The A of B

[dougo]

tahnan came up with the silly idea of finding all his iTunes song titles of the form "The A of B", and then sorting the As and Bs separately. So what the heck, I did it with my mp3s:

1. The Adventures of a Ladyman
2. The Agfers of Alpha Centauri Year 2794
3. The ballad of Andy
4. The Ballad of Arabia
5. The Ballad of Autumn
6. The Ballad of Betrayal
7. The Battle of Brixton
8. The Best Time of Caldra
9. The Black Hit of Cheese
10. The Bride of Childbirth
11. The Coming of Commerce
12. The Demise of Completion
13. The Depth of Craig
14. The Difference (In The Garden of Energy
15. The End of Evermore
16. The End of Everywhere
17. The End of Galaxy 5
18. The End of Grandma
19. The End of Innocence
20. The Engine of Jazz
21. The Evil Powers of Kodack
22. The Frayed Ends of Life
23. The Guns of Maria Marten
24. The Harsh Facts of Medicine
25. The Hounds of Mist
26. The Idea of No Return
27. The Isle of North
28. The Isle of Our Lives
29. The Joy of Peloponnesus
30. The Kindness of punk to come
31. The Last of Queen Lothera
32. The Last Day of Radio
33. The Light at the End of Red Buckets
34. The Long Song at the End of Richie Lee
35. The Marriage of Rock and Roll
36. The Migration of Roger Stone
37. The Miracle of Sanity
38. The Moon is Made of Space
39. The Murders of Spring
40. The Mystical Path of Spring
41. The New Face of St. Anne's -On -The-Hill)
42. The Other Side of St. Francis...
43. The Other Way of Stopping
44. The Potential Energy of Strangers
45. The Prayer of Summer
46. The Rainbow-Gilded Leaves of the Day
47. The Ride of the Duck Billed Platypus to Australia
48. The Secret Life of the Famous International Playboys
49. The Seventh Hour of the JCN fan club
50. The shape of the Number Eighty Six
51. The Silence of the Record.
52. The Spirit of the Seventh Day
53. The Story of the Silence that was Reigning Over the Veranda
54. The Strange High House of the Sun
55. The Summer of the Tunnel Is a Train
56. The Terran Invasion of the Valkyrie and Fire Music
57. The Tones of Time
58. The Vengeance of Time
59. The Voice of Underwater Traffic.
60. The Wheel of Ushers Well
61. The Whole Point of X (Spotters Delight)
62. The Wife of Zero and One

Capitalization and punctuation provide some clues for reconstructing the orignal titles, but probably most of them are too obscure to be recognizable (even I don't recognize some of them).

This is how I did it, by the way (in tcsh on Linux):

find . -name "* - The * of *.mp3" -print | sed 's/^.*- //' | sed 's/.mp3//' | grep '^The' > the-of.txt
sed 's/ of .*//' the-of.txt | sort >! the.txt
sed 's/The .* of/of/' the-of.txt | sort >! of.txt
paste -d' ' the.txt of.txt >! the-of-sorted.txt

Perl experts could probably do it in one line, but I'm too old-school.

Update: Oops, I forgot, here's the list of artists: Amps For Christ, Andrew W.K., Bardo Pond, Bob Bannister, Caustic Resin, The Chameleons U.K., DJ Spooky, DJ Spooky, David Bowie, Davis Redford Triad, Dream Escape, Flexus Intro, GONG, Golden, Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5, Jessamine, Jon Charles Newman, King Missile III, King's X, Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin, Man or Astro-man, Metallica, Morrissey, Mourning Cloak, My Dad Is Dead, The New Pornographers, The New Pornographers, O-Type, Pinebender, Polar Arc, Polyphemus, The Rapture, Refused, Robert Wyatt, Rush, Scenic, Scenic, Shellac, Sleater-Kinney, Spiritualized, Steel Pole Bath Tub, Stone Breath, SubArachnoid Space, Supersuckers, The American Analog Set, The Cancer Conspiracy, The Cancer Conspiracy, The Clash, The Cure, The Hidden Variable, The Lothars, The Police, Thingy, Thinking Fellers Union Local 282, Union Wireless, Unwound, Wagner, WarHorse, Wire, Yo La Tengo, Yo La Tengo.

Comments

[rikchik.livejournal.com]

Did you check for capitalized "Of"?

[dougo.livejournal.com]

Nope, but that would have added 38 more, and the list is already too long... I could probably find even more by searching on ID3 tags, since not all my files use the same naming scheme. (Of course not all the ID3 tags are correct either, sigh.)

[novalis.livejournal.com]

Or generalize to permit any case of "of" (including, for J-Pop fans, special handling of "no").

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Well, I know one of those songs. Actually, if you add a "the", I know two of those, but that's probably not who you meant.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure that WarHorse's "The End of Innocence" is not a cover of Don Henley's "The End of the Innocence", if that's what you're thinking of. Although coincidentally the latter is in tahnan's list.

[greyaenigma.livejournal.com]

Yep. That one and The Other Way of Stopping were the ones I got.

[(Anonymous)]

"The Agfers of Kodack" works surprisingly well with the song title halves it ended up with.

-- Francis