{"id":56,"date":"2010-08-09T21:12:31","date_gmt":"2010-08-09T20:12:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/?p=56"},"modified":"2016-11-15T13:58:26","modified_gmt":"2016-11-15T13:58:26","slug":"killer-squirrel-on-the-loose","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/?p=56","title":{"rendered":"Killer squirrel on the loose"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Killer<\/a><\/dt>\n
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A friend of mine is obsessed with killer squirrels. The idea of a marauding squirrel leaping out of the trees to attack unwary passers-by intrigued me so I decided to\u00a0 write a song about it. You can listen to a newly recorded version on myspace<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It turns out, though,\u00a0she has more reason to be obsessed\u00a0than I’d initially thought. Back in 2006 the Metro<\/em> reported on a squirrel in Florida called Bruce<\/a> (after Die Hard star Bruce Willis) who carried out a ‘week-long reign of terror which saw him take on three women, a toddler and his father, and several police officers,’ surviving a beating and being pepper-sprayed before he was finally apprehended.<\/p>\n

Last year the Mirror<\/em> went as far as to list the ‘Top ten squirrel attacks’<\/a>, including a woman in Passau, Germany being attacked in her living room and a fatal attack on a dog in the Russian town of Lazo (although a local pine cone shortage was cited as a mitigating factor) .<\/p>\n

Just a few months ago a columnist for the Edinburgh Evening News<\/em> claimed to have been attacked by one of these ‘tree rats’<\/a>, and that was after several ‘stalking’ incidents.<\/p>\n

Even in the world of fiction \u2013 children’s fiction at least \u2013 the idea of ‘scary squirrels’<\/a> seems to be catching on, according to the racy ‘Library News’ column in the Abington Journal<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I predict killer squirrels are going to be big, protentially displacing the current fox frenzy to become the next national bushy-tailed b\u00eate noires. So it’s handy that I’ve already got a song ready to cash in on the trend. Maybe I should get it onto i-tunes, though, before it really takes off.<\/p>\n

How it was done<\/h3>\n

I wrote the song on acoustic guitar, as I usually do, but for the recording I wanted to try something a little different (and quicker) so\u00a0I used a Rhodes VST<\/a> (Virtual Studio Technology) plugin for the main chords and a simple but effective analogue sequencer plugin called Anemone<\/a> for the bassline and some additional parts. For the coda I added a cello sound and some recorded acoustic guitar, beefed up by doing several overdubs.<\/p>\n

The recording is a fairly rough and ready affair, taking just a\u00a0few days, and the song probably requires a little more work. Let me know what you think.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A friend of mine is obsessed with killer squirrels. The idea of a marauding squirrel leaping out of the trees to attack unwary passers-by intrigued me so I decided to\u00a0 write a song about it. You can listen to a newly recorded version on myspace. It turns out, though,\u00a0she has more reason to be obsessed\u00a0than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43,14,4],"tags":[15,44,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56"}],"version-history":[{"count":30,"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2508,"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56\/revisions\/2508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.moogieman.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}