Metamorphosism

What a Martian

[PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT FOR ALL YOU GUYS COMING HERE LOOKING FOR JANIS JOPLIN'S MIDDLE NAME: HER FULL NAME IS JANIS MIG JOPLIN, ACCORDING TO VARIOUS WEBSITES WITH WHICH I AM NOT AFFILIATED. I WAS NAMED AFTER HERPS: how about one of you drops me a note in the comments below and tells me what this is about - I don't normally get dozens/hundreds of visits a day looking for Janis Joplin's middle name, you know? Just curious.]

She asked me what were the lyrics to Janis Joplin's "Mercedes Benz."
"Go to Google and type in Janis Joplin Mercedes Benz lyrics," I told her and went back to my newspaper. She went around the house singing the first verse over and over. "We sang that in choir in school last year," she said.
Later, after dinner, and after she squirted iced tea and a blackberry out her nose we got on the subject of strange names.
"Amaryllis has got to be the worst," my wife said.
"Well, flower name for a girl, that's not beyond the pale yet, but yeah," I said.
"What about William Yeats, what was his middle name?" the kid asked.
"Butler," I said. "You're fourteen, what are you a Martian? Yeats?"
This morning she showed me the new ring tone on her cell phone, Bob Marley singing "I shot the sherriff."