A reader fills in some background to that extremely dire video clip Jonah

posted Monday.

“John—actually, there are two versions of this song (not counting several

horrible ‘comedy’ versions).One is sung by a Romanian-born Italian woman and

a man whose origins I don’t know about – that’s ‘Haiducii’. The other

version (which is the original one) is sung by an incredibly trashy boy band

from Moldova called ‘O-Zone’.

“Both were major hits in Germany this year. The ‘O-Zone’ version was at #1

for about ten weeks. And for several weeks, we had ‘O-Zone’ at #1 and

’Haiducii’ at #2 with the same song. Luckily, both were one-hit-wonders and

their follow-ups had no big success. But I’m really curious if ‘Dragostea

din tei’ will be successful in the United States…”

Well, it got my kids’ attention all right. We now have MA-IA-HII!

MA-IA-HUU! for breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper. And to think I’ve been

saying nice things about Romania…