tweet of the day
I’d be less likely to think “isn’t it ironic?” than “why the fuck did I buy 10,000 spoons?”
— Matthew Baldwin (@matthewbaldwin) January 18, 2012
Phonograms
Patrick Feaster studies the culture of early phonography (the recording and reproduction of sound) and blogs at Phonozoic, where I’ve been hanging out for the past hour or so. At the 2011 conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, Feaster shared “Phonogram Images on Paper: 1250-1950.” You can listen to his presentation and download slides here. Just scroll down a little ways and you’ll find the links.
(via Excavated Shellac)
I said
“You can take [your stress] out on my cock. She’s tough. She can take it.”
from the moderated comment spam
I am also commenting to make you be aware of what a really good experience my wife’s princess enjoyed visiting your blog.
It was almost as if there was a secret world of pronouns that existed outside our awareness
COOK: What are some of the more unusual “texts” you have applied this technique to?
PENNEBAKER: Some of the more unusual texts have been my own. There is something almost creepy about analyzing your own emails, letters of recommendation, web pages, and natural conversations.
COOK: And what have you found?
PENNEBAKER: One of the most interesting results was part of a study my students and I conducted dealing with status in email correspondence. Basically, we discovered that in any interaction, the person with the higher status uses I-words less (yes, less) than people who are low in status. The effects were quite robust and, naturally, I wanted to test this on myself. I always assumed that I was a warm, egalitarian kind of guy who treated people pretty much the same.
I was the same as everyone else. When undergraduates wrote me, their emails were littered with I, me, and my. My response, although quite friendly, was remarkably detached — hardly an I-word graced the page. And then I analyzed my emails to the dean of my college. My emails looked like an I-word salad; his emails back to me were practically I-word free.
One of half a dozen subjects discussed in an interview with James Pennebaker, chair of the department of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, on his work with the hidden world of pronouns.
(thanks, Andrew)
data out of context
from the comments
Phallus, Phallus, Fucker, Fuck, Fuck, Fuck, Fart, Fart, Farty, Bitch, Bitch, Bitchy, Faggy, Boobie, or, in British English, Fanny or Fanny
Multilingual is something to do with animals
Further thoughts on the evolution of language on safari in Kenya.
I fear for future generations
Bad Lip Reading
So I guess this is a thing now.
Word Request
“That feeling you get when you realize you have no idea how to pronounce the word you’re about to say, because you’ve only ever used it online, but it’s too late to turn back.”
Tuesday Morning Corporate Sellout
Favorite new word I learned today:
‘Feculent‘
I feel like this should be on Star Trek or something
So I played around with the free demo a bit, and it’s touchy. You have to do a little bit of moving around and refocusing before it will correctly identify the words on a page. I have no idea how good the translation software is, but Google Translate is notorious for hilarious mistranslations, and this is running on a phone, not a huge server farm.
But still, character recognition algorithms, digital camera sensors, and machine translation are always improving. Even in the state it’s in right now, it’s damn impressive, and you can really see how something like this will be commonplace in a few years when the kinks are worked out.
submitting to the hypocrisy of the most photographed gesture in the world
“Never again”…
…is the expression of an immortal.
Theatre of Great Discomfort
against hypertext
Short story on this brilliant, little essay: hypertext has little, if nothing to do with interactivity.
Whence hypertext? The hypertext novel as we know it today, the click-to-see-more-screen-text kind of hypertext, is unquestionably a content-based structure. A writer creates all of the copy, plugs in the links, and then the reader tunnels through all of the nooks and crannies. There is a kind of authorial vanity in the hypertext scheme. The implicit presumption: that the reader will actually take the time to explore every link and ponder its meticulously choreographed significance.
The act of reading hypertext: click…click…click. Robbed of contingent, dynamic consequence, the token interactivity of the hypertext novel is a thin veil over the deathly rigid structure. Hypertext “choice” is not meaningful, as it is in a game of Go or Zork. Instead, each click reinforces the rigid authority of the author, any sense of play reduced to acquiescence. The hypertext form is nonlinear, yes, but stillborn.
Maiming’s what I prefer. Psychologically.
In a pre-election missive to Gordon Brown on his Cameron strategy, the (sadly) fictional Malcolm Tucker simultaneously addresses American health care, the $25 meth baby, and the membership of clusterflock:
In the final week we’ve got to promote in the public imagination the role of the odd, the pimply, and the cerebral. The people who are going to take away your child and exchange it for a voucher, give you a slot-operated hospital bed and get you to swipe your credit card as you’re heaved on the air ambulance. And other actually very brilliant ideas.
Ask Swearengen
Dear Al,
My boss just fired me because I said some stupid things about him in a magazine. Was I over the line?
General Disarray
—
General,
Over time, your quickness with a cocky rejoinder must have gotten you many punches in the face. You want a donkey’s attention, you bring a fucking pole down between his ears. Enjoy retirement.
Al
Dick and Jane’s Deepwater Horizon
Okay, I get that one should tailor a message to the audience, but this hit me as more than a little condescending:
President Obama’s speech on the gulf oil disaster may have gone over the heads of many in his audience, according to an analysis of the 18-minute talk released Wednesday.
Tuesday night’s speech from the Oval Office of the White House was written to a 9.8 grade level, said Paul J.J. Payack, president of Global Language Monitor. The Austin, Texas-based company analyzes and catalogues trends in word usage and word choice and their impact on culture.
Though the president used slightly less than four sentences per paragraph, his 19.8 words per sentence “added some difficulty for his target audience,” Payack said.
What does Payack mean by “over the heads of many in his audience”? This is the sentence he singled out as problematic:
“That is why just after the rig sank, I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge — a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s secretary of energy.”
Makes my lips tired just reading that sentence. Ever seen someone bend down and talk loudly to someone in a wheelchair? Kind of seems like that’s what they think Obama should have done to the American people.
Spam name
Puddeszay Geste.
And another one:
Sponer Bowse.
Ask Swearengen
This is a revival of sorts (but without tents or snakes). On another blog several years ago, I introduced an advice column called “Ask Swearengen”, in which the proprietor of Deadwood’s first saloon, the Gem, dispensed advice on matters of life and love. At risk of introducing a glut of advice columns to the ‘flock, I surmise from people’s “7 favorite” answers that Al’s help might be just what Doc Cochran ordered.
Dear Al,
This oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico really troubles me. I find myself staying up late at night, unable to turn off CNN. When I sleep, I dream of oily dolphin carcasses washing up in Biloxi. I don’t trust BP to fix this, but I don’t know who else can stop it. How should I handle my despair?
- All Lubed Up and Nowhere to Go
—
Dear “Lubed”,
Pain or damage don’t end the world. Or despair or fucking beatings. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man… and give some back.
Al
Dear Clusterflock,
have you seen the title that PETA chose for their blog? It could easily be misread.
For India: a Dinner in Morocco
My friends Rick and Teel recently told me another amazing tale of a memorable meal, in the mode of an earlier one I have written about here. This one involves a meal at the home of Jacqueline Rosenblum, who taught at Mohammed V University in Rabat in the early ’60s. Rick was there as a Fulbright Lecturer in 1963-64, teaching American literature, and his wife, Teel, was teaching English. Their friend, Jacqueline was (is…?) a remarkable polyglot; she was teaching Latin, but was also fluent in Arabic, English, German, French, and other languages. I’m not quite sure of the details, but apparently control of the university was soon to change hands (in 1965), and with the change would come the exclusion of all Jewish faculty. Jacqueline arranged a dinner party and invited a number of faculty members to her small house, where she served a meal she prepared herself: a leafy salad, flat bread, couscous, a large platter of lamb’s eyes, and a bowl of snails, stacked in a spiral cone. As Rick and Teel sat in the murmur of a dozen different languages at the table, they looked at each other with trepidation. A woman sitting next to Rick asked him, in French, if he would be able to eat what had been set before them. Rick, whose French was not terribly strong at the time, answered with “Je sui pouissant.” He meant to indicate something along the lines of “I can take it,” but had apparently told the woman he was “potent.” Instantly the woman’s husband, seated across from them at the table, was up and rushing around to get at Rick, saying in Danish “Did you hear what that man said to my wife?” Fortunately Jacqueline swept in, making good use of her many languages to explain to all what he had meant to say.
What a microcosm of cultures and conflicts that dinner was! I asked Rick and Teel if they ate any of the lamb’s eyes. They said they liked the snails but passed on the eyes.
