simont | (no subject)

Whew. It's been another slightly hectic week… It would have been only slightly hectic had it not been for the fact that I started it without a car and rapidly accumulated urgent errands I needed a car to run, so I had to run them all in something of a hurry when I got the thing back. A pain.

Still, mostly all over now, and I even have my shiny new Dension car stereo. Only I can't install it, because I lack the specialist tool required to extract the existing one! I think a lot of today is going to be spent trying to get my hands on a Sony car stereo release key. Gah. If I have to end up paying tens of pounds to get a professional to install the thing, I shall be most annoyed.

Went to the Carlton last night as usual, and was very amused by their new jukebox. It displays the title and artist for each track, with no intervening punctuation, in a box that isn't really big enough so a lot of the titles are truncated. This leads to such wonderful gems as ‘Living On The Blancmange’, ‘Town Called Jam’, ‘Don't Dream It's Crowded House’, and the outstanding ‘You Can't Hurry Phil Collins’. I feel a word game coming on. Anyone come up with any other particularly amusing examples?

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Have you never played the same game with book titles, reading them off the spine as a single sentence? "Dying inside Robert Silverberg" is a particularly gruesome-sounding example, and the nearest to hand is the rather dodgy "Once more with feeling Victoria Coren and Charlie Skelton".

It works better in this instance because the song titles are truncated in such a way the artists are replacing missing nouns or verbs, which means that more of them work well, because they don't have to rely on being able to add an extra one.

Although the very best ones are those in which the artist doesn't just replace a noun, or where the grammar changes significantly in the process. A couple of particularly good ones along those lines from Monochrome (where I set the game up this morning) have been:

I Am Smashing Pumpkins
Which Describes How They Might Be Giants
The Gentle Art Of Making Faith No More

We Are The Queen
My Lovers Garbage
Lucy In The Beatles

Why can't there be a group named “Borg”, dammit?

Fat Bottomed Queen
Are we in Shakespears Sister
Under the Red Hot Chili Peppers
Fight Fire With Metallica
Feed me to Adam and the Ants

Don't Worry, Be Bobby McFerrin
Driven Like The Sisters Of Mercy
U Can't Touch MC Hammer
Can't Help Falling In UB40

And continuing the Phil theme:
A Groovy Kind of Phil Collins

... or possibly Can't Help UB40 :)

Wake Me Up Before You Wham!

Please Please Please let Me Get The Smiths

What Do you Get When You Fall in 10CC

What Do you Get When You Fall in 10CC

Not very wet, of course.

*ahem* sorry :)

The best one I saw on that jukebox is “Love is all Wet Wet Wet”.

Flicking through my music at work, “Enough Gravity Kills” and “All the same Orgy” both do quite well as entire title/band tuples.

Anyone Can Play Radiohead (Guitar)
This is a Blur (Low)
What's the REM (Frequency, Kenneth?)
An Eagle in Boards of Canada (Your Mind)
Feed Me With My Bloody Valentine (Your Kiss)
Where Is My Pixies? (Mind)

and many more...