spotify
Understanding a Misunderstanding
Spotify has always behaved weirdly regarding how you queue tracks up. Today I think I realised why.
They think “Queue this track up” means “Cue this track up”. They’re thinking like DJs, but they are confused by homophones.
I’m thinking like a programmer, I admit: queues are first-in-first-out; but more importantly, like an ordinary person: you join a queue at the end, not just behind the person at the front.
See this discussion on their suggestions board which explains the weirdness, and is where (as I was adding a comment) I suddenly understood their thinking. Also definition 2 of “cue” is the appropriate one.
Edited: Queues are of course first-in-first-out, not last-in-first-out, as I wrote. That would be a stack, in programming terms. Whoops!
88 Lines About The End Of Reasons To Leave The Elements
Back when John Peel was still with us he played a song called '88 Lines About 44 Women'. I only heard it maybe twice, and never caught the name of the band. Later, when it became easy to find things out, I discovered they were called The Nails. I've recently been rediscovering that very fine song, which I like as much as ever; and I'm pleased to find that there are couple of different versions of it.
(According to the Wikipedia article on the band, Jello Biafra was their roadie, which was a strange and surprising discovery.)
It reminded me that I have a fondness for list songs, which as you can see from the link, is a sufficiently real genre, or class, that it has its own entry.
So I made a Spotify playlist of some I like. Click that link if you have Spotify, or this one if you don’t. Unfortunately it won’t show the contents of the list – there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to do that. It will just prompt you to sign up.
There’s a song on there by The Beautiful South which, if I remember correctly, was intended to mock the use of women’s names in songs. I wonder what they’d think of ‘88 Lines About 44 Women’.