Category Archives: language

The Macro’s Saga

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Every so often, the conditions are right and half the world’s population of internet users decide to go ape over the same silly thing simultaneously. As Prof. Harold Hill would say, “Mass-steria!” The shared memetic obsession this time around? Cat macros, also known as LOLCats or image macros (including the saga of the lolrus and the bukkit). The first rumblings were apparent as early as last Saturday – see the caption to the zombie picture on my AM cleanup post. The big seismic event, as far as I’m concerned, was on Wednesday when the LOLbots site went live. rstevens (the prime mover) on the rollout:

LOLBOTS.COM went up last night and promptly rode such a big wave of meme that we overloaded two servers. My admin Don got us back up and running and helped me optimize some code. The dude’s Bat-Man with a command line.

…

Originally, I was just goofing on the concept of icanhascheezburger-style kitty macros from the perspective of someone prefers machines to animals. I didn’t really think it would catch on, but 40,000 visitors later we have almost 200 robots posted and a backlog of dozens more. In a word: Insane. *

The quotes above are from a post dated Friday, June 1st – 2 days earlier rstevens had an idea and sat down at the keyboard. The fun continues – it will be interesting to watch the meme-seismograph for aftershocks.

Herewith, my faves from the frenzy…

If you know what the Camel Book is, you have – like me – spent too much time in front of a screen.

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You may have noticed that I like Schrödinger’s cat jokes – I love this one:

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And last, one that ties to another post currently floating around the wide-open spaces of my cranium – it will be a mashup of Google Street View and Charlie Stross (that’s a cat in Mary Kalin-Casey’s window).

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Credit where it’s due – the lolcats phenomenon was showing up on my son’s radar even earlier than it did on mine. I think he told me about memecats at about the same time I told him about “I can has brayn?”

Update – didn’t want to leave out creative powerhouse, Mr. Lex10 – he did some LOLPresidents for a fark contest early in the lolnomenon. You should blast over to the Glyphblog to check out the baseball cards; they are (as we say up here) wicked pissah.

Update II – c’est encroyable. The LOLCode version of Hello World:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Marlowe day!

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May 30, 1593 is either the day that Christopher Marlowe was killed by Ingram Frizer after arguing over who’d pick up the tab or the day he faked his death and was spirited off to the continent. I’m not a big one for conspiracy theories; they seem to me to have a lot in common with ‘not a sparrow falls’ religions – the desire for some kind of purpose underlying the random horrible (and wonderful) things that happen. That being said, you have to admit that the Marlovian’s theory is quite the rippin’ tale. Whether you like the theory or not, the connection to Francis Walsingham looks quite likely and from there it’s just one more hop to the preeminent cryptographer of the day, Thomas Phelippes. Rakehells, spies and code breakers – sounds like a reason to celebrate the day to me!

Wordly Wise

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I love this word; I always have and I don’t know why.

defenestration is the act of throwing someone or something out of a window

I’ve always seen it used to mean something like ‘thrown under the bus’ or ‘thrown to the wolves’, often in a political context. Come to find out, the political aspect is extremely important – defenestration (at least originally) refers to an act of dissent/resistance. From Wikipedia’s entry on the two Defenestrations of Prague:

At Prague Castle on May 23, 1618, an assembly of Protestants (led by Count Thurn) tried two Imperial governors, Wilhelm Grav Slavata (1572–1652) and Jaroslav Borzita Graf Von Martinicz (1582–1649), for violating the Letter of Majesty (Right of Freedom of Religion), found them guilty, and threw them, together with their scribe Philip Fabricius, out of the high windows of the Bohemian Chancellery. They landed on a large pile of manure and all survived unharmed.

A great find while poking around learning about the whys and wherefores of todays word – The Defenestrator – a comic book superhero who carries around a window through which he chucks baddies.

My Thirty Years War pseudonym? Baron Defenestratus von Hohenfall (patron of manure piles everywhere)…

Wordly Wise

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Two new (to me) words that I like quite a bit:

  • Handwavium

The fictional material handwavium (similar to unobtainium) is sometimes referred to in situations where the solution requires access to a substance that is probably possible to create, but only by means which would require a great deal of research, development, time, effort, and/or money, none of which the speaker intends to explain at the moment. *

  • Beausage – probably pronounced byoosij, but I like the sound of bō-sahzh…

…it’s a synthetic combination of the words beauty and usage, and describes the beauty that comes with using something.

How, you may ask, is beausage any different than patina? Well, it’s certainly related, but different. Patina is really more about surface level changes happening at a chemical level: oxidation, chemical stripping, and so on. Beausage describes changes that happen in 3D where atoms get torn and stripped away, as occurs with scratches, tears, chips, and wear marks. *

For another nice example of beausage, see here.

Soma and synchronicity

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An interesting coincidence: I’ve been on a bit of a soma jag recently (research, not use) because of a brief mention of it in Helen Macdonald’s excellent Falcon. I started by re-reading Brave New World for old time’s sake; back in high school it added soma to my vocabulary; college brought R. Gordon Wasson and the idea of entheogens. Soma has been off the back burner and on a slow simmer in my head for a while; there seems to be a connection between the bowls found in Central Asian burials and either soma or Amanita muscaria use (allowing that A. muscaria might not be soma). The picture at the top of the post is a handle for one of these bowls. Falcon brought the simmer to a boil, so – in preparation for (maybe) writing a long soma post – I’ve been spending the past couple days reading things like The Soma-Haoma Problem. Now comes the coincidence – last night I was lying in bed reading The Areas of my Expertise and laughing my head off (not a great way to get to sleep, I discovered); page 87 consists of the following:

 

WERE YOU AWARE OF IT?

The famous Cole Porter tune “I’m In, You’re In” was actually Porter’s typically wry response to the urine-drinking craze of the 1920s.

The practice originated with the fierce reindeer herders of Siberia known as the Koryac, who centuries ago had devised a means of purifying the hallucinogenic toadstool known as fly agaric. A local shaman would eat the mushroom, using his body to filter out the poisonous muscarine; its mood-altering compounds were preserved in his urine, which was then ritually consumed by other Koryac and also some of the more favored reindeer.

Marco Pensworthy, a monocled young libertine and staff member of the American Museum of Natural History, who was later dismissed for seducing the skeleton of a giant ground sloth, introduced the custom to New York. During Prohibition, many a tuxedoed, thrill-thirsty swell attended one of Dr. Marco’s private “Siberian Tea Parties,” beneath the frozen gaze of the stampeding elephants of the Hall of African Animals, where, wrote Porter…

There isn’t any shame in
Meeting with the Shaman
And making like the reindeers do…
It’s just a little wonder
That will unfreeze your tundra
I’m in, you’re in. You’re in too.

After his disgrace, Pensworthy would wander Central Park humming Porter’s tune and offering passersby swigs from a suspicious flask. Finally arrested and institutionalized, he trepanned himself to death in 1952.

Like a lot of good tall tales, there’s a grain of truth in there – the Koryac references are accurate regarding the mushroom and the urine (I’d be surprised if they shared their pee with the reindeer – but I could be wrong).

I’m running into these kind of coincidences more and more frequently (the one before this was putting Lost World of the Moa down, flipping the teevee to Animal Planet, and falling into the middle of a segment on Haast’s Eagle). I’m developing a hypothesis that rests on two factors – both Internet related – the immediate availability of information and the number of personal contacts with like-minded people that communication technology provides us with. I’ll do some more thinkin’ on it – perhaps a later post.

 

Hug me till you drug me, honey;
Kiss me till I’m in a coma:
Hug me, honey, snuggly bunny;
Love’s as good as soma. *

 

Wordly Wise

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A few good words (and terms) I’ve run across recently:

  • Pareidolia – taking a vague pattern and seeing something clearly in it – pattern recognition gone awry. Think of Mother Theresa’s image on a piece of toast. The word is courtesy of Victor the Talking Budgie via the Kircher Society web site. Paredolia’s polar opposite (antonym just doesn’t seem to fit this context) is a phenomenon I’ve heard described as native vision – the ability of a local to see something that someone who wasn’t intimately familiar with the environment would miss. Hmmm… think I need to watch Dersu Uzala again.
  • Prolix – windbag-ish. I’ve read through this word many times, assuming I understood it’s meaning from context. I finally looked it up – huge sigh of relief – I didn’t have my head lodged.

Jollie (1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c) incorporated many aspects of the osteology of the group in his work, but as Olson (1985:108) pointed out, the work is “prolix and idiosyncratic” and it is “a labor of love” to extract information from it. The Lost World of the Moa, Worthy and Holdaway

  • Nutpicking – the practice of attempting to discredit a blog by grabbing the craziest comments you can find and claiming that they are representative. A vice that seems to be particularly prevalent among ‘traditional’ journalists.
  • Friedman Unit (abbr. FU) – 6 months.

Word of the day

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Flopsweat – n. Theater. nervous perspiration caused by fear of failure before an audience. From “Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, Volume 1, A-G” by J.E. Lighter, Random House, New York, 1994. This earliest citation in this reference is: 1966 Susann “Valley of the Dolls” 292: The applause had been deafening on her entrance, but after ten minutes the air was heavy with “flop sweat.”

OK, let’s use it in a sentence (this line is what made flopsweat today’s word). Via the apostate Balloon Juice blog,

Unsurprisingly, practically everybody involved with the glorious clusterf*ck in Iraq has switched into desperate damage-control mode. Michael Leeden’s [sic] personal dodge (Supported the invasion? You must mean some other Michael Leeden) is particularly funny for its mix of mendacity and flopsweat.”

Humboldt’s parrot

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Very interesting post at the Kircher Society web site – it’s almost impossible to describe without giving everything away, so click through. The story reminds me of a children’s book I just read: The Last Giants. There are similar themes – destruction of the discovered world and the marks it leaves on those that live on. Not the point of the post, but I can recommend Mr. Place’s ‘Giants’ book without reservation – a good story and wonderful illustrations (that’s Monsieur, not Mister).

Update (6/14/09) – The Kircher Society web site is gone; I re-linked above to a snapshot in the Wayback Machine. Just in case, here’s the post:

In 1804, when the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt returned from his five-year expedition to Central and South America, he brought back this poignant anecdote about a dead language once spoken by an annihilated tribe that had been kept alive by a single feathered linguist:

“It is to be supposed that the last family of Atures did not die out until a long time afterwards: since at Maypures – bizarrely – there still survives an old parrot that nobody, say the natives, can understand, because it speaks only the language of the Atures.”

Humboldt recorded the 40 words spoken by the parrot, the only remnant of the dead Ature language. In 1997, with the help of a linguist and a bird behaviorist, artist Rachel Berwick painstakingly taught a group of parrots to speak those 40 words, and exhibited them in a cylindrical aviary made of transluscent plastic.

The story of Humboldt’s Parrot is recounted in Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages by Mark Abley.

Incidentally, Charles Darwin wrote, “I shall never forget that my whole life is due to having read and reread as a youth” Humboldt’s Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent During the Years 1799 to 1804.

Saturday AM cleanup

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Taking a break from doin’ the domestic thing this morning – time to clean up a couple loose ends I’ve been meaning to post about…

First – Saturday morning, regardless of what you’re doing, is always improved by Kathy and Red Eye R&B on our local college radio station: WUNH. You can listen across the net and this is one of those cases where, because you can, you should.

Next – a couple new interweb vocabulary words: crowdsourcing and sockpuppet. Crowdsourcing is the strategy Neuros is using with their OSD box – release the hardware, open-source the software and let the hacker community take it from there (with the crowdsourcing company continuing to develop high priority applications and attempting to influence the direction the crowd is taking). A sockpuppet is an identity assumed by a blog author in order to comment favorably on himself, esp. on his own blog. Watch the comments on this post for an example.

Finally – search terms. I run a log file analyser on my little web server; one of the things it shows me is what search phrases bring people to the blog. Number one with a bullet is ‘litel man’ – I have no idea what folks are trying to find, but at least some of them (not many) end up here. Another ‘what are they trying to do?’ phrase is ‘netware hezbollah’. I know there’s a lot of information out there about fourth generation/open source guerilla warfare (see John Robb’s Global Guerillas in the blogroll), but this is crazy. Seriously. The last term I want to throw out there brought a smile to my face – ‘knicker critter’ – yes, at times my sense of humor is not particularly sophisticated.

Back to work…

Making Light & Mike Ford

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I’ve followed links in to Making Light twice in as many days. Today I thought I’d read around a bit and found that I’d arrived a bit too late. They are marking the passing of their friend John M. Ford who died Monday. I thought I’d quote two of the things he wrote (in comments!) on the site – just because I like them so much.

Against Entropy

The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days—
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.

—John M. Ford

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By John M. Ford, from the Infernokrusher thread:

[From Verona Total Breakdown (Liebestod), a forgotten early Infernokrusher work by Bill “Hoist This Petard” Shakespeare …

Ro-Mo. Your windows are still mirrored; taunt me not,
But show your colors, dare to challenge me,
These lips are two shaped charges, primed and hot,
That wait the go-code for delivery.
J-Cap. The flag is to the deadly, not the loud,
Yet aim as well as posing shows in this;
The worthy throwdown’s always to the proud,
And hammer down is how the hard girls kiss.
Ro-Mo. My draft is stopped; I struggle toward the clutch.
J-Cap. And would a charge of nitrous make thee run?
Ro-Mo. Too much; but what else is there but too much?
Let me take arms, and elevate the gun.
J-Cap. Small arms but hint what demolitions say.
Ro-Mo. Then, gunner, gimme one round.
J-Cap. On the way.

Abecedaria naturae

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An interesting paper – The Republic of Codes – looks at artificicial languages, codes vs. ciphers, and the desire on the part of academics to find ways to communicate effectively in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War. I have to admit, some of this is a bit over my head – a semiotician, I’m not- but the general outline is very interesting, We meet our old friend John Wilkins and another key player in the Baroque Cycle, Gottfried Leibniz. Also making an appearance – Athanasius Kircher (aka The Last Man to Know Everything). There is a link to the Kircher Society in my blogroll.

Coincidentally, I’m reading a history of the Silk Road. The Nestorian Stele (mentioned in The Republic of Codes) pops up there in the context of religious and cultural flows along the trade route.