What do you get when you combine the basic idea of a Markov chainer with the contextual searching abilities of Google? Why, Google Talk, of course. (Thanks to Nyperold for the link…)

Here’s just a sample of the insanity that results from chaining such a large database of text:

“It was a Dark and stormy Night. The rain drenched not only my own thoughts and feelings from the heart. a Leader S Guide. to the Internet. and the World Wide Web Resources. for the study of The American Medical Association. All rights reserved…”

Edited to add: Even better, mentioning a particular anime convention causes us to get into a loop that goes on forever:

“Anime Weekend Atlanta By car from This site. is not a Geek/ ForumOC, Members: Threads: Posts: Last post: The latest version of the United States House of REPRESENTATIVES. Category: of One: s Own ORGANICS Guide to HTML? and CSS. by Example By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example, By Example…”

And one last bit of insanity, via a mention of that popular cartoon villain:

“Strong Bad Email Addresses. and phone Numbers. and addresses, Phone, Numbers and addresses, Exceptional circumstances EC) drought assistance, for the web, Yellow pages directory ON the internet. This Is London is the sky blue Sounds. like A Pirate Day! Sept. th Sept. th Sept. th Sept. th Sept. th Oct. th am Dr. Megavolt; and his OWN words. A M”

Hilarious stuff, at least for people as easily amused as myself. And it appears to give different results on each run, or at least so it seems, judging from the results I’ve seen on consecutive runs of the same phrase.

Since I don’t really have anything important to talk about in my life, and since I’m generally too busy to post anything all too introspective, I’ll instead just share an amusing bit of Engrish spotted on a local Chinese restaurant’s menu. This doesn’t appear to be just a careless typo, as it appears this way twice on the menu:

And I quote:

Kasparov, Computer Tie in Chest Match

(If by some chance the headline is actually fixed, I’ve taken a screenshot for posterity as I always do.)

From a San Francisco Chronicle article linked in this LiveJournal post (whose poster, incidentally, I know from the 1997 National Spelling Bee):

…a proposal in the seaside Marin County town of Bolinas is getting the most attention. Voters will ponder a stream-of-consciousness statement of policy that reads: “Vote for Bolinas to be a socially acknowledged nature-loving town because to like to drink the water out of the lakes to like to eat the blueberries to like the bears is not hatred to hotels and motor boats. Dakar. Temporary and way to save life, skunks and foxes (airplanes to go over the ocean) and to make it beautiful.”

My own question: Is that even in English?!

Simply amazing: a video clip of a guy beatboxing while playing the harmonica.

How interesting. I check my e-mail to discover that someone has left a comment on an old blog post from last Christmas, and so I go to see what it is. Seems that somebody by the name of “Kasara Albert” has left this complete non-sequitur as her comment:

i think that you guys suck to the max and i don’t like your story at all i think it is boring and i think that i can tell better stories than anybody in the world and well this one gurl thinks im conceded becuz well it first started out like when i hooked up wit her boyfried but she didn’t know then when me and her were arguing i juss blurrted everything out that me and her boyfriend were goin out for along time then she beat me up……. the end of my fricken wanderful story…and that i said i was better then her and that i said i had better clothes then her and our usta be friends.

I’m still trying to figure out what in the world this has to do with anything at all in the post. It’s clearly not blog comment spam… but what IS it? Who have I been mistaken for this time?

I don’t think I’ll ever come up with a satisfactory answer, but judging from my server access logs, this person found the post in question by searching on Ask Jeeves for “why are ghost’s present.” I don’t think it’s merely a coincidence that the good virtual butler decided to send this user to the same site that hosts the Proofreader’s Hall of Shame… 😀

Anyway, I may eventually delete this complete non-sequitur from that post’s comments, but I’ve decided to leave it up for a while just because it’s so utterly bizarre. Either that, or I’ll mark all over the original comment with proofreader’s marks. I’m not sure which.

Grr. Don’t you just hate it when your browser– or worse, your entire computer– comes crashing down as you write an entry for your weblog? I know I do.

Before my computer decided to thwart me with its cold Blue Screen of Death (which resulted, incidentally, from the use of a gadget mentioned later in this post), I was sitting here in this hotel room in Daytona, trying to write about the ACM Programming Competition Southeastern Regionals (or, as one of my friends has somewhat jokingly referred to it, the “Daytona 486”), in which I and numerous others participated earlier today. The results are in, and Mercer University’s Essential Bear team– a.k.a. Team A, a.k.a. the team that I’m on– placed ninth overall, with eight problems solved, the highest number solved by any school in the undergraduate division. That’s right: we placed first in our division!

But wait, it gets better. Mercer Team D placed second in the undergrad division, Team B placed fourth, and Team C placed fifth. All four of Mercer’s programming teams, in other words, were in the top five in our division!

And I’d be content with that, but it gets even better. One of the prizes given to each member of the winning team in our division was this webcam/digital-camera thing (yes, these gadgets are rather hard to describe concisely). Naturally, I’ve been playing around with mine tonight… I’m such an easily amused geek, I know, I know. 😀

Anyway, I’ll be returning to Macon with the rest of the team tomorrow– OK, technically today, though tonight is somewhat of a time warp anyway. It’s been quite a fun trip, though, and I’m extremely proud of how well we performed at the competition.

Today’s youngsters express their opinions on the electronic games of the late ’70s and early ’80s… quite amusing. And to think I grew up playing some of these. (via MetaFilter)

I finally have a scan of one of the most common yet most infamous translation horrors, which I picked up while eating a couple nights ago: yes, it’s that one chopstick wrapper. Marvel at all the horribly mangled misspellings and stilted grammar found therein.

The sad thing is that I’ve seen several variations of this package, each one having a different set of typos. It’s insane; really, it is. This version is the one with the highest number of errors in this particular selection of text, and I can confirm that it’s most definitely still in circulation.

It’s too bad that the other side of the package only had Chinese characters on it, and not the classic bit of Engrish mentioning the “glorious Chinese history and cultural” (with widely varying spellings of “glorious” and “cultural”, naturally) that’s usually found on the opposite side…

For those who can’t read the text in the above-linked image, here’s a transcript, with all spacing, punctuation, and typographical errors intact:
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Those of you with weblogs offering comment features, please ban the 209.210.176.* range of IP addresses from posting comments. Seems that some Ukrainian porn spammer is using that IP range to spam his site on various weblogs; this guy has hit my site three times in the past week, and out of frustration, I’ve gone ahead and blocked the entire class-C IP from posting comments. Sorry to any legitimate posters who happen to have an IP address in that range, but judging from a Google search, it belongs to an ISP commonly used by spammers; besides, what else is the maintainer of a PG-rated weblog to do?

I didn’t mind it so much when the spammers were promoting sites that, while unethical, were still “safe for work”; I could delete the spams when I got around to them, and though I may not have agreed with the usurping of my blog’s comment pages for advertising purposes, I would have at least felt safe linking to the sites had they not been so unscrupulous. The latest batch of spam has gotten quite a bit racier, however, and it’s enough to make me wish there were an easily implemented, accessible solution to the problem of blog comment spam.
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