storme has assigned me the letter O and charged me with listing my ten favourite songs beginning with that letter. Here's what I've come up with:

1. OK! - Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich ('All the world has got its worries / Every night has got its dream')
2. Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da - The Beatles ('Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace / Molly is the ( Read more... )

For completeness' sake, the two that went unguessed:

1. sea pie, main topsail, *bomb-ketches, *percussion caps

The Commodore by C.S. Forester, published in the US as Commodore Hornblower. Horatio Hornblower gets involved in the Baltic theatre of the Napoleonic Wars, showing up at the Siege of Riga and trying his hand (not very successfully) at ( Read more... )

Let's finish this off. Three left to get; I've given the full list of SIPs this time, and where there weren't any more I've provided (asterisked) a couple of extra examples that seem improbable to me. Any takers?

1. sea pie, main topsail, *bomb-ketches, *percussion caps
2. (radiotelescope got it)
3. big wild mammals, domesticable wild plants, archaeological ( Read more... )

Pick ten of your favorite books, look them up on Amazon.com, and find the list of Statistically Improbable Phrases for those books. Pick a few SIPs from each book, list them here, and then have people guess what books they are. (Obviously, using Google or Amazon to figure it out is cheating.). (via huskyscotsmanAs with most people who've posted this, my choices ( Read more... )

Swiped from isquiesque, my personal locational extremes:

DirectionLocationLatitudeLongitude
NorthDundee, Scotland56°28' N2°59' W
SouthGalveston, Tex.29°18' N94°48' W
WestSanta Rosa, Calif.38°31' N122°49' W
EastRonneby, Sweden56°16' N15°16' E
(Great-circle flight routes from the UK to the US go rather further north than Scotland, but that doesn't really ( Read more... )

Google Groups non-Beta has finally passed away, it appears. The last half-dozen international sites (I was using the UAE one, after the Danish one succumbed a week or two ago) have been assimilated by the buggy, ugly, cluttered, awkward, allegedly-"advanced" Beta version. I can see myself doing a lot fewer Usenet searches in future ( Read more... )

For those of you who know I'm in London, but aren't sure where Finchley stands in relation to this sort of incident: I'm fine. I'm some five miles north of town, and things are pretty quiet up here; the main road is slightly busier than it otherwise would be, but in general everyone in the office is just reading the news reports like anyone else.

Since I can't work out any of maga_dogg's, I'll inflict some on you lot instead:

1. Pick six songs that most people will know.
2. Select lyrics of up to but not surpassing 150 words from each one.
3. Go to babelfish4. Enter the lyrics thus ( Read more... )

Guessing seems to have stopped, so it's time to identify the unguessed lyrics. Calling them "easy" was decidedly disingenuous, I admit - I'm slightly surprised at some of the ones that were got and some of the ones that weren't, though.

( 16 apparently-trickier ones )

Since I've been getting absolutely none of the lyrics that have been being posted as part as the most recent meme, I've decided that I'm going to post a set of 25 for the rest of us, those who aren't particularly up on music at all. My own mp3 collection should do well for that, nothing all that obscure here...

( 25 easy ones )