Now that was funny. Don’t associate us with lower Michigan (Detroitish) We are in the upper peninsula where there aren’t any coney dogs. Only pasties (wifey made some yesterday) and yes lots of coffee. “The boys” will meet tomorrow morning at 6 and have all the worlds problems solved by 7.
We winter in Texas now, so the old ice shanty (on wheels) is toast.
BTW my blood pressure is 100/60 and yes I can fix anything. ha ha. Wanna arm wrestle??
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I apologize. Being a Yooper is a whole different story. Detroit would be ceded in two days; Yoopers would protect their territory forever.
It’s also cold enough up there in July to cause shrinkage, and you’re lucky to break through the ice to go swimming. My band played in Iron Mountain once in November, and the last three hours of driving to get there was basically through a snow tunnel. It made Mackinaw City look like a Caribbean resort. It is a truly stunning area if you have the shrunken stones to live there. I remember running through about 20 yards of 3 foot deep snow to sit in a cedar sauna. ( My inseam is 32”, do the math). Truly great people up there.
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Sorry STM for hijacking your thread. I live 20miles north from Iron Mountain. Our band did most of their gigs there. Wish I would have known you then. Sprinting to the sauna in the raw…yes from an outie to in inny almost instantly. BTW heavy snow in November would be very rare, but it does happen. Love the witt
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I was actually born in Michigan, but was carried away at a young age. I like to think there’s still a bit of Michigander in me, but only genetically at this point.
Ha, but that’s where I was born. Damn!
Clearly those Yoopers are the Spartans among us. They may be our last defense against … well, I’ll save politics for another day. 
No worries, it’s perfectly fine, great conversation! Maybe some new (theme) song ideas too. I forgot to mention you are my hero. Maybe you already were. That seems like The Great White North to me. Never made it up that far.
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By the way my wife and I graduated from. Michigan State, so we are indeed Spartans.
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A noble lineage. Serendipity, the Spartan theme bears more exploration.
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Stan_Halen,
Thank you for the review! Now your song: intro chord is discordant to me ears. After that I really like the main electric guitar and electric bass riffs. Vocals sound like they are in the style of a humorous novelty song to me. Flame Gems? It makes me think of Fire Agate, if my memory serves me from the early to mid 70’s from a rocks & minerals class I had more than once. My brain still works! Googling the topic verified my memory. No, I didn’t fail, I liked making cabochons; polishing geodes; and similar things.
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Thanks for the review!
Yes, I see what you mean. I do think it sounds cool though! 
I think I hit some string harmonics, but don’t recall which ones. It was just an intro count-in thing, wasn’t planned, but I left it in.
I think you’re the only one that’s asked about the story/theme behind it. Maybe I was going for a kind of Frank Zappa or Dr Demento type thing with the lyrics/vocals, but I did get a comment that the chorus vocals sounded like Prince, which I took as a huge compliment.
The story is actually based on an episode of Star Trek TOS (the Original Series); “The Trouble With Tribbles”. Only hard-core Trekkies might remember this, but the main ‘guest’ character on that episode was a space merchant called Cyrano Jones. He sold all kinds of space novelties, including Tribbles (cute fuzz-balls that bred like rabbits). One of those was Spican Flame Gems - presumably, nice little rocks from the Spican star system (Spica is an actual star, the brightest in our constellation of Virgo). For whatever reason, I decided to riff on that idea. I even snatched a sample of Cyrano Jones’ infectious laugh and inserted it at 0:44 (shhh, don’t tell anybody 
).
I guess the silliness of the idea, and playing around with it, got me leaning toward the TV series theme song idea. That, and I couldn’t think of any more lyrics 
.