Sounds Like the Man’s Loony Tunes Are for the Birds

Dennis Knicks, 37, makes a living as a custom songwriter and performer, celebrating pets, children, weddings, anniversaries and retirements. “I’ve written a polka for a chicken, heavy metal for lizards and a song about an alpine goat in Nova Scotia that loves canoe riding,” said the founder of Songco, his Des Plaines, Ill., company. “I also wrote some blues for a woman in Mississippi whose grandparents believed she could talk to the family’s Doberman.” He bases the lyrics on customers’ information and performs the songs, using computer equipment. Customers, who pay from $35 for a basic pet song to $150 for a package, such as tunes for the first five anniversaries, get a tape and a lyric sheet. They can also choose a musical style, from rock to tangos. He’s written “Duke’s Night Out,” about a break-dancing dog, and a song about an armadillo, a real challenge. Here’s one about a Welsh Corgi: “A little ice cream and some yogurt makes Brickie feel OK./ Then she takes a nap/ Lying on her back/ And when she’s up, it’s time to play./ There’s some hair on the couch and some on our friends,/ So Brickie has been visiting today. . . .”

--A New York area hotel has named a suite for Douglas (Wrong Way) Corrigan, the pilot who set out on July 17, 1938, for Los Angeles and landed instead in Ireland. The hotel paid Corrigan, a Santa Ana resident, now 80, an honorarium to participate in festivities this weekend and he showed up for a parade through Hampstead Village, Long Island, wearing the same $10 leather jacket in which he made his transatlantic flight. The 50th anniversary celebration, fittingly conducted on the 49th year, renewed speculation about whether his flight was an accident. Corrigan said that shortly after takeoff, he misread the compass on his single-engine Curtiss Robin monoplane. “There were clouds below me so I couldn’t see the water, and clouds above me so I couldn’t see the sun,” he recalled. “When I figured I was over Arizona, I went down below the clouds, and that was the first time I saw the water,” he said. “And right ahead of me was the Irish coastline.” But he also recalled that the Commerce Department two years before had denied him permission to fly from New Finland, Canada to Ireland, telling him to “get lost.” “That’s exactly what I did,” Corrigan said.

--Did Amy Carter’s time spent protesting apartheid in South Africa and CIA activities take her from the books too much? The Providence Journal Bulletin reported Saturday that the 19-year-old daughter of former President Jimmy Carter had been dismissed from Brown University for academic reasons.