Not every time is the music that the Perl Weekly Challenge inspires going to be a Broadway show tune, a banger from classic rock, or even a baroque fugue. Sometimes, it’s going to be a marketing jingle: 🎶 Double your pleasure, double your fun, with double good, double good, Doublemint Gum! 🎶
See, it’s because “Luhn” rhymes with fun. No? Fine, let’s chew on Perl Weekly Challenge 290 for a little bit.
When I think about the second task and how it jumbled words, my mind immediately went to Lewis Carroll, and that meant that tonight’s musical theme needed to be Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.
So let’s feed your head on Perl Weekly Challenge 289!
So, when someone mentions palindromes, my mind immediately jumps to my favorite book on mathematics, algorithms, music, art, and philosophy: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. This was the book that introduced me to the idea of a musical palindrome, a piece of music that sounds the same played forwards and backwards, and the author cites J.S. Bach’s Crab Canon as an example.
So let’s approach Perl Weekly Challenge 288 from both sides… (no, no, I will not change the theme to Joni’s Clouds).
Continue readingThis week the peek into my brain comes via the first task, Strong Password. Immediately, I thought of David Wilcox’s, Strong Chemistry. Likening passwords to the emotional pull of an ex-lover is probably strange, but, hey, I never claimed to be normal.
With the musical setting out of the way, let’s dive right into Perl Weekly Challenge 287.
For some reason, my brain saw “Order Game” and I thought “Circle Game“. Perhaps because my wife and I watched a Joni Mitchell documentary last week.
Anyway, let’s go round and round to the Perl Weekly Challenge 286.
Nothing jumped out at me for the theme this week, so I started free-associating. The first task, “No Connection”, makes me think of bus routes, and that’s reinforced by the second task, “Making Change”. But I’ve already used The Hollies Bus Stop, so I started thinking about busses, and how they keep getting stuck in traffic, and I landed on Jimi Hendrix’s Crosstown Traffic.
So, with the musical background set, let’s not slow down and get to the other side of Perl Weekly Challenge 285.
Continue readingThis week I’m having trouble locking in on a musical theme. With the tasks being “Lucky Integer” and “Relative Sort”, nothing really jumps out at me. I finally decided that “Lucky” was the key, and that made me think of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s Lucky Man.
Now that we have our musical accompaniment, we can work on Perl Weekly Challenge 284!
“Bag!” “Bag?”
“Bag! Bag!” “What do you mean, bag, bag?”
“Bag! Bag! Bag!” “What bag?”
“No bag!” “No bag?”
“Your bag! Suddenly! Here! Now—gone!”
When I saw the tasks for this week, my programming brain immediately screamed “Bag!” (it’s becoming my favorite class for PWC problems) and the moment that happened, my theater brain immediately went to Vicky and Roger in Noises Off. My wife, however, pointed out that Noises Off isn’t a musical, so she suggested this week’s musical theme, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag. James Brown is certainly appropriate accompaniment to Perl Weekly Challenge 283…
Continue readingThis week the tasks are all about characters ch-ch-ch-changing, so of course I needed the musical theme to be David Bowie’s Changes.
So let’s be quite aware as we’re going through Perl Weekly Challenge 282!
This week, both tasks are chess-based, so I’m just linking you to the original concept album for the musical Chess, knowing full well most of you will only know the big single, One Night in Bangkok.
So let’s move on to the ultimate test of cerebral fitness: Perl Weekly Challenge 281!