Wednesday, April 07, 2010

The Other Analog Hole

I was going to forgo these intermittent statements but this is an important announcement, maybe, I guess? It's not that important as important things go but it is definitely an announcement.

So, I did something I'd been meaning to for a long time and ran the dates from my current songwriting through an internet widget that calculates and the number of days elapsed between the dates. The number of days between the dates (inclusive) equals the number of songs, and thus did I discover that my song count was off by 599 (seriously). In a general sense this explained the frustrated sense that's been scratching at the back of my mind lately that I ought to have written a whole lot more songs by now.

Specifically though I had to dig back through the volumes to discover a total of four errors, three of which made some kind of sense (in two cases it seems likely I misread the previous song's number and so wrote down an erroneous number for the next in the sequence, in the other case it looks like I flipped back an extra page when checking the previous song's number); in one case the error was inexplicable, I jumped the number ahead by several songs without any reason I could discern. The first error I made way back in volume three (I'm on eleven now, mind you), almost 6 years ago. Dang. Such are the travails of a hand-numbered sequence in a series of longhand volumes, especially with handwriting like mine.

This is clearly far too many to write in corrections by hand (I'll take care of it piecemeal when I eventually get around to transcribing these songs) so instead I made notes on the front and back endpapers of each affected volume with instructions on correcting the numbers via simple mathematical corrections.

The other upshot of this of course is that basically every song number I've posted in the weekly status updates is incorrect. I fixed things from 1/25/10 on but other than that you're on your own, because explaining how to correct the other dates would be tedious and I'm sure nobody really cares. Suffice to say I should be writing song 1,800 of the second project today.

You can read an explanation of the origin of these lyrics here

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