Gotta Put a Post Up, Preferably a Mood Enhancer

It's not like I often suffer writer's block, but today I have been preoccupied with the news from Egypt, and the nagging fear that the U.S. State Department will intervene in a spectacularly wrong-headed way. I think I need a mood enhancer... a breath of tropical warmth would do on a cold night, while the mountains of snow from yesterday's THUNDERSNOW!!!! harden into dirty gray hillocks. The song Sweet and Dandy by Toots and the Maytals never fails to raise a smile. The song, sweetly sung in patois, is a simple tale, of Ete and Johnson being gently chided for pre-wedding jitters by their families. A truncated version of the song was featured in the movie The Harder They Come. I'm embedding a version with the intro: My favorite thing about the song is its theme of ordinary people living life well, even though they're not wealthy. I remember talking to the server at a local coffee shop about music, and he ended up playing this on the stereo four times in a row. Luckily, the place wasn't crowded, because our singing along with the disc would have driven away the other customers.