...thinks the Football Gods can kiss his ass, cause if Hanson, Britney Spears Heart to Heart, and a copy of RV can't get us wins, then the Football Gods are truly fickle, vain, and wholly uninterested in the welfare of even their most devoted of servants, and I'd rather make an outrageous and completely untrue claim than suck up to them anymore. So in that spirit, the Friday Embarassing Admission is no more, to be replaced with Todd's Friday Outrageous Claim of Dubious Veracity. This week's Outrageous Claim: I'm the inspiration behind the line "Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti" in Toto's "Africa."
It all came about while I was sitting next to David Paich during a four hour layover in Salt Lake City, and we got to talking about the Monkees of all things and he seemed impressed that I knew so much about Mike Nesmith's solo career, so he asked me if I would mind helping him with a song he'd been working on. He was stuck at "I know that I must do what's right," and desperate for a rhyme for "company," and I was like "Hey man, you're in Africa, Kiliminjaro's in Africa, the Serengeti is in Africa, this stuff writes itself." It probably isn't the best line of any song ever (in fact, I still laugh at it's awkwardness whenever I hear it), but it's a lot better than what he had come up with, which was "I know that I must do what's right, which is stuff my ears with baskets full of yummy, tasty raspberries." That just didn't make sense at all.