“They couldn’t have been spies…Look what she did with the hydrangeas.
Spyburbia, baby — you heard it here first!
How do you fool so many in suburbia for so long? “She said they were from Canada.”
Yes Virginia, there really are spies everywhere, even in your neighborhood. Especially in your neighborhood, most likely. And if they say they’re from a mysterious blank spot on the globe called “Canada”, call the FBI immediately. [In Ordinary Lives, U.S. Sees the Work of Russian Agents]
Anyone remember that ’70s Charles Bronson B-movie classic, Telefon? As Wikipedia reminds us,
During the Cold War of the 1950s, the Soviet Union planted a number of long-term, deep-cover sleeper agents all over the United States, spies so thoroughly brainwashed that even they didn’t know they were agents; they could only be activated by a special code phrase (a line from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” followed by their real given names). Their mission was to sabotage crucial parts of the civil and military infrastructure as a precursor to a possible US/USSR active conflict or war.
I think ol’ Bob Frost was probably one of those secret agents as well. Just look at this video — something just doesn’t look quite right:
The Great Recession of 2008-09 has so scarred us all, it seems fitting to process it culturally through the Stages of Grief. Inspired by this Wordlab Forum punnery that moved me from “quant” to “can’t”, I started thinking of songs whose titles include the word “can’t”, as in Can’t Buy Me Love, in terms of finance and the recent economic meltdown.
So to make all this cant even campier, let’s process our collective trauma over the Great Recession through the Sages of Grief in songs of “can’t”, leading off with an extra stage that sets-up our cultural addiction to the dream of spectacular profits:
1. Addiction — Show me the money!
You Can’t Resist It
Money Can’t Buy It
I Can’t Wait
I Can’t Decide
Can’t Say No
Can’t Stay Away
Can’t Take My Eyes Off You
Can’t Fight This Feeling
Can’t Slow Down
Just Can’t Get Enough
I Can’t Help Myself
I Can’t Quit You Baby
Can’t Live Without You
I Just Can’t Help Believing
I Just Can’t Wait to Be King
2. Shock and disbelief — Housing prices can’t go down!
I Can’t Be Bothered
Can’t Believe It
Can’t Take It In
Can’t Happen Here
I Can’t Tell You Why
I Can’t Explain
3. Denial — It’s just a blip on the way to greater market value.
It Can’t Rain All the Time
Can’t Stop Me
Can’t Tell Me Nothing
You Can’t Take Me
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop
Rudie Can’t Fail
I Can’t Go For That
Can’t Give Up Now
You Can’t Catch Me
You Can’t Bring Me Down
They Can’t Take That Away From Me
4. Anger — Bernie Madoff did what with my pension?!!!
I Can’t Stand the Rain
Can’t Stand You
U Can’t Touch This
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
I Can’t Outrun You
You Can’t Win
Can’t Stand It
I Can’t Stand It No More
5. Bargaining — Mr. Banker, will you renegotiate my mortgage?
Why Can’t You See
I Can’t Do It Alone
Why Can’t I?
6. Depression — We’re fucked, and soon we’ll be living in mud huts again.
Can’t Get You out of My Head
Can’t Keep It In
Can’t Stand Losing You
Can’t Get Over You
Can’t Cry Anymore
Can’t Go Back
Can’t Go On
Can’t Get There From Here
Can’t Let Go
Can’t Shake It
Can’t Find the Words
Can’t Get It Out of My Head
Can’t Sleep At Night
Can’t Finish What You Started
Can’t Get Out of What I’m Into
I Can’t Do This
Can’t Stop This Thing We Started
Can’t Stop This
Can’t Go Back Now
Can’t Stop the World
Can’t Let Go
Can’t Get Away
A Fire I Can’t Put Out
7. Acceptance — I don’t really even need a house, now that I have an iPad!
This Can’t Be Healthy
Can’t Deny It
I Can’t Deny
Can’t Have It All
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
You Can’t Turn the Tide
You Can’t Stop the Rain
We Can’t Help You
Can’t Be A Cowboy Forever
Monty Python, “Rock Notes”, from the album, Monty Python’s Contractual Obligations (1980). Performer/Writer: Eric Idle. Great inspiration for anybody faced with naming their band. Also inspiring is Wordlab’s Rock Band Names List and Band Name Generator. And if you sign up for a free membership to Wordlab, you can post your band naming project as a New Topic in the Band Names group Forum.
The clip below is a more recent performance by Eric Idle, with original the transcription below that:
Eric Idle performing Monty Python
Rex Stardust, lead electric triangle with Toad the Wet Sprocket has had to have an elbow removed following their recent successful worldwide tour of Finland. Flamboyant ambidextrous Rex apparently fell off the back of a motorcycle. “Fell off the back of a motorcyclist, most likely,” quipped ace drummer Jumbo McCluney upon hearing of the accident. Plans are already afoot for a major tour of Iceland.
Dead Monkeys are to split up again, according to their manager, Lefty Goldblatt. They’ve been in the business now ten years, nine as other groups. Originally the Dead Salmon, they became for a while, Trout. Then Fried Trout, then Poached Trout In A White Wine Sauce, and finally, Herring. Splitting up for nearly a month, they re-formed as Red Herring, which became Dead Herring for a while, and then Dead Loss, which reflected the current state of the group. Splitting up again to get their heads together, they reformed a fortnight later as Heads Together, a tight little name which lasted them through a difficult period when their drummer was suspected of suffering from death. It turned out to be only a rumor and they became Dead Together, then Dead Gear, which lead to Dead Donkeys, Lead Donkeys, and the inevitable split up. After nearly ten days, they reformed again as Sole Manier, then Dead Sole, Rock Cod, Turbot, Haddock, White Baith, the Places, Fish, Bream, Mackerel, Salmon, Poached Salmon, Poached Salmon In A White Wine Sauce, Salmon-monia, and Helen Shapiro. This last name, their favorite, had to be dropped following an injunction and they split up again. When they reformed after a recordbreaking two days, they ditched the fishy references and became Dead Monkeys, a name which they stuck with for the rest of their careers. Now, a fortnight later, they’ve finally split up.
[This paragraph is in the original, in between the other two paragraphs, but not in the YouTube clip version above.] [--Divorced after only eight minutes, popular television singing star, Charisma, changed her mind on the way out of the registry office, when she realized she had married one of the Donkeys by mistake. The evening before in LA's glittering nightspot, the Abitoir, she had proposed to drummer Reg Abbot of Blind Drunk, after a whirlwind romance and a knee-trembler. But when the hangover lifted, it was Keith Sly of the Donkeys who was on her arm in the registry office. Keith, who was too ill to notice, remained unsteady during thes thrt ceremony and when asked to exchange vows, began to recite names and addresses of people who also used the stuff. Charisma spotted the error as Keith was being carried into the wedding ambulance and became emotionally upset. However, the mistake was soon cleared up, and she stayed long enough to consummate their divorce.--]
Our sister site Wordlab, created by one of Igor’s founders (me), just re-launched today in a big way. I completely re-designed and re-coded the site, changing it 100% from the old Wordlab that had remained largely unchanged since it launched in 1998.
The new Wordlab is a full-fledged social network for naming and wordplay, collaboration and creative thinking. As such it is structured a bit differently than what you are used to if you were a user of the old Wordlab and its Wordboard forum, but the opportunities for interaction and collaboration are much greater and more powerful.
Check it out, sign up for a free membership, and join in the fun, either as someone looking for naming help, someone who can lend suggestions and advice to other users, or both.
Wired has an interesting article in its March, 2010 issue, How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web, that illuminates some of the reasons why Google’s search algorithm works so well and sets Google apart from other search engines.
“The algorithm is extremely important in search, but it’s not the only thing,” says Brian MacDonald, Microsoft’s VP of core search. “You buy a car for reasons beyond just the engine.”
Amit Singhal types that koan into his company’s search box. Singhal, a gentle man in his forties, is a Google Fellow, an honorific bestowed upon him four years ago to reward his rewrite of the search engine in 2001. He jabs the Enter key. In a time span best measured in a hummingbird’s wing-flaps, a page of links appears. The top result connects to a listing for an attorney named Michael Siwek in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s a fairly innocuous search — the kind that Google’s servers handle billions of times a day — but it is deceptively complicated. Type those same words into Bing, for instance, and the first result is a page about the NFL draft that includes safety Lawyer Milloy. Several pages into the results, there’s no direct referral to Siwek.
The comparison demonstrates the power, even intelligence, of Google’s algorithm, honed over countless iterations. It possesses the seemingly magical ability to interpret searchers’ requests — no matter how awkward or misspelled. Google refers to that ability as search quality, and for years the company has closely guarded the process by which it delivers such accurate results….
Of course, just by being written about and linked to from Wired, Lawyer Siwek’s search results have all been skewed. But no matter — that’s to be expected. What interests me is how Google is essentially playing with language, like we do here at Wordlab, in a continuous effort to break it up and recombine it to figure out contextual relationships and semantic meaning.
…Google has used its huge mass of collected data to bolster its algorithm with an amazingly deep knowledge base that helps interpret the complex intent of cryptic queries.
Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”
But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”
…for the most part, the improvement process is a relentless slog, grinding through bad results to determine what isn’t working. One unsuccessful search became a legend: Sometime in 2001, Singhal learned of poor results when people typed the name “audrey fino” into the search box. Google kept returning Italian sites praising Audrey Hepburn. (Fino means fine in Italian.) “We realized that this is actually a person’s name,” Singhal says. “But we didn’t have the smarts in the system.”
The Audrey Fino failure led Singhal on a multiyear quest to improve the way the system deals with names — which account for 8 percent of all searches. To crack it, he had to master the black art of “bi-gram breakage” — that is, separating multiple words into discrete units. For instance, “new york” represents two words that go together (a bi-gram). But so would the three words in “new york times,” which clearly indicate a different kind of search. And everything changes when the query is “new york times square.” Humans can make these distinctions instantly, but Google does not have a Brazil-like back room with hundreds of thousands of cubicle jockeys. It relies on algorithms.
The Mike Siwek query illustrates how Google accomplishes this. When Singhal types in a command to expose a layer of code underneath each search result, it’s clear which signals determine the selection of the top links: a bi-gram connection to figure it’s a name; a synonym; a geographic location. “Deconstruct this query from an engineer’s point of view,” Singhal explains. “We say, ‘Aha! We can break this here!’ We figure that lawyer is not a last name and Siwek is not a middle name. And by the way, lawyer is not a town in Michigan. A lawyer is an attorney.”
This is the hard-won realization from inside the Google search engine, culled from the data generated by billions of searches: a rock is a rock. It’s also a stone, and it could be a boulder. Spell it “rokc” and it’s still a rock. But put “little” in front of it and it’s the capital of Arkansas. Which is not an ark. Unless Noah is around. “The holy grail of search is to understand what the user wants,” Singhal says. “Then you are not matching words; you are actually trying to match meaning.”
Thanks to the Interweb, Mike Siwek and Audrey Fino (and, from the article, Garden Grove psychologist Cindy Louise Greenslade) are now cyberlebrities, endlessly spidered, SERPed, and iterated through the dreamtime that is not real, yet we think about it. Like conceptual art.
Ben & Jerry created “Yes Pecan!” ice cream flavor for Obama.
They then asked people to fill in the blank for the following:
For George W. they created “_________”.
Here are some of their favorite responses:
- Grape Depression
- Abu Grape
- Cluster Fudge
- Nut’n Accomplished
- Iraqi Road
- Chock ‘n Awe
- WireTapioca
- Impeach Cobbler
- Guantanmallow
- imPeachmint
- Good Riddance You Lousy Motherfucker… Swirl
- Heck of a Job, Brownie!
- Neocon Politan
- RockyRoad to Fascism
- The Reese’s-cession
- Cookie D’oh!
- The Housing Crunch
- Nougalar Proliferation
- Death by Chocolate… and Torture
- Freedom Vanilla Ice Cream
- Chocolate Chip On My Shoulder
- “You’re Shitting In My Mouth And Calling It A” Sundae
- Credit Crunch
- Mission Pecanplished
- Country Pumpkin
- Chunky Monkey in Chief
- George Bush Doesn’t Care About Dark Chocolate
- WMDelicious
- Chocolate Chimp
- Bloody Sundae
- Caramel Preemptive Stripe
- I broke the law and am responsible for the deaths of thousands…with nuts
But who is Dom Nozzi? If it is true that you can judge a man by the company he keeps, then Dom can be summed up by this list of his friends as of 1966.
Of course, you may just want to judge him based on the fact that he maintains a list of his friends from kindergarten.
Are your company or product name brainstorming attempts long on storm and short on brains? Wordlab is ready to help you name whatever needs naming — most have very low mileage, are hardly ever driven during the week, and are used only sparingly on weekends to scan refrigerator contents and such. Our collection of brains can be picked through in the forums belonging to the Wordlab Groups, where you’ll find lots of free for naming and branding brainstorming fun. Jump in and pick the brains!
Tips for picking a brain:
1. Do not pick if the skin is too green–it’s not ripe yet.
2. The brain should be viscous and phlegmatic, yet hold up to a good thumping. Not too firm, not too soft.
3. The end that was twisted from the brain stem should be pliable when you poke your thumb through the outer membrane. If you can’t break the membrane with your fingernail, the brain was picked prematurely.
4. Smell is the most reliable indicator of freshness.
John Updike’s sex scenes — including a romp with a “Widows of Eastwick” witch in a beachside motel room — won a Lifetime Achievement Award at Britain’s ever- anxiously awaited Bad Sex in Fiction Awards.
Rachel Johnson, the sister of London Mayor Boris Johnson, captured the 16th annual Bad Sex Award itself for a scene in “Shire Hell” that begins with moans and nibbles and works up to screaming and other animal noises.
Previously won by Tom Wolfe, Sebastian Faulks and Norman Mailer, the contest seeks to dishonor the author of the year’s worst sex scene. London’s monthly Literary Review inaugurated the prize in 1993 “to draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it.”
“They couldn’t have been spies…Look what she did with the hydrangeas.
