Mahnamahnah

When I was a kid of about 14, my Friday afternoons were usually spent with some friends listening to a music show on Radio Teheran called "Music For The Youth", where people would call up and request foreign Top 40 songs which would then be broadcast alongside their names a little later. As these things usually go, the day came that we decided to get through the Radio Teheran lines to request "our" song. Basically, we just wanted to show off a little as we knew the girls on the street would also be gathered somewhere, listening to the show.

As this was my idea, or so they said, my friends left me alone to do the dialing job and went back home to record the show on tape. The problem was that the lines were so busy that I tried for some three and a half hours to get through without any success. Imagine trying those numbers with the dialing system of those days. I think that phone was so hot in the end that I could have fried a couple of eggs on it.

Anyhow - by that point, the four-hour show was coming to an end and all the songs I had thought of requesting had been played over the air, as they had all previously been asked for by other listeners who had apparently had more luck getting through.

I was just dialing automatically and was about to give up, when somebody picked up the phone. I recognized the voice: It was that of the main DJ! Imagine the shock as I was left with no songs to ask for on the one hand, and that voice waiting for me to say something at the other end of the line on the other. My mind went blank.

Strangely then, I remembered this song I had heard on the Muppet Show some time ago, which I knew the radio station had a copy of since I had also heard them play it the week before as a joke. So without being able to think of anything else, I impulsively requested... "Mahnamahnah" by The Muppets!

No need to say that after the song was played with the mention of "Parham, Vandad, Mazdad and Siamak" being the culprits behind the request (I still have that part of the broadcast in my ears as if it were yesterday), my friends were extremely pissed off at me for not only associating their names on national radio with what they condidered a kid's song, but to have made a total, complete fool out of them in front of the girls. I don't think any of them talked to me nicely for months afterwards. They even avoided me on the street whenever they saw me.

It has now been 29 years since those days in the summer of 1977. Last year, I ran into one of those friends by pure accident for the first time since. He had become a DJ of all things! He still remembered the episode. He treated me as if I were a criminal.

Some things are hard to get over...

Ahmadinejad's Letter To Bush

An acquaintance of mine who works for the National Censor's Bureau was telling me the other day that they actually had to cut out a part of Ahmadinejad's much-publicized letter to Bush for security reasons before they released it to the press, because they simply couldn't figure out what it meant. The part was actually a one-liner and came in the form of a post-scriptum at the end of the letter. It said:
"p.s. Mr. President, if you don't forward this letter to 20 other people immediately, you will have 20 years of bad luck."