A very creative young man named Jonathan Mann started a project of writing a song every day for a year. This was some time ago now, and I don’t think he has stopped. (You’ll have to look him up—I’m not that interested in his work.) He goes by the name Rock Cookie Bottom (he has a song about that, of course—I think it may be some reference to the song Big Rock Candy Mountain) and his most famous song is one written about the great economist and New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman:

Now I find that Loudon Wainwright III also has written a song about Krugman:

It is interesting that they seem to have been written right around the same time. Mann posted his on 17 March 2009 and Wainwright’s live performance of his song was put on YouTube on 22 June 2009 (although the performance was on 17 June). It is cool that Paul Krugman has become such a big pop cultural reference that people are writing songs about him. Imagine people writing songs about Gary Taylor or Denys Turner? But when I heard the Mann’s song, I thought, “Why didn’t I think of that!”