infundibulum

There is a place called… Faaa.

Sometimes you’re programming, and something spooky happens:


>>> os.listdir('.')


You see the face? OMG!

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE DRUNKEN ROBOT BEHIND THE SCREEN

It seems that the greatest sentence in Wikipedia has come up against… well, Wikipedia.

If you are among the unilluminated, I quote it for you here in its once-glorious entirety, from the Punch and Judy article:

Featuring, as it does, a deformed, child-murdering, wife-beating psychopath who commits appalling acts of violence and cruelty upon all those around him and escapes scot-free, it is greatly enjoyed by small children.

Hear ye, Nature editors, Bitter Journalists and Other Cretins who would presume to suggest that Wikipedia cannot ascend to the heights of literary genius! Thou art shamed by this Literary Marvel!

But alas, NPOV is a harsh mistress. To what depths have we fallen? Phraseology, she is a changin’:

The stereotypical view of Punch casts him as a deformed, child-murdering, wife-beating psychopath who commits appalling acts of violence and cruelty upon all those around him and escapes scot-free, - and is thus greatly enjoyed by small children.

A travesty, I tell you, a travesty.

But this is Wikipedia. This is a perfectly good excuse to argue! Behold, Talk Page Conflagrations!

The line is a violation of NPOV. How the fuck do you know what goes on in the minds of children? Are you a psychic? Do children enjoy puppet shows without violence? Do they laugh at shows without violence? You don’t know shit. And wikipedia is full of morons like yourself. This whole encyclopedia is polluted by garbage points of view, propagated by loser nerds who have nothing better to do than try to be clever online.–Capsela 15:59, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Your comments are in violation of WP:CIV & WP:NPA. Besides, I think you are looking at this out of scope. We are talking about puppet murder here. I for one would like to see more puppet murder, I don’t feel that our kids get enough as it is. Kids like violence, I’ve personally observed children laughing at slap-stick antics on classic and modern cartoons where characters are hurt.Cfpresley 19:31, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

It never ends!

Oh man, I hope it never ends.

Wikipedia is greatly enjoyed by this small child.

DeVito’s Not So Sobering View

“I knew it was the last seven limoncellos that was going to get me,” a disheveled DeVito said as he plunked himself down on the View sofa.

NOW Magazine - Movies in Toronto, NOVEMBER 23 - 29, 2006

Cruz’s Spanish performances are quicksilver and funny, ever since her first major role in Bigas Luna’s Jam&oactue;n (1992), as a rural girl involved in a passionate affair with Javier Bardem.

After her sojourn in America, it’s a relief to see Cruz back where she belongs. More importantly, it’s a relief to hear her back where she belongs, not trying to wrap her Castilian consonants around English words.

That’s a pretty lame thing to say.

Penelope Cruz can speak in whateeeeeever language she wants, as far as I’m concerned.

Preferably to me.

Oh, and guys? It’s “oacute.”

Kthx.

I was reading John Battelle’s The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (good read, by the way), and something caught my attention.

In a footnote to the chapter on the birth of Google, Batelle gives a quote from Wikipedia with the definition of a graph (this definition of a graph , as a matter of fact).

And something occurred to me.

If you quote something from a wiki, using sic in your quotation would be… well, weird.

Because if you’re quoting a wiki, you’re implicitly giving your approval of the content. After all, if you find a mistake that you would otherwise mark as “sic,” you can fix it before you quote it!

So then, you’re actually sort of quoting yourself, right?

I don’t suggest thinking about this sort of thing whilst sober.

You know, we here at Infundibulum, or rather, ME here at Infundibulum, well, we, I, you know what I mean… attempt to run a respectable operation.

I mean, we don’t go for the cheap joke around here.

Very often.

But sometimes man, it’s irresistible.

Now please, tell me, was that really the only spelling they could come up with to try to render the pronunciation of Albert Pujols’s last name?

Nay, we think not.

Somebody was feeling kind of second grade at ESPN.com, methinks.

Thanks for pointing that out, there, Amy.

I was joking around with my friend Kari, about how hilarious the concept “dictatorship tourism” would be. So of course, I started hacking up some html, because I find such things amusing.

1. I decide on a list of nefarious dictators to include in the page — you know, package deals for touring Equatorial Guinea under Nguema; very, erm, structured tours of Pyongyang under Kim… you get the idea. The fun never stops!
2. So then I start hacking up this silly website and I think to myself, “Self, you are not being DRY, you should put these names into a data structure, see, and then read the structure from a file, and generate the HTML that way. Then you can easily add more nefarious dictators later!
3. So, of course I need to use YAML, because, well, it’s leet.
4. But I’ll be needing a parser, then, you see… time to install Syck.
5. Oh no, my precambrian Fedora distro (FC3!) came with Python2.3 as the default, and when I try to install Syck with yum, it wants to install the 2.3 version, instead of 2.4. Which we all know is unacceptable.
6. You know, it’s really time I upgrade my Fedora box.
7. But wait… my laptop is muuuch happier with Ubuntu than it ever was with Fedora…
8. What I really need to do, see, is I need to install Ubuntu on this desktop.
9. But it would make sense to install more RAM first.
10. Hmm… what kind of RAM does this box’s motherboard want, anyway?
11. I spend several hours in Linux chat rooms and bugging aforementioned Linux guru friend Kari to figure out how to figure that out…
12. Well, it looks like I need DDR. (No no no, not that DDR, you nincompoop… stop trying to distract me.)
13. But can I put 1G memory doohickies in there, or can I only add another 512M?
14. Apparently I have to reboot and ask the BIOS.
15. Okay, well, I can do that and then figure it out and then go buy some RAM.
16. Oh, man, there is so much dust around my computer. It’s grody.
17. I really need one of those hand-held vacuum cleaners.

Yes, children, that really is what my brain does all day. Data structures turn into vacuum cleaners.