Since reading about alibi clubs I’ve been subscribed to Textuality.org a blog about text messaging on cell phones. New technology collides with society: sparks fly. The template for these stories seems to be you take a distinct preferable subordinate group and text messaging and out pops a story!

Here some examples:

• The Unemployed, text them:”Mango picking jobs available. Run!”
• Truants: “Jr. didn’t show up for school!” I think that one needs the knob turned up. Text all the adults in town: “Bobby, Susan, and Timmy didn’t show up for school! Get ’em.”
• Old Folks: Workshops how to text message!
• Innocents Abroad: Watch dog timers! Send a text message that announces you have gone missing if you don’t cancel it’s delivery upon arrival at your destination.
• Rude People: Cell phone users feel they are more courteous than other cell phone users!
• Nostolgia: Payphone used to have doors! Isn’t that quant?
• The Lascivious: News, cell phone owning youths more promiscuous! This is complemented a few days latter by cellular company announcing cell phone owning youths more sociable. Meanwhile some researchers are concerned about cell phone radiation affecting sperm counts while some other researchers are concerned about men losing their confidence if you take their cell phones away from them. Which makes sense since yet other boffins have noticed that men use cell phones like peacocks use their feathers.
• Call Girls: Pretty much required to have phones! This is news?
• Hackers: Cell phone viruses!

The fun never stops with new technology!

It was inevitable. Today I was told to RTFB.

“Depends on what you mean by death.”

That is all.

The world needs more words. Today’s word is monger. Who retires these words? Somebody should stop them.

The Oxford English dictionary is clear. Monger is associated with disreputable trade. Makes one wonder. cheesemonger? Ironmonger? Well, Perl Mongers; that makes sense.

Tradesmen, middlemen, intermediaries are a disreputable lot. Two faced and all that. So a few words reserved to remind one of the disreputable undercurrent is most useful. Monger’s just the ticket – enabling all kinds of tempering: patriotism mongering, metric mongering, procedural mongering.

They used to past laws about this stuff: sailor mongering. This crime was apparently the perpetrated by houses of prostitution who’s employees would be sent out to board a ship entering port. There they would lead the noble seamen astray so that later they might take them prisoner and hold them until the ship’s management would pay to spring them. I’m a little unclear where in that narative the unsavory bit of trade enters the picture; it seems a bit unsavory from end to end.

Bonus word tools: I’ve been desperate to find the time to browser., and something me; but oh please avoid marketecture!

Today – Robot Traffic Cones

Tommorrow – The Daleks!

Is that Dr. Davros in the video?

You have been warned.

This is a depth tree meme.
Copy this text into your journal and increment the following number by one!
I am at distance 3 from the start of the meme.

I assume that most of my readers have low Erdos numbers and will therefore wish to know what they are worth. My original bid of $1.35 turned out to be too low. The number five went for $1,031 dollars.

As you can see from the screen shot bellow even eBay, market-maker to the world, ponders “How did this happen?”.

Update:: The virtue of erdos numbers has found a defender! A rightous Don Quixote . A brave man willing to defend the foundations of the ivory tower from such flippant conceptual undermining.

In an amazing scoop the ever wise investigative journalist Andy Oram has revealed a secret draft of the ICANN process for obtaining a top level domain. Rush to see this before the forces that be get an injunction. With luck there will be time since they are distracted doing a denial of service attack on the memory hole‘s web site today.

It has been argued that one key to a vibrant democracy is that status, wealth, and power can be traded for one another. 99 cents for status; that’s pretty powerful!

Update: Yeah! Bummer, I’ve been displaced.

I hate displacement!