1 - How can it be a press release if it's not news? Sounded like same-old-same old. 2 - is being disgraced in Tampa really such a bad thing? I'm thinking badge of honor.
For those of you now too busy asking DALL·E 2 for baby pictures of Gene and Pat in diapers or a velvet painting of them as dogs playing poker, you may have missed the news that the latest iteration of chatbot ChatGPT (recently released v.4) has passed a bar exam (as well as the LSAT and the SAT) with flying colors. Since the former Pretender to the Presidency is running out of lawyers (who expect to be paid, in any event), could ChatGPT be next up in his legal rota of shame ? Certainly couldn't come up with defenses any more "novel" than the human mouthpieces have to date. Although it might very likely advise that since it still must rely on human input, it doesn't yet have the ability to find one --- and to wait for v.5.
"What's the difference between a conservative commentator and a liberal commentator? One is called a conservative commentator; the other is called a commentator."
Let's credit that to Hall of Fame Loser Jeff Contompasis; it was his winning entry to one of my first contests (2004), asking specifically for right-leaning humor. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was his first inking entry ever. He now has 914 blots of Invite ink.
Montgomery not only practiced journalism at a high level (nominated for a Pulitzer), he taught journalism as well, so this business with the Dark Side email and Axios strikes me as odd and probably not a one-off. He likely reached the limit of his bullshit tolerance and threw caution (and his job, as it turns out) to the winds. Like "Howard Beale" (Peter Finch:) in "Network," he no doubt yelled on receiving the so-called press release, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" He made a choice facing all true journos these days --- and especially when the shots are being called more by bean counters than experienced editors --- to keep an umbrella unfurled for the ever-present shit storm to fight another day or --- to quit or commit suicide by intimidated editor. The other odd part of this business was that the Axios editor-in-chief actually has some cred as a serious journo/editor from her days at NPR and the executive editor who officially did the deed was previously deputy national editor at the NYT. Strange all around, but unfortunately not unexpected in our present alternate universe.
I guess I sort of misunderstood the rules--there are several selected titles that didn't actually use every letter in the original title when some of them were duplicates (A GULAG OF THEIR OWN is missing the two Es in "League," etc.).
All my ( albeit lame) entries were “ pure “ anagrams. I didn’t like the modification option. To me it was like allowing a threesome to be part of the foal contest. You’ll definitely get more, maybe even funnier, entries ; but it seems diminished. Making up a funny plot for a movie called “ I Am BB” seems more challenging than for one called “ I Am Bi,” with its dropped B and added I. But what the hell do I know?
The problem with asking for pure anagrams was that we'd be WAY more likely to get tons of duplication. We did run some: Jeff Contompasis's "Post Light"/Spotlight, "Tsar's War"/Star Wars" and "Aisles"/Lassie, for three; there were probably others as well this week. Oh! Jon Carter's "Pope Ye"/Popeye!
It didn't occur to us until late in the process that we should have spelled this out. But we did say that you could use those letters "as often as you like." We should have anticipated this question. My apologies for the confusion.
"So, should we now call you 'Pat-The-Almost-Perfect,' Ms. Myers ?"
"Objection, your honor"
"Sustained"
"Your attempt to favor your and Mr. Weingarten's love children, would appear to be suggested by your rather cavalier use of the phrase "use all of the letters" in the contest instructions, when judging it. What do you say to that ?
"Objection your, honor. Pure conjecture."
"Yes --- I know, but I want to hear about these love children. Ms. Myers ?"
"Well. Maybe one or two --- but I said I was sorry."
"Not good enough Ms. Myers, my clients demand not only an abject apology but participation trophies."
That could get eaten up fairly fast. I guess the strategy is to compose ideas first and enter only the ones that have a high humor potential and then only refine a little.
Yes, I suspect the contest will run into problems because most participants have not previously considered the arcane art of "prompt engineering" (phrasing your request such that the AI gives you something like what you were shooting for), will have difficulty getting useful output while they climb that learning curve, and will then run out of credits before they come up with good submissions. But, we shall see.
Agree. And, in fact, having now spent time with Dall-E 2, it's unlikely that the art itself will be funny --- odd maybe --- but unlikely to be funny in itself. So, IMHO, what will actually be judged in Invitational # 11 are the captions or descriptions.
Might be a moot point. I'm not going to be able to compose entries on my iPhone which probably means waiting until I'm on a home PC to download and upload pictures. Corporate computers aren't too fond of downloading files from certain sites.
"Do you think DeSantis would be more disastrous for our country than Trump?" - I said from the beginning of his term that my greatest fear is that the next guy HAS to be Trumpier than Trump to get elected.
What a moron you are. The way to set a grandfather clock without having to wind the hands a quarter of an hour at a time is to set your phone alarm to go off a minute before the time that your grandfather clock reads. When the alarm goes off merely set the clock to ticking.
Regarding the unfortunate but should-have-been forewarned Ben Montgomery:
I've worked as a journalist. I've also written and distributed press releases aimed at journalists. All press releases involve a degree of propaganda (spin, if you prefer). Politicians like DeSantis engage in almost pure, uncut propaganda. Even heroin dealers dilute their product, but not Gov. Kinkyboots. Still, the best course for a journalist is just to ignore this junk -- or limit comments about its Pravda-worthy composition to colleagues within the newsroom. Especially in today's environment, throwing it back in the face of highly aggressive propagandists is (a) likely to get you in hot water; and (b) going to be used by the Friends of Goebbels Society, er, I mean Fox News types, to brand establishment media as biased against perfectly legitimate propaganda.
I know, and I sympathize with him. And I know that veteran journalists like Montgomery all recall a time when you could have a degree of private give-and-take with politicians and their staffs. But I have seen the goalposts shift over the past decade or two, and no one exemplifies the playground bully style of this new breed of monster more fully than DeSantis and his staff. (After reading statements by his then press secretary Christina Pushaw, the first question I asked myself was whether she possibly could have been raised by human parents.) Being a bit cautious by nature, had I been in Mr. Montgomery's position, I think I would have worried that, if I hit "send" on that email, DeSantis' staff would have escalated it into a firestorm. Once that happened, Axios — a news organization that has had unusual success in getting politicians like Donald Trump to sit with them for TV interviews — was going to be in a difficult position: Throw him under the bus, or stand with him on principle and lose future opportunities for Jonathan Swan to ask tough questions of people like Trump.
Sadly for Axios, since Cox bought them out the quality and content has been going downhill. Jonathan Swan is at the NYT now. Daily KOS just got rid of some great reporters as well.
I once got into a strident argument with a cowboy voice actor in a recording studio over the pronunciation of "pshaw." He insisted that the "p" was silent. I insisted that the "p" was included as an aspirated sound, sort of like the "t" in "tsar." I thought for a moment things were about to get western in there, and in the end I let him do it his way. Not that I couldn't have kicked his ass, but I figured this was a situation where discretion was the wiser course -- which is sort of on topic for this thread.
Thanks to the quirks of English, you and the cowboy voice actor were both right about the pronunciation of "pshaw" --- just at different times. It probably originated in the 17th c. via onomatopoeia with the "p" pronounced --- as the bilabial sound of an expulsion of air after closed lips, expressing disbelief or contempt. You know, like "pshit." Then when written down, someone likely decided it looked like a number of English words taken from the Greek starting with a silent "p" which, just as oddly, was pronounced in the original Greek --- and the "p" became silent in standard usage. It turns out that by some estimates, 60% of English words have silent letters, thanks to the incorporation of words from other languages over the centuries.
The classic example of this bane of students of English and often (but wrongly) first attributed to George Bernard Shaw, is the word "ghoti," pronounced "fish," with the "gh" as the "f" from "tough," the "o" as the "i" from "women," and the "ti" as the "sh" from "nation." Might make an interesting Invitational, this business of word respellings and their pronunciations/meanings.
Regarding the press release...
1 - How can it be a press release if it's not news? Sounded like same-old-same old. 2 - is being disgraced in Tampa really such a bad thing? I'm thinking badge of honor.
Yes! I think it was Yosemite Sam (but maybe Bugs Bunny). Now I will have to see if I can find a clip on YouTube.
For those of you now too busy asking DALL·E 2 for baby pictures of Gene and Pat in diapers or a velvet painting of them as dogs playing poker, you may have missed the news that the latest iteration of chatbot ChatGPT (recently released v.4) has passed a bar exam (as well as the LSAT and the SAT) with flying colors. Since the former Pretender to the Presidency is running out of lawyers (who expect to be paid, in any event), could ChatGPT be next up in his legal rota of shame ? Certainly couldn't come up with defenses any more "novel" than the human mouthpieces have to date. Although it might very likely advise that since it still must rely on human input, it doesn't yet have the ability to find one --- and to wait for v.5.
I could agree with Liszt's Rhapsody NO. 2, but ONLY if there is a mouse running up and down the keyboard while he's playing.
The Sri Lankan Civil War was a civil war fought in Sri Lanka from 1983 to 2009.
Right again, Gene! Right up there with guys thinking they provide all the material for babies!
"What's the difference between a conservative commentator and a liberal commentator? One is called a conservative commentator; the other is called a commentator."
Let's credit that to Hall of Fame Loser Jeff Contompasis; it was his winning entry to one of my first contests (2004), asking specifically for right-leaning humor. In fact, I'm pretty sure that it was his first inking entry ever. He now has 914 blots of Invite ink.
Montgomery not only practiced journalism at a high level (nominated for a Pulitzer), he taught journalism as well, so this business with the Dark Side email and Axios strikes me as odd and probably not a one-off. He likely reached the limit of his bullshit tolerance and threw caution (and his job, as it turns out) to the winds. Like "Howard Beale" (Peter Finch:) in "Network," he no doubt yelled on receiving the so-called press release, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore!" He made a choice facing all true journos these days --- and especially when the shots are being called more by bean counters than experienced editors --- to keep an umbrella unfurled for the ever-present shit storm to fight another day or --- to quit or commit suicide by intimidated editor. The other odd part of this business was that the Axios editor-in-chief actually has some cred as a serious journo/editor from her days at NPR and the executive editor who officially did the deed was previously deputy national editor at the NYT. Strange all around, but unfortunately not unexpected in our present alternate universe.
I guess I sort of misunderstood the rules--there are several selected titles that didn't actually use every letter in the original title when some of them were duplicates (A GULAG OF THEIR OWN is missing the two Es in "League," etc.).
All my ( albeit lame) entries were “ pure “ anagrams. I didn’t like the modification option. To me it was like allowing a threesome to be part of the foal contest. You’ll definitely get more, maybe even funnier, entries ; but it seems diminished. Making up a funny plot for a movie called “ I Am BB” seems more challenging than for one called “ I Am Bi,” with its dropped B and added I. But what the hell do I know?
The problem with asking for pure anagrams was that we'd be WAY more likely to get tons of duplication. We did run some: Jeff Contompasis's "Post Light"/Spotlight, "Tsar's War"/Star Wars" and "Aisles"/Lassie, for three; there were probably others as well this week. Oh! Jon Carter's "Pope Ye"/Popeye!
It didn't occur to us until late in the process that we should have spelled this out. But we did say that you could use those letters "as often as you like." We should have anticipated this question. My apologies for the confusion.
"So, should we now call you 'Pat-The-Almost-Perfect,' Ms. Myers ?"
"Objection, your honor"
"Sustained"
"Your attempt to favor your and Mr. Weingarten's love children, would appear to be suggested by your rather cavalier use of the phrase "use all of the letters" in the contest instructions, when judging it. What do you say to that ?
"Objection your, honor. Pure conjecture."
"Yes --- I know, but I want to hear about these love children. Ms. Myers ?"
"Well. Maybe one or two --- but I said I was sorry."
"Not good enough Ms. Myers, my clients demand not only an abject apology but participation trophies."
I thought I posted this comment already. Second attempt:
Doesn't DALL-E limit the number of requests from a single account per month or have they changed this?
Yes, it's on a credit-based system. Free sign-ups get 50 credits to play with. One credit per try (or to do a variation, or an outpainting, whatevs).
That could get eaten up fairly fast. I guess the strategy is to compose ideas first and enter only the ones that have a high humor potential and then only refine a little.
Yes, I suspect the contest will run into problems because most participants have not previously considered the arcane art of "prompt engineering" (phrasing your request such that the AI gives you something like what you were shooting for), will have difficulty getting useful output while they climb that learning curve, and will then run out of credits before they come up with good submissions. But, we shall see.
Agree. And, in fact, having now spent time with Dall-E 2, it's unlikely that the art itself will be funny --- odd maybe --- but unlikely to be funny in itself. So, IMHO, what will actually be judged in Invitational # 11 are the captions or descriptions.
I created some inadvertently funny art and submitted them in the contest.
Might be a moot point. I'm not going to be able to compose entries on my iPhone which probably means waiting until I'm on a home PC to download and upload pictures. Corporate computers aren't too fond of downloading files from certain sites.
FYI: Gene's comment about the Sri Lankan people WAS A SATIRICAL, SELF-DEPRECATING JOKE. He knows about the Tamil Tigers, etc.
you;re doing a fine job of covering for him but i don't believe you.
I can see why you picked that name. Sheesh. But if you didn't read it as a joke, I have to think you're not very familiar with Gene's humor.
The people are gentle and in need. They need a benevolent despot.
So Montgomery gets "tarnished" and fired for privately speaking truth to powepropagandar.
This should be a warning to journalists that all communication from the DeSantis organization should be treated as both public AND propaganda.
A couple of weeks ago, Last Week Tonight did a good takedown of DeSantis.
Still, the question remains: Are there that many MAGATs in Florida who have smaller brains than a Burmese Python?
I'll say it now. The firing was totally outrageous and an awful precedent about how a despot can cow a media that permits itself to be cowed.
"Do you think DeSantis would be more disastrous for our country than Trump?" - I said from the beginning of his term that my greatest fear is that the next guy HAS to be Trumpier than Trump to get elected.
I like that you brought this possibility to our attention. I do not like that it's probably as likely as you say.
What a moron you are. The way to set a grandfather clock without having to wind the hands a quarter of an hour at a time is to set your phone alarm to go off a minute before the time that your grandfather clock reads. When the alarm goes off merely set the clock to ticking.
That is in fact what I do but it is a pain in the ass, whcih I said. Spring forward is much easier.
Regarding the unfortunate but should-have-been forewarned Ben Montgomery:
I've worked as a journalist. I've also written and distributed press releases aimed at journalists. All press releases involve a degree of propaganda (spin, if you prefer). Politicians like DeSantis engage in almost pure, uncut propaganda. Even heroin dealers dilute their product, but not Gov. Kinkyboots. Still, the best course for a journalist is just to ignore this junk -- or limit comments about its Pravda-worthy composition to colleagues within the newsroom. Especially in today's environment, throwing it back in the face of highly aggressive propagandists is (a) likely to get you in hot water; and (b) going to be used by the Friends of Goebbels Society, er, I mean Fox News types, to brand establishment media as biased against perfectly legitimate propaganda.
Agreed, but... remember he wrote it as an email. He didn't write this to hurt them publicly. To me, that is the entire issue.
Yes, this. The new ethic in De-Insane-tits land is just as Trump left it, no ethics.
I know, and I sympathize with him. And I know that veteran journalists like Montgomery all recall a time when you could have a degree of private give-and-take with politicians and their staffs. But I have seen the goalposts shift over the past decade or two, and no one exemplifies the playground bully style of this new breed of monster more fully than DeSantis and his staff. (After reading statements by his then press secretary Christina Pushaw, the first question I asked myself was whether she possibly could have been raised by human parents.) Being a bit cautious by nature, had I been in Mr. Montgomery's position, I think I would have worried that, if I hit "send" on that email, DeSantis' staff would have escalated it into a firestorm. Once that happened, Axios — a news organization that has had unusual success in getting politicians like Donald Trump to sit with them for TV interviews — was going to be in a difficult position: Throw him under the bus, or stand with him on principle and lose future opportunities for Jonathan Swan to ask tough questions of people like Trump.
Sadly for Axios, since Cox bought them out the quality and content has been going downhill. Jonathan Swan is at the NYT now. Daily KOS just got rid of some great reporters as well.
Do you pronounce that press secretary’s name like “pshaw”? Because if I ever write fiction I want to use that name
I once got into a strident argument with a cowboy voice actor in a recording studio over the pronunciation of "pshaw." He insisted that the "p" was silent. I insisted that the "p" was included as an aspirated sound, sort of like the "t" in "tsar." I thought for a moment things were about to get western in there, and in the end I let him do it his way. Not that I couldn't have kicked his ass, but I figured this was a situation where discretion was the wiser course -- which is sort of on topic for this thread.
Thanks to the quirks of English, you and the cowboy voice actor were both right about the pronunciation of "pshaw" --- just at different times. It probably originated in the 17th c. via onomatopoeia with the "p" pronounced --- as the bilabial sound of an expulsion of air after closed lips, expressing disbelief or contempt. You know, like "pshit." Then when written down, someone likely decided it looked like a number of English words taken from the Greek starting with a silent "p" which, just as oddly, was pronounced in the original Greek --- and the "p" became silent in standard usage. It turns out that by some estimates, 60% of English words have silent letters, thanks to the incorporation of words from other languages over the centuries.
The classic example of this bane of students of English and often (but wrongly) first attributed to George Bernard Shaw, is the word "ghoti," pronounced "fish," with the "gh" as the "f" from "tough," the "o" as the "i" from "women," and the "ti" as the "sh" from "nation." Might make an interesting Invitational, this business of word respellings and their pronunciations/meanings.
Isn’t there some Looney Tunes character that says it? Bugs Bunny? But this was probably back before you could pull out your phone and prove it.