Pun Salad

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.