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!”

This 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!

There’s no relation to the problems for this week’s musical theme. Earlier this week, my wife and I watched the documentary Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind, so you’re getting my favorite Gordon Lightfoot song… Canadian Railroad Trilogy.

So now, while we’re listening to the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, let’s construct some code as part of Perl Weekly Challenge 280!

“Oh, look at that motorcycle, he’s ridin’ between / He’s splittin’ lanes, if you know what I mean…“

We’re just splitting strings this week. Oh, and sorting letters. Onward to Perl Weekly Challenge 279!