User blog comment:Gideoncrawle/New Year's special - LTDI update and preview/@comment-1153194-20110103023024/@comment-1874924-20110103030736

Glad you liked it, Sprink, although I thought you didn't like to read previews. The scene in this preview is noteworthy in that it doesn't advance the story (although I did slip in a bit of foreshadowing) and is present merely to add color--a "pause that refreshes", if you will.

I thought "Happy Birthday" was old enough to be in the public domain, but no matter--my inclusion of it is obviously "fair use". Now that you mention it, though, I will be including a copyrighted song that will actually be part of a major plot point; and its copyrighted status is the reason the Storyteller gives for its being edited out of the finished episodes. (The producers, she says, were apparently too cheap to pay the royalties.)

In similar vein, I will be incorporating several (mostly famous) poems into the story, for reasons that I will reveal when LTDI is ready to launch. Most of these are in the public domain, but at least one is recent enough to be copyrighted. Some of these poems actually advance the story--one even has a challenge built around it--but most are present for flavor, and to expose the kids on this wiki to them. As Jack Point boasts in The Yeomen of the Guard:

I can teach you with a quip if I've a mind; I can trick you into learning with a laugh; Oh, winnow all my folly, and you'll find A grain or two of truth among the chaff!

As for the "Yes, Virginia," bit, that's just my associative memory at work. My stories tend to include such references (be they ancient or modern) as do TDI-G&S's plot summaries. In LTDI, I add these references with a forklift.