Heh, I was hoping you'd like this one, bkev. I just had a feeling you, specifically, would be bringing down the hammer on me if I screwed this one up, so I'm glad you like it.
So let's see... Norwegian Wood. I've actually read both those things. The way I see it is that the real-life inspiration was an affair (or one-night stand), but the lesbian aspect was a subtext for the scenario of the song. As in, a real scenario was extrapolated as basis for a fictional song, sorta like how "Hey, Jude" was supposed to have been written for Julian Lennon, but Jude simply sounded better than Jules. But basically the story for the song, as I've heard, is that the singer is invited over to a woman's house. She cockteases him for a while (being a lesbian) before making him sleep in the tub. He wakes up and sets fire to her Norwegian Wood-paneled apartment in revenge.
About Run for Your Life... hmm, I just listened to both the stereo version and the version I used in the video back to back, and the latter does seem just a bit slower. For the songs where there actually were corresponding cartoon episodes dedicated to them, I just kept the corresponding audio rather than switching it out with the version I own. I did this for two reasons. 1: I'm lazy. 2: All I own is the 1987 stereo mix of the album, which I know doesn't exactly have the best rep. Through a good portion of their catalogue, The Beatles considered the mono mixing to be the standard, while stereo was more of a niche thing (it'll never catch on). So I felt it was important to have what I assumed was the original mono mixing for as many of the songs as I could swing. That said, I got all of my TV show clips from YouTube, so I have absolutely no idea if there were any conversion issues that might have affected playback speed. As a matter of fact, given that I've heard that you have a decent vinyl collection, I was hoping maybe you could tell me. ^_^
Finally, as for your hoping I didn't look most of this up... I guess that depends on what you mean. I mean, unless I was there to witness the events the first hand, or the information was just transmitted into my brain (either of which would have been really awesome), I would have had to have looked this up. But I guess you mean if I looked this up solely for this review, in which case, no, most of this stuff I learned back in high school, although I did refresh myself before writing this just to make sure I wasn't making anything up.