T w e n t y S i d e d

I was in seventh grade (1984) when I came up with this silly game that I’d play in my head during moments of boredom. (School.) The idea is to take pop culture names – movies, famous people, famous places, song titles, etc – that are two or more words long, and then find ones where the end word of one matches the starting word of another. Consider:

Loverboy George Michael Jackson Browne

So the list contains five two-word names:

1. Loverboy (Slight cheating here, using a compound word.)
2. Boy George
3. George Michael
4. Michael Jackson
5. Jackson Browne

The goal is obviously to make a chain with as many names as possible. Above is the longest one I can remember from my teenage years. I’m sure I had longer ones. (In fact, I suspect the above is only a fragment of a longer one, but I can’t for the life of me think of what it might have been linked to. I’m not sure “Browne” is right, either.) You could put “The Big Easy” on the front, but the word “The” is an annoying dead-end in this game. Browne is also a dead end. We could try:

The Big Easy Loverboy George Michael Jackson Five Easy Pieces

…which brings us up to eight names, but I can’t think of anything that starts with “pieces”. At any rate, my ultimate goal at the time was to make a loop, which I never accomplished. Still, I was about 13, and hadn’t absorbed much pop culture yet. I notice the game seems much easier now.

Let’s try a new one. I’ll start with Paris Hilton:

Haunted Honneymoon in Paris Hilton Hotel California Girls of Summer of Sam Rami

1. Haunted Honneymoon
2. Honneymoon in Paris
3. Paris Hilton
4. Hilton Hotel
5. Hotel California
6. California Girls
7. Girls of Summer
8. Summer of Sam
9. Sam Rami

Nine items in that one, although to be fair I don’t think “Girls of Summer” works. To my knowledge, It’s not a famous person, movie, TV show, famous place, or song: It’s just a phrase.

Try again:

Haunted Honneymoon in Paris Hilton Hotel California Girls Just Wanna Have Fun With Dick and Jane Eyre

Dang. “Eyre” is a dead end for sure. How about:

Haunted Honneymoon in Paris Hilton Hotel California Girls Just Wanna Have Fun With Dick and Jane White is Sick and Twisted Sister

Someone needs to make a movie called “Sister Haunted”, and then I will at last meet my goal of making a loop. The game gets a lot easier if you’re willing to use IMDB and just accept the names of obscure indie movies nobody has ever heard of, but that seems to defeat the purpose of the game in my mind. It seems a lot more interesting if everything in the list is more or less easy to recognize.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out I’m not the first person to try this, although I have no idea how I’d go about searching for it.

What would you call it? I mean besides a waste of time?

Anyway, it’s been years since I even thought about this. I have no idea why it came to my mind now. Still, now I suppose I’ll have to try and come up with one that loops.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.