Lyrics or Phrase-Generated?

Happy Father's Day!  This morning Marinda surprised Amit with a card and a book for his present.  "I love it!" Amit responded.  "On the front of the card is a baby lying on his daddy's tummy."  The book was "Lectures on Faith."  Amit doesn't follow the Mitchell family tradition of having a super sugary breakfast in bed.  "Real men eat breakfast at a table," he says.  "And real men don't want to risk spilling chocolate soy milk on their pillowcase."

Marinda stole this from a website, but she had to use it - it is just too cute!
"Just can't wait to see them take naps together!"

Still no baby - but we have to be getting close.  Yesterday (Saturday) Marinda was at 39 weeks, so there really only can be a couple weeks left at the most.  In other baby news, our OB estimated that Luke is about 7 or 7.5 lbs (±1 lb).  So slightly above average, but he's still growing at about 0.5 lbs/week!  "Ahhhhhhhhhh!" Marinda said.  "At least it was confirmed that he doesn't have an abnormally big head or anything like that."

Overall Marinda is feeling a lot more tired.  "What happened?" she asks the universe.  "Last week I was doing so well and now I'm like 'flop' all over the place."

Today Marinda's parents will be here, with Amit's parents coming on Wednesday.  "All of a sudden this has become real," Amit said.  "You know things are serious when both sets of parents are in town."

We have continued our MYSTing and are happy to report that we beat the fifth game today!  "You know you've been playing too many walkthrough adventure games when you're seeing potential puzzles all around your house," Marinda said.  "It's also bad when we're walking through the neighborhood.  I keep wanting to poke every weird plant and see if it does something."  Knowing Marinda, she would probably do it even if we weren't playing Myst.

On a lighter note we've been playing a game while listening to the radio in the car.  It's called "Lyrics or Phrase-Generated?"  To play you listen to a song and try to determine if the artist actually wrote out lyrics or just used a phrase generator to come up with random strings of words that rhymed.  Here are some examples:
Lyrics:
Train - Drops of Jupiter (not necessarily the most lyrical song ever but a good one nonetheless)
Tell me did the wind sweep you off your feet
Did you finally get a chance to dance along the light of day
And head back to the milky way
And tell me, did Venus blow your mind
Was it everything you wanted to find
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there


Phrase-Generated:
Usher - Scream (or quite frankly, anything by Usher.  If you don't know if it's an Usher song or not, just listen to first 10 seconds and I guarantee he will say his name at least 3 times.  Apologies to all you Usher fans out there.  Not for offending you, but either for your poor taste in music or your lifelong hearing impairment)
If you wanna scream, yeah
Let me know and I'll take you there
Get you going like ooh baby baby, ooh baby baby
A-ooh baby baby, ooh baby baby


This started with Amit theorizing that if you counted the number of distinct words in a song and plotted them by popularity you would probably find that an inverse relationship - that most of the popular songs have very little lyrical diversity.  Some general rules we've decided upon - the more often you hear the word 'baby' in a song, the less time it probably took to write the song.  Another one - if the same phrase is repeated over and over again, well, that's obviously not a good sign.  And if that phrase also includes the word 'baby,' congratulations, you've just listened to a song written by a phrase generator!

One last note - this can also apply to Christian contemporary music.  The Book of Psalms may be holy writ, but that doesn't mean it's exempted from the list of phrase generators.

Last thing to end this egregiously long post - this past week Amit has been having some eye irritation so he wore his glasses instead of the contacts he always wears.  "I have never seen Amit with glasses!" Marinda exclaimed.  "He looks so different.  It's like Clark Kent and Superman - I use to agree with people that it was ridiculous that Superman's 'disguise' was just a pair of glasses, but I totally see it now.  I watched him put them on and I still had trouble recognizing him!"  Amit's responds to all this: "I'm not Amit.  Amit doesn't wear glasses.  I'm someone different."


Okay, one last, really last thing.  Political commentary from Amit: "Isn't it crazy how a country with a GDP lower than Washington state's (namely, Greece) can put the entire world in disarray (potentially)?"

Yeah... we need this baby to come...