There is a website called Ask For Cents. One day you will have to pay for the service, but for the moment it is free. The gist is this: If you email a question to q@askforcents.com, a human being will email you back an answer. Usually, in fact, you get two answers. And usually within minutes. The question-answerers are users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, and are being paid a few cents for every question they answer.

The answers aren't vouched for, aren't necessarily true. They're simply answers. And you can ask them whatever you like: advice on love, driving directions, gift recommendations, Excel problems.

Some questions I have asked, for you, dear readers (all q & a's, throughout this post, are true and real and from AskForCents.com):

q: If Kelly Clarkson's 'Since U Been Gone' was a fish, what fish would it be?

a: Flatfish

q: What is your favourite song, what animal would it be if it was an animal, and if that animal could talk what would it say?

a: My favorite song is "Daniel" by Elton John. This reminds me of a dog and it could talk it would say "I miss you".

q: Why should people have 'guilty pleasures' in music? Isn't the pleasure you take from one given song as legitimate as the pleasure from any other?

a: From a perfectly pragmatic point of view, the popularity of something has no bearing on itself the thing itself, assuming that the thing is macroscopic and does not change with observation. So it's absurd to judge anything by its popularity.

q: What is hip-hop?

a: Hip-Hop is music that makes you want to drink 40s drive an escalade and commit felonies.

As you will doubtless have observed, Ask For Cents is also - given Said the Gramophone's rather unconventional taste in aesthetic descriptors - a most beautiful source of music writing.

And so here we are.

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Gene Vincent - "I'm Goin' Home (To See My Baby)".

q: If Gene Vincent's song "I'm Goin' Home (To See My Baby)" was riding a vehicle, what kind of vehicle would it be? And where would it be going?

a: A huge, purple semi on its way to San Francisco. (Source: imagination)

The beginning of the song is a trick. You think it's a blues tune, that we're going to circle round and round, listening to the lonesomeness of that electric guitar. But no, no no. Oh no. Because then the drums storm out of the closet, the saxophones pop out from behind the furniture, keys are grabbed from the hook by the door - and out we go, all piled in, heading crosscountry. There is a cactus by the on-ramp, sunlight in the air, not a cloud in the sky.

q: If Gene Vincent's song "I'm Goin' Home (To See My Baby)" were a meal, what would that meal be? Would the saxophones eat the same thing as Gene, or something else?

a: The meal would be a turkey. The saxophones would eat the same thing as Gene. (Source: Gene Vincent)

[buy (thank you "P")]

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Young People - "Your Grave". It's night, there's an open window, and the curtains are waving, slow-slow, in the breeze. Watch, watch, watch, til' the watching becomes a trance and the curtains become a lesson.

Young People are here just bass, guitar, voice, and a strange circulatory system of beats in the deep, buried background.

A blues that you can't put your finger on, can't keep track of; just something you'll feel one night, after which you'll spend years waiting to feel it again. I think of a tiny hotel-room in Hull, Quebec, friends falling asleep, dawn just suggesting itself. The sliding door to the balcony is open and it's cold.

A constellation: Vincent Gallo, Cat Power, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Liars.

Bits and pieces.

q: In the Young People song "Your Grave," what is the electric guitar saying at the end?

a: It is singing the lyrics of Morphine's "Do Not Go Quietly to Your Grave":

Listen young people I'm 74
And I plan to live 60 or 70 more
Yeah I've been all around I've done a few things
And I spent a few nights on the floor, oh!

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Moistworks, that finest of mp3blogs, is doing the extraordinary: Writers Week(s). Including contributions by Jonathan Lethem (!) and Christopher Sorrentino, writing about songs.

At Amazon, you can buy a Badonkadonk Land Cruiser. The reason I point it out is the reviews.

How to make Garfield funny: remove his thought balloons. (My favourites: 1 2 3 4)