The challenge: "Can't think of a book title" or "Can't think of a book idea"?

I've always thought that the book title was the easiest part, but the book story the hardest. I tried this idea for both titles and story lines. Use the names of songs and the lyrics to get ideas. When listening to a song one day I said, what if that was a book title, what would the story be, and it took off from there.

Top 10 songs today:
Royals; Roar; Wrecking Ball; Wake Me Up; Hold on, We're Going Home; The Fox; Rap God; Holy Grail; Applause; Blurred Lines.

All but two are easy or the least challenging. Wrecking Ball and Blurred Lines look the most intriguing.
Let's take Wrecking Ball as the title of a book.The best part is whether you like or don't like the song and or artist, it doesn't matter. You don't even have to listen to the song and it's probably best not to be swayed by the meaning of the actual song. You could even take the worst song and make a book title out of it.

What could the title be about? An abused relationship, or some crazy home breaking adultery, a couple of angles here; the last dance at a high school homecoming; a detective or soldier who goes on a rampage.

How about some Lyrics to the song as titles:
WE clawed, we chained our hearts in vain.
Some possibilities here. Mostly as a love story gone wrong, but the clawed part could lead to a monster or the current vampire/werewolf craze.
We jumped, never asking why.
How about a sky diving group and their charismatic or hypnotic leader.
We kissed, and fell under your spell.
Lots of obvious ones here. Black magic, etc.
A love no one could deny.
This one has a very wide range of topics. Love of whom, what, where, even Why. Love of adventure; self; addiction; God; food; dieting; just too many to chose from.

Blurred Lines is an interesting title:
Obvious is right and wrong, but what kind of right or wrong? Same thing about Good and Bad; How about a race driver losing his sight. A portal between two worlds. Someone deciding to come out of the closet or have a sex change.

You could probably take each of them and try to match a genre to it. Mystery, Detective, Science Fiction and Fantasy, Love Stories, even your favorite person as a back door approach to their life or a back door approach to a time in History.

You could do the same thing to the Top 10 Songs of all time or the Top 10 songs of an era or year or ANY song if you thought about it.
Just try the title or look at the lyrics.
There are endless possibilities.
Misspelling the title or using homophones, homographs or homonyms also works in thinking of book titles.

Explore your fun side or dark side.

It's Baseball time again. Here are some Baseball Records that will not be broken. Not this year or EVER!

Charles 'Old Hoss' Radbourn's 59 games WON in 1 year.

OK, pitchers don't even pitch 59 games a year now, unless they're a relief pitcher. The last pitcher to even get 30 was Denny McClain in 1968 with 31 wins. Radbourn not only won 59 games, he started 73 games. He had an ERA of 1.38 and struck out 441 batters.
Ted Williams, 84 game On-Base Streak
And I thought the 56 game hitting streak of Joe DiMaggio was the one to beat. Getting on base 84 times in a row, WOW!
Matt Kilroy's 513 KO's in one year
No modern pitcher, Nolan Ryan, Sandy Koufax, Randy Johnson, even had close to 400.
Joe DiMaggio's famous 56-game hitting streak
Never, never, never, going to be broken, Pete Rose came close.
Ted Williams .553 Single Season On Base Percentage
No one will even get close to .500
Babe Ruth's .847 Single Season Slugging Percentage
Hugh Duffy's .440 Single Season Batting Average
The last one to do it was Ted Williams .402, in 1941. Closest after that is George Brett's .390 in 1980
Babe Ruth's 1.379 Single Season OPS (On Base + Slugging %)
Billy Hamilton's 198 Single Season Runs Scored
Chief Wilson's 36 Single Season Triples
Tim Keefe's 0.86 Single Season ERA
George Bradley's 16 Single Season Shutouts
Fernando Tatís 2 grand slams in a single inning

Josh Gibson’s 84 Home Runs in 1936. (Negro Leagues, no steroids!)
Cool Papa Bell's 175 stolen bases in a 200-game season in 1933

Cy Young's 7356.0 innings pitched in a career.

Cy Young's 511 Lifetime Wins
Sam Crawford's 309 Lifetime Triples
Pete Rose's 4,256 Lifetime Hits
Tris Speaker's 792 Lifetime Doubles
Nolan Ryan's 5,714 Lifetime Strike Outs
Nolan Ryan's SEVEN Lifetime No Hitters
Only 26 players in baseball history even have two. Only five have three, only two have four

But -----Johnny Vander Meer  had TWO in the same year, 
Back-to-BACK!

Cal Ripken's 2,632 Consecutive Games Played
Joe Nuxhall, Youngest Player, 15 years old and 316 days,
Satchel Paige, Oldest Player, 59 years old and 80 days
Will White's 75 Most complete games in a season

The safest of them all is Walter Johnson's Lifetime 41 triples, as a batter, and he was the PITCHER!

Possibilities for this and any season, BUT HIGHLY UNLIKELY:
Rickey Henderson's 130 Single Season Steals
Baseball Almanac
Major League Baseball

The Mathematics of Religion

The Mathematics of Religion: One God, but who's?

.....between religion and arithmetic, other things are not equal. You use arithmetic, but you are religious. Arithmetic of course enters into your nature, so far as that nature involves a multiplicity of things. But it is there as a necessary condition, and not as a transforming agency. 

No one is invariably "justified" by his faith in the multiplication table. But in some sense or other, justification is the basis of all religion. Your character is developed according to your faith. This is the primary religious truth from which no one can escape. Religion is force of belief cleansing the inward parts. For this reason the primary religious virtue is sincerity, a penetrating sincerity.

In the long run your character and your conduct of life depend upon your intimate convictions. Life is an internal fact for its own sake, before it is an external fact relating itself to others.

Religion is the art and the theory of the internal life of man, so far as it depends on the man himself and on what is permanent in the nature of things. But all collective emotions leave untouched the awful ultimate fact, which is the human being, consciously alone with itself, for its own sake.

Religion is what the individual does with his own solitariness. It runs through three stages, if it evolves to its final satisfaction. It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion. Thus religion is solitariness; and if you are never solitary, you are never religious. Collective enthusiasms, revivals, institutions, churches, rituals, bibles, codes of behaviour, are the trappings of religion, its passing forms.

Accordingly, what should emerge from religion is individual worth of character. But worth is positive or negative, good or bad. Religion is by no means necessarily good. It may be very evil. The fact of evil, interwoven with the texture of the world, shows that in the nature of things there remains effectiveness for degradation. In your religious experience the God with whom you have made terms may be the God of destruction, the God who leaves in his wake the loss of the greater reality. 

For those that say, "God is everywhere, all around us." Your God, nor mine, may not be everywhere. He was not in that cafe in Kabul that was just blown up by a terrorist, at least not my God! He was not in that store or building that was terrorized by some crazed person with a gun that shot those innocent people, at least not my God.

In considering religion, we should not be obsessed by the idea of its necessary goodness. This is a dangerous delusion. The point to notice is its transcendent importance; and the fact of this importance is abundantly made evident by the appeal to history.

You are the sum total of all you have experienced, learned, thought, felt, believed and acted upon. 
What you are -- is inside of you, influenced by external forces, both good and bad. 
You are -- what you believe, based on who taught you and how you interpreted their ideology. 

My God lives and can only live, inside of me, guiding me.

Excerpts from:

Religion in the Making by Alfred North Whitehead (1926)

http://alfrednorthwhitehead.wwwhubs.com/ritm1.htm

Suggested reading:

The Psychological Origin and the Nature of Religion by James H. Leuba

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=2538692

The Death of the BOOK

From a link in Arts and Letters Daily. http://www.aldaily.com/ to; http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/4659371294/the-death-of-the-book

"Pity the book.  It’s dead again. Suddenly they seem clunky, heavy, and almost fleshy in their gross materiality. Their pages grow brittle. Their ink fades. Their spines collapse. They are so pitiful; they might as well be human."

Funny, or not, books are kind of the mirror to the soul. It used to be that when you walked into someone's home or office you would find a bookshelf full of books, or at least a book lying on a table. You could tell a lot about the books represented there. A glimpse into the psyche of one who lives or works there. The books were lined up along a shelf and could show what interested the occupant. You could tell how diverse their interests were and if they were "high-brow" or "low-brow", had a since of humor, or leaned toward the weird and off-beat. You could learn a lot about a person by the books they read.

Not so, anymore. More and more books are being downloaded to computers, readers like Kindle, and to the iPad or smart phones. Now a part of the soul of a person is being hidden from view. People don't need the bookshelf anymore; they don't even print the cover of the book to display their recent interest.

I have books that can be handed down from generation to generation. Books that may spark the interest in some far fringe of the curious who peruse the titles. They can even pick up the book and leaf through it. You can't do that with the downloaded books. They are most likely going to be erased from the memory of what ever they are stored on and lost not only to the owner, but their followers.

I can see the use of downloading a book or two, but at the current cost of the downloaded book compared to holding one in your hand, the cost is way too high. I can usually buy a book for less then $20. The cost to down load most top selling books, or even newly published books is about $9, when it should be less then $2. After all, they didn't have to go through the same publishing process of printing thousands of copies. All they had to do was store the data - once - and send the data to - anyone. Maybe when the cost becomes more realistic, I'll download more books, but for now I like the comfort of holding it in my hands and kind of letting people look into my soul when they see it on the table or in the bookshelf.