Tuesday, January 25, 2011

XKCD: Na... (Suggested Revision)

I'm a geek. I'm a nerd. Perhaps that's why I love xkcd so much. It's difficult to make it through Tuesdays and Thursdays as I wait to get my dose of xkcd on the next day.

A good deal of the humor is in the observations; there are a lot of really good thoughts that go into the making of xkcd. Another slice is the sheer simplicity of the artwork used to portray the humor - sometimes it's stick figures, other times it's graphs. The part that truly cinches it for me, personally, however, is the accuracy. I can laugh to myself over the truisms on his world map of the Internet for a better part of an hour, as I notice smaller gags I had overlooked at first glance.

It's for this reason that I was a bit shocked and saddened when comic #851 appeared to be riddled with inaccuracies...

Chart comparing different songs with a common 'Na-Na-Na' part.

First of all, there should be twice as many "Na"s before "Batman!". Second, as far as I could tell, from memory and looking on the Internet, there are three "Hey"s in "Hey, Hey, Hey... Goodbye!". I was unfamiliar with the Katamari Damacy song, so I checked that one out, and it appears that one was correct. And, while there are, undoubtedly, several other songs that could be added, "She's got the look" was extremely obvious, so I was surprised it wasn't included.

I'm no expert, so I may have gotten this wrong, but from what I could tell from multiple careful listenings to these songs, I suggest the following revised version:



I know this is a lot wider, and at first I thought, perhaps, he was intentionally truncating the Batman thing for space, but dimension has never been an issue for xkcd. I might be wrong; I might be crazy. If you see something wrong here, let me know. I welcome comments and suggestions.

Addendum: I just noticed on xkcd, that there is actually an officially "updated" version of Na, which simply features the addition of "Hey Jude".