Songs JoCo doesn't know how to play, but that we want.

Mess_iah

At the Chicago show on Saturday, JoCo mentioned that he doesn't play some of his Twitter requests because he doesn't know how to play them, or doesn't know how to play them well enough. I think it would be cool if we could pick one song he's never performed live that we'd like him to figure out how to do, and see if he'd be willing to give it a go. I have my own preference, but let's see what we think as a hivemind. First, let's get a list of songs we think he's never played at a live show. I've only been to Chicago shows, so please feel free to correct me if he's done one of the songs on my list at another city's show.

Here's my list. I'm including only songs I'd like to hear, so as to not have to go through the whole catalog:

Dance, Soterios Johnson, Dance
Under the Pines
Furry Old Lobster
Madelaine
Skymall
Big Dick Farts a Polka

Once a bunch of people have listed what they'd like to hear (and corrected each other about what he's played other places), we can set up a poll and pick one (is it still the case that only Bry can set up a poll?)

Bry

It has not been the case for some time that only I can set up a poll (otherwise this Favorite Song Tourney would, frankly, never have gotten off the ground due to laziness... many, many thanks to robgonzo), but it is still the case that I'm rather likely to post a link to another thread on this subject. (Particularly when I'm guilty of having forgotten about the thread myself.)

Jmonkee

Soterios Johnson has been played a number of times, and Under the Pines was done once. Madelaine I think was a regular at one point, with Supergroup, but it would be great to hear him do it again.

If I can only vote for one, I'm going with My Beige Bear. I've always thought that could be one of his great crowd-pleasers..

ManFriday

I was thrilled to hear him say that, because I myself can't play many of the songs I have written.
Now I don't feel quite so pathetic.

Dr. Perry Cox

For me, it's Bozo's Lament. When the next Cleveland show is announced, I'm going to send him an e-mail to request it, so that he'll have time to figure out how to play it, and he'll be more likely to actually play it

Caleb

+1 My Beige Bear
And adding: The Big Boom

Gina

Of that list, I'd only be certain that Big Dick hasn't been played. I've seen him do DSJD, Under the Pines (Jammin' Java 3/07), and Furry Old Lobster (on video). Madelaine, I have a feeling it was done once over the last couple of years, but I'm not sure. Skymall, I really don't know. But that isn't one I'd care for him to add to his playlist.
My Beige Bear would be nice, but it's not one of my favorites.

He even did W's Duty at the Sellersville show over a year ago, with the Zendrum.

I'd love to hear him do Big Dick, but I don't think he is going to. The best chance might be in NY, since he'd have to haul out an accordion...

Has he done Summer's Over? That would be good.

Looking over all his songs very few if any stand out to me as "never been done live" and "worth learning to do live." Maybe Lady Aberlin's Muu Muu.
So I'll vote for that, and Summer's Over if he's never done that.

Bry

I reiterate: There is already a thread about which songs have not been played live. Feel free to bump that thread instead.

CoolJammer00

Summer's Over would be one I'd like to hear, but it'd have to be done at a certain point in time.

Jmonkee

@Bry: In fairness to us, that other thread was different. It was a discussion of songs not played. This is a discussion of which of those songs we'd most like to encourage him to play. Similar, but I'm not sure why they'd need to forced into a single thread.

The Jackyl

I've never actually seen him live so I don't really have a good grasp on what he plays live. Does anyone have a list?

mtgordon

The wiki has set lists.

Jmonkee

Reading through this thread will give you a good idea, too....

Angelastic

Here are the latest statistics based on setlists added to the wiki.

SpaceParanoids

I think the song-counting bot has a few bugs.

• Wikipedia:They Might Be Giants: 2

Ah, who doesn't love to sing along to the Wikipedia article about TMBG?

BenS

I wrote the song writing bot and if you can work out a better way to detect what are the song names in the setlists I would be grateful if you could tell me. For the way I currently do it you can feel free to see the code here: http://jonathancoulton.com/wiki/index.php/User:BenSbot/Code1. There are bugs in it but without changing the way the setlists are formatted once more I can't see a way of removing the rouge links to other things. I normally remove them all by hand but that one clearly slipped trough the net this time.

Caleb

Oooh! Python. Yay! :-)

The first line made me LOL:

import wikipedia

Bet that takes a while. ;-)

My first suggestion was going to be to filter out .*:.* (strings containing a colon), but clearly, that wouldn't catch everything, and it would mistakebly remove RYB instead.

So here's a thought - create a "blacklist". A simple text file that contains known bad entries, and strips them out from the result. That would automate at least most of the cleaning-up process. Then whenever a bad entry shows up, just add it to the blacklist.

The code would look something like:

linkslist = [item in linkslist if item not in blacklist]

Of course, it's an O(n^2) algorithm, but I don't think that's a big deal. ;-)

You could even allow regexes in the blacklist, like "Wikipedia:.*".

ETA: Whoops, just realized that linkslist is a dictionary, not a list, so my sample code isn't exactly right, but you get the idea. The dictionary-based implementation is left as an exercise for the reader.

BenS

Oh wow, I wasn't really expecting any feedback, was more making the point that it is hard to make anything perfect. your idea seems to make sense so I will implement that making the blacklist a wiki page in my bot's user space. I have so far made it such that if I disappear all of my code is pretty easy for someone else to use.

Also, despite that fact I'm sure you were joking, my pedanticism demands I point out that wikipedia is a module (in pywikipedia) that gives you the functions to import and play with mediawiki pages. As I'm sure if you know python you worked out.

Watch this space, should be done within the hour I expect.

ETA (forum says I posted this 2 hours ago, missed my estimate by 100%+, whoops): That took so long as I was trying to be clever then found out how found out being clever doesn't work as well when I was bug testing so basically started again doing it in the same simple way the rest of the code is written. Anyway, long story short, the code is done so those things won't show up again.

skyen

Re: Vos Cervaux.

He can play it, sure, but bet you he'd trip over the diction once or twice.

There are some SEVERE contractions in those lyrics.


Maybe he'll play it at a Canada-concert, someday? I mean, after rickrolling the audience with the Zendrum, it seems like the natural thing to do :P