What really kills it is that you can't enter other IP addresses. Network geeks can't, therefore, waste hours entering IP ranges--you just get to hear the one address. Unless you go running around to all the machines in the lab. Which my colleages will do as soon as I tell them about this.

I see that you can go to the associated site HearMyIp.com to hear Stephen Hawking* reading your IP address, too. Eh.

*I know, I know

It works for me at least.

(Note: this is not a complaint.)

(Note: this is not a complaint. Kudos to Bruce.)

(As a Making Light thread grows longer, the chance of someone turning another commentator's off-hand comment into a pastiche/word game/poem approaches one.)

Actually, so does recruiting various celebrity voices, like AOL did a while back for its various "you've got mail" sounds.

I have written
a comment
That links to
xkcd

and which
you will probably
find
perceptively challenging

Forgive me
it had to be done
(this is
not a complaint)

Secretly, moanmyip.com is my new favorite website. I like the way she says "dot," it cracks me up every time.

The likelihood of an unfalsifiable assertion being made approaches one as the thread grows.

Seriously -- how would one disprove Godwin's Law?

They blinded me with Science. Science!

Of course, if I want to hear men moaning IP addresses, I just need to go into the office and say I need to spin up a server...our server vlan is clean out of addresses. *rim shot*

As a grad student, I spent countless hours entering DNA sequences into a sequence analysis program called MacVector. To minimize errors, one could have the program read back the sequence as it was entered, either in a non-nonsense male voice or a breathy female voice.

The way she said "A" was straight out of the bedroom. Ahh, MacVector babe, where are you now?

By a rather straightforward generalization, as a mathemstician might say, I'm reminded of a scene in a movie I saw many years ago (I think it was "The Osterman Weekend", but I won't swear to it) in which a plump and follicly-challenged middle-aged sugar daddy* is huffing and puffing away on top of his sweet young thing. She has her arms around him, her hands behind his back, and she's doing her nails while moaning most unconvincingly. Some people are completely satisfied by "I can't believe it's not axle grease!".

* We're going for Extreme Stereotype here.

* Sorry, I can't remember the official nomenclature, and no one ever told me what the unofficial nickname is.

Lacks rigor.

That reminds me of a friend's story she told my wife and I. She is a data retriever for her police force, specifically retrieving child porn and other items from people's computers.

One of her cases involved an underaged girl and her teenage boyfriend. Apparently he videotaped the encounter, but it was hardly complementary of his efforts; she was clearly looking at her watch over his shoulder during most of the act...

It being a Taiwanese product, the young lady who presented the video was of Chinese ancestry, and spoke English with a definite accent.

She was also wearing a minidress of some sort of metallised fabric. Pbviously, they take anti-static precautions really seriously.

"Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva bought the movie rights for six million rubles,
Changing title to 'The Eternal Triangle',
With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse."

--Tom Lehrer

Ingrid Bergman. (That dates both me and Lehrer.)

[pedantry] I think that the Brigitte Bardot/Ingrid Bergman thing is a canonical textual variant, originating with Lehrer in a later recording of the song. [/pedantry]

But regardless, for me it's all about the salacious qualities Lehrer manages to put into his pronunciation of "hypotenuse."

(I actually used this song as a reading list, when I was a teenager.)

Jason, #37: I used to know one of those women in real life. She really was a grandmother, although she wasn't that much older than me; and she made a good living working for a telephone sex service. She was also one of the most physically unattractive women I've ever met, a walking ad for the "but she has such a lovely personality" stereotype. She told me that she couldn't get any other work that paid as well as the phone sex, even though she was a very competent office administrator; I'm sure visual prejudice was a factor in that.

It didn't even have th charm of a grade-school play. There affect was so strained the effect hurt my ears and mind.

The "Tom Lehrer Revisited" CD has a live recording (1959, Kresge Auditorium, MIT) which has "Brigitte Bardot".

The "The Remains of Tom Lehrer" box set has both a studio version which has "Ingrid Bergman", and a live recording which has "Brigitte Bardot". Those are presumably the same recordings as above.

I no longer have the individual CD releases of Songs and More Songs to check, and never have had the pre-Reprise self-published Songs. Is that the recording that had "Doris Day"?

ses

*And now, not being a math guy, I have exhausted my high-school trigonometry vocabulary. So, I need to sine off from this area while I can still function.

I wonder how much time he had to spend out in the sun to become one.

I no longer have the individual CD releases of Songs and More Songs to check, and never have had the pre-Reprise self-published Songs. Is that the recording that had "Doris Day"?

doris day is on "an evening wasted with tom lehrer. possibly others, but that was the record i grew up with.

(I hesitate to make that a link, since I'm sure none of the many versions online are there legally. Anyone who doesn't own The Cyberiad can find either the book or the poem fairly easily, at any rate.)

I have two different CD releases of "An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer", and neither has "Lobachevsky" on it at all.

An Evening Wasted is more or less a concert version of More of Tom Lehrer, while Tom Lehrer Revisited is more or less a concert version of Songs by Tom Lehrer.

So you'd be sitting there, waiting for your print job to finish, and suddenly you'd hear a sultry English-accented female voice inform you that "paper is jammed in your printer."

I think networked printers are an exception to the general rule that computers should be seen and not heard. An "out of paper" beeper or announcement ("Feed me!" in the Audrey 2 voice?) right at the printer would often be nice.

What you need is a better photo of a sexy-looking woman, and a much better actress moaning, panting, whimpering, and throatily murmuring well-known mathematical equations.* That’d work. You could sell ads.

You're three years behind the times... If you think of the entire thing as an ad, that is.

Even better than the lyrics, watch him sing the song, he does it so slyly.

Funny you should mention that--we just tried to read it in my house. Each of us got about halfway through Volume Two (of three) before deciding that, yes, even sex can get boring. Even lesbian sex. Even kinky lesbian sex. Liam lacks the typical (and in my mind, inexplicable) male "two chicks is hot" thing, and I'm about as straight as it's possible to get; by the time we stopped we were both kind of rolling our eyes and going, "OK, yeah, the weaving in of elements from the stories is cute and all, but for Ghu's sake we've all seen a penis, OK?!*"

We took it back to the library with a warning that perhaps they should consider not shelving it with the graphic novels the little kids were gonna be looking at--Lost Girls is in fact a graphic novel, but in, shall we say, more than one sense.

* ASCII really needs and interrobang.

(The Wikipedia article you linked to tells you how to insert one; see the section entitled 'display')

The expression on the library worker's face* when I asked where the graphic novels were kept was almost worth the disappointment when I discovered that all they had was Pokemon-type adventure manga** - any volume but #1.

*My understanding is that just because you work at the circulation desk, that doesn't make you a librarian, and I can't recall what the proper term for non-librarian library workers is. Apologies for the annoying workaround.

**Nothing in particular against that type of manga, but I was hoping for some of the more plotty ones, or else some good old American style comics. The assortment they had seemed pretty strongly aimed at ten-year old boys, and I don't know enough about the genre to be willing to wade through to find something I'd like.

Each of us got about halfway through Volume Two (of three) before deciding that, yes, even sex can get boring. Even lesbian sex. Even kinky lesbian sex.

YES. i was really disappointed in that book. i'm a big fan of alan moore's, & i waited a year to buy the book, cause it was just so big & expensive. i finally got it, a birthday present from my husband, this past san diego comicon.

& alan moore wrote some of the sexiest sex in comics that i've ever read (when the invisible man ravishes the girls' finishing scool? duuude.), so i really thought i'd like it. but i guess he set out to write 600 (?) pages of porn, which means 600 pages of "ooh, yeah, just like that."

there were about 20 pages of interesting, & the characters had to be shallow in the way that many porn "characters" are shallow, fungible really, just to get them into all the permutations of partner & position. yawn.

i guess the one thing the book was good for was making me realize, no, i don't think i like porn.

The third book gets very meta, with porn-within-porn and interesting discussions of fantasy vs. reality when it comes to erotica, and how the fantasy has its own role to play.

I very much liked it, and have been going around recommending it to people who were suspicious of it.

I certainly didn't find it wholly unproblematic. (For example, I have major problems with the "lbh'er bayl n yrfovna orpnhfr lbh'er nsenvq bs pbpx, naq vs lbh unq n tbbq shpxvat lbh'q ghea onpx gb zra" angle -- that rot13 is NSFW and contains sort of a spoiler.) But I found it worthwhile and have read it twice now.

I guess YMMV.

(I also didn't think the Invisible Man ravishing the girl's school was sexy. I guess we just have different tastes.)

maybe i'll like it better if i read it again. your rot-13ed point is very true.

& i'm not, you know, upset or surprised you didn't like the invisible man bit. i was kinda surprised that i did. it is problematic itself.

*cough*

serge,

i actually haven't read swamp thing. is it collected?

By no means do you have to like it! I just wanted to register my opinion.

I'm sorry if I came off sounding tetchy. It's dinnertime and I haven't eaten yet, which is a situation in which I often sound shorter than I mean to.

& here we are, apologizing all over ourselves. isn't that like a couple of women. :P

(it was an extreme case. i needed to use a smiley. sorry. i mean no! what? eep!)

(And sometimes I just ramble incoherently. That's when I really know it's time to eat.)

Yay for low blood sugar. *waves tiny low blood sugar flag*

I'm pro-smiley in situations when they're needed to disambiguate tone.

Also, I believe Swamp Thing is collected. Friend of mine bought it in trades just a few years ago, so I suspect it's available in that form now. Actually I need to get it, and will now put it on my list of things to look out for at the local used book store.

Funny comic.

I always associate a perfume with one of the early Alan Moore story arcs. The student in the dorm room next to where I was reading dropped a bottle, and it took me a bit to figure out that the aroma wasn't coming from my stack of back issues. Now, when I smell that perfume, I vividly picture Swampy.

"Happy birthday, dear. Here's a little something for you."
"What is it?"
"Why don't you open it and find out?"
(sound of ripped wrapping)
"Oh my God!"
"Do you like it?"
"Of course I do. All the other girls will be green with envy when they smell that eau de swamp!"

He's felt cheated, in that DC hasn't let them go out of print. The bastards...

This comment was stuck in my brain-queue from an earlier conversation about authors upset because their books were not in print.

In a way, Lost Girls has many similarities to de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, which is also relentlessly graphic to make a philosophical point. I'm not ashamed to say that I bailed on 120 Days - yes, Marquis, I understand the philosophy you're espousing (vice, power, blah blah blah, I get it) but no, you've done a good enough job of making the unthinkable banal that I don't feel the need to read the remainder of the book. Lost Girls, on the other hand, is a hell of a lot more readable and definitely makes more interesting philosophical points.

But much as I think Lost Girls is tremendously interesting as a work of art, it's not unproblematic. And I kind of think it is meant to be that way - it's meant to provoke different types of intellectual and emotional responses (to say nothing of physical ones) but I don't think it's meant to be a book that anyone is expected to uncomplicatedly adore.

Todd etc: I can't name the record (they're all long-vanished), but "Doris Day" is what I recall from one of the original LPs (bought no later than 1970, but probably a 1950's recording). A friend tells me TL did a \lot/ of re-recording in his prime -- IIRC mentioning an orchestrally-accompanied "Masochism Tango".

Jules: what browsers support your interrobang? My IE6 doesn't -- which surprised, as I recall it displaying CJK glyphs.

I wonder what other differences there are? Now I need to get those LPs. And a record player.

There are orchestral versions of "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", "The Masochism Tango", "The Hunting Song", and "We Will All Go Together When We Go" in the "The Remains of Tom Lehrer" box set. I'm not sure what they were originally recorded for; I remember hearing them on the Dr Demento show several years prior to the box set's release.

You been getting off on Lisp porn?

By the way, here's some Lisp poetry.

And, at least from the British PoV, lesbian sex bypassed some awkward details of the law of the time. It was almost impossible to show a penis, and it's only a few years since the courts decided it was lawful to show an erect penis.

There's other potential awkwardnesses, such as the hint of gay cooties from the idea of a male viewer getting excited by a scene showing a male erection. More likely, it's as unsubtle as double the T&A from the money allocated to paying the cast.

Perhaps we should put together a Making Light phrase file for it....

The non-librarian titles, i.e., without an MLS or MLIS degree, vary greatly from system to system. As Marilee @ 81 points out, some of them are volunteers. In Minneapolis they are Aides. Years ago, when I worked in St Paul, they were called pages (if you just shelved books) or clerks. Some of them have titles like Library Assistant or Associate.

The official term is "Library Para-professional". It's often a sore point, since they do a lot of the heavy lifting, literally, and get paid less, sometimes much less, than the librarians. In some places, the aides or clerks or whatever they are called, can do almost everything, and have a lot of responsibility, but little or no authority.

This is what I have done most of my adult life. It keeps me near the supply for my major addiction.

Nice one!

what is my ip and ip tracer

Now that my memory has been refreshed, I think the term I'd heard in the past was "clerk" or "associate." I don't think these were volunteers, though I'm not sure why I think that way. Possibly the size of the branch in question- it was a tiny one - though I'm not sure why that makes a volunteer less likely.

The whole thing has always struck me as a bit odd, since to the general public you're a librarian if you work in a library and aren't the sixteen-year old doing obvious scutwork shelving books. The low chances of ever getting the distinction to be made by anyone outside the field makes demanding the distinction seem silly. But then, I twitch every time a male sewist* gets referred to as a tailor on the basis of his gender. That's a skilled field, requiring years of specialized training. Just being a male who can sew doesn't earn you the respect of the title. When I consider it in that light, the librarian distinction makes a lot more sense.

*That's a new word I've seen recently and thought was very useful. Sewist = person who sews, gender not specified.

Have you ever worked with a really good research librarian? These are people who had google-fu before there was Google. I worked with one at the Intel corporate library a long time ago, and I was astounded at the information she could pull out of an unstructured database with a single, not particularly long, query. It's not just talent, of course, having spent the years to get a PhD in Library Science gets you knowledge and experience points towards that too. So, yes, I think it's worth recognizing the level of skill and knowledge required for that job with a special title.

"mister Data, make it sew."

What's the difference between a sewist and a tailor? Is it a labor vs. management thing?

I can sew--I can take a pattern, choose appropriate fabric, cut out the pieces, and end up with a functional (and usually even attractive) garment. I am not a tailor, because I can't make a pattern myself, nor make extensive alterations to one without screwing it up, nor work out on my own how to do the little beautiful details that make an item really, well, tailored. It's hard to explain.

Sew I've been told.

No, I haven't. The few times I've felt the need to seek help, it wasn't that helpful for various reasons (not all the librarian's fault.) I'm sure if I had, I'd see the distinction clearly.

Recasting it in terms of tailor/sewist does make the difference in skill more clear, and I agree it is deserved. But I've never seen it personally, so it still feels artificial to me, respect I grant because I assume it is deserved, not instinctively. Obviously I need to go do more research to change my experience.

Not so much labor and management, though I think in really fine tailor shops it does somewhat shake out that way. It really comes closer to the distinction between a chef and a cook, I think.

(I'm not actually that knowledgeable, so take this all with a grain of salt.)

Tailoring is a specific skillset that a sewist may or may not have. Fitting a tailored jacket is unlike most other fitting, and the construction is also different from most other garments. So there's one set of differences. Just because you can sew, that doesn't mean you can tailor. (That paragraph I'm pretty certain of and stand behind.)

In addition, tailoring used to be (and I think still is) an apprentice-taught profession. I'm not at all sure how the system works. I suspect it is fairly loose, but I'd still be wary that I was claiming an education I didn't have if I hadn't been apprenticed but called myself a tailor. I wouldn't hesitate to say that I can do tailoring. But until I spend some time apprenticed to a professional tailor, I'd be leery of calling myself a tailor. (This is the bit I'm not at all sure of.)

If I recall correctly, this blog:

http://www.englishcut.com/

shows some of the distinctions and the strata of the tailor's shop. I stopped having time to read it, but I seem to recall the tailor drawing the suit pattern directly onto the fabric from the customer's measurements as an ordinary part of his job. I still boggle at the thought.

R.M.Koeke, #123, before I got sick, I could alter clothes and make custom pieces, including lined jackets. I'm not sure I'd call myself a tailor, though. I always thought the important part of sewing was good logistics skills.

Not being up to the higher standard of what I'd call a seamstress, I used to be able to call myself a 'sewer', but I'd prefer not to have to write that down.

I think of the workrooms with highly-skilled — have I seen the word 'tailoress'? — who make the haut couture outfits, or the less-haut versions. Extraordinary what they can make real from a sketch or something draped and pinned, and the quality of their plainwork as well as their ability with fancywork. <sigh> Luckily for my clothes-addiction, I am a "sofa" by designer standards (aka normal Australian woman), as well as having medically-induced deformities, so unless & until I can afford to have clothes made-to-measure, I'm safe from their blandishments.

I'm very pleased by "sewist" because it gives me a viable alternative to sewer.

I don't think tailoress is common, at least not in the States. The woman who taught me tailoring called herself a tailor. Like chef, I think it used to be assumed to be masculine because tailors were mostly men. As the profession has equalized, the term has drifted to become gender-neutral.

This is where my knowledge trickles off, unfortunately. There could quite well be a heirarchy of professions in a couture house, but I don't know them.

I think that many of the non-designers who work in constructing couture fashion are called "petits mains." This may specifically relate to those who do embroidery and other embellishments. I'm not sure.

"If you don't behave, I'll make you rip out these seams!"

I'm an adequate quilting sewer, but for clothing alterations, I pay someone, because I've not spent the time to develop those skills as much as I'd like. The good thing is that because of the quilting and fabric art, I know who has super-duper clothing skills.

Oooooh... We're getting onto the seamy side of human interactions now.

Yes, it's a pattern that I've plaid again and again.

Wool this madness ever stop?

Maybe not. You see, I'm part-Vulcanized. Some of us go thru mating urges every 7 years, and it is called the pon far. Some of us instead feel the urge to become standup comedians, and when we gather it becomes the pun fair.

In the Parisian couture houses, 'petit main' is a term used for the people doing the construction work; 'premiere main' is the supervisor for that section, whether they're doing construction, decoration, or whatever. Another term used is 'midinette'; I don't know which gets preference currently. (This I owe to a Fench-English dictionary)

It may be beyond the pale.

I can has bukkit?

In other words, I can has punz.

Part of the reason I brought up sewist is because it was new to me and I hadn't found another gender-neutral word for it. I sorta wanted to get opinions on it from a crowd of word-savvy people. I figured at the very least people would complain if it was awful.

I like seamster a lot, too, and it seems to have a bit of the weight of tradition behind it. Hm.

Anyone been withholding an opinion that wants to pipe up on the matter?

Not that I want to rip into any of you...

The first citation dates to 995.

Because weave nothing more relevant to say.

Give in to no looming dreads in this context; I'll not be thought to have satin judgment on a fellow punster.

Worry not, nor be on jacquard. Twill be OK.

We're just trying to avoid a looming disaster...

Hopefully we can at least get some purls of wisdom out of the situation...

At least if we aren't too knitpicky...

Never mind, then. Carry on.