Monday morning quiz: Pop lyrics
Posted: October 25th, 2004 | 4 Comments »Oh, prostate audiologist that crafty Cory Doctorow! Prancing around all la-di-da! “Look at me! I put my books on the web for free!” Ain’t he just the shiznit?
Yeah, well, his wasn’t the first big new science-fiction novel to be
given away free on the web, oh no! ‘Cos back in 1997, when I worked on Starship Titanic website, we gave away the entire text of the tie-in novel. (concept by Douglas Adams, book by Terry Jones)
That’s right. Every single word.
(Okay, now you have to go off and get the joke before you continue reading)
Well, okay, not every word, because we left off the last fifty and spun it into one of the web’s stupidest competitions (that was, remarkably, won). But we also showed the world how it was done, with PIPA – one of the silliest/coolest/most compact bits of Perl I’ve ever written.
Returning to Mr Doctorow, I notice that his first novel, Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom has been out in its new remixable form for a while now and not much has been done with it (other than a Russian translation), so it’s time to change that:
- Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (CAPIPA Remix) – in which the original has its words reordered alphabetically, using PIPA’s new cousin, CAPIPA, which retains capitalisation. (Thanks for putting it online, Sean!)
“Beautiful,” BEAUTY beauty, became. BECAME because because because
because because because — because because because because because
because because because because because because because because because
become become become become become become become bed bed bed. bed bed
bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed bed, bed bed bedroom bedroom
bedroom-bedroom beds bedside bedside bedside.
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (Sausages & Mash Remix)
– in which the original has all words beginning with the letters S and
M replaced with “Sausage” and “Mash” respectively, in accordance with
the classic children’s game.He chuckled. “No sausage, not mash. I’m into the kind of mash sausage that you only come across on-world.”
Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom (More And Bloodier Wars Remix) – in which the original is run through Babelfish several times, from English to French to German and back to English again. (With some help from Dan Urist’s WWW::Babelfish module)
I never thought that I would live, in order to arise, where the
maintenance would decide A-Movin ‘ Dan at the person in possession of
a favour light up to the death of the heat of the universe.
(Regarding
the bizarre disconnect between what spreadsheet applications were
originally intended to do and what they are used for now, buy the
surprising connection between Excel users and UNIX geeks, link and how I’m
standing out in the cold.)