Sunday, August 16, 2009

Whither SomethingTown?

You know how you sometimes overexert yourself, most often physically, but sometimes mentally, & then a couple of days later some muscle or some other part of your body (could be your brain or your nerves) rebels & you've got this ache or pain or other condition that causes you to completely derail whatever plans you might have had because suddenly you have to deal with the excessive thing you did that, at the time, didn't cause any apparent discomfort but now, hours & maybe days after you finished it, it completely screws everything up?

Well, yes, it happens to me a lot but it has nothing to do with this week's theme.

This week is just an exploration of some adjective or noun or god forbid an abbreviation in front of the word "town." For example, & I never heard this once in my two decades living there, but imagine it was the hipster thing to do to call Austin "A-Town." Then someone wrote a song about it. Then the song was good, so I played it on my show. That's the idea behind this week's theme.

I specifically looked for that construction - I didn't look for town's nicknames, like "The Big Apple" or "The Armpit Of The Metroplex" (that's the nickname of my hometown of Garland, Texas) (or, if it isn't, it certainly should be) (& by the way, to give credit where it's due, I totally stole that from a Howard the Duck story written by the great Steve Gerber in which he calls Cleveland "the armpit of the universe"), I just looked for descriptions of towns in some way, avoiding more generic parts of towns ("downtown" or "uptown") & also just adding the word town to a named place ("London town" or "Chicago town"). It's very simple & the culling still left me with over seventy songs that I still have to sort out.

Other than that, what's up with you?

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