I spent a lot of time with my maternal grandparents as a kid. They lived just a few minutes’ drive away in the same town, and after my parents were divorced, they were like a second set of parents to us. As a result I know a lot more than your everyday person about Big Band music and the dulcet elevator stylings of Richard Clayderman. Also, I use a lot of oddly outdated phrases like “lickety split” and “jeepers creepers” and “kittycorner,” which do not sound strange to me at all and drop seamlessly into conversation with FameThrowa, but which never fail to get me really weird looks from Sir Monkeypants.

For her birthday, Little Miss Sunshine got a little bike from her aunt and uncle that has an interactive dashboard with lots of lights and buttons. The buttons each play a different royalty-free chesnut like “Turkey in the Straw” or “She’ll Be Comin’ Round the Mountain.” One of the songs is a song that I know as “Sailing Sailing,” which my grandmother used to sing around the house sometimes:

Sailing, sailing, over the bounding main
Where many a stormy wind shall blow
‘Ere Jack comes home again…

Do regular people know this song? Or is this another of my grandparent-taught oldies? In any case, I’m pretty sure this is the song on the bike.

However, Gal Smiley recognizes this same tune as “Puff the Magic Dragon,” which she learned at preschool this past year. And I have to admit, the tunes are strikingly similar. So similar that, at the Gal’s request, I can sing “Puff” to the “Sailing” tune with little trouble.

I looked it up and apparently “Puff” was written by the Peter part of Peter, Paul, and Mary (the group that took the song to number one). There doesn’t seem to be any mention in wiki of blatant plagiarism but I think there may be a lawsuit here for some guy who’s been dead for 200 years. Something to think about, dead guy!

Peter, Paul, and Mary also were the ones who popularized the tune “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” which was also involved in a plagarism suit several years ago. New Order’s song, “Run 2,” can never be released again in its original form because its guitar solo is, apparently, too close to “Jet Plane.” I thought that this meant that Peter, Paul, and Mary are major hypocrites, but it turns out that the song was actually written by John Denver, and it’s John who brought the lawsuit against New Order.

Still. Peter, Paul, and Mary — I’ve got my eye on you.