Inspired by this Language Log post discussing what Mark Liberman describes as “a nice negative specimen of the phrasal template ‘What happens in X stays in X‘” [see also this 2004 roundup from Tenser, said the Tensor], I’ve spent a little time searching the Metafilter archives for applications on the site of what I’ve found myself thinking of as “the Vegas snowclone”.

I came up with a healthy crop of results spanning from very late 2003 on up to the present, most of which fall roughly into one (or more, but I’m keeping it simple) of a few loose semantic and structural categories as seen below.

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Odd phrasing from Josh Marshall over at talkingpointsmemo:

What does seem clear to me is that Lieberman’s days in the Democratic caucus, or more specifically, his days with a committee chairmanship courtesy of the Democratic caucus are numbered in months.

It’s easy to see how it could happen — Marshall wanted to convey the scope of time explicitly (e.g. Lieberman is in trouble come Election Day or thereabouts), and “Your months are numbered” isn’t any good — but adding units on to the end of the fixed phrase just doesn’t work for me.

Or it does work for me in a making-me-chuckle sort of way, I guess.

I’ve just finished up the initial version of a new project:

Garkov — Garfield + Markov chains.

It’s a probability driven strip generator that builds Markov tables from transcripts of existing strips and then synthesizes and renders novel text as a new strip. The results are sometimes pretty apt and sometimes deeply weird, and I’m pretty happy with it so far.

Examples: Speak - The suspense - Crazy about you

Right now it’s working from about 500 transcribed strips — just a fraction of the 10,000 that have been published by Jim Davis over the last thirty years — and is using nine different background strips. Both of those numbers will likely grow as I have the chance to do more transcribing and strip-preperation.

In principle, this can be applied just as well to other comic strips. In practice, the code should make it reasonably easy to do so as well, so I hope to at least test another strip sometime in the not too distant future.

[Update 6/9/08 - response to Garkov has been pretty great, enough so that I ended rewriting the db code underneath it on Saturday after a bunch of traffic crushed the will out of my original rinky-dink Perl DBM solution.

Also, I update the link up there to actually go to the site. Sheesh. Sorry about that.]

I don’t want to alarm anyone, but there are reports coming in from the Internet that I may, in fact, be a nerd.

I–I know. It’s shocking. Scandalous. This is a difficult time for all of us. But I think we can work through it.

One photograph a day for eighteen years.

Via metafilter.

Of the three folks currently in the US Presidential Primary race, none have (at the moment) a surname that has a citation in the Oxford English Dictionary.  The online OED is ever helpful though, and suggests a possible near-match candidate when a specific lookup fails, and so we get this list:

Obama — obambulate: intr. To walk about; to wander here and there.
Clinton — clintonite: a variety (or a synonym) of SEYBERTITE.
McCain — McCarthyism: …oof.

Quick pointer to another language question on Ask Metafilter, this one from use whatzit.  The meat:

For example, “Yes, I am” is okay. “Yes, I’m” is not. I haven’t been able to find any good logic for this case or that works for the different contractions in general (”don’t” can also stand alone, “I’d” and “I’ve” cannot).

Interesting question about grandpaternal nicknames on Ask Metafilter today, from user 23skidoo:

Do you call your grandfather Bumpy?

How common is the title “Bumpy” for a grandfather? Like “Grampa Joe” or “Peepaw Frank”… do you say/understand the usage “Bumpy Jackson” for a grandfather? If so, where did you grow up?

Responses so far have folks who’ve never heard of it (I’m in that camp), folks who have, and folks who know some similar variation.  I’ve done a little googling that suggests that (1) it’s not something restricted to some chance acquaintences of 23skidoo, and (2) there are probably a lot of other variations on this theme, e.g. “bumpa”.

I think maybe I should get into the evangelism biz.

New project: blogging, with my wife, every single episode of The X-Files, start to finish.

Check it out: Mulder’s Big Adventure.

Recaps and commentary and obsessive thematic observations.  Because, let’s be honest, you like the X-Files.  Or perhaps you dislike the X-Files.  The point is you’ve seen the X-Files, and you have an opinion about it, and it’s time to relive some of those unspecified positive or negative feelings.

Plus we have these cute little icons.  Seriously, go there now.