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October 28th, 2024:

Boodliyakisaki!

What I call “scraps” are short memories that pop into my head at odd moments, sometimes with a recognizable trigger, sometimes without. I was emailing with a friend of mine about Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, and we were bitching about how faint it was, compared to comets Hale-Bopp (1997) and Hyakutake (1996.)

Hyakutake. Kind of rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Then, ping! there it was, a line from a big band-style song sung by a girl group like the Andrews Sisters:

“Hold tight, hold tight, Boodliyakisake!”

I don’t know where or when I heard it, but it rhymes (mostly) with “comet Hyakutaki.” So where did that come from? One challenge: I had no idea how to spell “boodliyakisaki.” I brought up DuckDuckGo and tried all kinds of spellings, and got nowhere.

Hmm. I started looking up songs titled with or containing “hold tight.” There are several. The lyrics sites turned up nothing remotely close to “boodliyakisaki.” Then another part of the scrap popped up: The song was about shrimp and other seafood. Huh? What? But that’s how scraps work: Focus on one and additional bits of it sometimes pop up.

Figuring out memory scraps can be hard. But this time I tried something new: I brought up Copilot and started a conversation. Here’s a copy/paste:


You

What song begins "hold tight, hold tight" and is about seafood?

Copilot

The song you’re thinking of is "Hold Tight, Hold Tight (Want Some Seafood Mama)" by Sidney Bechet. It was released in 1938 and became quite popular. The song has playful, double-entendre lyrics that celebrate various types of seafood.


Ohhhh…kay. Back to the lyrics sites. I searched for the song and several links popped up. It wasn’t “boodliakasaki.” It was “Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki.” With hyphens. Here’s a characteristic sample:

Hold tight hold tight hold tight hold tight
Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki
Want some seafood Mama?
Shrimpers and rice they’re very nice
Hold tight hold tight hold tight hold tight
Foo-ra-de-ack-a-sa-ki

Adding to the peculiarity is that some lyrics sites spelled the magic word a different way. I saw “Fododo-de-yacka saki” and another that I can’t find now. A little further research showed me that the Andrews Sisters had in fact recorded it in 1938. You can listen to the song on YouTube.

It may be a silly thing to write an entry about, but the real message I want to leave with you is that CoPilot found it instantly and gave me some context with citation footnotes. I’m still suspicious of AI-assisted anything, but in this case it worked like a champ.

And now I have a taste for shrimp, sigh.