33 Comments

Damn those earworms. Some people are just TOO good at writing songs!

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Right? There's no medicine for earworms. We just have to hope and wait.

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I hate when songs get stuck in my head. Fortunately never had one stuck that bad. I’ve been on car trips with my wife and whatever the top pop song was that she liked would be playing on the different satellite radio stations and that song would get stuck in my head. A song I didn’t even like. Augh!

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I get them all the time. Once, a friend of mine and I had the same earworm at the same time, an eerie moment.

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Every time someone says ear worm I am immediately reminded of an episode of Night Gallery where an earwig went into a guy’s ear and ate its way through to the other side.

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Ouch, yikes! I liked Night Gallery, but don't remember that episode. I'll hunt for it.

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Yikes! What an imagination you have, Bill. Such an odd idea! I, personally, have never heard this song. And now I am not inclined to check it out....

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Thanks, Sharron. I'm glad you enjoyed the story.

I wrote the lyrics to The Star so you won't find it online. :)

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Hah! You fooled me. Cool! Lyrics aren't so dangerous. It is the tune that is the killer.

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Great job, I loved how the action started small and then built.

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Thank you very much, Scott. I'm happy you enjoyed Please, Somebody Make it Stop. I had fun writing this.

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Spooky! As someone who constantly can't get songs out of my head, this doesn't seem like too much of an exaggeration. The Star's lyrics are so catchy that I fear what the song itself sounds like...

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Definitely. I could The Star wending its way into my mind and never leaving.

Spooky it is!

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I don't think I want that song stuck in my head. 🙂

Enjoyed the story!

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Me, neither, John. But I'm glad you enjoyed the story.

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I enjoy how the story, based on a common, trivial annoyance, build up to a dystopian crisis. Well done.

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Thanks, Miriam. I was wondering what happens when everyone in the world gets the same song stuck in their head at the same time. Now we know.

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This reminded me of when the song Kung Fu Fighting came out. 🤣

I am expecting to see you playing The Star on TikTok soon.

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I've been thinking about getting TikTok for a while. Everyone's there. Everyone's there?

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It is great if you're a musician. You can build a following crazy fast. I don't think it works so well for writers, though.

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Nightmare apocalypse scenario right there.

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I think so, too.

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What a creative and unsettling story! I love how you can take a single idea and turn it into an adrenaline rush.

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I'm happy you enjoyed, Somebody, Please Make it Stop, Justin. I like stories in which the characters have no time to think--when everything happens faster than thought.

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I just searched IMDB and the episode (which had two stories) is called The Caterpillar followed by Little Girl Lost.

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Thank you!

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Loved this! Essentially a horror story. Also wondering if the 42 rooms in Harvard were a Douglas Adams reference 😅.

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Thanks, Thomas. I'm glad you enjoyed Somebody, Please Make it Stop.

Actually I don't know about the 42 rooms, but I'm looking it up now.

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In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a machine figured out that the number 42 is the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, although it hasn't yet figured out what the question is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)#The_Hitchhiker's_Guide_to_the_Galaxy

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Interesting idea! Collective consciousness. Earworms are odd things, jingles, pop songs. Kars for Kids, or the Lumineers.

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Thanks, Shielagh. There's a lot happening in this story and I might need to write a sequel.

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I don't deal with ear worms much anymore, but for a period of my life when I was dealing with enormous stress, they were constant, adding to that stress. I can relate to your characters in this story!

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I don't listen to the radio as much in Japan as I did when I drove in the US, so I get fewer earworms, too. I used to play a second song to clear out the one that was stuck.

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