Saturday, April 25, 2009

The Ungoogable List of Mr. Monroe

Randall Monroe of XKCD proposes a list of words that had no hits on google when he wrote them. These words now have a number of hits, mostly people talking about his list like I am.
I think most of his phrases had no hits for quite good reasons. He picked some damn unusual thoughts.

"ate a violin"


No animal on earth is capable of eating all the parts of a violin, although if I allow multiple organisms, I can find a combination that can eat everything: Termites consume the wood, various specialized bacteria can eat the laquer, the nylon strings, and if I let the metal parts rust away, these can be made into an iron rich health supplement.

"driver-side bidet"


A bidet is a toiletry part that squirts water onto your toileting parts to clean them. To use it successfully, you probably shouldn't be wearing pants as you do it. They're uncommon in America.
"Driver's side" seems to imply that this is in a vehicle, and used by the person operating it. If you're driving without pants, (or a skirt, or something to cover your crotch) then I think I might be a tad disgusted by you.

"unlike normal furries,"


"Furries" are an internet sub-community that depict themselves graphically as anthropomorphic animals. They're new enough that no one is sure what is "normal" for them. In fact, every time the internet turns around, it seems to uncover an even stranger one than was ever seen before. Thus making "normal furries" a nonsensical concept in two ways.

"Sarah, plain and tall and a cyborg"


Sarah, Plain and Tall, was a book about a stepmother who moved from the east coast to the midwest, and was about loneliness and existentialism. The book was set long before cyborgs were technically possible.While at first thought being a "cyborg" would make one explicitly not "plain," I suppose a plain and tall Sarah could have a pacemaker surgically installed, therefore making her a combination of a person and machine and therefore a cyborg.

"people are too civil on the internet"


For one, people tend towards the rude and caustic on the Internet. The authors of Penny Arcade point out that if you give the average person both anonymity and an audience, their behavior decays considerably (warning, rude language).
The other thing about this is that "too civil" is really really hard to imagine. What discussion wouldn't be better without the normal half-baked retorts and copious insults and the raging fury of a thousand broken dreams that characterize most internet arguments?

"his penis shattered my world"


I'm still not sure if having one's world shattered is a good thing or a bad thing. In any case, most straight women only really care that a potential boyfriend has a penis and that it works, and even among gay men, "size queens" are kind of rare.

"more like LAME-arkian theory"


Lamarkian Evolution is so entirely and throughly discredited that this kind of insult is stupid and unnecessary.

"my little horse must think it gay"


Horses of any size probably don't give a web slap if something is homosexual or not. Unless you mean it in the "it's lame" sense, in which case horses don't think that way either.

"it turned out her bottom half was a robot"


Half body replacement is still not technologically feasible.

"Aww, a baby hooker!"


Most people (in America anyway) would reguard anything remotely similar to "a baby hooker" as immensely creepy. Even the offspring of a hooker would be more pitied than admired.



I'd like to thank Mr. Monroe for this little crazy journey.

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