Of course, no one is reading this anymore, as I've slacked off. But anyway.
Prinsiana Weekly Quiz #1, and I rightly do wish to live up to that adverb:
a) What do these words have in common: texan, jigsaw, it, fix, chloë? (Hint: Jigsaw and It would not qualify.)
b) Give the last three numbers in this sequence: 6, 3, 3, 7, 5, 2, 7, 4, 1, __, __, __.
Send your answers to mdprins@yahoo.com. A randomly selected winner will receive a $1000 gift certificate to Prinsiana, excluding the Prinsiana store. That's assuming there is a potential winner to randomly select, of course.
oh so lovingly written by
Matthew |
these are comments, absent.
Assorted tips in B.F. Johnson's new book, Marketing: I Haven't Done It Myself, But How Difficult Can It Be?
1) Start press releases with an obvious grammatical error. Your reader will be so surprised that he'll read down to the end of the letter to see if you've made other stupid mistakes.
2) Regardless of the topic of your print advertisement, you can't go wrong with a picture of a pig with a curly tail.
3) Use lingo like "down wit that," "aww yeah," "homies," and "in the house."
4) Buy a 30-second TV spot. Have the spot be nothing but a full green television screen. You will have your audience's attention, I tell you what! (Note: this is a particularly useful tip if the name of your company is Full Green Television Screen.)
5) Hire Charles Nelson Reilly as a spokesperson.
6) For ritzy companies: Have pens made up with your company's name and logo on them. Give them out to the poor and homeless. When they win the lottery, they'll be sure to remember your product.
7) The easiest way to get your company's name on page one: During a parade, hand out poisoned candy to children.
8) Do product placements for sermons.
9) Overthrow the government of a small country. Rename the country after your company. Think of all the free advertising: maps, atlases, encyclopedias, globes, social studies textbooks.
10) Spraypaint your company's name in low-graffiti areas.
The Grammar Police have now returned from unpaid leave.
I posted this elsewhere, but some of my loyal readers might be interested to read it:
: : "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers are coming to the
: : Show-Me Center."
: And this sentence is problematic ... how?
Okay. Let's go back a few steps:
1) I think we'll all agree that "Daniel Amos is coming to the Show-Me Center" is correct. "Daniel Amos" is one entity -- a band -- even if it has multiple members. Great.
2) A bit trickier now: "The 77s is coming to the Show-Me Center." This gets arguable, because while "The 77s" is one unit, one could also argue that the members of the band could each be called "a 77," and thus multiple 77s will be playing, requiring the plural. However, since The 77s are known and playing as a band, not individual members, I'd go with "The 77s is..." construction.
3) About as tricky as #2: "A Man and His Two Beautiful Wives is coming to the Show-Me Center." To clarify: "A Man and His Two Beautiful Wives" is the name of the band. If four single Jersey guys picked the name because they thought it was cool, let's say, the "man" and "two wives" are obviously not referring to band members (particularly since there are four of them). Thus, it must be a singular entity.
It gets a bit more iffy if A Man and His Two Beautiful Wives is made up of a man and his two beautiful wives. Still, I'd argue that it's one unit in this case -- being the name of a band -- and would get the singular.
4) "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers is coming to the Show-Me Center." If "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers" were a one-man accordion show -- let's say the guy bought the name from Petty, etc., for $500,000 -- it would be a singular entity, right? Because it'd be the name of the band, right? And there's no way a one-person band could be plural, right?
Well, "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers" is the name of a band. As far as I know, every album put out by Petty and every tour he's gone on has been under the guise of "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers." (I'm not much of a Petty fan, so I could be wrong.) "Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers" is as much of a singular band name as "Daniel Amos," I believe.
oh so lovingly written by
Matthew |
these are comments, absent.
Google is my best bud.
Where Prinsiana (or a page from Prinsiana) ranks in the following Google searches:
Prinsiana: 1st
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"calico cat" "campaign finance": 6th
"professional question-answerer": 3rd
"how perfectly swell": 1st
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"Dr. J." haiku: 2nd
haiku Ruffles: 2nd
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"Josh Prins": unlisted
"Joshua Prins: unlisted
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"Michele Imperato": 25th
Michele Imperato: 27th
"Randall Smyth": 10th
"Matthew Prins": 28th
Matthew Prins: 30th
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"Matthew Prins" stupid: 9th
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Richmond "disk golf": 9th
Richmond Haiku: unlisted
Richmond film Prins: 42nd
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"Monsters, Inc." "Saving Private Ryan" "Charlie Brown" "Ghost World": 2nd
"The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain": 25th
"M. Night Shyamalan" naked: 170th
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haikus: 11th
stupid haikus: 134th
best haiku ever: 4th
oh so lovingly written by
Matthew |
these are comments, absent.
Hi. My name is Matthew Prins. I want to let you know that this is me, because I am posting this only two days after my previous post, and so you may have thought that someone with lesser procrastination skills might have guessed my password (it's "PShoreRulz," by the way) and broken into this journal.
Not that I have anything to talk about, mind you.
Okay. How about this. I meant to do this in Catholic week, but why not now.
1) The first note of the first verse in "Wings" is one half step below the base of the chord: a C# against a Dmaj7 chord, I think. I like major 7th chords, but the major 7th is a difficult note to start singing a song on. Even in choirs, I hear lots of minor 7ths and base notes sung.
2) Not only does "Wings" contain my pet peeve of writing the rhythm around the lyrics (rather than the lyrics around the rhythm) and thus changing the rhythm from verse to verse, but...
3) ...even when the rhythm doesn't need to be changed, it is. In one verse, a dactylic foot is sung as an eighth note/quarter note/eighth note; in the same place on the next verse, the dactylic foot is sung as triplets. Which by the way...
4) ... is triply wrong, because triplets are difficult for amateur choirs to sing correctly (and near impossible for congregations), and is made even more difficult by the...
5) ...similarity of the eighth-quarter-eighth rhythm and the triplet rhythm. There's just a twenty-fourth of a beat difference between the spacing in the two rhythms. There's no reason all the verses couldn't have been a simple eighth-quarter-eighth.
6) The singer has to go down a fifth from the last note of the verse to the first note of the chorus. That isn't easy to hear and sing in the best of circumstances, but it's made more difficult by that pesky bottom note, which is a (I believe) an A below middle C for women, and an A below low C for men. And it gets worse.
7) In the next measure, there's a sixth down (to that low A) followed by a fifth up. And you think we're done?
8) In the measure after that, there is a minor seventh down (to that low A), followed one beat later by a sixth up. (For those of you scoring at home, that's a half-step difference.) I'm awfully good with relative pitches, and I can't always hit both those notes correctly.
9) It just sounds amateurish, like Joncas wrote it on his lunch break from his job at the widget factory.
10) There aren’t SATB parts. (I can’t imagine a SATB arrangement that’d sound good, but still.)
oh so lovingly written by
Matthew |
these are comments, absent.
Okay. Last week was not much better. I consider this a personal failing.
i sincerely do not know what you are doing here. are you lost? were you
looking for your delicate calico cat, and did you follow her up two flights of stairs
to this room? she is not here. she was here, yes. we gave her a warm bowl of milk, we talked with her about campaign finance reform for a time, and then she bid us good day. i believe she was
going to the post office two blocks down, but i don't quite recall.
for surely you did
not find your way from prinsiana, the least traveled site on
the internet. if you did, though, perhaps you are looking for humor. perhaps you are looking for profundity. perhaps you are looking for answers.
i'm sorry, but you shall go naught-for-three.
