Mailbag Monday 59

Hello dear readers, it’s MAILBAG MONDAY again!  On this special day I will search through my mountain of reader mail and answer the five most pressing questions! What’s that you say?  Do I really get that much mail?  Well, I’ll admit…the contact section of this website doesn’t get used that often, but, one of the perks of wordpress stats is that I can see the google search terms that people use to find my site.  And I’m going to go ahead and pretend that these search terms will count as reader mail, since they are often entered in the form of a question.  So as you read these, remember that each “question” was something that someone actually typed into google that brought up my site as a hit which they then clicked on thus letting wordpress stats report to me the search they used to find my site.  I could make up the questions myself, but it turns out the actual google searches are far better than anything I could come up with! This month I answer the following questions:

• Metal song titles about darkness?
• Cheesy black metal cover?
• Satanic origami?
• I have trodden many plains?
• Serious pop music aficionados?

So, without further ado, it is time to dig into the old Mailbag to see what kind of things have been on my readers’ minds in the last month!

Metal song titles about darkness?

So obviously, darkness is going to be a pretty common topic for metal songs, hell, it might even beat out uncle Beelzebub since it is a lyrical subject that can even be embraced by the more lyrically timid (or non-teenager) bands out there. Still, just saying “yeah sure, there are a lot of metal song titles about darkness out there” is not good enough for Mailbag Monday!  Thus, in order to find out exactly how many metal song titles about darkness there actually are, I headed on over to the indispensable www.metal-archives.com in order to get an exact number from among their database of 96,310 bands.  In order to make things a bit more accurate, I also included all the synonyms for “darkness” that came up at the somewhat more dispensable (at least when compared to the Metal Archives) www.thesaurus.com. Here’s how many songs I found for each word:

• Black – 19,562
• Dark – 10,025
• Darkness – 8,915
• Shadows – 3,978
• Twilight – 1,583
• Eclipse – 857
• Dusk – 768
• Shade – 450
• Obscurity – 435
• Nightfall – 348
• Blackness – 263
• Gloom – 257
• Blackout – 159
• Crepuscule – 50
• Murk – 20
• Dimness – 10
• Shadiness – 2
• Cimmerian shade – 2
• Cloudiness – 1
• Brownout, Duskiness, Lightlessness, Murkiness, Calignosity, Smokiness, Tenebrosity – 0

For a grand total of 47685 songs using the word “darkness” or some variation thereof (keeping in mind I’m sure I missed plenty of other synonyms and misspellings), which comes out to about one song about darkness for every 2 bands.  Honestly? That seems low.

Also, apparently brownouts are SO not metal.

Cheesy black metal cover?

I took a quick picture of my bed since you asked:

Still, I don’t think I’d call it cheesy…more like badass and/or sweet.  I’d say KVLT too, but Behemoth really isn’t very KVLT, not even their first album.

Satanic origami?

I’ve discussed metal origami before, but none of it was really all that Satanic in and of itself.  Ok, maybe the origami Satan was pretty satanic:

But that’s totally my old stuff, I just finished a new model that is the most satanic of all!  Check out my recently folded origami Cross of Saint Peter:

I had to heavily modify the diagrams found in Quinten Trollip’s Origami Sequence in order to get this special “inverted” cross (basically, I just folded the entire model with the book upside down).  This particular piece of origami is so brutal I probably didn’t even need to have KVLT Brazilian black metal madmen Mystifier in the background in order to evil up the atmosphere.

I have trodden many plains?

So, when I first saw this, I was like, wow, when did I write something this silly? Was it a Lord of the Rings the Lost Chapters? Was it perhaps a Nerd Open Letter? No, turns out it was just a direct quote from The Lord of the Rings:

I have crossed many mountains and many rivers, and trodden many plains, even into the far countries of Rhûn and Harad where the stars are strange.

Hell, it wasn’t just a direct quote, it was actually one of my FAVORITE quotes.  I guess I should just go ahead an own it and try to work the word “trodden” into more of my day to day conversations.

Serious pop music aficionados?

As a recent visit home made clear, I don’t have to look any further than my own family to find a whole host of serious pop music aficionados.  Specifically, my niece Pandora.  As it turns out, she was really jealous of me having tickets to see Miley Cyrus live next week:

My favorite part of this video is that, despite knowing the song even better than I do, she appears to have flubbed an important lyric and accidentally said “All I wanted was to wreck your balls!”  Comic gold.

Still, as good as she is at singing about wrecking one’s balls, she can’t compete with her uncle Isley when it comes to Britney lyrics:

If that’s what happens in my car when I know someone is filming me…just imagine what goes down when I’m by myself…