EtherHouse.com

Is death smart? I say yes.

Uncommon Knowledge about Death

Is it used by the police?  I say Probably.
Does it have a hole in it?  I say Probably.
Is it a predator?  I say Probably.
Is it used for entertainment?  I say Probably.
Does it have a backbone?  I say Probably.
Does it have a face?  I say Probably.
Does it use numbers?  I say Probably.
Does it dig holes?  I say Probably.
Is it found in salad bars?  I say Probably.
Is it smart?  I say Yes.
Is it originally from Africa?  I say Probably.
Does it have arms?  I say Probably.
Can it speak?  I say Probably.
Is it ferocious?  I say Probably.
Is it delivered?  I say Probably.
Does it cut?  I say Yes.

Words of wisdom from 20Q,net, a site that allows you to play 20 Questions with a robot. The interesting thing is: The robot learns from each game. It's an ongoing artificial intelligence experiment. I've played the game many times and tried to catch the robot learning, but the questions seem to rotate as part of the game, so it's hard to detect a change.

The robot is very talented at guessing objects, but has trouble with abstract concepts. The noun I was trying to get the robot to guess above was "suicide." It did manage to guess that my concept had something to do with death, so gold star for robot boy. After I admitted "defeat," it bragged about some of its other knowledge about death, spewing out the list shown above.

Sigh. Robots apparently have little need to understand death. (Although I will admit that death is used by the police, is used for entertainment by some, alas, and is found in salad bars. Especially in certain Korean delis around the midtown Manhattan area where they leave the lunch food in the hot/cold trays until dinnertime, by which time the whole buffet has become a deadly hot 'n' cold Petri dish of romping pathogens.)

Try a game yourself here.

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I, the prudent EtherPundit: Anagrams, Part II

"I, the prudent" is an anagram for EtherPundit. I've already written about my love for anagrams. I can't help myself: I had to delve for some more, this time for EtherPundit.

Anagrams for EtherPundit:

Pud tinter, eh?  As a matter of fact, the color is all natural! But thanks for noticing.

Hit DU, repent.  Because it's not nice to torment retards.

Dr. Petite Hun.  She's cute as a button, but watch out for that prostate exam.

Hindu petter.  Those Bollywood films get me all randy...

I tuned Perth.  An unusually good night for DX. I suspect tropospheric ducting.

Hup! Rid Tenet!  Hey ho, hey ho! George Ten-et has got to ...  he's gone, you say? Huh. Just as well.

Deep thin rut.  Every blogger's worst nightmare, and inevitable fate.

Hide pet runt.  If maw finds out you didn't drown that thing, there'll be hell to pay.

I.D. the punter!  Blimey, guv! I prefer to remain anonymous!

Nu, Dr. Epithet?  So now you're a doctor, suddenly it's okay to talk this way to your own mother? Such a foul mouth!

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New Feature! Yiddish Proverb Sundays! Read, so you should learn!

You asked for it!* Regular readers** wanted to see some weekly features^†, and I'm only too happy to oblige. So today I inaugurate...

Yiddish Proverb Sundays!

Unless noted, all proverbs will be from the 1970 book "1001 Yiddish Proverbs," by Fred Kogos.

I'll start the series with the last proverb in the book:

Altsding lozst zich ois mit a gevain.

Everything ends in weeping.

That's got to be the ur-proverb, right there. Could be pulled straight from Ecclesiastes, and for all I know it is. There it is, distilled into a few words, hard and sharp as diamonds: Ladies and gentlemen, the human condition.

This might be a good time to note that I don't speak Yiddish. Several people have called me an honorary Jew, though. Perhaps that's why these proverbs speak to me; I mean, the human condition is the human condition, but some cultures face it a little more squarely than others. And with a little more humor, might I add.

(Language nerd stuff coming up. Avert your eyes if you are sensitive to dorkiness or products processed in a dorkiness-processing facility.)

I'm going to include the Yiddish version whenever I can, because the originals often have lilting cadences and rhymes that don't carry over into the translation. (I imagine anyone with even a slight familiarity with the sound of spoken Yiddish or German could easily "hear" what the Yiddish might sound like.) Plus, I like spotting English cognates. In this example, there's Altsding ("all things") and gevain (sounds like "whine," certainly shares a root). And I'm guessing lozst shares DNA with "lost."

(Okay, the dorkiness-sensitive can resume reading now. If you are a dorkiness-sensitive patron and you got any of the above paragraph in your eyes, please proceed immediately to the nearest eye-wash station, where your eyeballs will be flushed with issues of Maxim and Sports Illustrated until all traces of dorkiness have been expunged. Thank you.)

* No you didn't.
** Of which I had, at last count, between 0 and  23, depending on whether you count the voices in my head.
^† If the voices in my head do count as regular readers, and I don't know why they shouldn't, then this statement is true.

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EtherHouse: Seethe Hour

"Seethe Hour" is but one of many anagrams for "EtherHouse."

I've always been fascinated by word games, and anagrams are one of my favorites. A really suitable anagram is more than just wordplay -- it seems to reveal hidden truths about its subject.

Like "I, Rearrangement Servant" -- an anagram for Internet Anagram Server, a site I love to waste time at. There are other anagram sites, but this remains my favorite because of its simplicity, speed and power. I do find that the human touch is required to polish the suggestions of the program, but it does most of the hard work for you.

More EtherHouse anagrams:

Treehouse "H".  Any Simpsons fan will recognize this nickname for the "Treehouse of Horror" series.

There, sue OH.  We all know Bush stole the state with the help of his minions at Diebold. Let the writs fly!

He tore US, eh?  Our Canadian neighbors express their typically meddlesome opinion about the starkly divided electoral map.

Hetero hues.  Hey, I can't help the sexual orientation I was born with! Lighten up, anti-breeder bigots!

Sheer Tue OH.  Yes, Ohio was a tight race indeed on Tue Nov 3. I believe they didn't call it, in fact, until early Wed morning.

 

Hush Roe tee.  I'm as pro-choice as the next person, but really: these kinds of garments do more harm than good.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The new Newspeak: Making wicked thoughts unthinkable

Ace of Spades makes an important point about the slow, stealthy redefining of words like "diversity," which has now come to mean "abundant presence of certain so-called 'minorities'; which ones specifically are to be determined by your betters." One can't help but notice that this bears virtually no resemblance to the dictionary definition of diversity.

Nor, come to think of it, does the accepted (read: deviate and you're a racist) definition of "minority" bear much resemblance to its dictionary definition. Women, for example, are not actually a minority. They're virtually the only natural subdivision of people that are not a minority; there are more adult females than adult males. Jews are a minority, yet one never sees hiring quotas for Jews. I suppose you could say that "minority," used in certain contexts, means "group believed to need favors for political or cultural reasons." Fine; then why not say "favored group"? Why take an existing word and Newspeak it? Why not call "diversity" "favored-group presence" instead of sucking the marrow out of a perfectly useful, necessary, ancient English word? Is the reality of what these words mean thought to be so ugly that the public would recoil in horror if the truth were spoken?

Come on. I think we're all used to the idea of racial quotas, "affirmative action" and such. I think we can all tolerate the truth at this point. Can we have some of our words back now?

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