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Footnotes to "Laughter & Lust"

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[ Obvious Song | Stranger Than Fiction | It's All Too Much ]

Obvious Song

"There was a man in the jungle, trying to make ends meet [...]
When a voice said 'Buddy can you spare that tree
We gotta save this world – starting with your land.'
It was a rock 'n' roll millionaire from the USA...

Even though he's not from the USA, the rock 'n' roll millionaire trying to save the jungle could be a reference to LINK:Sting and his campaigns to save the rainforests.

"And the stars are looking down through a hole in the sky..."
Obviously a reference to the LINK:ozone hole.

"Walls are coming down between the west and the east ..."
Reference to the fall of the LINK:Berlin Wall in Germany on 9 November 1989.

Stranger Than Fiction

LINK:Mark Twain is often quoted with the phrase "Stranger than fiction", but it had appeared earlier in the poem "Don Juan" by the English poet LINK:Lord Byron (1788-1824):

'Tis strange – but true; for truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.

It's All Too Much

"A hundred mineral waters, fun to guess which ones are safe to drink ..."
A reference to the LINK:Perrier scandal of 1990. The French mineral water company lost millions of dollars after the discovery of minute traces of benzene, a hydrocarbon thought to cause cancer, in Perrier bottled water. This hit public confidence in a drink favoured by the health-conscious and billed as absolutely pure. Unable to track the affected batch, Perrier recalled 140 million bottles at a cost of $40 million.


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