You didn’t know what the Weekly Challenge was / Until you met a hacker on a Github bus / I got there in the nick of time / Before he got his code across your git commit line…

Yeah, yeah, it’s a stretch, but it’s an excuse to pull out Ian Hunter’s Once Bitten, Twice Shy (yes, Ian Hunter).

So you got the rhythm, you got the speed, you got Perl Weekly Challenge 292.

(sorry I’m only doing one challenge this week; it’s been a rough week)

This week’s Perl Weekly Challenge task 2 is about poker hands, so the musical theme this week has to be Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler.

So ante up and let’s deal out for Perl Weekly Challenge 291.

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.

This 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.

This 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!”