Holy Tango of Literature

Wee, sneaky, glowrin, vill’nous thiefies, O, how ye filch in half a jiffy! —Holy Tango of Literature What poets and playwrights would write about if they wrote about anagrams of their own names. The above is from “Robber Runts,” by Robert Burns (not). I had heard of “Toliets” by T.S. Eliot, but I didn’t see…

Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you’re not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren’t to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. “Spindle” is the word that most…

The tickle inside

“Let’s walk around looking for people who are laughing to themselves because of something they’ve just thought of,” I say. “When we find them, you take their photograph and I’ll ask them what they were thinking about that was so funny.” —Jon Ronson —The tickle inside (Guardiian) There aren’t actually any pictures on the website, but…

Hardcore today, arcade tomorrow

Pac Man today has been tossed into the “Retro” bin and is avoided by teens who think it lame, slow, boring and ugly. May as well call Akira Kurosawa’s Ran crap because it’s 20 years old, or write off all black-and-white movies because they lack “realistic” coloration, right? […] [T]oday’s teens grew up in a…

Mom on Sabbatical

I’m using this sabbatical to work on a longer, more complex novel than I’ve ever written before. Even though I’m giving my writing, and my child, more of myself than they’ve ever had before, they both cry out for more. “Mommy, I wish you were there when we sing “Come In, Grown-Ups,” my daughter says,…

How I've Grown…..

What I have done is taken two blog entries from the same story: The Yellow Wallpaper. I have taken one blog from when I was a freshman, and another blog from this year’s American Literature course. I feel that these essays are written from two completely different people. I am going to leave both of…

Online Encyclopedia Tightens Rules

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site,…

Oops-onomics

Abortion, legalised throughout the United States by the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, prevents unwanted pregnancies from becoming unwanted children. Higher abortion rates from the 1970s onwards thus help to explain why crime rates fell in America about two decades later. That’s the theory. But a paper published last week? by Christopher…

Tic Tac Toe

# If neither player makes a mistake, the game is drawn (but we knew that already). # This is an exercise in examining the objective properties of a game. There are two interesting sides to this: # 1) The objective properties of Tic Tac Toe really matter for our enjoyment of it: It is a…

Pass the Paddles: Man's Best Friend

Computers were still huge assemblies of vacuum tubes and transistors when the German-Jewish émigré and computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum published a paper called ?ELIZA — A Computer Program for the Study of Natural Language Communication between Man and Machine,? in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery 9. It was 1966, and Weizenbaum programmed ELIZA…

How News is Made

First, most of what we call “news” today starts out as a press release, which then becomes a headline, a sound-bite, and eventually a story. In a parallel to the way government operates, in which special interest groups lobby to create or defeat legislation, most of our news stories come as a result of PR…