Daily Archives: November 11, 2009

Today the ghost of Ben­nett Cerf called a meet­ing of the Plan­e­tary Pun Com­mit­tee and awarded Pun of the Year prize to James Taranto and his crew at Best of the Web for their entry:

It’s Mao or Never

“White House Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Anita Dunn will step down by the end of Novem­ber and be replaced by her deputy Dan Pfeif­fer,” reports Fox News.

If she’s still unem­ployed after three months, she’ll have a long March.

Neo-Neocon did a won­der­ful post about Spam-Bots and being seduced by silico-flattery. In it she touched on some things I have been feel­ing, one of which is the ter­ri­ble lone­li­ness of the begin­ning blog­ger. It can be intim­i­dat­ing. You feel like you’ve just been kicked off of a mov­ing train in the mid­dle of Siberia. After a while you find your­self resort­ing to trans­par­ent sub­terfuges. You write emails to friends and include links to blogs you’re proud of with­out men­tion­ing the link goes to your blog. Since one of the rea­sons you started blog­ging was to stop pes­ter­ing your friends with a bar­rage of email this is a lit­tle counter-productive.

Then you aban­don all the man­u­fac­tured hau­teur and say, “Hey! I wrote this blog post. Give it a look and leave a comment.”

Even that approach has its pit­falls. I used it on one friend who replied, “I wanted to write some­thing but it said “no comments.”

I was just about to start fool­ing it by sign­ing on with the library’s com­puter and pre­tend­ing I was some­one else when I read Neo’s post. Oh, yeah! And right after I read that I got my first com­ment! Sort of  (I blocked out the link; no point in encour­ag­ing him).

Wow, great blog. I love read­ing blogs about comdey. The world needs more laugh­ter these days. Who is your favorite come­dian? I would have a hard time choos­ing between Bill Mur­ray. I don’t have time to read it all right now, I found this site when look ing for some thing else on Bing, but I’ve book marked your home page and will visit again soon to see the lat­est posts. Please book mark my com­edy blog at http://www.xxxxxxx.xxx and let me know what you think of it. Have a good week!

I saw it because the Word­Press spam-ketcher told me I had some span and what did I want to do with it?

Do with it? Hell, I wanted to buy it some flow­ers and take it out for mimosas and a long walk along the beach!

Before graph­ics devel­oped to the point where sim­ple punc­tu­a­tion was viewed as stodgy if it didn’t rhumba across the screen there were these great text-based mys­tery games, most of them writ­ten in a lan­guage called LISP. You were in an uncer­tain sit­u­a­tion where some­thing had hap­pened and you were sup­posed to do some­thing about it. You had to acquire items along the way and inter­act with the peo­ple you met.

After start­ing the game you would be told you were in a cer­tain place at a cer­tain time. Then you were on your own. Because of the partial-AI nature of the LISP lan­guage it often seemed like you were hav­ing an actual con­ver­sa­tion. You could almost hear its voice.

I miss those games. Some of them were pretty good puz­zles and the game could change rad­i­cally based on the ques­tions asked and the items retrieved, the places vis­ited, the iden­ti­ties of the peo­ple encoun­tered, some of whom lied. Given the graph­ics capa­bil­i­ties of the day there was even a sense of motion and pas­sage of time. The cur­sor blinked.

When I first read about Japan­ese “lights out” fac­to­ries, which didn’t need any lights because all the work was done by robots, I used to won­der what the peo­ple would do when the com­put­ers were doing their jobs.

Sim­i­larly, when the era of text-based com­puter games was over and the lit­er­ate and intel­li­gent bots were replaced by ones that were good at mak­ing car-screeching and machine gun noises (some­thing I was pretty good at myself when I was around eight) I thought about what would hap­pen to all those bots. And I think I fig­ured it out. Not what they’re doing NOW.   Now they’re pes­ter­ing blog­gers. What were they doing between the time their text games dis­ap­peared and they found new work leav­ing com­ments on blogs?

I’m sure I have it.

Remem­ber what showed up just about the time those text-based com­puter games dis­ap­peared? Psy­chic Hot lines. All the rage (at least until the Jamaican Voodoo princess proved to be some­body from Queens). I’ll bet that’s the answer.

Think about it. It’s not much of a stretch from this (what the player types in appears in ital­ics)

After enter­ing the door of the coun­try house you hear a scuf­fling sound off to your right and go to inves­ti­gate. next?

I walk into the room.

next?

I feel around on the wall until I find the light switch and turn in on.

You are in a large room. A large chan­de­lier hangs from the ceil­ing. Against the far wall is a fire­place with a fire burn­ing in it. Near the fire­place is a sofa. Lying on the sofa is a hard­cover book with tat­tered cov­ers, a set of keys, and a used condom.

to this (caller in ital­ics)

I see you are a woman of courage, even though uncer­tain of what you will find. Yes! That’s me! Near the end of this month you will be invited to a large house. Really? Where? On an estate. I KNEW IT! When you enter the house I see you going to a large draw­ing room. It is dark. As you enter you touch the sil­ver wall plate and a chan­de­lier hang­ing from the ceil­ing comes to life, giv­ing the room a soft, caress­ing glow. Oh this room! This room! I feel like I’ve been there! Then you see him.

He is seated on a divan near a large fire­place with a crack­ling fire, wear­ing a Scot­tish pullover and hunter-green slacks. He is tall, and very hand­some. In one hand he holds a book, in the other he is hold­ing a large trans­par­ent bal­loon of inde­ter­mi­nate color, and his face is expresses sur­prise at your noise­less appear­ance. There is a hint of cru­elty to his mouth as he turns to see you, but his eyes sparkle with desire when he sees who it is. What is his name!? That.  Is a room. You must enter.  Yourself.

And so now they are leav­ing com­ments on Neo’s blog. And, finally, mine (I guess it’s a step in the right direc­tion – IGNORED BY SPAM-BOTS is not some­thing I want on my tombstone).

Finally, this bot wasn’t even that good. While the post it replied to was in the cat­e­gory Polit­i­cal Humor it wasn’t com­edy.  It was humor­ous in an eat­ing Irish babies sort of way, noth­ing like Ghost Busters.

I sup­pose that’s to be expected. the gen­eral intel­li­gence and knowl­edge level seems to have fiz­zled a bit. When my mother grad­u­ated from high school she had French, Latin, and Greek. Today’s Ivy League seniors have trou­ble dis­cov­er­ing India on a map. Even silicon-based life forms are affected. The savvy bots that I remem­ber would never have a pres­i­den­tial can­di­date talk about vis­it­ing 57 states.