Pun Salad

It's been four years since our first post. It's a chance to thank you for reading, and thanks to the folks who link to our content. And also thanks to our official, and still totally uncompensated, mascot, Ms. Cathy Poulin. She's cut down her appearances in the Bob's Discount Furniture TV commercials, but she's still doing good work.

Not that I sit up nights and ponder my referrer logs, but I noticed an odd one today: the Wikipedia entry for songwriter P. F. Sloan. And sure enough:

Well, … sometimes. If you keep an eye on the subtitle under "Pun Salad" at the top of the page, you'll notice it changes from time to time. Specifically: the subtitle on the primary page at punsalad.com changes whenever the page changes; clicking permalinks or archive links generate pages on the fly, and they get a random subtitle.

The subtitle is picked via a standard Perl idiom that chooses a random line from a text file (here called subheads):

    open( F, "<subheads" ) || die "Can't open subheads: $!\n";
    while (<F>) {
	rand($.) < 1 && chomp( $subhead = $_ );
    }
    close(F);

There are (as I type) currently 46 possible subtitles, so you have about a 2% chance (1/46) of seeing the one referred to by Wikipedia:

This is a reference to an old Jimmy Webb song, described in the Wikipedia article as a "catchy, bittersweet composition, which seems to be about the costs and disappointments of being a creative groundbreaker." Yeah, I guess; I just like the song (you can probably give it a listen here). Wikipedia also describes some weirdness associated with it:

P. F. Sloan wrote some pretty decent songs, but he also wrote "Eve of Destruction", a three minute and thirty-eight second demonstration of how stupidly self-righteous the 1960s were.