Posts Tagged ‘Wikipedia’

LittleBigPlanet Is A LittleBigMystery

Saturday, August 23rd, 2008

LittleBigPlanet is a game so radically new that all attempts to describe it must fail. Words aren’t enough, because my eyes glaze over trying to understand the Wikipedia article. Even trailers aren’t enough, because the ones available on LittleBigPlanet’s official site are so surreal that I spent all my viewing energy figuring out how the images onscreen resembled a game.

Critics continue to stain their underwear in anticipation of a game I don’t think they understand beyond secondhand accounts. Until LittleBigPlanet gets in my hands—if LittleBigPlanet gets in my hands, if I ever pick up a PlayStation 3—the game will only have the one redeeming quality of OMG CUTE vouching for it.

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Forever Forever Forever Forever: CWRU's Ridiculous Alma Mater

Monday, May 26th, 2008

It’s been a little over a year since I graduated from Case Western Reserve University (May 20th, 2007). My commencement was god-awful, with laughter in all the wrong places. The commencement speaker Richard Lederer ((Who? Yeah, that’s the question I asked.)), a man who makes a living cracking jokes about motherfuckin’ grammar, failed to score points with most of the crowd. Grammar can be funny, but he talked about his professional poker-playing kids ((Both their Wikipedia articles are longer than his; the latter is three times so.)) more than his livelihood, so I had all the reasons I needed to take a nap for 20 minutes.

All the laughter was pent up in preparation for Case Western’s alma mater song. A tune that should inspire pride and honour in alumni instead made me struggle to keep from snickering. It was written in 1990, even though CWRU was founded in 1826.

Shine on, forever, Case Western Reserve.
Loyal and true are we (are we).
Your brave sons and daughters,
Your knowledge we use to make our history.

Our school days we will cherish forever more,
A lifetime of friends from the start (the start).
Shine on, forever, Case Western Reserve.
You’ll be forever in our hearts.

Let me outline a few rules for any future anthem writers that may be reading:

  1. Don’t make your school song so generic that the college’s name can be swapped out with another and have it still make sense.
  2. Don’t use the same noun word (pronouns excluded) more than twice. Count the number of times forever is used above. Thanks to Warren for pointing out that, in fact, forever is not a noun.
  3. CWRU’s song could have been produced by a computer algorithm told to give weight to a short list of sentimentalist buzzwords. If your school song passes the Turing Test, you’re doing it wrong.
  4. Creativity is rewarded, which is why ‘The Eyes of Texas’ is one of the most famous alma maters of all time to the point it is considered an unofficial state song. Phrases like ‘make our history’ are clearly plagiarised from Party of Five screenplays.

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The Right To Bear Chainsaws

Saturday, March 8th, 2008

The deeper recesses of Wikipedia tend to have the worst and least creative vandalism. In researching yesterday’s post about obnoxious riddles, I encountered Wikipedia’s analysis of the hypothetical question. Contrary to tradition, the article has been lovingly molested and twisted into brilliant absurdity. The examples cited are below, in case future authors trash the article in a last-ditch effort to maintain academic standards. (Ha!)

  • What if there were no such thing as a hypothetical question?
  • How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?
  • What if someone had a knife to cut us out of this hypothetical situation?
  • Which would you rather fight, one queen-size mattress or two single-size mattresses?
  • If you were a bear with chainsaw arms, what would be your stance on deforestation?
  • What would you do if I cheated on you?
  • What would you do if I slapped you?
  • If trees screamed, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down?
  • What if they screamed all the time for no good reason?
  • Would you rather have another sibling or a toaster oven?
  • Would you rather kill a turtle or have one of your good friends become a Scientologist?
  • Were I to be a pretty, pretty lady, would you love me?
  • If a shark were to high-five a bear with chainsaw arms, would it make a sound?
  • What if 3-ways were required by law?
  • What if Thucydides had been Herodotus? Would it make a sound?
  • Would it make a sound?
  • Could God, in his infinite Wisdom and Power, create a beer so bad that he himself could not drink it?
  • If tissues were edible, what wine would be served with them?
  • What if, in 1980, plutonium was available at every corner store?
  • What if Jesus was the ultimate drinker?
  • If wine could become blood, what blood type would it be?
  • If you were an Athenian during the Peloponesian War fleeing a litigious and plague ridden Athens, what former king/rapist turned bird would go to for help? For extra credit, after you have constructed a wall blocking heaven off from earth, how would you convince Heracles to let you marry the Princess in order to become the highest divinity of all?

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Anti-Federalist Virtual Tanjore Painting Environments

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008

January 1st also marks the anniversary of my dabbling in Wikipedia. My interest fluctuates periodically. This summer I’ve been exceptionally active whenever I’ve had occasional downtime at work. Just don’t do what my predecessor did and produce a trail of IP-logged anonymous edits pointing to her/my computer. Had she half a brain, she would’ve spent thirty seconds registering an account, thereby hiding her edits’ IP from public view. ((Had I half a brain, I wouldn’t be blogging about wiki-ing at work!))

Another New Year’s blogging tradition of mine is supplying my Wikipedia watchlist [.txt, 12K] as a personality zeitgeist. This year it’s grown to 274 articles, and it’s fascinating to browse the list and see my very soul summarised as a bulleted list. I hold a personal interest in most content I maintain, though some are just too out there to understand.

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Sir Charles Grandison

Tuesday, November 20th, 2007

A neat thing about facebook’s Visual Bookshelf app is that you can see how many people in the body of 33,000 have read a given book. Since facebook combines the girlish fascination with social networking with the nerdy single libertarian male’s fascination with technology, guessing the top books registered is cake. The Fountainhead. Most Harry Potter books. 1984. Need I go on?

The greater challenge is reading a book that no one else has read. I’ve come ridiculously close, but never the coveted ’1 person.’ Certainly I can go to an academic institution and pick up, say, Micro- and Nano-Structured Multiphase Polymer Blend Systems: Phase Morphology and Interface with the assurance that I’ve beaten my peers to the punch. Without an interest in the book, though, it’s a shallow victory.

Tonight, though, I picked up a new book I can truly call mine: Sir Charles Grandison by Samuel Richardson. It’s 1600 pages of epistolary moralist sludge, but I want to read it because I’m a literary adventurer. A book is a mountain, and it must be my flag at its summit! Sir Charles Grandison promises that. The Wikipedia link above demonstrates no one gives a damn about this book. It’s already defeated the previous owner of this book, Case Western Reserve University’s English Department chair Dr. Siebenschuh. About halfway through the book the annotations he makes conspicuously disappear, as if he thought one night, ‘Screw it—analysing this makes literary criticism more futile than normal.’

See you at page 1600!

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Yes, But Is It Arse?

Wednesday, October 17th, 2007

The best thing about contemporary art is that it acts as a random noun generator. Perhaps you will recall Chris Ofili, creator of the Virgin Mary made of poo and pornography. Whatever an artist’s motives are, nothing else in the realm of reality would bring the nouns Virgin Mary, poo, and pornography together into the same sentence. (Well, not nothing, but do you really want to think about what might?)

Another artist you might want to consider when you need an example of a sentence that is syntactically correct but somehow doesn’t register in the brain is Paul McCarthy of Salt Lake City, Utah. His art is part performance, part…body fluid. One journal tries and fails to describe his actions in words:

In Class Fool, for example, McCarthy flung himself around a classroom at the University of California, San Diego. Slipping in ketchup, dazed and bleeding from falling and running into things, McCarthy vomited several times, after which he inserted a Barbie doll into his rectum. The performance ended when the audience, unable to stomach the performance any longer, left the room.

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