I don't like ice cream trucks

YouTube link.

Memorial Day marks the unofficial beginning of ice cream truck season.  When I say I dread their arrival, it may me sound like a curmudgeonly old man yelling "stay off my lawn" to neighborhood kids, but that's not the case.  What I don't like is that the trucks play only one (short) melody that repeats endlessly at a loud enough volume that it can be heard ~5 blocks away.  This means if I'm doing yard or garden chores, I have to listen to this melody several hundred times as the truck cruises - slowly - through the adjacent subdivision and ours.

Today, the most popular ice cream truck song in the country is a half-minute loop of “The Entertainer,” according to Mark Nichols of Nichols Electronics, the Minnesota company that makes most of the nation’s ice cream truck sound systems. His father started the firm in 1957 after inventing a transistorized replacement for the clockwork-style machine that used to be the norm.

“The technology has changed, but the songs have hardly changed at all in a century,” Nichols said. “They’re all old, all simple and all in the public domain. We go out of our way to avoid violating anybody’s copyright.”

Also echoing around American cul-de-sacs each summer, he said, are “Turkey in the Straw,” “Sailing, Sailing,” “Little Brown Jug” and “Camptown Races.”

This video captures the same song our local truck plays - "The Entertainer" by Scott Joplin - which is a nice enough melody, but maddening enough under these circumstances to make me want to throw things at the truck.

Grumble, grumble...