Been complaints that I haven’t updated this blog for ages – for various reasons, the most significant being an impending house move due to a forced relocation because of work.
Anyway, inspired by a Guardian Blog Post about a piece of software designed to name bands (Which has apparently come up with such gems as “One Second Darkens the Dream”, “Silence Fears the Morning” and “Farewell Says December” (I’m not making these up!), here’s my much simpler method for naming third-rate indie bands.
- Take a book at random from your bookshelf
- Open a page at random
- Read down the page until you find the first plural noun
- Put “The” in front of it.
What could be simpler?
The first time I tried it (sample book was Vol 3 of the H.P.Lovecraft Omnibus), the name was “The Grants”, which is already taken.
So picking up another book at random (Ken MacLeod’s “The Night Sessions”), we get
- The Traces
- The Forensics
- The Ambulances (Crispy ones, by any chance?)
- The Leaflets
Any advance on those? I guess you get different indie sub-genres depending on the genre of the book.
I got a couple. The Ghost by Stephen Harris laying around… Let’s see:
- The Clouds
- The Houses
- The Bunkers
- The Photographs
- The Words
Aaaand a Terry Pratchett books gives these:
- The Dusters
- The Ingredients
- The Cities
Wow, it works…
The Requirements.
The Surprises.
The Problems.
The Facets.
The Renderers.
(A couple of software engineering books and the Flex 3 book from O’rReilly)
the Fatcats.
And Hedgeprog made me wonder if it works with entity models, provided you use the plural forms.
So…
The Organisation Units
The Works Orders
The Stocktakes
The Celebrity Endorsements
This last one does come from a real entity model, BTW, dating from the Dotcom bubble.
From Ken Kesey’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test p91:
The Reviews
The Qualities
The Critics
The Men
The Obligations
The Years
The Pranksters
The Huns
The Sheets
The People
The Mandalas
The Cameras
The Microphones
The Kingdoms
The Spotlights
(Escape from Kathmandu by Kim Stanley Robinson)
I am very impressed by this method.
If anyone’s wondering, “The Celebrity Endorsements” comes from the late lamented ClickMango.com – Anyone remember that?
Or you could use Wikipedia’s random article link:
(Athletics at the 1972 Summer Olympics – Men’s 800 metres)
The Mens
The Metres
(Servite High School)
The Servants
The Servites
BTW Tim, if you ever find yourself in Tokyo, the Metro paper today has a picture from the Akihabara Washington Hotel where they’ve built a model railway in one of the rooms for guests to play with! Apparently it costs £170 per night but you can take your own trains.