Oh, that's MUCH better

I'm no stranger to misheard lyrics. I have the whole collection of books starting with 'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy. But this might be a new record.

Berlin released The Metro not less than 23 years ago, and I've surely heard it 100 times since then. It was in heavy rotation when I first got MTV, so I had frequent opportunities to wonder what the heck was wrong with the androgynous guy who apparently thinks he can do better than Terri Nunn. I remember kids in my high school who were drawn to Berlin by the single entendre moaning of Sex (I'm A ...) conceding that Sex, the prototypical song high school kids play in their bedrooms with one hand on the volume in case their parents walk by, was fun but really wasn't as good as The Metro.

In the past year, I've watched the Bands Reunited episode on Berlin and downloaded The Metro on iTunes.

And all this time, I thought one particular line of the song was "I remember I had a wrinkle in my hair."

As I drove home one day this week, The Metro came up on my iPod. For reasons that could be understood only by a neurologist, my brain finally heard "I remember a letter wrinkled in my hand."

That's much better, isn't it? I've always liked this song, but deep down, I thought it seemed a little flimsy to be so concerned with her hair at that moment. And how does hair wrinkle, anyway?

By the way, I count at least six cover versions at AllMusic, probably more. Most of them are simple reworkings of the synthesizer riff, including one foreign-language remix surely meant for dance floors in Europe. I like the version by Mike Lopez/Eve's Drop. The System of a Down version, predictably, sucks. Does anyone actually like this band? I remember seeing ads for them around the time Strangers With Candy was on the air, and the resemblance to Jerri's favorite band (Buddha Stalin) was uncanny. Every time Mrs. MMM and I run across the name System of a Down, we sing "Diarrhea milkshake, poo poo!"

Speaking of Strangers With Candy in this rambling post, it appears that the movie -- with a cast that includes TV series stars Amy Sedaris and Stephen Colbert along with appearances by Sarah Jessica Parker, Matthew Broderick, Allison Janney and a few others you wouldn't expect to see in a trashy Comedy Central spinoff -- will indeed be released at some point, more than a year after its appearance at Sundance. The talk in the IMDB message boards is that Warner bought the film, then got cold feet after The Dukes of Hazzard hit some legal snag. (Something about a TV show being loosely based on a movie whose rights are still owned by someone else or perhaps a network.) But depending on who you believe, it's either been ironed out with Warner or has been offered to another distributor.

Now attempting to verify with a quick Yahoo search (I don't "Google"):

- Oh, this is funny ... an interview with Sarah Jessica Parker that says "Her first project after Sex and the City ended, for example, was Sundance Film Festival entrant Strangers with Candy, a gritty movie about a recovering drug addict." Sure. Much in the same way that Hot Shots was a riveting study of military life.

- A site on indie movies backs up the IMDB posters' version of the Warner saga but says nothing about a release date.

- Good quote from Sarah Jessica at Boston.com: "(Amy) made us sign IOUs two years before it was even made: I hereby give my life to Amy Sedaris and will do whatever she asks of me."

So no verification that it'll be released. But to get back on topic, Yahoo lists 43 mentions of "I remember I had a letter wrinkled in my hand." None for the wrinkle in my hair.