None of the stations played anything good, but I kept at the buttons, pushing off songs from a childhood we were all supposed to have had. Commercials bothered me more than ever, news was propaganda, and traffic reports were no more useful than the weather. It wasn’t yet 1988, and I was driving home from Tacoma.The passage contains no j, q, x, or z, but these hardly qualify as common. There's no obvious pattern in word lengths, which include everything from 1 to 11. It doesn't seem like Uncleftish Beholding, either. Any ideas?
Friday, May 08, 2009
Constrained excerpt
Anu Garg offers this passage as an example of writing with a constraint. I didn't read the rest of the article to find out what the constraint is, but these kind of things are typically based on tricks like leaving out a common letter, acrostics, or palindromic constructions.
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2 comments:
No progress on this one. I looked up the source and read enough to get this clue: "the title of the book gives a hint."
The title is Negativeland. I don't see any connection to the band. Every sentence contains a negative construction ("none," "no more useful," "wasn't"); maybe that's it.
That was it.
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