Doug Landauer: humor

Overheard at Bruno's

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 05:26:29 GMT

Mom: What are you giving up for Lent?

Earnest five-year-old girl: Pink.

PXSL, Scala Android, Giant Rat of Sumatra

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 06:00:05 GMT

Cool stuff this week:

Tom Moertel's PXSL, a Parsimonious XML Shorthand Language, which I'd love to look more deeply into, later. I think I posted something on Pyscerocha about the various XML shorthands, or alternate syntaxes, that people have come up with to ease the pain of using XML directly.
Scala Android — my first thought upon hearing of Android was how long before I could play with it in Scala?
Silliness: The Firesign Theatre had a 1974 album called "The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra". This week, it appears that the animal has been discovered. Well it was on New Guinea, actually, but who can tell the difference from here?

Another entry for week 508

Sun, 02 Dec 2007 06:54:12 GMT

Paradogxical — when your two canine pets are sitting outside in the freezing cold, staring at the fire in your fireplace.

See this entry, and maybe this one.

Linguistic Mayonnaise

Thu, 05 Jul 2007 18:25:24 GMT

Quote of the day, from a post on how Google Earth works:

For the more technically inclined, you may want to read these patents directly. Be warned: lawyers and technologists sometimes emulsify to form a sort of linguistic mayonnaise, a soul-deadening substance known as Patent English, or Painglish for short.

Idle question

Wed, 30 May 2007 06:55:46 GMT

Do Lambda Calculus weenies call Java programmers "weak-head normals"?

25 mph == Tai Chi driving

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 17:08:15 GMT

I used to consider 25 mph a punitive speed limit -- the majority of us are being punished by requiring us to drive so slowly, due to a few idiots. But last week, after my mother mentioned taking a Tai Chi class, I decided to consider having to go as slow as 25 to be a form of Tai Chi driving. It changes one's whole attitude ... Apparently, others have come up with similar thoughts. See here and here. From the latter link:

Today I imagined how a Tai Chi driving lesson might go... "In the beginning there is stillness. From stillness comes movement, forwards, back, left and right, this is driving - you must understand this."

Buddhist colony -- shed your ego

Sun, 08 Apr 2007 04:32:50 GMT

Deb was saying something about a buddhist community, and called it a "Buddhist Colony". So I said that I thought that was a place where most of the residents would take off all of their egos.

Scammon, Aman, Kolo, Progenitorivox

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:21:24 GMT

On Monday, my nephew Benjamin, his mother Mary, and I went to Monterey, to listen to my mother (Dr Landauer) talk about Captain Charles Scammon. It was the third installment of a series of talks about California History. Here's the brochure they put up about it:

It was a very interesting and informative talk, about a very different time. She put together slides (mostly old photos and drawings, many by Scammon himself) for the talk, but her facility has no projector. But it does have a big screen connected to a DVD player. So I scanned the images (and snagged one from the Internet), sent them to Mary, who then had them put onto a DVD ($10 at Bay Photo, though I think she managed to get a heck of a discount), and we just brought the DVD. I hope to make those images available when I get a bit of time to do so.

Phil Anast, a long-time friend of my Mom's, was at the talk, along with his wife -- they live in Pacific Grove. Phil's association with my parents dates from the 1960's, when they were all involved in some Balkan and Eastern European folk singing and folk dancing, mostly with the UCLA-based Aman Folk Ensemble. The six of us went out to dinner together, at El Torito on Cannery Row; we got a windowside table with nice views of the sea lions, otters, dolphins, pelicans, seagulls and other denizens of the Monterey Bay. It was nice reminiscing about the Balkan music and dancing that my brothers and I grew up with, Rastko and the skateboard, Branko Krsmanovich, Kolo, and some of the other touring Yugoslavian dance troupes that visited us when I was young. Fun old times. The next day, I did a web search for Aman, and found a very nicely done set of pages about Aman and its history:

And also the somewhat related group "Westwind":

http://www.westwind-folk.org/mission.html

My mom said that she's in some of the photos linked from the Aman pages. Some of the names seem so familiar ... Tony Shay, Ruth Garber, Vince Evanchuk ... Blasts from a long time past! Phil also mentioned the Tamburitzans, and some of their members that he and my mom knew way back when. All in all, a very enjoyable afternoon and evening. To add to my auto-musico-biography: my parents' participation in Aman and related activities means that all those exotic rhythms and harmonies are part of the music I grew up listening to. Many of the songs from that region are in 5, 7, or 11 beats per measure, instead of the boring old 2, 3, 4 or 6 that almost all western music is based on.

Almost forgot to mention -- saw the Austin Lounge Lizards at the Kuumbwa on Saturday night. Great show, but now I need some Progenitorivox.

Lorry epsom dollar sit

Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:31:21 GMT

My stream-of-semiconsciousness lorry epsom:

Lorry epsom dollar sit amid, consecutive adipose e-lit, sed s/a/b/g chmod tempura incidentally out Labor Day eat at Dolores magnetic alleycat. Ute denim add mirren venom, squish nostrils exercise undertow a la Boris and Natasha on Nishiki upto a liquid lunch with the ex, on the commode (consequences). During autumn, rural doll or reprehensible in voluptuous velcro essay, silly drooler (ew) Club Fugazi never ends Beach Blanket Babylon. Exceptions signed ocelot cupertino not provident, Sunday in culver city quiz officiously ate dessert with Molly, amid intestate boron.

Standard Lorem ipsum:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. [File under "silliness".]

Sometimes you have to dig deep ... for humor

Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:32:20 GMT

Some time last year, I found Paul and Michael Albert's fascinating story and awesome photos about "The Flying Mobulas of the Sea of Cortez". For some reason, the story resurfaced recently on digg or reddit or somewhere, in the form of a pointer to the (en español) weblog fogonazos. The entry about the mobulas has a few mobula videos that I hadn't seen previously. But what I really wanted to point out was the following comment on that entry:

"ningun cazador de cocodrilos está seguro!!"

which means "no hunter of crocodiles is safe!" (Not knowing quite as much Spanish as I'd like, I had to ask Google to translate for me.) (Side note: fogonazos' current entry is about the giant sunfish — "pez luna" in spanish. We get some smaller sunfish off the Central California coast, and I was crewing once on a sailboat that ran into one -- literally. You don't often witness a roadkill at sea.)

Forth, Yoda on

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 15:38:44 GMT

On pragprog last week, Ged Byrne wrote:

Yoda forth program? if say ." a powerful ally is the forth " then

And on the python list about six years ago:

William Tanksley: Always doing things backwards, Forth programmers are.
Greg Ewing: Ah, that explains it ... household programmers Forth of in Yoda up grew.
Kragen Sitaker: household programmers Forth of of Yoda up grew in, think I. This silly is but.

And someone with way too much time on his hands wrote an in-depth analysis of "Yodish". Just thought I ought to bring these things together.

Wherpetology

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 07:02:15 GMT

Speaking of wherpetology ...

True story:

Last May, I went for a walk in Quail Hollow Park. Misty, then drizzly, then sunny. No, that's not my companions, that's the weather. I was walking with a couple of friends, Mary and Richard. We saw several newts or salamanders along the way (probably either yellow-eyed salamanders or Coast Range Newts). Mary kept calling them lizards.

Mary: We don't have lizards like that around Reno.
Richard: They're not lizards -- they're salamanders.
Me: Yeah, they're amphibians, not reptiles.
They have a reptile dysfunction.

I had been waiting at least a couple months to use that one. I can just picture the ads ... Does your snake fail to uncoil? Lizard not doing his push-ups? Tortoise stays hiding in its shell?

Week 508 revisited

Thu, 25 Jan 2007 06:54:01 GMT

As I quoted here:

... take a word from the dictionary, add, change or delete a single letter, and redefine the word.

These ones are original, sad to say:

congross: 144 legislators, i.e., the average conscious population of the capitol building.
funique: each time you say "very unique" or "the most unique", God kills a pedant. Funique is almost always what you should have meant to say.
fighteousness: the evil side of religion, that leads the weak-minded to want to kill infidels
sparadigm: libertarian plan for dealing with the homeless: let 'em beg
fleeways: the roads that let a million people escape LA every weekend
insturgent: a very large, feisty fish
caviat: the warnings we get about the insturgents; or, their embryos (another two-fer!)
wherpetology: the study of lost pets, especially snakes, especially when discovered emerging from a bathroom porcelain facility

Ok, now, that's enough! Make it stop!

Washington Post Style Invitational Week 508 Letter Rip

Sat, 20 Jan 2007 05:11:51 GMT

I was handed a forwarded email today. Fun list. Seemed vaguely familiar, though. On the way to work, I came up with these two entries:

stupod: an implantable device that makes the wearer seem stupid, i.e., puts them in an apparent stupor. (This one's a two-fer!)
yellphone: a cellphone so tiny or stupidly shaped that the microphone is several inches away from the yeller's mouth.

And then I did some research, because I thought maybe I'd seen one or two of those words before. But first, I did have one question: what word is "arachnoleptic" supposed to be one letter away from?

My research led me to a John Dvorak column/blog, where he posted the same list in March 2005 ( http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=1598 ). One of the comments says:

Just doing some urban legend control.. this contest actually occurs weekly in the Washington Post but it's called The Style Invitational. It varies in content but the words listed above came from a 2003 contest, not 2005. Typical net meme: good content, bad metadata. Netadata?? -- Comment by Ebone Likea Mutha -- 4/25/2006 @ 11:40 am

And that was the pointer that finally allowed me to find it. Another search, tonight, led me to this cynical comment on the matter.

Anyway, it appears that one of the sources of the list was indeed the Washington Post, in their fun "Style Invitational" column. The list in question was apparently published as "Week 508", in the Post in June of 2003. The Post's permalinks kinda suck (they want to make money off their archives), and their site is pretty hard to navigate, but:

The Style Invitational contest column page: http://www.washingtonpost.com/styleinvitational.html only goes back to mid-2005.
The Style Invitational "Loser's page" is here: http://www.gopherdrool.com/ but it doesn't appear to mention the net-meme status of the week 508 contest.

The easiest way I found to locate (part of) the column on the Post's site was this google search:

"washington post" "style invitational" "week 508"

Here's the contents of the free preview available there, I hope this constitutes "fair use":

The Style Invitational
Week 508: Letter Rip
[FINAL Edition]
The Washington Post - Washington, D.C.
Date: Jun 1, 2003
Start Page: D.02
Section: STYLE
Text Word Count: 1013
This week's contest has been suggested, over the years, by literally dozens of clueless readers from around the country. These people's only contact with The Style Invitational occurs online, and consists entirely of having read the excellent entries like those above, ripped off from a long-ago contest. They have evidently concluded that The Style Invitational is a dreadfully boring and unimaginative contest that, week after week, for years and years, has been inviting readers to take a word from the dictionary, add, change or delete a single letter, and redefine the word. And so every so often, out of the blue, we get an entry from one of these people! This has been going on for years! These people's entries are invariably terrible. So finally, we decided, what the hell. Here we go. One more time. First-prize winner gets an amazing prize donated to The Style Invitational by the Post's Food section: Four promotional place mats produced by the Australian meat and livestock industry. Each depicts, in the style of a different classical artist, people eating lamb chops.

Oh, the list itself? Just search for intaxication, reintarnation, cashtration, beelzebug, and so on; I have confidence that you'll be able to find it.

Fourteen lazyweb years later

Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:51:51 GMT

The lazyweb may be cool and ultimately all-powerful, but here's a reminder that it only works on its own timescale ...

My 1992 request (a google groups link to a 1992 posting I made to the USENET group rec.arts.books):

direct
tinyURL preview lets you see the target URL first

So ... 14 years later ... in 2006, the framework ... finally shows up, that will possibly (by 2009?) become populated by the summaries I envisioned.

wikisummaries.org

I guess I oughta add that Ghostway one.

Lola became Leo

Tue, 03 Oct 2006 04:47:10 GMT

Daisy had six puppies a couple of weeks ago. After some guesswork, names were assigned. One of the pups was named "Lola". Well, now that they're a bit older, well, it turned out that Lola may have " ... looked like a woman but barked like a man ..."

Dwarvish and Reverse Polish Wines

Fri, 29 Jul 2005 04:56:16 GMT

Italian Varietals? That second one sure looks Dwarvish to me! Jeez, the summer of 2005 is halfway over! It sure has been a long time since I put any photos up here. Deb and I got to take a nice trip up to the wine country a few weeks ago, mainly to attend the incredible annual lavender festival that is held at Matanzas Vineyards, near Santa Rosa. I haven't done up all the pix from the whole trip, but here are a few wine store pictures, with a cool shimmery outdoor wall-art thing from Santa Rosa. The wine store was Oakville Grocery, on the corner of the main square in Healdsburg. Click on the pix to get bigger versions, with some brief captions. I find it amazing that no one else has posted anything anywhere on the web about the Reverse Polish Wine:

Kill Blobby-the-whale

Fri, 22 Jul 2005 04:37:47 GMT

I Took Bear Creek Road to work this morning, and shortly after I dropped onto Hwy 17, a great blue heron flew over the freeway. Good omen. In unrelated news ... (For the non-locals: highway 17 is the main drag connecting Santa Cruz (sea level) over the hill (Patchen Pass, 1800 feet elevation) to Silicon Valley (approximately sea level).) For nearly as long as I've lived in Santa Cruz County, there has been a billboard for the southbounders, just before you reach the straightaway freeway section that bypasses Scotts Valley. The billboard almost exclusively advertises some car dealership, and it almost always features this very annoying rounded-cartoon whale/seal character, very badly drawn. Well, I was so delighted to see a URL covering part of that billboard a few days ago ... http://www.killblobby.com/ ... that I literally laughed out loud. Ahh, I thought, someone agrees with me about the grossness of that dorky blobby whale-thing. I could hardly contain the anticipation to see what humorous website someone had come up with, taking up a web-collection or doing a silly web-survey asking that the damn blobby whale-thing never grace our commute again. Sadly, it turned out to be some kid-with-cancer site. At least it's a "successful surgery" k-w-c site, but still. Color me wryly disappointed, and send Cole my congratulations and best wishes.

Backpacker Mag -- Hiker-Slang, Sea-to-Sea, Bonny Doon

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 06:47:12 GMT

Here are some notes inspired by the August 2005 issue of Backpacker magazine. There's a very amusingly-written article about hikers' slang -- "The Unofficial, Unabridged, Slick-talking, Fast-walking Hiker's Glossary". The article is unattributed, but it sure reminds me a lot of the Dictionary of MTB Slang that I edited a decade ago, and that Jim Frost has been maintaining ever since. (I'm not suggesting plagiarism -- the article is original and quite well-done. I just wonder whether the unmentioned author had read the MTB Slang page -- the styles are quite similar, IMHO.) The article is illustrated with cool, retro-cartoon style drawings that also rung a bell -- this time, a wine label bell. My wife and I are members of DEWN, the wine club for Bonny Doon Vineyards. Their early-release wines always have distinctive and interesting labels, and it turns out that some of my favorite labels (e.g., the DEWN Freisa) were indeed created by Gary Taxali, the illustrator of this month's Backpacker article. Cool. The other article that caught my interest was about the Sea-to-Sea trail, from the mouth of the St Lawrence, to the northwest corner of Washington State. I mentioned that trail and the Pacific Northwest Trail in my long trails in North America article. (Aside: check out this search.) This month's related Backpacker article highlighted Andrew Skurka, who by next month may complete the journey that makes him the first person to "hike the entire 7,700-mile Sea-to-Sea Route (C2C)". Further mention of the Range Creek Ruins will have to wait.

Wiley, the Santa Cruz breatharian

Sat, 18 Jun 2005 21:53:38 GMT

Mark Frauenfelder boingboing'd a piece from "The World's Worst...", about breatharianism, the world's least healthy diet. It reminded me of this character that I read about, shortly after moving to Santa Cruz county. All I remembered was his name "Wiley" and that he claimed to be a breatharian. Google and The Santa Cruz Metro came to the rescue: Best Reuscitation [sic]. Short recap: last seen emerging from a 7-11 with a slurpy.

Giving your creditors the finger ...

Thu, 19 May 2005 22:38:30 GMT

... if you have an extra one handy. In all the news I've read and heard about the deal with Ms Ayala's recent finger-related fraud attempt, I'm shocked that I haven't seen anyone word it quite like this: Now it has been revealed that Rossiter owed Ayala's husband $50, and when the husband asked Rossiter for the money, Rossiter gave him the finger. ... as so many debtors do to their creditors ...

Funny Songs List

Wed, 27 Apr 2005 06:58:25 GMT

Blast from the past! I wrote up this Funny Songs List almost ten years ago: I got an email about it today. Update: Turns out that Funny Songs List is another phrase for which a page of mine is currently the top result on Google.

Nuncocentric

Thu, 27 Jan 2005 06:56:46 GMT

I decided to coin a word. Tonight, zero hits on google. Here's my bozos-list email about it:

Hey, all you Latinophiles, sesquipedalians, and neologians, I'm not sure there's a word for this, but I'm trying to find or coin one. It's related to egocentric and ethnocentric. It's related to TWIAVBP (The World Is A Very Big Place), the acronym that the AFU-ers (alt.folklore.urban) used to use to tell people that not everyone's environment is the same as yours. But it's about time. "NOW-centric". People have ranted and railed, whined and wailed, for millennia about how terrible things are Right Now, how near the end of the world is if we don't [DO SOMETHING], how important it is to change this terrible course we're on ... and it's always about Right Now. There's a great (probably apocryphal) quote about how wild the younger generation is, how it is clearly leading to the demise of all civilization on earth, and so on, and it turns out to be a quote written by a Greek guy in 1000 BC or something. So what's the word for this too-common lack of temporal perspective, this failure to realize that things have been worse, been better, and that Right Now isn't (usually) the brink of terrible disaster?

One suggestion was that this sounded too much like an obsession with the sisters in a convent; another one (from Jamie) was:

The Latin "prope" meaning: near, nearly, not far from, just now, closely, not long from now. All of which seem apt, and I feel the resultant word, "propecentric" to have a more pleasant ring to it, and to sound less made-up despite its manufactured nature.

Though I agree about "propecentric"'s more pleasant ring, I feel ever so slightly more inclined toward nuncocentric, because I think it'd be slightly easier for the unfamiliar to guess its meaning. (Google for Latin nunc English, for example.) "Prop..." just seems like it's too closely related to too many other concepts in English for it even to be recognizable as Latin-inspired.

Bad advice on JoS

Thu, 19 Feb 2004 06:50:03 GMT

Here's a quote taken only slightly out of context, containing some rather spectacularly bad advice. In a discussion thread a couple of weeks ago, someone tells Joel "on Software" Spolsky to just click the "trust all software from ms" check box.... Yikes! I'd clean up the rest of this, but the URLs for JoS' discussion thingie are sorta messy.

The discussion thread about a Linker for .NET
The particular posting is number 108833.

Brain supplements

Sat, 14 Feb 2004 06:58:41 GMT

There's an ad on the (AM) radio these days, about brain supplements. It claims at one point something like "People all over the country are saying that this is the best brain supplement they've ever tried!" Of course, the people saying this are people who think you can improve your brain via a pill you heard about on the radio.