This page contains a song that I wrote for a friend of mine, Mark Johnson, who one winter morning complained that I always said things that were obvious. That morning Mark and I were walking together to a class at Purdue University, where we both went to college, and it was very, very cold. I was hunched over against the wind, concentrating on each step so I wouldn't slip on an ice patch and fall. (Slipping on ice and falling was a big social faux pas on campus.) I kept repeating "Man, it's cold....Man, it's cold." This phrase was all my half-frozen mouth could utter.

After hearing the same phrase the third or fourth time, my friend Mark said, "I know it's cold. That's obvious. You always say things that are obvious."

This shut me up for a moment, as I thought about his accusation. Then, as Mark and I started up the steps to the building where our class was to be held, I turned to him and said, "We're walking up the steps." As we passed through the door I said, "We're going into the building now." And then, "Sure is a lot warmer in here than it is out there." I had decided to persecute Mark with obviousness.

Several years later, my friend Tom Prionas and I wrote "The Obvious Song" for Mark's benefit to continue the persecution, the barage of obviousness, that I had started on that wintry morning at Purdue. The full text of the song is shown below. If you have a Java-capable browser, you can press play on the applet that follows the text to hear me singing the first verse and refrain of this song.

The Obvious Song

Verse 1:	The grass is green. The sky is blue. I am here. And so are you. The forest has A lot of trees. They bend and sway When there's a breeze.
Refrain:	You may think It's nothing new. It can't provide A stimulus. But it can still Be beautiful. Even though It's obvious. It's obvious.
Verse 2:	The winter's cold. The summer's hot. And in the spring It rains a lot. The night is dark. The day is bright. And in between We have twilight.
Refrain:	You may think It's nothing new. It can't provide A stimulus. But it can still Be beautiful. Even though It's obvious. It's obvious.
Verse 3:	The ceiling's up. The floor is down. The furniture Just hangs around. We sit on chairs. We sleep in beds. Upon soft pillows We lay our heads.
Refrain:	You may think It's nothing new. It can't provide A stimulus. But it can still Be beautiful. Even though It's obvious. It's obvious.
Verse 4:	A pizza has Tomato sauce. It's dough is made by skillful toss. Imagine the ways One could devour A hundred million pieces of flour.
Refrain:	You may think It's nothing new. It can't provide A stimulus. But it can still Be beautiful. Even though It's obvious. It's obvious.
The End:	The End.

To understand the last verse of "The Obvious Song," you need to know a bit more information. About a week before I sang this to Mark for the first time, he told me that he had recently been at one of those Pizza Parlors where they let you watch the cooks make your pizza. He said that as watched pizzas being formed, he started thinking that there must be a hundred million little pieces of flour that go into each pizza. He realized that because those hundred million pieces of flour could be assembled together in an infinite number of configurations and still be called a pizza, the chances they would end up in any one particular configuration was infinitesmally small. But somehow, they always ended up in some configuration despite the odds against any particular configuration.

I thought this was an interesting observation on Mark's part, but I also thought it was kind of obvious. So I worked the observation into the last verse of the song to persecute Mark with a small sample of his own obviousness.

Note also that singing "The End" at the end is an important final piece of obvious information for this song. Don't leave it out. (Sorry if this last warning was, well, obvious.)