Tenser, said the Tensor

The Cats Did What-now?

Another reason to love Wikipedia: there I was, minding my own business, reading an article about Olive Oyl (whose name, I learned, is a pun on "olive oil"—it's true!), when I stumbled upon somebody's creepy foot-fetish interpolation:

Unlike most modern damsels in distress, Olive Oyl has short hair, is tall, skinny, with enormous feet that have been tickled on several occasions.  Once tied up on a ship and having her shoes taken off, milk was spread on her feet and licked of by cat's she was laughing very much.

OK, now I know way too much about Olive Oyl's feet.  What's more, that's a run-on sentence with a dangling modifier, a misspelling of off, and a greengrocers' apostrophe in cat's.  Oh, and [citation needed], I think.

Cross-stitch, said the Tensor

Somebody's been stitching about my favorite telepathic mind-shield earworm.  Excellent!  (via)

Joe Job

Today in a thread on Ask MetaFilter, I learned a new word (well, lexical item): joe job.  That's when someone sends out spam with the return address of another person they want to make look bad.  The AskMeFi poster actually uses it in a slightly broader sense that lacks the malicious intent.

Unnerving

This doesn't feel right.  No, not right at all.  As I'm typing this post, well...

Google is down.

Google is down.  Oh, the front page loads, but hitting the search button produces nothing but the World Wide Wait.  I've tried several times, too, and one time Firefox asked me if I'd like to download an octet-stream called "search"—does that mean they're messing with the MIME types?  Whatever.  It's been down for minutes...like two minutes.  I don't like it, not one little bit.  It's like being temporarily lobotomized.  Without Google, what am I supposed to do?  Go back to Altavista?  I'm getting the shakes just thinking about it.

Hmm.  I've finished typing the post, which was supposed to kill some time until Google came back, but it's still down.  Come back, Google.  I miss you.

Well, I Guess It's Low in Fiber...

The title of one of today's crop of spam emails:

There is a secret weapon to weight loss polonium

It may sound a little drastic, but it's absolutely effective.  If you sign up now for the new Putin Diet Plan, your dose of polonium will be delivered free, anywhere in the world—you'll hardly know you're taking it!  And signing up is easy—just criticize Russia's slide towards tyranny a little too publicly.

WikiName?

I need some advice.  I've been getting annoyed with the errors in the linguistics-related entries on Wikipedia, and I've been tempted to create an account and go fix them.  The question is this: should I use my real name as my WikiName, or should I use a pseudonym?  If the latter, is there any reason not to use TheTensor?  I ask because my initial impulse was to use my real name—I'm going to be editing linguistics entries, after all, so I figured I might as well be up-front about my qualifications, such as they are—but then I read the page where people request user name changes, which includes a lot of variations on, "I hadn't realized how public I'd be making my real name."

So, if you've participated on Wikipedia, either under your own name or a pseudonym, I'd appreciate hearing about your experience with regards to identity issues.

Neoprene What Now?

Attention spammers!

1. I do not want to order a "Neoprene Horse boot",
2. I do not know what a "Neoprene Horse boot" is, and
3. I am afraid to Google the phrase "Neoprene Horse boot" in order to find out.

That is all.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

I don't know if you've noticed, but this blog now reeks of legitimacy and authority.  (Can you smell what The Tensor is cooking?)  At 1:30:07 AM PDT on July 31st 2006, I received my first visitor to this site via a link in the English Wikipedia.  The link, which is in the entry for Toy Story 2, points to this post that explains why it's funny when one of the characters in the movie says "Don't touch my moustache!" at the end of a phone call to Japan.  The link was apparently added on June 11th (thanks, Che fox), but I guess nobody clicked on it until today.

I'm grateful for the link, though I'm far from the most knowledgeable Japanese expert on the 'net.  But what the hell—Wikipedia may be a house built on sand, but now I'm a part of that sand.  Woo-hoo!

[Update:  Hmm.  It occurred to me to try searching for more Wikipedia links here, but that turns out to be hard to do.  Wikipedia's internal search doesn't search URLs in links.  Google won't let you specify link: and site: on the same search, which is annoying.  However (eureka!) Windows Live Search will.  Unfortunately, it seems not to have indexed the links on Wikipedia recently.  Still: advantage, Microsoft, on this one.]

[Now playing: "Volcano" by The Presidents of the United States of America]

How'd They Know?

Spammers are getting alarmingly sophisticated.  I just received a piece of email titled:

Hi, Non-mongol

Wow, how'd they know that?  There must be some kind of super-advanced, AI-complete data mining going on behind the scenes.

[Now playing: "Burning Inside" by Ministry]

Separated At Birth?

In a recent post, Dagger Aleph mentioned the MyHeritage Face Recognition site, which will take an uploaded photograph of your face and tell you which celebrities you look like.  (Feel free to fill out the registration form with garbage—I did.)  I fed it my favorite headshot, and it tells me I resemble the following fine individuals:

Dan Quayle (60%), Matt Dillon (60%), Joseph McCarthy (56%), Carlos Santana (50%), Alice Cooper (48%), Tony Stewart (45%), John Ritter (45%), and Saif Ali Khan (45%)

You know how sometimes you take an online test of some kind and the results seem eerily accurate?  Um, I'm not having that reaction right now.

UPDATE:  Aha!  Unsatisfied with my original results, I tried feeding it a different picture, and I got much more plausible results:

Johnny Depp (68%), Edith Stein (67%), Richard Clayderman (64%), Rene Russo (63%), Dolph Lundgren (63%), Gael Garcia Bernal (62%), Bill Murray (62%), Audrey Tautou (60%), and Sarah Michelle Gellar (59%)

That's more like it.  Remember, computers are infallible, and this one says I look like Johnny Depp and Audrey Tautou all rolled into one.  Aw, yeah.  (Edith who?)