You probably have heard a plethora of noise toys while you are trying to talk on the CB. Some of them can be funny, many of them are aggravating. I am not going to decide what’s aggravating and what’s not, nor who owns each toy. I will simply point out what I personally know about them. Let’s start with one that’s almost a classic in Thurston County, the Bunchie the Green Llama song.

First of all, what the hell is a Bunchie?

A bunchie, according to the Urban Dictionary, a Bunchie is “a strange thing that seems to be half slug, half llama, and half biggin’. It originated from a gif image. It prances along smiling in an unnerving fashion. Some people call it Kelet, after a person who posted an image of it in some forum, but its proper name is Bunchies.”

And according to knowyourmeme.com:  ”The Bunchie was created by designer Aaron St. Goddard and animated by Roel Van Mastbergen and is believed to have been popularized when a user named Kelet posted the animated GIFas a humorous response to a serious thread on the Penny Arcade forums. Because of this, the character became known as a Kelet amongst Penny Arcade users. Bunchie is also one of a handful of unofficial mascots adopted by genmay.com users at least as early as 2003.

This is a Bunchie:

And that song, what is that song about?

That song that’s played alongside Bunchie, is originally called the Ievan Polkka, commonly misspelled “Levan Polkka”. Translated, Eva’s Polka, it is of Finnish origin dating from the 1930′s. The melody is probably even older than that, perhaps dating from the 19th century. According to Wikipedia, the song is sung in Eastern Savonian dialects, and it is about a young man who “wants to dance with Ieva (Eva or Eeva in Savo), but her mother won’t let him. They sneak away to someone else’s house, where everyone is dancing to a polka, and dance all night. When he follows her home, her angry mother is waiting for them, but he tells her straight out that Ieva and he will be together no matter what.”

The song was more recently recorded using the Vocaloid Hatsune Miku, and that’s the version we know on the CB.

This is an old version of the song:

So there you have it. A long boring read!