One thing I love about the Internet: search engines.

I like Bing and several others, but Google is still king. So when Helen Howland asked me to find a song for her, I told her I thought I could.

Sure, I have a pretty good collection of “Old Sheet Music,” always looking for more, but I did not recognize that song title as something in my stash. I was pretty sure other people out there know this song, sure it has been recorded, and almost sure a performance would pop up on YouTube.

Sure enough: a performance by Eddie Arnold and one by Scotty Alexander. The song was written by Eddy Arnold, Steve Nelson and Ed Nelson. It made it to Number 5 on the Hit Parade in December of 1949.

Here are the lyrics:
/Will//Santy//come to Shanty town
To a poor little boy like me?
Will he bring me some toys
Like the other girls and boys?

Will Santy come to Shanty town
If he sees our Christmas tree?
Mommy said he would
If I promised to be good.

For we don't have a fireplace
Or a chimney on our shack
Like the other lucky children have
Who lived across the track.

Now if I say my prayers each day
When Christmas rolls around
Will Santy come to Shanty town.

He didn't stop last Christmas Eve
Doesn't he know we live here
Will my mommy have to paint my toys
The way she did last year?

Now if I say my prayers each day
When Christmas rolls around
Will Santy come to Shanty town?/

I hope you were singing along.

***

MacMall had a 1 Terrabyte Fantom GreenDrive, an external eSATA/USB, on sale for $49.95—after rebates. There was one $10 rebate, and also a $20 one. Free shipping by UPS ground.

Like duck on junebug, I pounced. First time I had seen a Terrabyte external drive at $50 or below. I downloaded the rebate forms.

The forms said I had 20 days from date of invoice to send them in. Delivery was slow. One rebate needed the buyer to go to a particular website and input the serial number, something not known until the hard drive was unpacked.

Terms and conditions language was stern. Postmark of rebate request had to be within those 20 days—no excuses. Well, not a problem, if they ship it promptly! It remains to be seen whether the rewards or rebates fulfillment people will send the rebates, or welsh on the pretext that the request was tardy.

To keep my business, MacMall and Fantom Drives need to offer real discounts, and refrain from playing the old rebate game, complete with gotchas.

Meanwhile, wouldn’t you know, along comes a better deal. Best Buy is advertising a Seagate Expansion 1 TB external hard drive for $49.99 shipped—no rebates required! Note to vendors: customers want discounts, or price reductions. We hate rebates.

Promoting low prices with “asterisk” restrictions such as rebates is sleazy. Vendors, you must think we are all doofuses. No? Just some of us? Enough who will lose all that paperwork or put off fussing with all the requirements until we miss your unrealistic deadline (like you can’t afford refund checks after a certain, imminent date)? That way we will be enticed by that “after rebate” number, but you will have to make good on only a portion of the rebates.

So why do we all need 1-TB or even 2-TB external drives? So we can save all our data when we backup our files—that’s one reason. Another is so that we can use LapLink or another utility to transfer all that needs to be transferred from the ole puter to the new one, or have a place to stash everything when upgrading to Windows 7. Or so we can take all the accumulated videos and photos from all sorts of media such as SD cards and memory sticks and copy them to a big drive and erase and reuse the
media—and the same applies to USB drives we carry around a lot.

What were the best deals you found on CyberMonday?