My Life According to Depeche Mode (I was tempted to choose "Modern English" in deference to a certain incident on KROQ)

I noticed an interest meme on Facebook today in a post by Vincent Kong, and I decided it would be an interesting exercise to try it out (and my food was actually still somewhat warm by the time I finished). I think a few of my answers are pretty clever, so I decided to include my post in this spot as well.

Instructions: Using only song names from ONE ARTIST, cleverly answer these questions. Pass it on to at least 15 people and include me. You can't use the band I used. Try not to repeat a song title. It's a lot harder than you think! Re-post as "my life according to (band name)".

MAP's additional note: I am spending way too much time trying to be clever with this. It helps that Depeche Mode (which is my favorite artist) has such a huge catalog. This would have been significantly harder had I picked Modern English or---dare I say it?---Baltimora.


Are you a male or female?
"Everything Counts"

Describe Yourself:
"I Want It All"

How do you feel?
"I Feel You" (Oh, _how_ do I feel... Sorry, I misunderstood the question.)

Describe where you currently live:
"Home"

If you could go anywhere, where would you go:
"Only When I Lose Myself"

Your favorite form of transportation:
"Walking In My Shoes"

Your best friend is:
"I Feel Loved" (I had to resist the urge to put "Master and Servant" here. DM can be so convenient for some things... And my answer refers to the friendship type of love, by the way, so nobody should get any ideas.)

What's the weather like:
"Precious" (I guess I'm writing this on the one day of the year it's that way here... Oh crap, I need to use this later. How about "Enjoy the Silence", which actually makes sense if you've seen the music video.)

Favorite time of day:
"Waiting for the Night"

If your life was a TV show, what would it be called:
"World in My Eyes"

What is life to you:
"Black Celebration" (Just kidding!)

Your fear:
"Death's Door"

What is the best advice you have to give:
"Get the Balance Right!"

Thought for the Day:
"Precious"

How I would like to die:
"Black Celebration" (Am I allowed to use the same answer twice? If not, then I'll be honest and select "But Not Tonight" and have that refer to now and forever more. Maybe I should become a lich?)

My soul's present condition:
"Dream On"

My motto:
"Policy of Truth"

Unintended Memes

Courtesy Kohl Gill, here is a component of a conservative Christian advertising campaign that is apparently about to backfire very badly. I approve!

I love unintentional awesomeness (and "awesomeness").

Other visiting friends

I meant to blog last term about a couple of other high school friends who visited me last term. Mimi Harris (who I hadn't seen since my ten-year high school reunion in October 2004), who overlapped with me both at Beverly High and a couple of years at Hawthorne elementary school, went to London on business in November, so I hopped onto the train and went to London to hang out with her and one of her friends (who hitched a ride with Mimi during a layover in New York). This is the day that I finally came to understand the glory of the "mind the gap" meme (I really want to get one of the shirts with that...), and I also created my own meme when we visited the Tate Modern. In one of the abstract art sections (I can't remember the official name of the general type of art in that section of the museum) was a painting that consisted of a brown background with a few orangish stripes. A nearby picture by the same artist had the same background and a single orangish stripe. I was pondering how little effort this took and how pointless this was (and was also reminded of a brilliant scene with John Malkovich in a recent indie movie in which he was an arist and a teacher as a prestigious art school), and every so often when I was ranting about how pointless this picture was, I reiterated (in defense of my opinion) the line, "But it's just a fucking stripe!" OK, so this probably doesn't seem particularly funny at all with the above description, but it became a meme (at least for the day) and was funny then. Or at least I thought it was funny, and the my companions got at least some amusement out of my caustic commentary. I guess that made the painting worth it after all (given the enjoyment that ranting about it gave me), but I still think that that particular piece of "art" is pointless.

Late last term, Maria King (opera singer extraordinaire) took the train down to Oxford to hang out with me for a few hours. She came down from London, which she was visiting from her temporary (few-month) home in Germany. She's now back in her regular home in New York City. Anyway, we hung out for a while and had fun.

Hmmmm... I think that this blog entry would have been much better if I had written about it several weeks ago the way I intended. Ah well, the important message is the following: I hung out with my old friends and had fun. I look forward to a lot more of that!

Pleasure e-mails

This week has been a busy week.

I set up several SURF students, worked on finishing up a paper (which we should submit very soon -- maybe as early as Monday), did some numerical runs for the archival version of the dimer chain paper (currently in progress, with an estimated submission time of mid July), engaged in some media sluttage, and sent tons of e-mails.

Between dealing with all this stuff, I think I sent more than 40 e-mails on at least three different days. However, very few of them were so-called pleasure e-mails, which is a meme I accidently started at dinner a few months ago. This, by the way, is what this post is really about. ("This is a song about Alice.")

Anyway, my nice little slip of the tongue (ugh... that could be interpreted multiple ways) became a bit of a meme in our crowd. I guess that's just the way things work.

Random Cracks

I just found out from Katiya that one of her officemates has chosen Bruno for his advisor.

She asked me to guess what he'll be working on, so I naturally assumed it entailed wave scattering off surfaces with random cracks. That is apparently going to be involved along the way, although it won't be the main thing. But there's no point in discussing the main goal, because random cracks are all that matter for the purposes of this blog entry. (For those of you who don't know, 'random cracks' are fightin' words when it comes to Tim and [especially] Cat. Also, this post gives me another chance to use my 'Cat' tagline.)

iTunes Prose (random 11)

In a twist on the usual random music selections from iTunes to determine fortunes, New Year's resolutions, and so on, I offer the following alternative. This idea dawned during an IM conversation I was having with Lemming during which I was quoting even more song lyrics than usual.

I loaded up iTunes, played the first 11 songs (it was going to be 10, but one of the songs didn't have any lyrics), took some lines from the songs (and the title of the song that didn't have any lyrics), and composed a story using them. I was originally going to make a poem, but I decided that prose would be a lot easier.

Here is the story. I actually kind of like it, especially given the constraints under which I was working. I hope you enjoy it.

Now, let's play a game. Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to figure out the identity of those 11 songs (artist and title) and which lines go with which for the 10 that have lyrics.

Mad props go out to Lemming for his major role in coming up with this idea.