I have a first name that while fairly run of the mill is not all that common and a surname that is very, very unusual. But there is someone with my exact name who also has a charge at Barneys because I am always being asked by the salespeople there if I am the UES version or the downtown model. It is very odd.

I used to work for a very small company that created educational programs for health care professionals, more or less focused around brief therapeutic interventions during consultation. After I left, they brought in a consultant with the same name as mine. Not a common name -- there are probably less than a hundred of us in the US. I bet the NIH was quite confused at how my resume had changed.

Some women's magazine a few years back had an article about an Egyptian prostitute. They used a pseudonym, which just happened to be my actual name. It would come up whenever friends tried to google me. They were very amused, to say the least.

I'm not sure I'd patronize a prostitute called Behemoth.

You shouldn't be patronizing to prostitutes, they're just working girls like the rest of us!

One of Paul's research assistants has the same first, middle, and last name AND SAME BIRTHDATE as a woman against whom someone has a protection order. So everytime the RA comes back into the country after being abroad, she is detained with the "suspicious characters." Gives her an interesting view of US Homeland Security.

The latest email offering to "icrease Your S''exual Desire and S''perm volume by 500%" ends with what appears to be a Dadaist verse:

lana provost dickinson eighteenth limitation dowel glutinous telephonic
chinese trianon wharton bureau shagging cancellate expositor deflater

My dad - academic astronomer - has the same name as an online astrologer (with a really bad toupee). Pretty bizarre culture clash. One of my friends suggested that a disaffected student of dad's might have taken both a very different career path and a pseudonym...

My sentiments exactly.

So what's this - James Joyce, maybe?

"pressed men"?

"dry like the measles"?

What about Be He Mouth?

At last. How and why I ended up where I am. Thank you, Cathy.

If it were a male prostitute, I would. Behemoth, Colossus, Gigantor, whatever.

Thats a fun game: designing male prostitue names. hmmm..
Pronto
Phalicus Bigus
Wang Fun
Probono
Stumpy McLicken

Your turn.

stumpy mclicken?

I've looked at clowns from both sides now....

From up......

And down....

That insane band of clowns brutalizing people in Seattle parks is pretty frightening. A crazed clown coming at people with a machete could give people nightmares.

A stocky, not very tall Scot crossed with a McDonalds sandwich cartoon character.

deleted by poster (for unintended snarkiness)

I'm going on a date tomorrow with a guy named Max Wood

Poo! I saw it and laughed out loud.
Can you just give me the phrase again? I intend to incorporate it in to my daily chat.

It could be worse...

Fly

On the N train today going home to Queens, not quite paying attention. Subway announcer:

I hear:
"This is a queens bound N train to ditmars blvd, next stop lexington avenue 59th street. Transfers are available to the poor..."

Of course what he really is saying:
"This is a queens bound N train to ditmars blvd, next stop lexington avenue 59th street. Transfers are available to the 4, 5, and 6 trains."

Reading the news is surreal. Calling home is surreal. I just found out some old friends of ours lost their home in Baalbeck, flattened. Luckily they were in Beirut. Their daughter is now stranded in Vienna, their son in Boston.

Behemoth, I hope all of your family and friends are okay. We have a large Lebanese community here in Ottawa and up to eight members of one local family were killed in the bombings, so with this Canadian connection the situation is very much in the news here. My thoughts and wishes go out to all.

Fly

Our waiter at a restaurant that is very proud of its gimmicky wine program: "And here is your bottle, the Chateau 2000"

the tail end of a long im conversation with an old friend:

For most of the past month, I have been working on a project with a couple academic friends of mine involving text categorization. The problem is basically this: given a bunch of example documents (for example email messages), and a document label for each document (for example "spam" or "not spam"), can you get a program to "learn" the system so that it can classify the "next" document that comes in (for example, can the program tell whether the email I just got is spam or not spam)?

When I started working on this, my yahoo email spam filter became completely hosed. All of the project emails went into my spam box. Many emails from long time friends were also misclassified.

A couple days ago, I sent an email to the managers of the project saying that I had finished the bulk of my work and I was wrapping it up. At that moment, the spam filter fixed itself, and is now working fine.

ooooweeeeoooo.

I passed a woman on the street whose ample bosom, barely covered by her tank top, was heavily tattooed.

That's gotta hurt.

Having to look at her, you mean.

And that's why indexes are written by real, live, thinking* people, not generated by computers. Have you talked with any indexers? They do that sort of thing all the time, you know.

*well, the good indexes are written by people who can think. So this doesn't include most cookbook indexes.

A new message appeared a few days ago on a billboard a few blocks south of us (midtown, Broadway), which we can see quite clearly from the apartment. White background, black type, no other marks/logos:

"Hi Steven,

Do I have your attention now?
I know all about her, you dirty, sneaky, immoral, unfaithful,
poorly-endowed slimeball. Everything's caught on tape.

Your (soon-to-be-ex) Wife,
Emily

p.s. I paid for this billboard from OUR joint bank account."

"Poorly-endowed slimeball." Ouch!

Well, hell hath no fury....

It said Emily, right? Whew!

oh you sooo funny

I think that's an ad for a CourtTv show, if I recall correctly. Too lazy to look up the article though.

So, I slip off my shoes under my desk to relax. After a while, I start blindly prodding around with my feet to slip them back on again.

Eh?

Three shoes?

No. Four.

Damn, there's that pair of shoes I've been looking for.

But - if I left that pair under my desk before, what did I walk out of the room wearing???

My deranged neighbor, the one I am afraid is going to burn down the building, has come up with a new way to litter the hallway (usually its little bits of paper creeping from under her door): the past couple of days there has been a small pile of feathers accumulating around her doorsill. I wonder if she is catching and eating pigeons. Wouldn't put it past her.

When I was in grade school in Thailand, we had to take off our shoes before going into any classroom. We put our shoes back on to walk along the corridor, and then took them off again to enter another room.

In haste I often ran from room to room without my shoes....the problem was by the end of the day I've been to so many rooms I usually lost track of where I left the shoes in the first place...

I went home shoeless more times than I'd like to remember...

And I recall reaching into my HS locker after gym class, pulling out a left and a right loafer, and putting them on to go home. Wasn't until I was on the subway that I noticed they were from two different pairs.

On a very cold day in February I had a job interview at a really big place you have all heard of. The HR person politely took my coat and put it into a closet and then led me down a set of stairs to the first interview; the second interview was in another place, and the third was in yet another. By the end of this, I had no idea where my coat was. I opened closets at random for a while (probably not a good idea given that my permission-to-be-here badge was in the coat) before finally getting in touch with the HR person and getting directions. I was on the wrong floor at that point.

Yes, for some things (like indices) you want a highly trained expert person who can be correct 100% of the time. But you don't want people reading your email first to decide if it's spam. And as you point out, that level of skill is a rare thing, and most people who have that skill have other options.

Also, there are cases where nobody knows the answer (one application of this code is "author attribution" which means given a text whose author is unknown, try to decide out who wrote it based on the statistical properties of the text) and many where there are important decisions made by people who behave very inconsistently (another application of similar code is assigning a grade to essay answers). So there are a lot of ways in which this kind of computer program can potentially be helpful. But for now it's basically research.

Just heard the same thing, on an ad for Rozerem

Fly

presumably this side effect is felt at times when the subject wants to be awake.

Ha. I think Lunesta is the sleeping pill where the commercial says: "You should be lying down when you take Lunesta." I always picture people taking the pill and just crumpling to the floor. Gotta get me some of that!

As I was searching the office today for White-out, one of the guys asked me if I knew who invented the stuff. I suprised him by giving him the correct answer. Thanks MF for getting all irrelevant the other week.

I saw Hollywood in Pasadena.

Yeah, but you were looking for Charlotte Rampling.

Walking (or swimming, rather) in Midtown yesterday, I spotted a woman with a large tote bag on her shoulder, made of ponyskin or cow hide. 'Cute,' I thought, until the pattern moved. Jack Russell terrier

And later in the day I began to think of just how many little dogs are carried around the city in bags by women. I'm talking about seeing at least a dozen every day. Eeesh. What is up? (rhetorical question)