Ben Newman

The head of engineering at a major tech company has just come down to the shop to inspect the prototype of the company's latest model. On his clipboard is a checklist on which each feature of the device will be checked against the officially approved specification. And so far it all looks good — this is according to spec, and that is according to spec. But...

Scattered throughout the mechanism are little platforms, and standing on each platform are a few tiny demons standing at attention, singing sad songs and dirges and wailing and bemoaning their terrible fate. This is disconcerting, to say the least, and — what's worse — it's not in the spec.

The head of engineering turns to the build team and gestures at the tiny sad singing demons and asks, "What are these, and what are they doing here?" And the nearest build team member grins and says:

"Oh, those... I wouldn't worry too much about them — they're just imp lamentation details."

At work there are some whiteboard walls. One of them used to be covered with puns, but recently the puns were erased and replaced with haiku. Since our company writes so much SQL, I thought it would be fun to contribute some haiku in SQL.

create view rainbow
as select distinct color
from meadow.flowers;

select count(flowers)
from meadow where wind is null
group by color, shape;

insert into heart
(select feeling from moment
where timestamp is null);

We also write an awful lot of Perl.

foreach $flower (@field) {
$rainbow{$flower->{HUE}}++ };
print sort keys %rainbow;

I decided to look up the exact time online so I could reset our clocks accurately. The site I found (by searching for [time reference]) contained a Java applet, so while it was loading, the page seemed to be saying "The official U.S. time is [a coffee cup]." That's not as precise as the information I was looking for (which did eventually appear), but it is extremely accurate.

My, it's been a long time. There have been a number of exciting things that happened that I meant to post something about, and then didn't. Someday, maybe, I will. I've been preoccupied, and I've been thinking that any day now I'll redo my website, and have been holding off updating my current website for that reason.

Setting all that aside, here's a post on the topic of pseudofilks, or cryptofilks, or whatever you want to call these things...

Often, when writing a song parody, I'll keep a line from the original song intact. Sometimes, that line motivated the parody in the first place. Other times, it comes as a surprise, even to me. Usually, the context of the filk changes the meaning of the line in a way that's particularly ironic, poignant, or otherwise powerful or punchliney. I mentioned a number of these at a song-parody-writing panel at Arisia.

And then there are the songs where, once I realize the twist that makes the parody work, the region of lyrics that can be kept, albeit with a changed meaning, grows and grows until it swallows the whole song. All the lyrics exactly the same. Then what? How do you perform such a filk — what establishes the context that changes the meaning, that makes the difference between the filk and the original song? These oddities are what I'm calling "pseudofilks".

The possibility of having a beloved song ruined for you forever minor, implicit spoilers for Babylon 5, and major spoilers for A Fire Upon the Deep follow ( after the cut )

One of these things is not like the others.

You'd think that, with a title like that, this would be an intensely personal post.

Nope.

It's Rosh Hashanah — shanah tovah, chaverim — and it's traditional to eat sweet things, because the new year should be sweet. Specifically, it's traditional to eat apples and honey together. Well, there are apples in the fridge, and I did buy some honey just for the occasion, but I was pulling out the roasted unsalted pistachio nuts from Trader Joe's when I had a terrible idea: what has honey and pistachio nuts in it? Baklava!

So, it so happens I don't keep phyllo dough lying around in case I suddenly decide to make baklava at midnight on Rosh Hashanah. But there is sliced whole-wheat bread lying around. So... baklava toast!

Baklava toast consists of bread, honey, chopped pistachio nuts, and cardamom. Toast bread lightly. Spread with honey. Sprinkle cardamom. Sprinkle nuts. Drizzle some more honey on top (on the theory that it will help hold the nuts on — this theory is false). Toast again. If you want the nuts to stay on, chop them really fine and shake off the excess, or make it a sandwich.

( Speaking of pistachio nuts... )

Speaking of linguistics, I was IMing with fiddledragon the other day, and made a number of egregious linguistics puns which I will now present in the form of riddles:

1. What team of superheroes have giant minimal meaning-bearing robots that combine to form a Word?
2. What super-villain is their arch-nemesis?
3. What kind of defensive systems do their giant robots have?
4. A British syntactician, fed up with arguing with a French colleague, tells him that he has his head up his butt. What is the Frenchman's retort?

( Answers... )

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The diagram above is a (partial) representation of the public transit system of a major east-coast city. The colors are those of the official map of the system in question. Which city is it?

(Note: spoilers in comments)