This is guessing. I don't know all the material of all the artists. I do know that Richard Thompson has done quantities of English trad (and that astonishing Britney Spears cover), Linda Rondstadt sang the hell out of Warren Zevon's "Poor Poor Pitiful Me," and "Respect" was not original to Aretha Franklin.

I am not immediately coming up with any notable covers done by Gregg Allman, Elvis Costello, or Frank Black, although I am feeling really stupid for not being able to call an Elvis Costello one to mind.

I want someone else to solve this riddle.

Sorry, wrong thread.

(For reasons of national security, I cannot provide evidence for either claim.)

Thirty minutes from question to answer! Not too bad.

Mystery managed.

What do the following bands have in common?

Meredith Brooks
Ricky Lee Jones
Poe
Kelly Clarkson
Avril Lavigne
Katy Perry
Sting
Rob Zombie
The Vandals
Guns and Roses
Nine Inch Nails
Devo

("They all suck these days" is not the answer I'm looking for, even if you think it's true. )

11:28 PM Eastern time. Go!

(Incidentally the proper Latin form is "Dei Gratia Dux Venetiarum" or "By the Grace of God, Duke of the Venetians." I was kicking myself for not realizing that of course it would be the same as the form for your generic duke, since Doge is just the Italian title derived from the same Latin word: "dux")

*ducks, runs for cover*

I think I'll temporarily swipe the vinyl next time I'm visiting Mom and Dad. Yum, phono-to-mp3! Thanks, Ion!

Gerard Butler, William Finley, Herbert Lom, John Tuturro, Tom Tyler, Billy Zane.

Lionel Barrymore.
James Mason.
José Ferrer.
Herbert Lom.
Robert Ryan.

When I was a very young coder, when minicomputers still roamed the data centers of America in vast, teeming schools, my father gave me a large format paperback book with about a hundred short little BASIC programs in it, most of them games or similar little curiosities. I remember one of them was Mandala. I think its longest program was Star Trader, which weighed in at like nine pages or something.

Anyway, this book was one of the three books that got me started in a long and generally satisfying career making computers dance (when they're not crashing), and I can't remember its name. I want to say it was something dumb, like 101 BASIC Games or something like that, but ABEBooks.com isn't sufficiently helpful. I think it might be this one, but I'm not sure.

Does anyone have a copy of the book I'm describing? Does it match my description completely, or am I confusing parts of it with another book? Can you tell me its ISBN?

I ask, because I think I may have promised someone that I'd port all its contents to Python or something like that. That someone is still getting his first set of teeth.

Richard Dreyfus.
Alec Guinness.
Robert Wagner.
Sean Connery.
Alan Arkin.

I remember the book you linked to, because I checked it out of our school library quite a few times. Does http://www.atariarchives.org/basicgames/ help any?

Audrey Hepburn.

Richard Dreyfus - "Always"
Alec Guinness - "The Lavender Hill Gang"
Robert Wagner - "Love Among Thieves"
Sean Connery - "Robin and Marian"
Alan Arkin - "Wait Until Dark"

Get along little Doge!

1) They are (or where) "Friends of Bill"? (Bill Clinton that is)

2) They were involved in the 1992 innauguration?

Yeovilton. Duxford. Weybridge. Manchester. East Fortune. Hillingdon. Manhattan. Christ Church. Tukwila. Filton.

A guess without Googling: Are they all places in New Zealand?

Scene: Venice some centuries ago.

"God, if you don't want me to become Doge, give me a sign."

(Lengthy pause)

"Clearly God wants me to become Doge."

"We don't need no steenkeeng Doges!"

Visiting Scholar: So, Doge, explain to me how you came to power. How did you get elected?
Doge: God knows.

A handsome young man of Stoke Poges,
in Venice composed apologias
for those aristocrats
who, though fond of their cats,
were accused of mistreating their Doges.

I'm not aware of any other rhymes for Stoke Poges, although no doubt the denizens of Making Light will now provide me with another 30 or so. And probably another ten limericks, at that.

(This is under no circumstances to be understood as a challenge.)

Loges. Though I'm not taking a reserved seat to see what happens with them.

Failing to segue, I
can't get this poem to the
field where the Lionheart
died, in Limoges .

... dammit, I almost managed to write a higglety-pigglety limerick.

What this makes me think about is that games in this form could, I imagine*, not have any secrets to reveal later (spoiler-able things), unless they are in the logic rather than the data or assembled from little scattered strings.

* I never did the typing-in-programs-from-paper thing myself.

From Rigoletto, Act 2, scene 4 (approximately, “You vile race of Courtiers! Damn you! What price did you get for my joy? There is nothing you won't do for money!” — I can substitute suitably for ‘courtiers’ & sometimes cut out the second line or substitute for ‘mio bene’)

Re. Spoilers found while reading code - yes, exactly. In most cases the spoilers from reading strings didn't matter because the random number generator controlled (at least partially) which code branches ran during a given game. Massive surprises were impossible, but minor ones were part and parcel of game play.

One's fluency in the language also made a difference - if you couldn't follow the logic, you couldn't see how pieces would be put together later on. In some cases you couldn't even see the logic at all - anyone else remember games from Compute! and other magazines, where you had to type in pages of hex codes? At that point I had the tools to look at the assembly language after keying it all in, but not the knowledge. Later on I played with 6502 ASM, but it's been long enough that I've forgotten it. Maybe someday I'll revisit it... eh, probably not, higher level languages are more fun. :)

There are very few authentically Grecian peripatetikoi
In Chicago, Illinois,
But you can't throw a brick without hitting one of the hundreds of loggias
In Stoke Poges.

(and, due to watching The Wire...)

Gangsterly-slangsterly
Calling acquaintances
Homies, or brothers, or
Bunkies, or O.G.s

May sound authentic and
Cryptonarcotical
If you're in Baltimore -
Not in Stoke Poges.

It seems weird to me that there were more resources for this in the 80s, when practically nobody had computers, than there are today when so many more people do.

(Not posting much—work crunch—but I do still read.)

Re. loss of resources from the 80's to now: I think that's largely because computers have gone mainstream. Early home computers came out of a culture that valued tinkering and hobby work; getting into the guts of the machine was part of the draw. Now, PCs are more of a commodity, and many folks don't want to know about the internals.

Purely guessing on my part, but I suspect that kids who want to learn about computers today have to find adults who are willing to help them along. Languages like Logo and Scratch are good places to start; giving a kid an OLPC computer is another option.

David Brin on his blog had been looking for resources to get one of his kids going in computer programming; he recalled the old computers that would boot up into Basic from ROM.

I pointed him in the direction of a Color Computer* emulator available online (and got a thanks in return), but that wasn't the route he ended up taking; I forget what he decided to go for, but he had found an answer he was satisfied with.

* A Radio Shack computer with a 6809 processor. I've claimed it was the true ancestor to the Mac.

We used Logo in elementary school as a class though our teacher told us what to type in. It was a lot more fun when I took a class specifically on it in junior high and we learned /why/ what we typed in worked the way it did. Computer science was also offered in high school. I took the first class in it. We learned Java.

(I'm a freshman in college at the moment so junior high was 2002-4.)

Gardner Dozois, Harlan Ellison, Philip José Farmer, Neil Gaiman, Jack Gaughan, David Hartwell, Dave Langford, Ursula K. Le Guin, Clifford Simak, Vernor Vinge.