These are the songs that scared the (Minnesota Viking) pajama pants off me when I was eight, my room lit only by the glowing blue numbers of my AM/FM digital clock-radio, which every five minutes seemed to issue another terrifying musical narrative, not the least of which were . . .

The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, by Gordon Lightfoot: Growing up near the big lake they call Gitchee Gumee, I couldn‘t help but be alarmed, as it were, when my alarm clock delivered this one. The knowledge that it was – as the scariest movies always say — “Based on a True Story” made it all the more mortifying. Line That Still Gives Me Goosebumps: “At 7 PM a main hatchway gave in/He said fellas it’s been good to know ya . . .”

Wild Fire, by Michael Martin Murphey: This song is a riddle wrapped in an enigma deep-fried in a conundrum. What is it about? Is it the horse who died or the girl? Or is it the girl and the horse she rode in on? And why the extra E in Murphy? LTSGMG: “Oh they say she died one winter/When there came a killing frost . . .”

Taxi, by Harry Chapin: This late-night cab ride to 16 Parkside Lane seemed to be played exclusively late at night and was depressing even then, inducing in me a third-grader’s equivalent of the mid-life crisis – the one-ninth-life crisis? The fact that Chapin had already died, in a car crash, made it almost unlistenable. LTSGMG: “She said, ‘Harry . . . keep the change’.”

Cats in the Cradle, by Harry Chapin: My own father, a traveling salesman, “had planes to catch and bills to pay” and I probably “learned to walk while [he] was away.” But he did teach me to throw and the only time he said “Not today” was when we asked him, as we frequently did, to take us bowling, to which he had — and still has — some clinical aversion. LTSGMG: “What I’d really like to do is borrow the car keys/See ya later can I have them please.”

Love Rollercoaster, by Ohio Players: There’s that background scream in the middle of it, and as everyone on the Nativity of Mary playground knew, that scream belonged to a woman being murdered in the alley outside the studio while this song was being recorded. (The Players evidently used a studio that wasn’t soundproofed.) Also, grape Bubble Yum was made from spider eggs. LTSGMG: “Aiiieeee!”

The Night Chicago Died, by Paper Lace: The thought of that poor kid sitting at home, knowing that “about a hundred cops were dead” and his dad might be one of them, preyed on the fears of every child. LTSGMG: “And there was no sound at all/But the clock tick on the wall.” (I wept sweet tears of relief when that door burst open wide, and his daddy stepped inside.)

Knights in White Satin, by Moody Blues: Like many songs from that era, meant to be listened to while stoned, they also freaked out those of us who were tripping on nothing but Nesquik. Where to begin? The whole thing is harrowing, but the Lines That Still Give Me Goosebumps are from that bombastic spoken-word interlude:

Impassioned lovers wrestle as one
Lonely man cries for love and has none
New mother picks up and suckles her son
Senior citizens wish they were young.

Cold-hearted orb that rules the night
Removes the colors from our sight
Red is gray and yellow white
And we decide which is right
And which is . . .an illusion.

Cue the swelling strings. And the John Bonham drum solo of my pounding heart.

I have an internet music service with 100 channels, one of which is dedicated entirely to TV theme songs. I’ve been playing it all week, and walking around the house as if in the closing credits of my own sitcom, so that any time something funny happens, I laugh and then freeze my face in mid-howl, holding the pose until the song plays out, the way every TV show ended in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

There’s been a typo: The ‘70s weren’t The Me Decade; they were Theme Decade, a point driven home when I heard the fully-flowered, 2-minute-and-8-second “What’s Happenin’ Theme,” by Henry Mancini, a starter on any Theme Dream Team, having also given the world the themes to “Pink Panther” and “Charlie’s Angels”, among countless others.

Mancini’s teammates would have to include Harry Nilsson, who wrote and performed the theme to “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” but is best known for the Theme to Midnight Cowboy: “Everybody’s talkin’ at me, I don’t hear a word they’re sayin’ . . .”

This entire post could be a Mike Post post, as his name appeared in the credits – over the themes that he wrote — for “The Rockford Files” and “Hill Street Blues” and “Magnum P.I.” (Next week: A Markie Post post.)

But the undisputed heavyweight champion of television themes in the Golden Age of Television Theme Songs was Rhythm Heritage, who made their name with the theme from “S.W.A.T.,” capped their careers with the theme from “L.A. Law,” but who achieved their magnum opus sometime in between with the theme from the Robert Blake vehicle “Baretta,” with its prophetic line: “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time . . .”

(Full disclosure: On a family vacation to L.A. in 1977, I witnessed Fred the Cockatoo from Baretta perform an astonishing array of tricks before the slack-jawed stares of me and my four siblings. Not on Hollywood Boulevard, mind you, but on the Universal Studios tour.)

The theme from “S.W.A.T.” reached number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, as did the themes from “Welcome Back, Kotter” and “Miami Vice” — Jan Hammer’s “Crockett’s Theme.” (“Tubbs’s Theme”, if he had one, didn’t chart.)

The first single my wife ever bought was the ubiquitous theme to “The Greatest American Hero.” As it and all of these songs played in our kitchen this week, I’d check their vital statistics on the display: That’s not the X-Files theme; it’s “Materia Primoris.” That note-perfect version of “The Twilight Zone” theme was performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic. Who is the genius who composed the Laverne DeFazio tour de force — the tour de fazio — “Making Our Dreams Come True”? Cyndi Grecco.

What have we gotten since the late ‘80s, since Al Jarreau’s theme from “Moonlighting”? The theme from “Friends.”

The prosecution rests.

On Sunday, I was at a Broadway touring company’s matinee of “The Producers” when Max Bialystock stopped singing, sat on his jail cot and said, in character: “In case you’re wondering, New England 14, San Diego 6.” There was a moment’s silence while the audience absorbed the remark, after which 2,800 New Englanders exploded in applause.

I looked up to see if anyone TiVoing the game had thrown himself from the balcony. But alas, no.

At some point, we’ve all been held scoreless while a big game sails on without us. You’re on an airplane or in a theater. You’re in church and incommunicado. My wedding took place, inexplicably, on moving day at the Masters. My oldest brother was married, inexcusably, during a Notre Dame-Michigan football game. In both cases, the scores went up one pew and down another like falling dominoes. They were passed on by a kind of oral bucket brigade that started with the limo driver, flashing updates to ushers by semaphore flag and hand signal.

I was at Candlestick Park in 1999 for a Giants-Cardinals game when the scoreboard announced that the U.S. women’s soccer team had just beaten China to win the Women’s World Cup. The crowd gave the scoreboard a standing ovation. Mark McGwire stepped out of the box and applauded.

A year ago my wife was flying from Atlanta to Knoxville when the pilot announced that the Colts had just beaten the Patriots in the AFC championship game. For the remainder of the flight, arms remained in the upright and locked position, toasting former Tennessee quarterback Peyton Manning.

The best way to learn of a much-anticipated score is via the out-of-town manual scoreboard at Wrigley or Fenway, when a yellow 7 suddenly appears in an empty square, like a friendly face in a window.

The worst way is by drip-torture, a score slowly revealing itself over the course of a day or even days. Years ago, I flew from London to Minneapolis, taxied to my apartment, went to sleep for a full day and then woke to the TV. Everyone – newscasters, weathermen, late-night comedians – was talking about Evander Holyfield’s missing ear and Mike Tyson’s newfound fondness for cannibalism. After several minutes of this, a lightbulb buzzed to life above my head and I phoned a friend: “Did Mike Tyson by any chance . . . bite off Evander Holyfield’s ear?”

As I write this, John McCain is on TV saying that he learned of the moon landing two years after Neil Armstrong’s giant leap for mankind, but that his captors were quick to pass along bad news, like the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

The same is true of the trivial, too. Bad news travels faster. As a Celtic fan in the ‘80s, I had friends who would call whenever Boston was losing, but remained silent when they were winning. Until I did the only thing left to me, and stopped having them as friends.

The other day, the opening notes of “Piano Man” abruptly issued from my car stereo speakers and I braced myself for a rhyme that has always rubbed me the wrong way:

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday/The regular crowd shuffles in/There’s an old man sittin’ next to me/Makin’ love to his tonic and gin.

Nobody orders a tonic and gin – “A T&G, my good man” – anymore than he orders a Coke and rum, or a soda and Scotch. I’ve often wondered – I ‘ve plenty of time for such things – why Joel didn’t have the old man getting it on with any other rhyming substance — say, Red Bull and Vicodin.

The fact that neither Red Bull nor Vicodin existed when he wrote the song is nitpicking on your part.

Among the worst offenders in these rhymes against humanity is Robert Palmer’s “Some Like It Hot,” which contains the line “Some like it hot,” followed by a three-beat pause in which Palmer rifles his rhyming dictionary for something to pair with that phrase. He ultimately settles on “Some like it hot/Some like it hot” – an exact rhyme, to be sure, but not a terribly satisfying one, especially as it’s repeated four times to end the song.

But the rhyme that I’ve always found most difficult to abide is in Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” in which the protagonist tells his inamorata: “You gotta/Prada/Bag with a lotta” – and here the listener begins to wonder, Monty Hall-style, what exactly she has in that Prada bag: Keys to a Hyundai Sonata? The liner notes to “Zenyatta Mondatta”? Appetizer portions of veal piccata? Wallets by Escada? Yankee catcher Jorge Posada?

Alas, the Fresh Prince comes up with, “You gotta/Prada/Bag with a lotta . . . stuff in it.”

He could have said any number of things that rhymed: Handel cantatas. Sleeves of balatas. 8×10 glossies of Erik Estrada. Yada yada yada.

But instead we get nada. Though not, sadly, the word “nada.” That — you’re way ahead of me here — would have rhymed.

In a buzzkill of a commercial airing during the NFL playoffs, Budweiser explains what exactly “Beechwood-aged” means, though “cold-filtered” – that other hyphenated staple of beer commercials – happily remains a mystery.

Advertisers have long enticed us with wondrous ingredients, with awe-inducing amenities whose names are so seductive – think of Halls “Mentho-Lyptus” — that further explication is unnecessary, and indeed unwanted. You had me at “rich Corinthian leather,” Ricardo Montalban.

Certs has forever boasted that it contains Retsyn, even though – more likely because – nobody knows what Retsyn is. Folgers has its exotic Flavor Crystals. And a few dry cleaners still practice the dark art of One-Hour Martinizing, a process at least as ancient – and every bit as arcane — as the corning of beef.

Automotive commercials are eternally shrouded in glorious obfuscation. Rack-and-pinion steering. Steel-belted radial tires. The viscosity and thermal breakdown of 30-weight motor oil. I’ve no earthly idea what any of these things are, which is precisely why these ads all work for me.

Literally work for me, in the case of Scrubbing Bubbles shower cleaner, whose smiling and thickly-eyebrowed bubbles “work hard so you don’t have tooooooo” – that last monosyllable chillingly drawn out as the bubbles are sucked down your shower drain, having evidently worked themselves to death, a concept the Japanese call karoshi.

Always Panty Liners with Dry-Weave: “What exactly is Dry-Weave?” asks a female in my family. “It sounds like something they might offer at my hair salon.”

And what, for that matter, is the aforementioned Halls Mentho-Lyptus? I’m guessing it is mentholated eucalyptus, though that hardly crystallizes the concept for me. Does anybody know what the mentholating process consists of, and if it is in any way related to the vulcanizing process that turns rubber into a hockey puck? Is there One-Hour Mentholating? And if so, is that faster than the expedient properties in Fast-Actin’ Tinactin?

Is Vicks’ Formula 44 in any way related to Formula 409, and do the 364 less-famous formulas in between have any marketing potential, either as medicine or counter cleaner (or both)? And what happened – to quote every comedian who has ever stood in front of a brick wall – to Preparations A through G? Is there really no beating “Deeeeeep Heating?”

Or is the answer to this and every other question in the history of commercial television exactly what I suspect it is: An ancient Chinese secret?

One rainy day in November my wife called for an umbrella and our 15-month-old daughter immediately sang, “Ella, ella, ella,” the hook from the inescapable “Umbrella.” I picked my jaw off the floor and manually locked it back in place before fetching an umbrella.

Rihanna’s not the only pop star to cross over to the 3-and-under set. Fergie’s “Big Girls Don’t Cry” spent weeks in the Top Ten of the Children’s chart on Rhapsody, having crossed over to dribblers – having crossover dribbled? – as a parental plea. “Hey Ya,” the outcast single, is the “Dark Side of the Moon” of the Children’s chart, having never left the Top 100 since its release.

Norah Jones says that people frequently tell her, “My 2-year-old loves you.” And indeed, just this morning, my three-year-old said, “Put on Norah Jones,” who sang Elmo a song – it’s in heavy rotation on Sesame Street – about a sometime vowel who stood her up: “I Don’t Know Why Y Didn’t Come.”

At the top of the pops for tots right now is Feist’s mandatory “1234,” which kids like to count to, and even feel superior to, as a later verse goes: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 10/Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then.”

“What happened to 7 and 8?” my daughter wonders, and I explain that sometimes numbers are sacrificed when rock stars contrive to rhyme, as when Bono left out 11 consecutive digits with: “Uno, dos, tres, quatorze.”

In my house, the feel-good hit of the summer — for those who still poop in their pants — was “Summertime,” by Kenny Chesney. There is nothing like a two-year-old singing nostalgically for the summer memories she hasn’t yet had, and won’t be allowed to have until she’s 35: “Two bare feet on the dashboard/Young love and an old Ford/Cheap shades and a tattoo and a Yoohoo/Bottle on the floorboard/Perfect song on the radio/Sing along cause it’s one we know/It’s a smile/It’s a kiss/It’s a sip o’ wine/It’s the summertime/Sweet summertime.”

She also loved Montgomery Gentry’s “Lucky Man,” in which a middle-aged man resolves to count his blessings after a bitterly disappointing loss by the Cincinnati Bengals. (She was two, as I say, and had no way of knowing that nobody is bitterly disappointed when the Bengals lose. Not even the Bengals.)

Some pop chestnuts seem to have been written for children but enjoyed by adults: “Yellow Sumbarine,” “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” “Witch Doctor.” But the best songs are written for adults and enjoyed by children, like Ernie’s “Imagine That” or the ridiculously great music from “The Backyardigans” or my personal favorite: The theme to “Jakers!”, an animated show set in Ireland, whose opening tune ought to be covered by the Pogues or Dropkick Murphys.

There hasn’t been a decent theme song on non-animated TV since “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” went off the air. Unless you look to Nick Jr. or Noggin or PBS Kids. Then you see why, say, the theme from “Bob the Builder” did the opposite of Rihanna and Fergie: In the UK, it crossed over from the kids’ charts to the grown-ups’ one.

This New Year, I resolved to stop drinking. Soda. And I’ve been Diet Pepsi-free for seven days now. The caffeine withdrawal headache subsided two days ago. There was one near occasion of relapse — on January 2, at 35,000 feet — when I spent 30 minutes watching the drinks trolley make its glacial progress toward my seat in Row 30. But when it arrived, I swallowed hard and asked for water. “No ice, please.”

I was averaging 24 ounces a day when I kicked the can. Hardly Hefnerian — I think he drinks a twelve-pack of Pepsi daily, or did at one time — but still: If I had a nickel for every empty soda can in my office. Scratch that — I do have a nickel for every empty soda can in my office. Or will, when I redeem them.

In December my wife made her semi-annual visit to the room in which I write and reacted the way John Nash’s wife did when she entered the mad mathematician’s sanctum sanctorum in “A Beautiful Mind”: With horror. Cans were everywhere, stacked in pyramids or strewn on the floor, as in a carnival midway game.

Truman Capote couldn’t write without smoking something or drinking something. I’ve found I can write just as easily on water as on soda, even though the former is better for me. I’m like Willie Nelson’s bus.

Indeed, kicking the habit has been easier than I’d hoped. I like self-denial. It’s a form of self-indulgence. Over the years, I found myself enjoying Lenten “sacrifices” — giving up desserts, for instance — which is why I’ve given up giving things up for Lent.

When I told my wife this morning that I was considering, late in life, smoking for the first time — as a challenge, to see if I could kick the habit — she suggested I was getting overconfident. She also noticed that my tongue was a deep purple, the color of Fierce Grape Gatorade.

I’m up to 64 ounces a day.

While I was in Florida over the holidays, three men were arrested for felony fishing violations, an unspeakable bait crime which made the TV news in Fort Myers. We got to see the men’s mugshots, each of which looked like an 8×10 headshot from a “Dukes of Hazzard” casting call. With those haunting photos still on the screen — you could see their “county orange” jumpsuits at the bottom of the frame — the female reporter said gravely: “Police seized 2,000 pounds of mullet.”