Torrefaction

Whee, music meme!  I got it from pnkrokhockeymom 

1. If you'd like to play along, reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. You then list (and upload or link to the video, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Then, as I'm doing here, you'll post the list to your journal with the instructions. Easy peasy!

My letter is "M."

1.  "Malo" by Bebe.  No embedding available for this video, sorry, but here's a link. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GBu5l8W8SCk

2. "Michael" by Franz Ferdinand

3. "Motownphilly" by Boyz To Men


4.  "Meds" by Placebo.  Another one with no embedding, frack! What is up with that? Here's a link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eh0rAUwZSQ

5. "Mad World" as covered by Gary Jules (original, by Tears for Fears, is also awesome).  The video is both twee and boring, but the song is beautiful and some of the comments are amusing.  My favorite: "if I get run over by a truck or I start to die I will think of this song."

via dsudis , a little widget that statistically analyzes text you dump into it and compares it to various authors.  I dumped a page of one of my stories into it and got: 



I am heartened by the fact that when I dumped the first three paragraphs of The Dead into it, it said "I" write like James Joyce. I wanted to try dumping part of a free online Stephen King short story into it, but "free King story"=bwa ha ha ha ha right.

I'm pleased that it decided my prose is King-like, because he writes a type of straight-ahead "invisible" prose that I like a lot (his plots are another matter). I don't try to emulate him but I do like his style. I suppose if I try to emulate anyone stylistically it's Hemingway, except without all the bull (-fighting and -shit). I am aware that I do not succeed, what with my love of tortuous sentences, but it's good to have a touchstone.

This reminds me that once I told my Mom that I had gotten an audiobook of Hemingway short stories, and that I'd listened to one story so far. She said, drily, "was it about love, and death?" To which I truthfully replied "yes, and bullfighting," which made her about fall over with glee and mockery. She is an English professor with not much use for Hemingway.