Jarvis Cocker has a beard. That is all.
Tag music
<dylan>Subterranean Homesick Blues</dylan>
This video of Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues overlaid with XML markup might be the geekiest thing I’ve ever seen. It’s the work of a body called the Text Encoding Initiative, whose mission is to “develop and maintain guidelines for the digital encoding of literary and linguistic texts.”
I’m sure the man would approve, once somebody explained to him what XML tagging is.
The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
It’s always good to find out that something you’ve experienced thousands of times in your life actually has a name:
Baader-Meinhof is the phenomenon where one happens upon some obscure piece of information– often an unfamiliar word or name– and soon afterwards encounters the same subject again, often repeatedly. Anytime the phrase “That’s so weird, I just heard about that the other day” would be appropriate, the utterer is hip-deep in Baader-Meinhof.
The coinage of the name is (apparently) explained in the comments. The phenomenon is probably at least partly explained by the recency effect, where the last thing that somebody learns is more likely to be recalled first, but it doesn’t make it any less odd when it happens to you. I most memorably had this with Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, which is not a bad thing to show a cognitive bias towards.
Of course, reading this post is likely to make the reader now see references to the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon everywhere within the next few days or so. The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon Phenomenon, anyone?
Ode to Outlook
A Postcard to Nina by Jens Lekman might be the only song I’ve ever heard which directly references Microsoft Outlook:
Your father’s mailing me all the time,
He says that he just wants to say ‘hi’,
I send back Out of Office AutoReplies.
A cash reward for anybody who finds me a song about Excel.
Dogs
Some songs about dogs.