OK. Got to the Christmas holidays. Going to use all my spare time between now and New Years to put up the promised web site, http://www.CrackingTheSimonCode.org .
The site will have, for each song, the lyrics as printed in the booklet, the lyrics rearranged as normal song poetry, the song poetry annotated (more on this in a bit) plus bloggings and crackings from this blog. The lyrics in both forms are already up.
I've grouped the lyrics of all the songs into a single page in each form. Your browser's Find (ctrl+F in all major browsers) makes it easy to answer questions like, "How many songs use the word 'holy'?" and "How many songs use the word 'brown'?". (Answer: two each.)
The annotated lyrics are demanding to create, but illuminating in the extreme. I'm using different background colors for each different bit of music. Dramatically different colors show the dramatically different themes. Minor color changes show the variations within the themes. For example, "It's outrageous ... " will be red, "Who's gonna love you ..." will be blue. The annotation will have two bands of red, and (count? gotta go do it!) other bands of blue.
So far I've completed annotations for "How Can You Live in the Northeast?" and "Everything About It Is a Love Song." Both have a similar structure. Two themes alternate, separated by a third theme in the middle and a fourth as a coda. Take a quick look at these and I think you'll agree, this is an effective way to visualize the structure. (At least it is for the first two songs.)
If no blogs are posted here for the next several days, keep in touch by watching the website grow. By the way, it's looking really good. Very simple but appropriate design. Hope you agree.
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For the record, that was my first post using my Google account from a Linux machine. Impressed with the lack of difference!
Oh, @#$%@#%$^@$%&!
I just viewed the website in MSIE. If you still use that piece of dogmeat, immediately DL Opera or Firefox or whatever.
Meantime I've added "BORDER=0" to two IMG tags on each of the three dozen pages already created, since MSIE puts a border around images if you don't tell it not to. No other browser does this.
Now I'm looking at the home page, where the title is not centered (it's off to the right) and on the bottom, the image is near to the center, though I've specified right alignment.
MSFT, don't you care? I'd be embarassed to be the author of this crap. Those guys have no pride. Ugh.
I've now added an MSIE-only page. If you log in with another browser, a javascript program automatically switches you to the real home page. If you log in with MSIE you get a page that links to Firefox and Opera, suggesting that you DL a capable browser. If you can't do this (in your office at a "Don't DL Any Unofficial Programs" company) you can link in to the home page and it won't look right. I am never going to waste another minute working around MSIE bugs.
This is a fascinating obsession (which I discovered from you link at my Multiply account). I'm going to link to this blog later today in my end-of-year review about "comeback artist of the year" (guess who it might be). So visit bloggedy blog later today if you're so inclined.
AC
Annotated "Sure Don't Feel Like Love" today. That song has exactly one chord, one rhythm and eleven (11) separate musical sections (one repeats, so that's maybe a dozen). These annotations are very time-consuming but they're great once they're done.
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