Category: Humor and horror

A Wilde ghost story

A seasonal tale by Oscar Wilde, via Standard Ebooks.

The Canterville Ghost
A Hylo-Idealistic Romance

I
When Mr. Hiram B. Otis, the American Minister, bought Canterville Chase, everyone told him he was doing a very foolish thing, as there was no doubt at all that the place was haunted. Indeed, Lord Canterville himself, who was a man of the most punctilious honour, had felt it his duty to mention the fact to Mr. Otis when they came to discuss terms.

“We have not cared to live in the place ourselves,” said Lord Canterville, “since my grandaunt, the Dowager Duchess of Bolton, was frightened into a fit, from which she never really recovered, by two skeleton hands being placed on her shoulders as she was dressing for dinner, and I feel bound to tell you, Mr. Otis, that the ghost has been seen by several living members of my family, as well as by the rector of the parish, the Rev. Augustus Dampier, who is a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. After the unfortunate accident to the Duchess, none of our younger servants would stay with us, and Lady Canterville often got very little sleep at night, in consequence of the mysterious noises that came from the corridor and the library.”

“My Lord,” answered the Minister, “I will take the furniture and the ghost at a valuation. I come from a modern country, where we have everything that money can buy; and with all our spry young fellows painting the Old World red, and carrying off your best actresses and prima donnas, I reckon that if there were such a thing as a ghost in Europe, we’d have it at home in a very short time in one of our public museums, or on the road as a show.”

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Notes from the Department of Circular Communications

A query about “armchair paleontology” in the Halupedia led circuitously to an entry about Auguste Dubois-Lacroix (b. 1842, Paris; d. 1907, Pont-de-Chéruy), “an individual whose primary professional skill was the avoidance of notice.”

… a highly unremarkable civil servant whose posthumous notoriety arose from the ADLB, a complex and ultimately unsuccessful initiative he spearheaded during his tenure at the Ministry of Applied Obfuscation.1

… The stated objective of the ADLB was to enhance the clarity and efficacy of government communications by making them deliberately more difficult to understand. The underlying philosophy, according to contemporary documents attributed to Lacroix, was that true administrative efficiency lay in preventing unauthorized comprehension.

… Under Lacroix’s direction, the ADLB developed a series of groundbreaking techniques. These included the systematic introduction of non-sequiturs, the invention of new verb conjugations requiring three or more preceding subordinate clauses for correct interpretation, and the mandatory inclusion of obscure references to the Catalogues of Unnecessary Objects. The notorious Protocol of Ten Thousand Delays, a prime example of ADLB’s methodology, became legendary.

Roadrunner with flying armadillos

An inquiry about the flying armadillos of west Texas led quickly to the Archives of Misplaced Endeavors, the Project to Quantify the Weight of Apathy, and the Ministry of Futility Studies. Further research touched on the Treaty of the Fourth Dimensions Annexation, Viking Pineapple Relocations circa 975 CE, the Society for the Advancement of Spurious Mathematics, Chronometric Discontinuity, and many more remarkably obscure topics.

So it seems that not only can AI assemble listenable songs, realistic photographs and incalculable reams of prose of many kinds, it is capable of passable satire as well. (The entire prompt for the top illustration was “Ministry of Applied Obfuscation.” GPT added all the verbiage, not me.) I still prefer the scholarship of Will Cuppy, Alan Coren and Henry Beard, but as an occasional satirist myself, I find Halupedia disquietingly competent. Has AI developed a sense of humor?

A note on Dilbert

James:

From time to time I had reason to stroll through some of the engineering buildings, or chemistry or math2, and now and then the business school. Fifteen/twenty years ago Dilbert was all over the place in physics (I had some) and computing and engineering, but not at the business school. Other cartoons appeared there, so it wasn’t a department dictum on decorum….

Since Dilbert so often skewered pointy-haired bosses and HR, it’s no surprise that the strip wouldn’t pop up on grad student doors so much in those regions….

From the speed with which the strip was dropped I suspect there was great relief in the relevant management and HR corporate quarters at the excuse for revenge.

I expect everyone visiting here has a collection of Scott Adams’ books in his library, so I don’t need to post my favorites. The Silicon Graybeard posted some of his here.

Golf and rewolwers

I’ve been reading Paul Johnson and P.G. Wodehouse, who go unexpectedly well together. See, for example, Wodehouse’s 1921 story “The Clicking of Cuthbert,” in which a Russian novelist is on a lecture tour of England:

The latest news which Vladimir Brusiloff had had from Russia had been particularly cheering. Three of his principal creditors had perished in the last massacre of the bourgeoisie, and a man whom he owed for five years for a samovar and a pair of overshoes had fled the country, and had not been heard of since. It was not bad news from home that was depressing Vladimir. What was wrong with him was the fact that this was the eighty-second suburban literary reception he had been compelled to attend since he had landed in the country on his lecturing tour, and he was sick to death of it. When his agent had first suggested the trip, he had signed on the dotted line without an instant’s hesitation. Worked out in roubles, the fees offered had seemed just about right. But now, as he peered through the brushwood at the faces round him, and realized that eight out of ten of those present had manuscripts of some sort concealed on their persons, and were only waiting for an opportunity to whip them out and start reading, he wished that he had stayed at his quiet home in Nijni-Novgorod, where the worst thing that could happen to a fellow was a brace of bombs coming in through the window and mixing themselves up with his breakfast egg.

Upon discovering that one of the attendees at the dreary reception is a golfer, he cheers up:

“Let me tell you one vairy funny story about putting. It was one day I play at Nijni-Novgorod with the pro. against Lenin and Trotsky, and Trotsky had a two-inch putt for the hole. But, just as he addresses the ball, someone in the crowd he tries to assassinate Lenin with a rewolwer—you know that is our great national sport, trying to assassinate Lenin with rewolwers—and the bang puts Trotsky off his stroke and he goes five yards past the hole, and then Lenin, who is rather shaken, you understand, he misses again himself, and we win the hole and match and I clean up three hundred and ninety-six thousand roubles, or fifteen shillings in your money. Some gameovitch! And now let me tell you one other vairy funny story——”

Miscellany

Noise comes in colors. There are white noise, pink noise, red noise, brown noise, blue noise, grey noise, etc. The various shades are most easily perceived by acousticians and sound engineers.

While wandering around an airport earlier this summer, I realized that there music playing throughout the building. It was light, watery jazzish stuff, difficult to pay attention to. There was a trumpet in the mix, but the sound was bland, not bold. The melodies were trivial and the chords hackneyed. It may very well have been AI slop. What I was hearing could be called “beige noise”: music intended to be ignored.

*****

Joseph Epstein on a biography he never wrote:

In my early thirties I signed on to write a biography of John Dos Passos, who was still alive. I wrote to Dos Passos to ask if I might have his cooperation in writing his biography. He replied instantly, saying that he would help me in any way he could, on the condition that I “put my liberal ideology in mothballs” and pledge never again to use the word “explicate.”

*****

Atomic Fungus shows how to talk to machines:

Mrs. Fungus was trying to get a tech on the phone, and was stuck at the recalcitrant AI prompt. After hearing her say, “I want to talk to an agent!” fifty-odd times, I took the phone from her.

Machine: “Do you want to try to restart your cable box now?”

Me: “NO! BIB GOBBLE WAGLE BAG GAG HANGLE!”

Whenever the clanker would ask me a yes/no question, I’d answer it, but then add random gobbledygook. And I kept making the tone angrier and angrier.

It gave up and shunted us to a human.

Mrs. Fungus: “How did you do that?”

The algorithm that translates what the user is saying into something the computer can understand has a limited capacity for literal nonsense. In theory, after a sufficient number of errors, it should crap out and send the caller to a human.

That was my theory. I’m glad it worked!

*****

A thousand years ago I discovered three records in the University of Dallas library that would determine much of my musical activity over the years to come: Augustin Anievas’ Chopin waltzes, the first disc of Isolde Ahlgrimm’s “Well-Tempered Clavier,” and Songs by Tom Lehrer3. Lehrer died recently. A few years ago he released his music into the public domain. You can find all the songs here.

*****

One of the places I passed through in Alaska, southeast of Fairbanks. There is culture in the wilderness.