Bring out yer dead

Thanks for checking in on me, United Nation. I haven't been very actively blogging these past few months, but I'm not dead yet. And if I were, would you stop sending out your spam my way?

Many of you will have noticed the title of this post is a line from a well-known Monty Python movie — and you may well have been lured to this page by it, who knows. Fear not, I will not leave your expectations unfulfilled. This video clip should make your visit worth it. Here's the scene from Monty Python and The Holy Grail. Oh, and it's OK if you've already got one, you can still watch it.

Redundant objects

This post has very little to do with spam, but I couldn't possibly let this news pass without a comment.

Fans of Kaamelott (a French parodic series about the knights of the round table, which I already mentioned here) certainly remember the series of episodes named Unagi, in which Perceval and Caradoc come up with new fighting techniques. In Unagi IV, the two knights explain to King Arthur that they are perfecting a new technique that makes use of objects found in their immediate environment – which usually is the local tavern. The trick, they say, is to look for "redundant" objects (they really mean "objets contondants" in French, i.e. blunt instruments). In this hilarious episode, you can see them train with such improbable weapons as loaves of bread, a fennel bulb, dry sausage links, a recorder, a hair brush and leeks. Watch it here.

Who knew their technique would be so effective against wild animals in real life?

Mont. woman fends off bear attack with zucchini

Read this story for details of how the 200-pound black bear ran away from a 12-inch zucchini! Now, if the story proves that zucchini are "redundant", it does not reveal which end the woman was holding (does a zucchini even have a "sporadic" end??), and whether she made "perimetric" use of it, or if she actually developed her own technique...

Acrostics, mesostics and trash metal

If you are still unclear as to what an acrostic is, the first two sentences of the definition given by Wordsmith.org (found here on Answers.com) may help dissipate any remaining ambiguity:

An acrostic is not an angry insect ("a cross tick"), any more than an oxymoron is a big dumb cow. Rather, an acrostic is a poem, in which the first letter of each line spells out a word.

This definition actually debunks two deeply rooted assumptions that I had concerning dictionaries:

• Isn't it unusual for a dictionary to start defining a word by what it does not mean?
• Would you have ever thought it possible to turn to a dictionary for comic relief? I thought humor — if at all present — could only reside in the citations used to illustrate the definition of a word in context.

This may just be that Wordsmith.org is not a conventional dictionary. As refreshing as it may be, this definition could be amended a little. Poems are indeed the preferred embodiment for acrostics, because of their mostly fixed layout, but Arnold Schwarzenegger's letter can be added to a long line of texts in prose which benefit from a two-dimensional reading. Among the more elegant and recent is Linton Weeks's farewell review in the Washington Post.

In both examples, the "hidden" message was meant to be discovered by everyone. A variant of the acrostic and a more effective cryptographic pattern is the mesostic, which also has you look for subtext by reading the text vertically. While acrostics rely on the first letter of each line, mesostics use the middle of each line.

Do you remember how we were supposed to be able to hear the voice of the devil by playing trash metal tracks backwards?

What's with my couch??

Recently, spammers have been very concerned about my couch.

Rubin: "heave your belove couch adventures"
Roscoe: "support your belove couch experience"
Jacklyn: "uplift your sweet couch experience"
Marilin: "ascent your lover couch experience"
Rosendo: "boost your couch experience"

Is it the type of experience you can mention in your resume, alongside your plow experience? 15+ years of couch experience. Somehow, I doubt it... The imperatives kind of give away what this is all related to. "Ascent" is the odd man out, here, grammatically speaking, but conveys the same idea as the verbs.

Out of curiosity, and to expand my knowledge of the English language, I looked up "to heave" on the Merriam Webster Online Dictionary. It turns out it's been around since before the 12th century, has both irregular and regular inflicted forms, and several meanings and synonyms, among which another word we don't see everyday: "to retch".

Did anyone puke on my couch?!?!

Spam me not... please

No, keep it coming actually. It's a lot of fun. Sometimes.