in Al if he jumped into said pile? Well, Al is 6' 0" (from his website), and 170 pounds, so we'll figure that he's got a waist size of about 32", which allows us to get a rough estimate of his surface area. Treating Al as a cylinder, which has a surface area of 2*pi*r*^2 + 2*pi*r*h, and dropping the first term since he doesn't really end in neat circles, we get a rough surface area of 7234 square inches. We'll take off about 20% to deal with deviations from non-cylindricality, for about 5780 square inches. Thumbtacks come in a range of sizes, from 5/16" to 1/2" heads. We'll go with the 5/16" size, assume no overlap, and also assume that he gets completely covered with tacks from rolling around after the initial impact, which means that at 0.31 square inches per thumbtack, Al will be on the receiving end of 18,645 thumbtacks, which works out to $658 worth using the nice nickel-plated ones which top the list in the last link. That's at $3.53 per box, but he probably qualifies for an even bigger volume discount than the one cited, since we're talking about 187 boxes here.
We can also investigate the number of razors it would take to fill Al's hypothetical swimming pool. A standard Olympic-sized swimming pool runs 50 meters by 25 meters by 2 meters, or 2500 cubic meters. Browsing the web for straight razor dimensions yields mostly dimensions specified in terms of cases, not blades, but reasonable figures seem to be about six inches long, two inches wide, and a half-inch thick, which means that at .0034 cubic feet per blade, or .00009 cubic meters, it would take 25.4 million blades to fill the pool.
As for the ultimate act of self-destruction, Al's pledge that:
I'd rather rip my heart right out of my rib cage with my bare hands
And then throw it on the floor and stomp on it 'til I die
we can't really speculate on how many stomps Al would get, but we know that you can rip a man's heart out of their rib cage and have it continue to beat, as documented in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, where the act was performed by Mola Ram.
As Weird Al has helped us to see, being miserable for love can be quite expensive, and fairly painful to boot. So make sure to give your significant others a hug today, and thank them for saving you several thousand dollars in leeches, thumbtacks, and razor blades. Then take them to Charlie Palmer's at Grand Central Terminal to thank them for saving you from having to clean the place. Happy Valentine's Day!
speechless, I am.
Posted by: eric "babe" morse | February 16, 2006 at 06:33 PM
Quite a study there. But "getting stranded in the gas station of love has nothing to do with buying gas.It's got a completely {and hilariously} sexual meaning, so why ignore that??? its the best line in the song.
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