Levity Amongst the Layers

I have been trawling through the literature on overlapping hierarchies and have repeatedly come across puns and other forms of humour. One of the outstanding examples comes from Steve deRose.

This model, originally named HORSE (Hierarchy-Obfuscating Really Spiffy Encoding) may seem wooden at first, but soon it comes to look quite natural. With its spartan syntax it should be attractive; but its name seems less so, and clearly a Muse meant us to rename this model

CLIX

because of its heavy use of point events scattered throughout the text or data stream: click, clicks, clix.

The acronym in itself is funny but even more humorous given that it is part of an extended conceit playing with a name: "This approach, which after Troy [Griffiths] is called 'Trojan milestones'". And is redoubled by the allusive heading to this section: "Catching Hell'n Tagging".

From "Markup Overlap: A Review and a Horse" (2004)
http://conferences.idealliance.org/extreme/html/2004/DeRose01/EML2004DeRose01.html

And so for day 2377
16.06.2013

Distracting Disorders

Phoebe Wang has a hilarious piece in BookThug's The Unpublished City curated by Dionne Brand.

It's the tale of an invigilator and the student conditions requiring special accommodation: ASUD - Attention Surplus Underactivity Disorder; the student with a light-sensitive condition who only took classes in winter months; and the Syntactical Dyslexic.

A hint of envy creeps in and quickly creeps out.

Lily almost envied their specialness, their impairments, disorders and fixations that exempted them from the ordinary masses. If she'd had the choice, which of — but this was no way to think. If she wanted to emerge from today with all her faculties intact.

Through the humour shines the evident delight in diversity.

And so for day 2035
09.07.2012