The Ancient Ghost of Irony...

UPDATE: SEE BOTTOM OF POST FOR NEW INFO

UPDATE 2: No, the song is not the song Angel... c'mon people...

I recently started rewatching the entire Buffy TV series on DVD. I own the Chosen collection, which is 1 big box with all 144 episodes. Today, I watched the 2nd season finale, the amazing Becoming two part episode. But I am not here to talk about the show itself, I am here to tell a story.

Many many many many years ago (like 9) my best friend and I decided to enter this big contest in the Games puzzle magazine. The contest involved answering many questions, and each question would somehow give a hint to the final question, which, if you could answer, entered you into the grand prize. The questions varied from "simple" mathematic equations, to knowing about historic events, to finding out about a specific painting and how much a bottle of shampoo in that painting cost. We hunted down answers everywhere from the then limited internet, up to and including heading all the way into center city Philadelphia to the city's big library to hunt down answers. Ok, he did most of it... but I was all helpy and supporty.

One of the questions what right up my alley. The answer we needed was which Sarah McLachlan song played at the end of the 2nd season finale of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I did not know. I could remember only a bit about the song. Now remember, this was before the internet had every piece of information available at your fingertips. I could recall a tiny segment of the tune, and a few lyrics. After finally finding a short clip on a website, I was able to get the lyrics "and I claw for solid ground." I even learned to play the few notes on the piano, a musical instrument that still mocks me to this day. But that tiny segment of the song is all we had to go on.

My best friend's friend, and one of our classmates, he found out, is/was a big McLachlan fan. He played the little ditty for me, I mentioned the lyrics, and not even she knew the full song... but she did own the piano books for her albums. After a lot of searching, we found the song was on an album called Surfacing, and the song was called Full of Grace. I still have a fond memory of this song, the hunt for the title, and that moment in the episode where Buffy's mom comes up the stairs, and those lyrics play.

Fast forward to an hour ago. I am watching the 2nd half of Becoming, the episode in question. The song starts to play. Buffy has just killed Angel and sent him to hell. Tears are pouring. Memories of the episode and our quest flood back. Then, I see Kristine Sutherland start to walk up the stairs. The lyrics begin... "and I claw for solid gr.........." Heh..... freeze frame... odd, I didn't touch the remote... Then the familiar XBox 360 bloink noise, and a message pops up "Attempting to read media." The disk cannot be read. It cannot be read AT THE EXACT MOMENT THAT PART OF THE SONG IS PLAYING.

I eject the disk, put it back, try another device... but there is something wrong with the disk AT THAT EXACT MOMENT. It winds up playing if I let it sit for a minute or two, but every device and every time, the disk freezes at this exact moment. So, long story short, the ancient ghost of irony has decided to freak me out a bit today.

UPDATE:
From Andrew, the best friend guy: "it's really funny to think of the internet as NOT being the mecca for all answers to all life, isn't it? i mean, we got that video of the commercial for the episode on the internet but couldn't find the episode. then when we nailed the little bit of lyric, we couldn't find it in context. that same question would've taken us ten minutes today, and from the time we actively started working on it, until the time Caitlin gave us the sheet music...had to be several weeks. straaaaaange..." More in the comments section.