Most ice cream trucks in Canada and the United States use music boxes made by a single mom-and-pop company in Minneapolis. If there’s a particular ice cream truck song that annoys you all summer, you have the Nichols Electronics Company to blame.
(You could always ask the your local driver if they’re able to switch it up — if they have one of the Omni models, they could change it to one of thirty-one other songs.)
Historically, ice cream truck music boxes were a sonic callback to late 19th-century ice cream parlors and soda fountains, which had coin-operated music boxes before phonographs were invented and jukeboxes could become a thing.
In the late ’60s, the government sought to adopt O Canada as the national anthem. The music and original French lyrics had passed into the public domain, but the English version was still under copyright. The government settled the rights for a dollar.
Ironically, the copyright to the English lyrics would have expired anyways by the time the National Anthem Act was finally passed in 1980.
Shawn Mendes’ song “Lost in Japan” has had me geographically confused since I first heard it covered by Scary Pockets. If you haven’t listened to the lyrics, the song is about a person who is thinking about their crush and the possibility of taking a last-minute flight to Japan to see them.
The question I can’t get off my mind is: where is the song supposed to be taking place?
The chorus goes:
Do you got plans tonight?
I’m a couple hundred miles from Japan, and I
I was thinking I could fly to your hotel tonight
‘Cause I can’t get you off my mind
from which we can infer that
the crush is somewhere in Japan
the singer is outside of Japan, and
both people are close enough to an international airport for one to entertain the idea of flying to the other’s hotel.
The most likely candidates for airports within “a couple hundred miles from Japan” are in South Korea.
The area within 100 to 500 miles of a Japanese airport with year-round
scheduled international flights.
When I first considered the geography of the song, I was satisfied with that answer: couple of hundred miles, South Korea, that sounds about right. But then I noticed the opening lyrics:
All it’d take is one flight
We’d be in the same time zone
That would seem to rule out South Korea, which is in the same time zone as Japan. With the closest locations out of the picture, we have to stretch our interpretation of the song. Here are the possibilities I can see.
The singer could be in Shanghai
Shanghai is 500 miles (in different directions) from Okinawa and Kyūshū Islands. Shanghai Pudong International Airport was the eighth-busiest airport in the world when “Lost in Japan” was released, and has plenty of routes to both Naha and Nagasaki.
This is probably the most plausible answer if we make the thematically appropriate assumption that the lovestruck protagonist is downplaying the distance in order to convince themself that taking a last-minute flight is a good idea.
The singer could be in Vladivostok
Vladivostok is also within 500 miles of New Chitose Airport in Sapporo. This possibility is pretty funny, but unfortunately it’s ruled out by logistics. The only regular flight I could find between the two was only opened by Ural Airlines after “Lost in Japan” was released, and did not last long before world events shut it down permanently.
The singer could be in Taipei
There’s only one location that geographically fits the lyrics exactly: our protagonist is in Taiwan, and their crush is less than 200 miles away in Ishigaki on Japan’s southwesternmost inhabited archipelago.
With a creative enough interpretation, this is also consistent with the second verse:
Do I gotta convince you
That you shouldn’t fall asleep?
It’ll only be a couple hours
And I’m about to leave.
The singer is presumably in a hurry to leave because they have just checked the timetable for the only direct flight from Taipei to Ishigaki, which runs on Wednesdays and Saturdays during the tourist season. The flight is short enough that “a couple hours” is realistic if customs is quick.
The line about falling asleep is, of course, a request for the romantic interest to skip their usual afternoon nap, since China Airlines flight 124 arrives at 11:35am.
The American copyright status of the song “Happy Birthday to You” has finally been resolved in the case Rupa Marya v. Warner Chappell Music. (Here in Canada, the song has been in the public domain since 1997.)
At the time of lawsuit, Warner was collecting royalties — around $2 million a year — for “Happy Birthday to You” despite the fact that the melody was in the American public domain. They claimed that the lyrics were still under copyright and that they owned the rights to them.
Although Warner had acquired some “Happy Birthday”-related rights, it wasn’t clear what those rights covered since the original transfer agreements had been lost. The judge ruled that the secondary sources did not support Warner’s claim on the lyrics specifically, assuming they were still under copyright at all. Settlement terms following the summary judgement definitively assigned the song to the American public domain.
As far as I can tell, the European copyright to both the “Happy Birthday” lyrics and melody would have been still valid, albeit with disputed ownership, until it expired in 2017.
