thoughtcrumbs : october 2003

I want this book

Slayer Slang: A Buffy the Vampire Lexicon

Lost in translation

This simple Perl-driven website will translate a phrase across five languages and then back to English, guaranteed to mangle even the clearest sentences. Examples:

• "Sometimes you feel like a nut." ---> "To the times it appreciates to think about data."
• "We had a fire drill at work today. I went for coffee." ---> "We have had today a one practitioner to satisfy to the fire with the work. They had had to try the coffee. "
• "Get on with your bad self." ---> "It obtains the excess with its defective individual. "

Search inside the book

Amazon announced a new feature today: full-text searching of books. Submit your best queries now and you might win a Segway.

What's on your screenshot?

A note to the vendor whose sales pitch I watched last week: When making screenshots for your big corporate presentation, use [Alt]+[Print Screen] to snap just the active screen, not your whole desktop. Then you won't be revealing to all of your customers your shortcut to Kazaa.

Beneath these fireworks

Matt Nathanson is a funny guy. He has the witty rapport with audiences that a to-remain-unnamed singer-songwriter used to have before hitting the cover of Rolling Stone. Matt, an ebullient San Francisco songster, played an acoustic show at Music Millennium yesterday, regaling us with tales of booming hiphop basslines emerging from foreboding New York SUVs (and what did the song turn out to be? Not Eminem, but Spandau Ballet:"Oh, oh, oh, ohhh, ohh / I know this much is true . . ."), and philosophising that those audience members too uncomfortable to participate in a singalong had probably never had an orgasm. He also admitted that the reason his evening show at the Aladdin was sold out was because his mom bought all the tickets. And I imagine it was an excellent one, if his afternoon performance was any indication. Catchy, plaintive love songs from his first major-label release.

Best of spam subject lines

• Watch out Viagra! Super Viagra is here!
• Genuine College Diplomas - no essays, books or exams!
  (which promises a genuine diploma from a prestigious non-accredited university today)
• transmitsable humpgrey

Recursive googling

The "I'm Feeling Lucky" button in Google takes you to the first search result, saving the intrepid person an extra click. Sergey Brin admitted that he'd like to remove the button, the overly-optimistic contribution of a college student confident of his software's accuracy. But it's one of the elements contributing to the search engine's quirky charm, so it's there to stay. In her interview with the founders of Google, Terry Gross asked Brin and Larry Page how often they googled themselves, and they replied with the expected nerdy modesty. She then described what happened when she googled Google. A regular search returned the usual results, but an "I'm Feeling Lucky" search for Google returned, so she thought, nothing. Over and over again she just got a blank search box. Had our favorite engine lost its steam? Nope, Google was just returning the best result for that search, itself.

Contemporizing the adage

A watched page never loads.

Tube map with walklines

When my mom and I were in London a few months ago, we made a pretty moronic loop on the Circle Line one morning, which I will choose to blame on station construction and a missing sign. When we couldn't find the track for the train toward Portobello Road (two stops to the "left" in tube-map terms), our sleep-deprived conclusion was that the train only went in one direction. So we gritted our teeth and took the loop all the way in the other direction (or, nearly all the way; construction had closed the last two stations before our destination, so we were forced to backtrack on the train in the opposite direction which had magically appeared). In most cities, we would have just walked between our destinations, but we were unable to gauge physical distance between stations on the tube map, and it was raining. An otherwise exemplary bit of information design, the map had alienated us from our geographic surroundings to the point that we were overly dependent on what it did convey: underground train lines. Enter the tube map with walklines, a simple solution with black lines connecting stations less than 500m apart. While several IAs agree the walklines detract from the skimmability of the map, the original map design was so good that adding another layer of information doesn't seem to harm it. Also beautiful is the walkline constellation map, allowing a a somewhat anthropomorphic look at urban planning. (From Boing Boing.)

High definition

One German tv station's late-night loop of a fireplace was so realistic it prompted one woman to douse her television with a bucket of water. Another called the fire department. "Sabine Kreft of the Super RTL network said the 'burning log' video which runs from three until six in the morning is popular, promotes congeniality, but is distinguishable from a real fire. 'Most people should really be able to tell the difference.'" (Full story.) Heard this morning on Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!.

Proper usage of the verb "to second"

If you're the third, fourth, or even fifth speaker in a row to begin your presentation by thanking the conference sponsors, you're not "seconding" those thanks. You're "thirding," "fourthing," or "fifthing." And we don't care anymore.

Damien Rice

The Crocodile Cafe was fifth-circle-of-hell hot and the kahlua was of the cheap, pungent variety, but what did it matter when Sounds Eclectic Irish darling Damien Rice had crossed both an ocean and a continent to be with us? Unlike the plaintive acoustic ballands on his CD, "O," the first three songs were funky, sweatily aggressive, and sung into a duct-taped distortion mic. He then turned to his more familiar, David Gray-ish melodies, backed by a cellist, bass player, and cue ball drummer, an ersatz Lisa Hannigan, filling in harmonies for the absent chanteuse who was otherwise occupied with the Dublin theatre. Damien prefaced "Amie" with the story of a "passed off" boy, sleeping alone in a neighbor girl's bed, told in a juvenile Irish brogue. Unfortunately, a couple of white hats in the audience felt this was their carte blanche to launch into their own poorly-accented heckling and singing-along. Damien bantered briefly with them, and then just chose to drown them out. Other highlights: Vyvienne, the cellist, did a solo rendition of "Purple Haze." Damien railed on singer-songwriters' arse-derived "honesty" and then broke his high E string. The band concluded with a lusciously layered "Volcano," this time compensating for a lost Lisa with a recorder, sampling and playing back Damien's vocals every four measures. And this is a guy who loves his chord modulations and vocal texture variations. After restringing and tuning for an interminable length, Damien finally returned for a forty minute encore. After snapping his A this time, he brought his opening band, the Pedestrians, back onstange to jam to a medley in Am that included "Creep," "All Along the Watchtower," Jeff Buckley's version of "Hallelujah," and a half-dozen other crowd pleasers. Having satisfied everyone's desires and sapped their energy, Damien and his crew left the stage, triumphant rock prizefighters, and we shlepped our weary bodies home.