Grok asked me after I was asking it about the poem "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" by John Ashbery, specifically my favorite line, "Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched/Her long thigh."
The poem had just come up in a crossword puzzle: 20 Across: "Cartoon character featured in the John Ashbery poem 'Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape.'" There are a lot of cartoon characters in that poem, but the answer is POPEYE.
I'd said to Grok: "That description of Olive Oyl and the poem title — 'Farm Implements' — made me think of this quote David Sedaris found in the biography of Jean Stafford: 'She was sharp-tongued and once described a fellow writer as 'looking as if she were pregnant with farm machinery.'"
"Set it too low, and the chatbot becomes a boring echo; set it too high, and it produces useless noise. The sweet spot places the output just beyond what you could have anticipated — familiar enough to seem plausible, unexpected enough to seem insightful. That gap between what you expected and what the system produced is where something remarkable happens: You supply the meaning. "
This reminds me: We don't all think the same way. Some of us hear a voice speaking full sentences in our head. That's not me. I've been trying to observe what I have instead of that, and it's almost impossible. Any effort to look at the form of my thoughts causes them to retreat into some backroom of the mind that denies my conscious thinking mind access. I write to see what I think. That's why I blog — not to convince readers to agree with me, but to get my thoughts into language form. And my use of A.I. is similar. I'm getting my own thoughts into dialogue form. It externalizes a debate I could have in my head in a very amorphous and multilayered blob, but working it out in writing and seeing it in writing is extremely helpful to me.
ADDED: After writing that last paragraph, I went and had a conversation with Grok about it. Learned the word anendophasia.
"Now, I have 5 months to get deep into every community that hasn't heard my message to make them safe. So I'm actually very excited because I felt very rushed. It's a big city and I was not able to talk to as many people as I look forward to talking to. This is the first time since 2005 an incumbent is going to a runoff."
Spencer Pratt is claiming victory for advancing to the Los Angeles Mayor General Election ‼️
“Obviously God wanted 5 more months of me exposing all the failures of our mayor, so it's going to be a fun ride. I hope she's ready!”
"... even more than you would typically encounter in the English language.
This bias appears rooted in the preference-learning stage, when the models are trained to align with human expectations about language. This process poses an inescapable problem: that you need real people to make sure the machine is aligned, but the human workers are ironically biased as well. As annotators click through sample texts, for example, they are probably subconsciously disposed to approve those that sound confident and incisive.
This new finding could help explain why large language models like ChatGPT and Claude seem to have a distinctive writing style. Previous research has found that AI chatbots tend to overuse words like 'meticulous' and 'commendable,' creating a kind of linguistic uncanny valley that sounds similar to how you speak, but ever so slightly off. Perhaps the ghosts of Latin and French haunted these words during preference learning, leading human workers to reward more prestigious-sounding sentences. Of course, the Germanic versus Romance distinction is a simplification of a messier etymological reality. The notoriously overrepresented word 'delve' is actually Old English in origin...."Writes Adam Aleksic, author of "Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language," in "Do these words make you sound smarter? The bias is spreading.
English speakers love the Romance vocabulary. AI noticed" (WaPo).The "Germanic versus Romance distinction" = "We’ll use more Latin terms when we want to speak formally or authoritatively; we’ll use Germanic words to sound crass or casual." That's how Aleksic puts it.That made me think about what Jorge Luis Borges said about English: English is a "far finer language than Spanish," and one reason is that "English is both a Germanic and Latin language.""For any idea, you have 2 words. Those words will not mean exactly the same. For example, if I say 'regal,' that is not exactly the same thing as saying 'kingly.' Or if I say 'fraternal,' that's not the same thing as saying 'brotherly.' Or 'dark' and 'obscure' — those words are different. It will make all the difference speaking, for example, of a Holy Spirit. It will make all the difference in the world in a poem if I wrote about the Holy Spirit or the Holy Ghost, since 'ghost' is a fine dark Saxon word, while 'spirit' is light —it's the Latin word...."
"... have expanded to the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary. Trump’s face will be stamped on a celebratory gold coin marking the semiquincentennial. His stern visage will peer from commemorative passports. Administration officials are pushing for a $250 bill featuring the president’s portrait. On Trump’s 80th birthday, June 14, the White House lawn will transform into a ring for a 'Freedom 250' UFC fight.... The pattern has culminated with many performers withdrawing from the Great American State Fair, one of the anniversary’s marquee events, after saying they did not realize how closely it was associated with Trump. The president responded by announcing he will headline the event himself, since he is [as he wrote] 'the Number One Attraction anywhere in the World, the man who gets much larger audiences than Elvis in his prime, and he does so without a guitar.' Historians, political leaders and others worry that America’s 250th birthday, which might have been an opportunity to pull a divided country together, is becoming so much about Trump that it will instead be just one more polarizing event on the national landscape...."
"Your antipathy to the future of the show has come through loud and clear. And I have heard you."
Said Nick Bilton, "60 Minutes" executive producer, quoted in "Scott Pelley fired from ‘60 Minutes’ after confrontation with new boss/The termination marks the latest shake-up during a tumultuous period for the iconic newsmagazine" (WaPo).What did Pelley say at that meeting?: "[Bari Weiss is] murdering ‘60 Minutes.... She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that. She has no qualifications for her job.... What qualifies you [Bilton] to be in this position?... You have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic. So why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?"She does not love this place — How important is it that the insiders to a show love it? That could lead you awry. Outsiders were brought in to look at it critically — not through the eyes of love — and perhaps to put journalistic principles above catering to insiders who were enjoying the lovable place they had built and maintained. Maybe those erstwhile outsiders are actually terrible, and they are reshaping the place into something that suits them and ruins it for the longtime insiders. But Bilton is charged with running the place, and Pelley chose to insist on getting fired.
"The plushie, which can be attached to a bag or clothing, has glowing eyes and a built-in speaker that plays growling sounds at an adjustable volume.... That robot looks like a cross between Beelzebub and Basil Brush, with shaggy fur, a grotesque fanged face and glowing red eyes. When its sensors detect an approaching animal it flashes LED lights and makes a sound, played at random from 50 different recorded noises, including a car horn, barks, blood-curdling howls, the sounds of hunting rifles and human voices. Although it cannot walk, four piston-like legs add another level of unpredictability by moving the Monster Wolf’s body...."
"... can bring to mind the heroic architecture of Louis Kahn or a Noguchi sculpture. When sunlight after a rain turns the gray stone pink, the building can look like a beacon. But from other angles, it’s cold and forbidding. That’s a jarring vibe for a project whose most groundbreaking ambition is to reimagine the presidential library as a warm, welcoming community hub.... From the street the carved granite words from Selma are illegible, the lettering bunched together like Cheerios in a box. Standing just below it in Jackson Park, the tower looms like a castle keep, its mass and height in tension with the park’s pastoral beauty and origins...."
"What is the state of the tits? They're not what you would call huge but they were at one point. At one time they were okay. So what happened there?"
Yes, that's what Maher said to the man's face, 37 minutes into the interview, after some drinking.I think Maher wanted to destroy Pratt and had that planned. Either Pratt loses his temper and struggles to respond or he displays a Dukakis-like coldness or Franken-like jocularity that would turn women against him.
But no:Maher: "But so then she had breast reduction?"
Pratt: "Yes, she did.... So I don't think you respectfully would notice anything."
Maher: "I respectfully wouldn't comment...."
Pratt: "Well, you brought it up."
Touché. Maher blabbers — "Well, I just... I'm telling you..." — then jumps to his backup attack: "My history of you is like 2007 douchebag and then years of nothing?"
Anyway, I think Maher came in wanting to reduce Pratt to the nothing he believed he was — a washed up reality show star who's pissed that his own house burned down — but Pratt prevailed and I think by the end Maher either felt supportive or wanted to manufacture some last-minute evidence that he had backed the winner.
"It instead focused on 'the girl with a job,' which would guide coverage for decades. Its glossy pages contained fashion, beauty and sex tips but also coverage of abortion, sexual violence and women’s growing financial independence.... The magazine’s Women of the Year awards, introduced in 1990, became a cultural touchstone.... Those it recognized included Anita Hill... 'I don’t know very many magazines, neither Time nor Newsweek, that gave me that much interest,' Ms. Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University, said in an interview, adding that it had given her hope. It took a place like Glamour, she said, 'to understand what the moment could mean to women.' But like its peers, the magazine got pinched by the digital age...."
Back in the 1970s, before I went to law school, I worked in a job that required me to read a lot of magazines, and I read all the mainstream women's magazines every month, so I know what Glamour was back then: The hippie era is over. The no-makeup look requires makeup. Here's how to transform your office outfit into a nighttime getup that will wow onlookers. Oh, to have had a blog! But back then, you just made jokes with co-workers. I considered Glamour horrendously outdated, but who knew it would take 50 more years to die? And it's not even completely dead yet. It's still squeezing dollars out of Amazon Affiliates links, like a one-person self-publishing writing operation in a remote outpost in the Midwest.
"And so it did, with multiple brands, including Fendi, Miu Miu and Dior Men all showing sandals and socks on recent runways.... That this has happened at the same time that Gen Z has become increasingly vocal about its general discomfort with visible toes — the subject of multiple 'who let the dogs out' memes and Reddit threads — is probably not a coincidence. (Gen Z, after all, is the consumer group most brands are most eager to attract.) Whether that reaction is due, as some have posited, to a fear of fetishization — there are accounts on OnlyFans devoted solely to feet — or some other generational quirk, it’s a real thing."
Complicated! I'd like to say wear socks and sandals in whatever combination expresses the youness of you, but as between the people who have publicly overembraced a supposed rule against socks with sandals and the people who are squicked out by the sight of toes, I'd like to skew toward the toe-haters. But make a good sock choice. Wear socks that say: I know what I'm doing.
I'm getting my American news from The London Times this morning. For this post, I was charmed by the description of Fetterman as "the Democrats’ most unbiddable member in the upper chamber."
I think it's funny to call the Senate "the upper chamber," and I have to go talk with AI to get a handle on what "unbiddable" means. Once you see the root, "bid," as the "bid" in the phrase "do as you are bid," it's easy to see the meaning of "unbiddable." You can't tell Fetterman what to do.
I spend some time musing about the word "bid" — looked it up in the OED, read the very lengthy etymology, and scanned the quotes. Here's one from a 1984 book called "Country Voices," which is a collection of oral histories from rural England: "You didn't go to a funeral unless you were all in mourning, and you didn't go unless you were what they called ‘bid.' When anybody had died, there'd be a young man come round to bid you to the funeral..the joiner's lad."
Do you see why it would be the joiner's lad? And would you like that approach to funerals? You don't just decide for yourself should I go or not.
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