lovehatethings

Alice - Jersey girl -
Red shoes by the drugstore.
Step right up. 
Come on up to the house 'til the money runs out. 
Anywhere I lay my head, please wake me up.
Please call me, baby.
T'ain't no sin.
Lie to me.

Poor Edward - telephone call from Istanbul...
Better off without a wife.
Fumblin' with the blues, bad liver and a broken heart.
The piano has been drinking:
Drunk on the moon.

Annie's back in town... Hang on St. Christopher!
Pasties and a g-string (at the two o'clock club) -
Watch her disappear way down in the hole: Johnsburg, Illinois.

Danny says Annie's back in town.
So it goes.
Chained together for life, the wages of love, drunk on the moon, 
This one's from the heart.
Watch her disappear.
A good man is hard to find.

Buzz Fledderjohn - in shades - 9th & Hennepin.
Oily night.
In between love.
Gin-soaked boy.
Christmas card from a hooker in Minneapolis,
Nighthawk postcards (from easy street),
16 shells from a 30-ought-six,
$29.00,
A sweet little bullet from a pretty blue gun,
Old shoes:
A sight for sore eyes.

I'm still here Lucinda, Bride of Rain Dog, Big Black Mariah, all you zombies,
This one's from the heart.
Misery is the river of the world;
God's away on business;
Everything goes to hell - cemetery polka.

The ocean doesn't want me.
I want you.
Picking up after you, I wish I was in New Orleans.

No one knows I'm gone. 
We're all mad here.

Closing time.
Hang me in the bottle.

So long I'll see ya.
Looks like I'm up shit creek again.

Abbreviation (Russian)

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT

Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.

Longest Baseball Throw

Glen Gorbous, a Canadian minor leaguer, who had a three year stint in the Majors from 1955 - 1957 still holds the record. In 1957, after a running start, the ball left his arm at an estimated 120 MPH and it flew and flew and flew. After all was said and done the baseball covered a total of 445 feet 10 inches before hitting the ground and breaking the old record by a whole nine inches.

Job Title 

"temporary part-time libraries North-West inter-library loan business unit administration assistant."

Song Title - Christine Lavin

Regretting what I said to you when you called me at 11:00 on Friday morning to tell me that 1:00 Friday afternoon you were gonna leave your office, go downstairs, hail a cab, to go out to the airport, to catch a plane, to go skiing in the Alps for two weeks. Not that I wanted to go with you; I wasn't able to leave town, I'm not a very good skier, I couldn't expect you to pay my way, but after going out with you for three years, I don't like surprises. (A musical apology)

...special mention goes to

"The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation." By Rednex 

Film Title

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D

...but it once was

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

Band Name

The Clouds That Fondle Jagged Crags And Raging Storms Conspire And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Album Title - Chumbawumba

The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother's hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don't just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to 'guard' any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it's over, then it's done, and the boy bands have won.

Some considerations on what we may be sacrificing to Wolfram Alpha's "computational" engine, and a long lingering question about why the colon separator has become so popular in non-fiction.

First of all, get your minds out of the anatomical gutter at the mention of the word colon.

Second of all, remember that in an age of 140 character messaging and blip journalism, the redundant has its own function.

In strolling through a big box bookstore today, I realized the concept of the colon-divided title has pretty much taken over all of non-fiction. Now I completely understand the appeal of such a titling archetype. Every author wants to stamp some personal creativity onto the ink-laden tome that it's taken them weeks or years to produce. But, as the bane of a publisher's existence is not being able to convey the catchphrase content of a book in 2 seconds or less, the creative title cannot last on its own. I remember thinking myself execeeding clever in high school and university in developing the titular witticisms that allowed me to show creative flair in delivering an essay on what was usually a dry topic.

As an example of the redundancy of the archetype I take a couple of the most popular non-fiction titles on Amazon and expose the relative meaninglessness of the pre-colon text.

Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea: One Man's Mission to Promote Peace... One School at a Time lends itself to such examination. Let's take the pre-colon text alone and adapt as necessary for whichever situation we can see fit.

Three Cups of Tea:

...How to Defeat Narcolepsy
...Liz, Chuck, and Bill and the Line to the British Throne
...Rocky III, The A-Team and After

How about, instead of the post-colon The Story of Success after Malcom Gladwell's pre-text Outliers, we substitute:

Outliers:

...A New Age Guide to Sunbathing
...Rural Endurers in an Urban Age
...How Pony Boy Stayed Gold (alright, I know this one's a stretch)

And to wrap the point, Mark R. Levin's Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto could just as easily be summed up with

Liberty and Tyranny:

...The Forbidden Love of a French Statue and a T-Rex
...The Making of Metalstorm 2: The Return of Jaryd Syn
...The Auteur Dictatorship of Anchors Aweigh

Seeing that pre-colon text exists strictly for creative reasons (albeit sometimes allegorical or metaphoric statement) one wonders why practice is ever-increasing... 

And so we go back to the beginning. There is purpose in the redundant. In as much as the colon archetype of titling has become a nuisance by its very success, and that the pre-colon text adds nothing substantial to the content indication, why have it at all?

There is enjoyment in words. I can echo the message "love sucks" in two words, two tweets, two paragraphs, two pages, two chapters, two books, or two lifetimes. Tom Waits can do it in gutteral imagery. Shakespeare can do it in ten syllable cadences. And Ezra Pound can wax psychotic in a dozen languages and pictographs to all achieve a similar message.

So while this entire post could've been condensed to "Colons in non-fiction titles maybe trite, but sometimes offer artistic entertainment value", it would have hardly been as fun to write.