Day: June 5, 2003

In today’s Salon, there’s a quote from Jerry Lewis concerning Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks. Lewis told the NY Daily News:

I’m old-fashioned. You don’t make fun of the Queen of England, and you don’t make jokes about the President of the United States. I resent those that do. The Dixie Chicks are embarrassed that he’s from Texas? You don’t say that about a sitting President. The First Amendment says you can say anything you want in this country, but it should have an appendage, ‘Try to do it with class.’

This is, of course, the same Jerry Lewis who said, “A woman doing comedy doesn’t offend me, but sets me back a bit. I, as a viewer, have trouble with it. I think of her as a producing machine that brings babies in the world.”

You know, there was a point, once upon a time, when the man was funny.

Well now, this is sort of interesting:

By registering their subjects in an identical framework, with similar poses and a strictly observed dress code, Versluis and Uyttenbroek provide an almost scientific, anthropological record of people’s attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element.

Found through Mighty Girl.

In today’s Salon, Cary Tennis writes:

Many women, however, have the same visceral abhorrence of porn that you have. If they found their husbands looking at porn it might be like finding them with a needle in their arms — or, more to the point, with a hooker in their arms, as the porn experience is a kind of disembodied adultery carried out in a fleshless world of signs and symbols. Women’s revulsion at porn also seems strangely autonomic, like a shiver out of the amygdala, uncontrollable, ancient, immune to secular society, powerful yet irrational, like a fear of spiders.

But in a physical sense, porn is no more dangerous than spiders. What if a husband covered his face with spiders? Why would he do that? He wouldn’t do it just to freak out his wife, would he? What would be the point? He’d only do it if it felt really, really good to cover his face with spiders — so good that he’s willing to risk losing his wife. Again, that sounds like addiction — why would a guy drink and ruin his life unless he just couldn’t stop?

I don’t exactly know why I felt the need to share that. Perhaps it’s the image of lonely men covering their faces with spiders. That’s just not something you see every day, thankfully.

Neil Gaiman posts a link this morning (or late last night) to “a poetry generator that takes URLs and makes poetry out of the web pages.” It’s fairly neat, and I found what it did to this page surprisingly amusing:

function ycs e { cc=1 {yfs=ycso[10]}29

AM not an improvement, usually just

me. 11:56

PM get_comment_link 95160256 Add a

brief discussion of curiosity. I even admit trying

to understanding the BBC

program schedule online, and,

then that a

Hollywood adaptation in America.

is, anyone

else out

Nevertheless, I found through This evening, I think what listening

for,

Al Sharpton.Oddball Comics ever tells

me I am

at least, Singer and

apparently, those who

responded to New puppy who, contacted me

any photographs.

Also neat is this demo for IBM’s new Text-to-Speech speech synthesis program. My only complaint is that, as a demo, it’s limited to text of 200 characters and less. Found through Maximum Verbosity.