Freitag, 25. Aug 2006, 10:00

This week I've been obsessing over the lyrics to Bad Things Happen All The Time. Hey, it's been a slow week, alright?

But I've drawn a blank at identifying all of the names dropped into the song. Here's what I've got for the lyrics closing out the song:

Milton Friedman gave us the thumbs up
Margaret Thatcher gave us the thumbs up
Leon Brezhnev gave us the thumbs up
Mao Tse Tung, he gave us the thumbs up
Charles de Gualle, he gave us the thumbs up
Helmut Kohl, he gave us the thumbs up
?
Richard Nixon gave us the thumbs up
Hirohito gave us the thumbs up
?
Jacques Chirac, he gave us the thumbs up
???? Mackenzie King
both of them gave the thumbs up
Boris Yeltsin gave us the thumbs up
Richard Nixon gave us the thumbs up

Anyone care to help fill in the gaps? For bonus points, any clue what "Neutron John" refers to?

As I say, I've been obsessing, and here's some trivia from the lyrics. The sequence of USA Presidents, stretching from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, is in chronological order and misses out only JFK. The reef on which a ship runs aground is Bligh Reef, which was the site of the Exxon Valdez disaster (hey, I didn't know that, maybe everybody else did). And Milton Friedman is the odd one out (as far as I can tell) - an economist rather than a national leader.