Tone @ MindSay 
Oh!
I love songs that sound happy and upbeat but have lyrics that totally don't match!
Find & listen to it if you can!
Excitable Boy
Written By Warren Zevon & LeRoy P. Marinell
c. 1976 Zevon Music/BMI and Polite Music/ASCAP
Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best
Excitable boy, they all said
And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest
Excitable boy, they all said
He took in the four a.m. show at the Clark
Excitable boy, they all said
And he bit the usherette's leg in the dark
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy
He took little Suzie to the Junior Prom
Excitable boy, they all said
And he raped her and killed her, then he took her home
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy
After ten long years they let him out of the home
Excitable boy, they all said
And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones
Excitable boy, they all said
Well, he's just an excitable boy
It's Van Halen at their recent Greensboro, NC concert playing "Jump." But there are no keyboards onstage anywhere -- which means that the keys are already pre-sequenced by a synthesizer and ready to go.
Except that it appears that the synth parts were supposed to be played back at 44.1 kHz and were actually played back at 48 kHz. What does that mean? It means that the pitch is suddenly (per the RW370 blog) "1.5 semitones sharp. So there’s no frets he can choose to fix the problem!" It sounds like a glorious train wreck.
And for those of you who aren't as musically inclined -- it's just fun to see David Lee Roth look like a doofus -- twirling a stick and riding an inflatable microphone Mick-Jagger style.
Ernest Hemingway writes in short sentences. He often breaks up sentences. Puts long thoughts into short phrases. Combines ideas. He's a big fan of the periods. Uses them all the time. Must have worn out the key on his typewriter while his comma key was barely ever pressed.
Tolstoy is different; in fact, almost all the Russians writers, Dostoevsky being perhaps the most famous, are different. They prefer long, flowing, intricate sentences; broken up by pauses, by stops, but not by actual breaks: Not finite periods that seem to bring the thought to its full conclusion, almost as if they can't commit, as if they refuse to end the sentence, because then they won't be able to get the next one started: They need their momentum to continue or their creativity will be completely drained.
Cormac McCarthy's most critically lauded work, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, is a combination. He used short sentences. But he's also very frugal with his commas and often builds long sentences made of many seemingly random thoughts and he piles them all into one sentence and combines actions with descriptions and often mixes in beautifully written paintings of nature and includes unique metaphors like comparing the sun resting on the horizon to a huge phallus or someone's murder to the horrific nature of war itself. He'll cram anything into a sentence - like a group of schoolboys creating the most disgusting combination of food for a friend is eat for five bucks - as long as he doesn't have to use a comma.
Scott Smith's latest page-turner The Ruins is something entirely different, existing in an odd sort of limbo between past and present tense, using commas to work almost as periods, melding many thoughts and actions together, keeping the verbs as "ing's" so that they seem fluid, always moving, always forcing the reader's eye to the right until the last word is read, ending with one deep, black, triumphant period, signifying the satisfying confusion.
These are all examples of a writer's style, and sometimes that style is dependant on the book. Lisey's Story, for instance, is Stephen King's latest work. And as he is trying to be more literary in it, the language is more appropriate for that tone. The New York Times called it Joycean (as in James Joyce), which is a far cry from his preceding novel before that, Cell, about horrible zombie slaughter with gore serving as a substitute for prose.
Take my novels as another for instance - all three are different. The first takes on a purposely silly detective story tone, reading like a film noir spoof. My second is narrated in the first person by an advertising copywriter who was taught to write in short sentences with quick paragraphs, and therefore does so in his story. My third is supposed to echo two types of Shakespearean plays, switching from a sad romantic comedy in the first half to a terrible tale of violence in the second, and is written in an appropriately poetic manner. Sure, my particular style of writing still sneaks its way out of all three of these books, but they stand on their own as well.
One of the best pieces of advice I can give aspiring authors is to write as much as possible, as often as possible, until they find their own style. It exists somewhere. It's almost certain that when you first start you're going to find yourself borrowing from other authors, maybe some of the ones mentioned in this post, and using their style to make you feel like you are a real writer, like your books are real books because they sound like published authors' real books. But you don't want to mimic other writers. You don't want to copy what already exists - you can never do it better than the original, no offense. So find your own voice. Use your own style. Let your words flow out of you.
You don't want to end up as an impressionist novelty act in Reno; you want your own original spectacle in Vegas.
As the semester comes to a close, my mind races with visions of pain and suffering rivaling that of labor and child birth. Yes, hell week looms on the horizon. I don't think I have done hell week justice in this record. Let me reiterate (I'm not sure what reiterate means, I just think it's a cool word)
Hell week is very much like what it sounds. A week of hell. Not only is their going to be pain and suffering worthy of the title, but it will be volentary, as is the steady road to perdition. For an entire week during the summer, I, Swiffer, Kyo, Scoot, and a camera will be traveling up Dry Canyon in north Orem, and camping on the saddle of baldy. We will make camp, then bring a single weapon out to the summit to train with in the wilderness. We will train until we exhaust ourselves, then head back to camp to rest our bodies.
We awaken early the next morning. The shadow of the Cascade Mountains will clear over our heads, and we will brake camp. We will hike down Battle Creek canyon, until we hit a road, which will take us six miles over to Timpanookee in American Fork, where we will camp again. After dinner, we will train until our bodies can no longer take the strain.
The morning of the third day, we will hike about three miles up from Timpanookee to Timpanogos Basin near the summit of the mountain. That day, we will likely spend the whole day training, because there will be so little hiking. We will physically exhaust our bodies to the maximum ability possible, while we Tei-kin the beauties of nature. If you got that joke you're either korean or a bigger nerd about martial arts then I am.
The next morning we will leave our packs at the trail junctions and summit Mount Timpanogos. From the summit you can see everything from Salt Lake City, to my house in north Orem, all the way down to the mouth of Spanish Fork Canyon. We will sign our names in the log book, make a donation to whatever cancer thing is up there this summer, and climb back down to our stuff. We will camp that night just over in the next basin near Emerald Lake. That will likely be a strenuous training day as well, because there will be very little hiking.
The next few days are debatable. At some point we will have to make the strenous hike from Emerald Lake all the way down to the parking lot above sundance. We may do that on Friday, or (more likely), we will train all day at emerald lake with no hiking whatsoever, then hike down on Saturday. Look out world, the boys are back in town!
Total muscle tone gain: Sexy
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