SONG CHALLENGE WINNER!

The Song Challenge:   Mummy, Where Did The Funny Little Man In The Garden Go?  PARIS -- The dormant Garden Gnome Liberation Front has sprung back to life, stealing about 20 gnomes during a nighttime raid on a Paris exhibition.  "We demand ... that garden gnomes are no longer ridiculed and that they be released into their natural habitat," the Front's Paris wing said in a statement following its weekend strike.  France's first garden gnome exhibition in the exclusive Bagatelle park on the outskirts of the capital opened last month and has been a hit with the public as chic Parisians develop a taste for kitsch culture.  The Garden Gnome Liberation Front vanished from the public eye in 1997 after a northern French court handed its ringleader a suspended prison sentence and fined him for his part in the disappearance of around 150 gnomes.  The only suspected sighting of the organization since then was a mass suicide of gnomes at Briey in eastern France in September 1998, when 11 of them were found dangling by their necks under a bridge.  A letter found nearby said: "When you read these few words we will no longer be part of your selfish world, where we serve merely as pretty decoration."  Now, the sight of 2,000 of the gaudy, colorful creatures dotted around the Bagatelle gardens has clearly proved too big a temptation for the group to avoid.   It warned that it would strike again unless the show was closed and all the gnomes released.  Organizers told the daily Le Parisien that they had no intention of bowing to the Front's demands.

Homesick Old Gnome by Lin in Kansas
(Tune:  "Dark as a Dungeon, Way Down in the Mine")

Lin in Kansas' Comment:  But...what if they don't wanna go?

Oh come all ye gardeners, and list to my plea,
For this homesick old gnome never wanted to flee
From my green grassy spot where the bees buzzed around,
To this dank, bor-ing mine way down deep in the ground.

CHORUS:
Now it's dark as a dungeon, and damp as the dew,
And the tedium is double and excitements are few.
And the rain never falls, and the sun never shines,
And girl gnomes aren't allowed down here in the mines.

I liked my warm shelter by the herb garden wall,
Where the dill and the fennel grew several feet tall,
And the mint and the basil, they'd smell so sweet
Where they grew and they tangled 'round my booted feet.

The Mistress, she'd talk all the while that she'd weed,
And she'd cuss out the sage plants for goin' to seed.
Then she'd giggle and pat my small hooded head,
And shock these old eyes as she bent o'er the flower bed.

CHORUS

The cats would come out and they'd play next to me,
And the house dog would visit when he had to pee.
The birds decorated my little stone butt,
And I'd smell oh so nice til the rain cleaned me up.

In the fall all the leaves would hold dances for fun,
And the breeze would play music 'til they were all done.
In the winter I'd sleep 'neath a blanket of snow.
Then wake in the springtime to watch flowers grow.

CHORUS

Then the Liberators came and they took me one day,
Set me down in the mountains, here beside this old cave,
They told me that now I could do as I pleased,
But no gnome here knew me, so for the mine I was seized.

Now I toil for subsistence with chisel and sledge,
While in dreams I am sleeping beneath my old hedge,
Oh I long for the sunshine and those bright days of yore,
And the tears streak my face when I think "never more."

CHORUS

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