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Woke up with a burning desire to distill a particular mechanic in Cursor*10 to its senseless essence. The following exercise in foolishness is the unfortunate consequence.

Let’s play a game: Word Disassociation.

Pick two words from a common dictionary — i.e. each word should have at least one non-medical citation. Enter them into Google search sans quotes, and try to minimize the number of hits.

Under 2000 is respectable; under 500 is meritorious; under 100 is possibly a result of serendipitous timing with respect to experimental shenanigans over at Google Labs.

A few entertaining couplings that made the cut:

• catawampous moustache
• flukeless micron
• schizoid volcanologist
• stinking classicalness
• tetrapodic federate
• uncommunicative prosodian
• woefully stereometrical

Feel free to post other good ones.

Addendum: back in the day, we would aim for under 10 hits, and had to visit every search result if successful. Unfortunately, the ’tubes of the present are clogged with pages upon pages of wordlists that dilute the delectable semantics of these combinations.

Quote of the day:

“Purring kitty is Purring complete.”

… the ability of a cat to drive nearby humans to inanity as effectively as any other cat?

Wait, so is there a universal Purring machine?

A sip of connect-the-dots in music history:

Wagner’s famous Ring Cycle, quadruple-billing gesamtkunstwerke extraordinare, demands somewhere between 14 and 20 hours of your opera-craving attention.

Satie, the antiheroic gymnopedist out to salvage French music from the evils and excesses of Wagnerism, penned the in-famous and irony-drenched Vexations, single page to be repeated 840 times with the advice

To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable
to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities.

The 1963 première lasted nearly 19 hours; Armin Fuchs’ solo performance in 2000 lasted 28.

The posthumous publisher of the piece and organizer of the première, a 51-year-old John Cage, would later concoct his monumental Organ²/ASLSP for [you guessed it] organ, with tempo marking As slow as possible. In this temporal respect, the most faithful performance to date began in 2001 and will clock in at a mere 639 years — performed by generations of organ-keepers to come, at Sankt-Burchardi-Church in sleepy Halberstadt, Germany.

France, your move.

The Cliburn semis are on, and you should probably be watching.

No snarky comments this time.

Wolfram|Alpha knows that the answer to life, the universe, and everything is 42, but still can’t tell me what the smallest positive integer not definable in under eleven words is.

Disappointment.

“Revolving door users reduce air exchange, saving 8X the energy lost when using swing doors.”

I might be wrong, but I thought this was an Institvte of Technology?

No doubt, when push comes to shove, one could probably make a relatively convincing argument about having successfully violated a law of thermodynamics or two, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. Occam’s razor prefers ignorance over mind-blowing resourcefulness.

Saw those sassy geek-rockers Chester French yesterday in Harvard Square, covering “Robot Rock” — which is, of course, the headlining single on Daft Punk’s riff-errific attempt at rocking out. I chuckled. Now can we find a way to get some hip-hop in on this ouroborous genre wash cycle?

Speaking of which, a committee of experts in the discipline has concluded that Daft Punk is indeed the ideal soundtrack of laundry-doing. Laundromats everywhere, take notice.