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"What a beautiful world this will be...What a glorious time to be free..."
Don't confuse "I.G.Y." with IGA or an IGO or a UGO.
This snappy lost hit by Steely Dan's Donald Fagen is one of a handful of songs I remember being popular around the time I wasted my brother's pink construction paper by drawing a stupid picture of a guy blowing a bubble. But that's not why it gets an entry here.
When I was 9, people developed a habit of wiping boogers on the wall and furniture at home. When a blob of mucus was found on a wall, it might be called an IGO - identified gross object. I also recall a UGO - unidentified gross object - stuck on a particular spot on the bedroom wall. It was right where you entered the room, below a styrofoam mock-up of one of those traffic signs that said "BUMP." Nobody knew what the hell it was. Sometimes those were produced when you got a piece of food stuck between your teeth and you spit it out in a projectile fashion.
After IGO's began filling our walls, "I.G.Y." began filling our airwaves. What does the title of the song stand for? It stands for International Geophysical Year - a period that ran from July 1957 through December 1958.
What was the song actually about? Although it was a hit in 1982, the topic seems tailor-made for the 2020s. I read an article a few years ago that said the song was about scientific arrogance. It was about scientists having unrealistic ideas and trying to impose them on everyone despite being at odds with objective facts. This inspired lines like, "90 minutes from New York to Paris." It was like "I am the science."
The International Geophysical Year itself seemed to defy objective facts. The event defined a "year" as being 18 months, like we're on Mars or something. It's like how the CIA just invents new oceans or how The View insisted the square root of 2 is a rational number.
What a glorious time to be - oh, wait.
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