The Problems with Puzzlemaking

For the past few weeks, I had been hinting about the return or puzzles to this blog.  In fact, I was ready to have the first in my annual series of identifying title puzzles to start today.  Things didn't turn out that way.  I was going to start out with song titles, based on some of the top one hundred songs from last year.  Just the same as the last two years.  Well, when I started looking over the list of songs, I noticed a plethora of one- and two-word song titles.  Those are the type of titles that are very hard to come up with alternative words for.  How does one come up with alternatives for titles such as "Bad Guy," "Truth Hurts," and "7 Rings?"  "One Less Than a Octad of Finger Jewelry?"  It doesn't have the right sense of humor as what can be achieved with longer titles.  The one-word titles are even worse.  Just look at "Sucker," "Wow." and "Me!" and tell me how am I supposed to come up with anything funny with these titles.  "First Person Singular Objective Case!" really isn't funny.  In fact, it is kind of dull.  Sure, some titles can work, such as "Yo Behold Female Parental Unit, This Child of Yours Has Achieved a Level of Fame and Fortune," for Panic! at the Disco's "Hey, Look Ma, I Made It."  That is funny, but such titles are few and far between this year.  What's worse is that I don't even remember hearing many of the top one hundred songs.  At one point, decades ago, the top ten songs each week had a fairly regular turnover.  So much so, that any songs that reached the top ten wouldn't make the year-end chart.  Last year, less than sixty songs reached the top ten, and many of them didn't chart long enough to make the top hundred for the year.  In fact, there are songs that didn't reach the top twenty that made the year-end char, such as, I kid you not, "Baby Shark."  There are so many songs on the list that I don't recognize, and I doubt I even heard them once.  With the way songs are charted now, this is happening a lot more than it used too.  I am fairly certain I have yet to hear the current number one song, "The Box," anywhere on local radio, and it has been number one for about two months as of today.  I thought about doing one of the other topics first, but I hit into more stags.  I had been getting my lists for movies and television shows from Entertainment Weekly.  However, since it changed formats, it doesn't carry the same amount of information, at least not to the level I would need to come up with the twenty or so titles I would like for my puzzles.  Books will be just as difficult.  Starting late last year, my store no longer qualified to get are last book catalog directly.  I have had to download it and print out copies of the appropriate pages.  This makes it harder to look back over a year to come up with a list of book titles.  Fear not, for I will still come up with some sort of puzzle soon; I just have to find the subject that will work out for the best and a puzzle type that works with it.