Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"'All staff are fully trained,' Stephen Boyd, the deputy manager, said grimly on a recent day. 'They know exactly what to do if there's a sudden outbreak of dancing in here.'"

(The context: it's from a New York Times story about fines for bars that allow dancing without having a public entertainment license, in London: "[...] deputy manager of one bar says it is his job to decide if customer is really dancing, or only swaying".)

• Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed... in 42 days (The Register, 3 April) describes how the meaning of a phrase was changed in a short time:

  Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a "Second Superpower", it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank to flood Google with Moore's alternative, neutered definition.
  
  Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the search engine was your primary view of the world, you would have a hard time believing that the phrase "Second Superpower" ever meant anything else.
  
  To all intents and purposes, the original meaning has been erased. Obliterated, in just seven weeks.

  The article goes on to describe some of the statistical peculiarities of the blogging scene, and draws the conclusion, "Which means that Google is being 'gamed' - and the language perverted - by what in statistical terms [is] an extremely small fraction indeed." ("[...] no more than 30 [bloggers]") It's not clear to me from the article whether the "repurposing" of the phrase was the result of a deliberate conspiracy or merely one meme getting a lucky break in the meme pool, but it does suggest that it might be easy to do this intentionally.
• Hack Yourself by Michael Montoure. An essay about taking control of who you are and escaping the past that made you what you have been. "I may sound cruel, I may sound simplistic, I may sound like I'm saying you should just 'get over it,' by suggesting that you should let go of your past. I'm sorry for that. But life won't hold still and wait for you to lick your wounds. The race is still being run. Get up and keep moving. You can't do anything about yesterday." I do feel that he's oversimplifying in places, but there's some good advice along with the sounds-easier-than-it-is parts. "Think about the person you want to be and do what that person would do. Act the way that person would act. Amazingly enough, once you start acting like that person, people will start treating you like that person."
• Journalist's souvenir fatally explodes. Note to self: don't pack a live grenade in my suitcase as a souvenir. (A security guard died instead of the fool.)
• Mail Order Ice Cream with a Conservative Flavor, the Star Spangled Ice Cream Company holds itself up as an alternative to Ben & Jerry's donations to "wacko left-wing causes". (10% of the profits go to "charities that support the men and women of the US Armed Forces" -- which seems to me a somewhat safer choice of conservative causes than they could've picked, but naming a flavour "'I Hate The French' Vanilla" still puts me off.)
• New job after regime-change -- an amusing JPG.
• The First Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, made up of nine avant-garde artists from Vienna, has since 1998 used various vegetables as musical instruments. The mental image of a musician nibbling at a hollowed out carrot to create a new recorder mouthpiece in the middle of a tune was enough to get me to Google for the name of the group, which found me other stories, including a promo for a concert in 2001 with other related, interesting concepts in instrument creation, and the orchestra's own web site, in German (which fortunately has an English version). "The instruments are subsequently made into a soup so that the audience can then enjoy them a second time." Oh, and from their FAQ page: "we are currently working on our second cd which will be released at the end of 2002 or at the beginning of 2003."
• A catalogue of fetishes from Stuff Magazine. I got this link from the latest Blowfish mailing, where Jamais wrote: "The article is a snarky listing of fetishes, just sarcastic enough to be amusing (except for the people who actually engage in the various fetishes, who will laugh along with everyone until it reaches their particular fixation, at which point they'll fire off an angry email to the editor insisting THAT'S NOT FUNNY)."
• "The Fine Art Of Being Come OUt To," A Straight Person's Guide To Gay Etiquette "We guarantee that after you've read and absorbed the information available to you in this gem of a volume, you'll have gay and lesbian acquaintances lining up around the block for the sheer pleasure of breaking the news to someone as sophisticated and savvy as you are. Of course, The Big Announcement isn't the be-all and end-all of gay etiquette. That's why we also include -- and at no extra cost! -- an extensive section on Beyond Coming Out: Long-Term Strategies For Not Pissing Your Gay Friends Off."
• Sex, Gender and Politics by almeda two years ago. "As time goes by, and the social system opens up a bit, we seem to be becoming more aware that gender is not a binary, either-or thing - and really never has been. But meanwhile, that very uncertainty triggers a lot of fear on the part of more traditional folks," and "All this is even aside from transgendering".
• A discussion in ukelele's journal about a month ago that I thought was interesting when I found it yesterday: "When you were in school, how did you feel about classroom Fun? [...] You know, events or instructional techniques which were aimed at Making Learning Fun. Did you, in fact, find them fun? [...] Did you learn stuff? Why/why not/how?"