FRONT END, BACK END, HIGH LEVEL, LOW LEVEL Part II

by James Lincoln Warren

Yesterday I explained the computer programming concepts spelled out in the title, but to before moving on, allow me to recapitulate. The front end of a computer application is the part that interfaces with the user of the device the application runs on, and the back end is the part that does the necessary computing to perform the function for which the application is intended. A high level computer language is one that resembles English and can be read and understood by a human being, and a low level language comprises mathematical binary strings, or machine language, comprehensible only to a computer.

And I furthermore claimed I could apply these ideas to story telling.

How? Glad you asked, he said, reaching into his toolbox and pulling out his Metaphor Applicator.

I can hear the Gentle Reader purse his lips, which if you think about it, means that the Gentle Reader must somehow be pursing his lips extremely loudly, and see the slight shake of the head indicating disappointment. Too obvious by half—is that all you got?, he may be asking.

Well, no. Although there’s nothing wrong with pulling out a Metaphor Applicator. Not to be too self-referential, but the Metaphor Applicator is, after all, itself a metaphor. It is also a front end tool. Metaphors are rhetorical devices. Rhetoric, you may recall, is the art of persuasion, and by extension, of eloquent expression. It is the means whereby a writer drives home the impression he is trying to make, but it isn’t semantically the same thing as that impression. It’s the the front end of expression, the interface between the reader and the meaning. Consider the following excerpt:

A lot of the streets in Pacific Palisades are as tangled as a can of bait as they climb and switch back on themselves up the hills north of the Pacific Coast Highway.

—“Heat of the Moment” by JLW, EQMM June 2007

In case you don’t know, Pacific Palisades is a rather exclusive neighborhood here in L.A., situated on the coast between Santa Monica and Malibu. The beach is flat until it reaches the Pacific Coast Highway (California State Route 1), where it gives way to steep hills and the Santa Monica Mountains. Houses and apartment complexes are terraced on these hills, and the streets are filled with hairpin curves. The obvious metaphor I used to describe those streets is the can of bait. But I also used another rhetorical device, known as synecdoche (pr. suh-NECK-duh-key), at the same time.

Now a can of bait cannot be actually tangled. How do you tangle a can? Obviously, the stuff that’s all tangled up are the worms inside the can. Synecdoche is defined as “a figure by which a more comprehensive term is used for a less comprehensive or vice versâ; as whole for part or part for whole” (OED). People use it all the time without even thinking about it; for example, when discussing foreign policy, you might say “America” when you’re talking about only the government of the United States, rather than about the whole huge physical place called the U.S. on maps and all the people, buildings, roads, and wildlife it contains.

The beauty of a rhetorical device is that it creates an image much more evocatively than a bald description can. The semantic back end of the narrative is simply the fact that the streets in the Palisades are winding, but the back end called up in the reader is the understanding that the roads are confusing and hard to navigate, like a coiled bolus of worms, and since this is a mystery story, that assists the theme of trying to make plain sense out of a set of convoluted circumstances.

Here’s what a more straightforward description looks like:

A lot of the streets in Pacific Palisades switch back on themselves as they climb up the hills north of the Pacific Coast Highway, and it’s easy to get lost driving on them.

It does the expository job well enough, but it’s dry and factual, not providing any emotional context at all. It’s part of an essay, not a story.

So the front end, the interface, is how the story gets told. There are two back ends on either side of it: the narrative back end, which can be regarded as a summary of story’s plot, and the comprehensive back end, which is what the reader gets out of the story.

Fine. What about high level and low level? Programmers describe low level as being close to the hardware. (One of the reasons I like PCs better than Macs, although I admit that Macs are probably better designed computers, is that it’s easier to do low level tasks on a PC than it is on a Macintosh—you can always open a command line prompt on a PC to see how its several parts are working.) The corresponding hardware in a human being is emotional response.

A good story must have a vicarious effect to work. Otherwise, what you have is a mere account. Love stories have to make the reader feel what it is like to be in love to be worth reading; likewise, the best way to show that a character is scared is to scare the reader while you’re at it.

This is easier to illustrate with a first person narrative than with a third person POV, because in the first person, the narrator is relating direct experiences, although a good writer can do it in any POV.

The climax of “Heat of the Moment” takes place deep in the Grand Canyon. Private eye Carmine Ferrari of Cal Ops has miscalculated the effect of the heat as he tracks the murderers.

        I followed them along the thin, winding trail leading down into the baking vertical wilderness, careful to remain just hidden. Once I missed my footing and went down like a blubber boy doing a belly flop in a community swimming pool. Luckily I wasn’t near the precipice, but I waited for several minutes before picking myself up, in case they had heard me, and when I did stand up, I felt a surge of sickening vertigo that nearly sent me down again. I squatted until I felt better, and reached for another bottle of water.
       Somehow I’d lost track of how much I’d drunk. The last bottle was only about one third full. I polished it off. What time was it? My watch wouldn’t stay in focus, but I finally realized it was about 2:30 PM.
       I had to hurry to pick up their trail. I couldn’t believe the temperature. Engine blocks don’t get that hot.
       I was mentally drifting, putting one foot in front of the other, when I nearly knocked Tarkauskas over the edge.
       He recovered quicker than I did. He stared at me, his face hard with surprise, and he shouted, “Amber! Trouble!”
       I pulled out my gun and leveled it at his chest.
       He smirked. “The Sig Sauer, I see.”
       “It’s a Beretta, cacasenno1,” I said. It was hard to hold the gun steady. “I told you I was Italian.”
       Amber Gerhardt somehow appeared beside him. I switched my aim point to her.
       “Look at him,” she said. Her voice irritated me. It was high and nasal. She laughed, a bubbling schoolgirl giggle, and it made me even angrier. My head was buzzing.
       “Just let him drop,” she said.
       “Amber, we can’t,” Tarkauskas said. “Not twice. We’ll get caught.”
       “All we have to do is make sure that this body is never found,” she said. “It was only dumb luck that somebody found the kike.”
       I dropped to one knee. It wasn’t on purpose.

If you don’t feel your strength sapping along with Carmine’s, then I didn’t do my job.

The high level part is the verbal description of Carmine’s predicament, which if done effectively, should translate into the Gentle Reader’s low level imagining of what it’s like to succumb to heat exhaustion. The description offers a set of instructions to the reader’s body on what to feel. The reader takes the English of the brain and transforms it into the machine language of the body.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point. The only thing left to be said is that if you think I’ve been comparing a human being to a computer, you are only partly right. The truth is that a computer’s design is defined less by its mathematical underpinnings than it is by how human beings use it—it has front and back ends and high and low levels because it was designed to imitate, or at least accommodate, us. Otherwise it’s just a very expensive abacus.

It’s always about the reader, after all.

1. cacasenno: scatological Italian slang for “smartass”. —JLW [↩]

FRONT END, BACK END, HIGH LEVEL, LOW LEVEL Part I

by James Lincoln Warren

I know you’re disappointed to see me instead of Leigh, but his computer problems are still so severe he couldn’t be with us today. And if Leigh, who was a star at IBM, has computer problems, you know that they’re pretty serious. So in his honor, I’m going to write about computers. Today is all geek speak, but it’s exposition—to understand how any of this has any bearing on writing short crime fiction, you’ll have to tune in tomorrow. (I figured since I’m doing two columns back to back this week, I might as well combine them as a two-parter. )

I’m not a complete ignoramus in computer science myself. When I re-entered civilian life back in the 80s, I naturally looked for a job in the defense industry, since it was what I knew. I had several interviews, and they all told me that they loved me, BUT—“You’re not an engineer.”

“I know I’m not an engineer,” I’d reply. “I’m not interviewing for an engineering job.”

“Yes, but you’re not an engineer. We’re looking for an engineer.”

I never did get a job in the defense industry, but looking for one motivated me to go back to school and study something technical to beef up my résumé. So I got a certificate through UCLA Extension in Computer Science. This is essentially the same curriculum as a B.S. in Computer Science at UCLA, but without the electives. That was twenty years ago, and Computer Science has come a long way in two decades, but trust me—the fundamentals and concepts are still the same. Believe it or not, all computers are computationally equivalent. The power of a computer has nothing to do with what it actually does, but rather how fast it can do it, as well as how much data it can store.

The other night I was at a social event, and at the same dinner table, two men were getting to know each other. One of the inevitable questions is such circumstances is, “And what do you do for a living?”

In this case, the answer was, “I’m in the I.T. department of a big financial services company.”

“Really? What do you do?”

“I design our web applications—but I’m at the front end, and there are only three of us. The guys at the back end are in a different department.”

Now there’s a term I hadn’t heard in a long time. In Computerese, the term front end usually refers to having to do with the user interface—it’s the part of a program that acts as a translator between the human and the machine. This is not exactly the same thing as standard IO or graphical interfaces, but it includes them. Back end is where the actual work gets done, the invisible part of the program. From a software engineer’s point of view, that’s a gross over-simplification of the implications of these terms, but they’ll do for now.

For decades, well-written computer programs have always been modular. In the early days, this was called structural programming, and meant that essential blocks of code were arranged in the most logical and efficient manner to execute the program. Contemporary programming languages generally enforce structural programing, like C and its variants C++ and C#, whereas very early languages, like FORTRAN, COBOL, and BASIC, didn’t. Still, even if you were struggling with FORTRAN, it was easier if you took a structural approach.

The good habits required by structural programming are still alive and well, but as programming languages became more powerful, the modules and the organization thereof evolved. Most programs and languages, for example, make use of predefined bundled libraries of functions, which means that every time you want to perform a common task, say, like resizing a window on the screen, the programmer doesn’t have to write the code from scratch to make it possible when you need it—he only makes a call to the library. Likewise, object-oriented languages have modules that have “inheritance”—you can define “objects” of data or functions or both combined (which is how it’s usually understood), and use such objects to create offspring objects for particular uses. This greatly simplifies complex tasks, such as generating a graphical user interface.

Some modules are front end (e.g., generating windows) and some are back end (e.g., building a data base). Sometimes the front end is specific to an operating system and the back end is general—an example of this is your browser. The internet mostly runs (although not exclusively by any means) using something called the Xenix Standard Operating Environment, but your home computer probably runs on Windows, the current Mac OS, or Linux. If you have a Windows-based browser, it will not run on a Macintosh, but the World Wide Web (being the back end) it’s used to communicate with is the same for both Mac and PC. In other instances, the front end is general and the back end is specific to a particular computer architecture, as with, for example, the original object-oriented language/OS, SmallTalk, which looks and acts exactly the same on every machine using it, but the insides of which have to be tailored for the specific machine it’s running on.

The critical thing is that the front end and the back end have to be able to talk to each other for the program to work.

But all this talk of languages reminds me of another antipodal pairing in computer science, this one specific to language: high level and low level. High level means writing in an English-like computer language (like C or Pascal). This is essentially a very strict form of shorthand. A human programmer reading it will (mostly) understand it. Low level, on the other hand, means zeroes and ones—what programmers call machine language, what the computer is actually using to compute, and is complete gibberish to most humans. (There are also mid-level languages called assemblers, which fall in between, but let’s not get into that here.) A high level language is therefore similar to the front end, and a low level language to the back end.

Got that?

Now think about these things if you have a few moments of leisure before tomorrow, because that’s when I’m going to explore how these concepts relate to telling stories.

WHAT’S THAT BOY SAYIN’?

by John M. Floyd

It’s easy sometimes to tell whether someone is from the South. And no, it has nothing to do with pickup trucks or chitlins or RC Colas. I’m talking about speech.

Some of the tipoffs are obvious. When a guy tells you he tikes a brike beside the like, or staahted to drive his caah to the baah, you know he’s not from Podunk Springs, Alabama. But there are a few other hints, too, that your new neighbor might be from somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon.

One of them is taking a word like rule or school or pool or tool and making it into two syllables. As an example, listen carefully to the way people say the word “cool.” If they pronounce it KOO-wull (two separate syllables) you can bet the ranch and the cattle that they’re not from good old Dixie. Native southerners usually say cool using only one syllable. As if they’re saying “koo” and then, as an afterthought, sticking an “l” onto the end.

Another clue is the way a person pronounces a word like dog or log or hog. Southern folks don’t say it with an “ah” sound, as in “jog.” It comes out sounding more like “aw,” as in “Paul”: dawg, lawg, hawg. It’s not exaggerated quite that much, but it’s definitely more of an “aw” than an “ah.” This is ironic if you consider that most movie actors are instructed to add an “ah” sound to many words in order to sound more southern, like “Wheah is my beeah?” or “Come ovah heah and eat youah coahnbread.” The truth is, folks in the South don’t speak that way and have never spoken that way. It pains me that one of the worst offenders was Tommy Kirk in Old Yeller. I remember thinking, when I saw that movie as a kid, Why’s that boy talking like that?

Another dead giveaway is the pronunciation of a word like center or winter or hunter. Folks from the north usually make the definite hard “t” sound in the middle (which is proper, probably) when saying those words: sin-ter, win-ter, hun-ter. Southerners usually leave that out, and make the word sound like sinner or winner or hunner. A lieutenant from Brooklyn who worked with me in the Air Force (George Valentino, if you’re reading this, I hope you’re a retired general now) was always talking about our compu-ta cen-ta at the base. To me it was always just the computer sinner. Not a big deal, but a sure indicator that Lt. Valentino had probably never seen a cotton boll except on TV at the end of football season.

Possibly the most foolproof way of knowing that a person (in this case, a writer or screenwriter) isn’t from the South is the mistake often made in movies and stories and novels, when an actor or character who’s supposed to be southern looks at another person and says “y’all.” Most southerners don’t do that, at least the ones I’ve known. “Y’all” is used only to address two or more people. “How y’all doing?” is fine if you’re talking to a group — but the same question sounds wrong if you’re speaking only to your cousin or the mailman or the lady standing behind you in the checkout line. So when the plantation owner says to the lovely Miss Violet, “Y’all sho do look pretty today,” you can only hope that several of her sisters are visible to him as well, somewhere off-screen. Otherwise, Paw, that guy ain’t who he says he is.

One thing that’s always puzzled and amused me is that many folks not from the South think all of us down here speak with a drawl. Some of us do; my grandfather talked in the same easy, drawn-out, slow-as-molasses way that Morgan Freeman and Jessica Tandy did in Driving Miss Daisy. But most southerners don’t speak every word slowly and lazily. Most of us talk pretty darn fast, and that always seems to surprise new neighbors who’ve moved here from elsewhere. It’s the words themselves that sound different, not the speed with which they’re spoken.

In closing, here’s a poem on the subject, that I published in a magazine called Wordplay a few years ago. It’s called “A Way (Down South) With Words”:

Where I live, “tea” means iced tea (the sweeter the better),
We don’t say “bush” beans, we say “bunch,”
And the evening meal isn’t dinner, it’s supper —
To me, the word “dinner” means lunch.

And when actors in films try to copy our lingo,
A southerner always can tell;
It’s the easiest accent to imitate wrong
And the hardest to imitate well.

By the way, y’all help yourselves to Moon Pies before you leave . . .

Whoops, almost forgot: Here are some more results from the movie-quote quiz of two weeks ago. (In #26, imagine the words being spoken with a southern/Texan accent, which is easy if you consider who’s saying it.)

21. What are you looking at? / I was just wondering where you hide your firearm. Don’t tell me, let me guess.
IN THE LINE OF FIRE (Rene Russo, in an evening gown / Clint Eastwood)

22. Moneypenny, what would I do without you? / My problem is, you never do anything with me.
ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE (George Lazenby / Lois Maxwell)

23. Roger O. Thornhill. What does the O stand for? / Nothing.
NORTH BY NORTHWEST (Eva Marie Saint / Cary Grant)

24. Whenever we needed money, we’d rob the airport. To us, it was better than Citibank.
GOODFELLAS (Ray Liotta, narrating)

25. How’d you do it? / Do what? / Manage to give a woman flowers and be President at the same time. / Well, it turns out I have a rose garden.
THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT (Annette Bening / Michael Douglas / Bening / Douglas)

26. What in the wide, wide, world of sports is goin’ on here?
BLAZING SADDLES (Slim Pickens, to his singing, dancing railroad work crew)

27. I coulda been a contender.
ON THE WATERFRONT (Brando, to Rod Steiger)

28. When I was nineteen, I did a guy in Laos with a rifle shot at a thousand yards in high wind.
LETHAL WEAPON (Mel Gibson, to Danny Glover)

29. How would you feel about another year of high school? Under my close personal supervision.
FERRIS BUELLER’S DAY OFF (Principal Jeffrey Jones, to Matthew Broderick)

30. You go in, find the President, bring him out in less than 24 hours, and you’re a free man.
ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK (Lee Van Cleef, to Kurt Russell)

31. I have a new play. / What’s it called? / Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter.
SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (Joseph Fiennes / Rupert Everett / Fiennes)

32. Here are your names: Mr. Brown, Mr. White, Mr. Blond, Mr. Blue, Mr. Orange, and Mr. Pink.
RESERVOIR DOGS (Lawrence Tierney, to the group)

33. You got ten seconds to run like hell. Then dynamite, not faith, will move that mountain into this pass.
THE PROFESSIONALS (Burt Lancaster, to Robert Ryan)

34. I should probably tell you that I’m taking the bus because I had my driver’s license revoked. / What For? / Speeding.
SPEED (Sandra Bullock, while driving / Keanu Reeves / Bullock)

35. Don’t start flirting with me — I’m not one of your plantation beaus.
GONE WITH THE WIND (Clark Gable, to Vivian Leigh)

36. The report read “Routine retirement of a replicant.” That didn’t make me feel any better about shooting a woman in the back.
BLADE RUNNER (Harrison Ford, narrating)

37. Why, you speak treason! / Fluently.
THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD (Olivia DeHavilland / Errol Flynn)

38. I keep telling you, this isn’t “a few birds”! These are gulls, crows, swifts, . . .
THE BIRDS (Tippi Hedren, to local fisherman)

39. Please welcome, the very excellent barbarian . . . Mr. Genghis Khan!
BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (Keanu Reeves, to the assembled students)

40. Here we are, millions of miles from earth, and we can still send out for pizza.
CAPRICORN ONE (Sam Waterston, to the other astronauts who faked the launch)

(NOTE: The final group of answers will be featured in next week’s column.)

READING SAM CLEMENS

by Steven Steinbock

At the beginning of summer Sam, my youngest son, was very happy to put all his schoolwork aside. He also declared, after finishing Lawrence Block’s The Burglar Who Liked to Quote Kipling, that he was finished reading until school started up again in the fall.

“What’s the matter? You didn’t like the book?”

“No, Dad. It was great. But it’s summer, get it? No books. Freedom.”

“No way,” I told him.

(This opposition to summer reading is restricted to my younger son. Nate, ready to enter his senior year of high school, is a pretty voracious reader. This summer it’s been Neal Stephenson, John Irving, and Yukio Mishima).

“Sam, you ever read Tom Sawyer?” I asked, abbreviating the title which I rarely do.

“No.”

“Son,” I said, handing him my old illustrated copy. “This is the greatest American novel of all time. Some people prefer Huck Finn, but for style, adventure, and the pure joy of reading, this is my favorite.”

“Okay.”

Flash forward. Late July. I ask Sam what he thinks of The Adventures of Tom Sawyeer, and he shrugs his shoulders. “I’ve only read three chapters. I just don’t understand the language.”

I set my hand on his shoulder, and put on my best Mississippi riverboat voice, and say, “Son, I’d be obliged if you’d allow me the privilege of reading to you tonight.”

He protested that he was thirteen, not seven. But I could see he kind of liked the idea.

Now, I’m no Hal Holbrook. Nor am I John Floyd. But I did my best getting inside the voice of Samuel Clemens, and I think I did an admirable job. From the questions, smiles, and frequent bursts of laughter, I can tell that the Twenty-First Century Sam Steinbock is fully engaged with the Nineteenth Century Sam Clemens. We’ve paused a number of times to discuss the authors use of irony and satire, as well as his keen portrayal of the innocence of youth. The mildly literate dialogue between Tom and his friends, juxtaposed with Twain’s erudite narrative, has brought up many a cackle. We’ve also had the chance to talk about how – even though many a modern reader misread his portrayal of blacks and his use of the N-word – Mark Twain had a deep understanding of race and racism and may indeed have been a more progressive thinker than the average Twenty-first Century politician or schoolteacher, whatever the color of their skin.

I’m having a fun time revisiting the fictional St. Petersburg. I hope Sam continues to let me tag along.

IT’S POISON, I TELL YA

by Deborah Elliott-Upton

An article in the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, newspaper said the police suspected their agency’s drug dog had been poisoned. An officer noticed the dog had been lethargic, so they took him to a Bartlesville veterinarian and a Tulsa animal clinic, both of whom diagnosed advanced kidney failure. The dog was put down and an autopsy performed, showing an “unacceptable amount of antifreeze” in the dog’s system. My question is: How much antifreeze is acceptable in a dog’s system, anyway?

Obviously, antifreeze is poisonous and therefore a weapon that could be used in a crime story. I haven’t tried it, but the experts tell me ethylene glycol antifreeze is sweet to the taste. I wondered why something hasn’t been added to the mix to make it less palatable to an animal (or a human) and therefore less available as an accidental or deliberate cause of death. Again, the expert to the rescue advised denatonium, the most embittering compound agent known, could be added to discourage accidental or deliberate poisonings.

Denatonium is already used in denatured alcohol, nail biting preventatives, animal repellents, some liquid soaps and shampoos. It could have saved a few animals’ lives—and perhaps a few humans as well, although I can’t imagine a human’s ingestion of antifreeze being an accident.

Of course, a criminal wouldn’t consider adding this safety measure or he’d defeat his purpose. But then, if the chemical shows up in an autopsy, wouldn’t he be less inclined to use antifreeze as a poison at all? Apparently not, as deaths due to antifreeze poisoning in humans is a reality, although rare.

Except there are so many really stupid people out there, I feel I need to state the facts even though dumb people don’t read Criminal Brief—or go against the law—but if they did, I’m here to announce: there will be a trail and it will lead back to you, so don’t use antifreeze as a weapon.

The Carlson Company, LLC web site says “Poisoning is the act of murder committed in slow motion.”

The profile of a typical criminal who poisons is a Caucasian male with an average to above average intelligence who is an underachiever. He is not athletic and a loner. A careful planner, he is meticulous and dislikes confrontation. Do you know someone like this? If so, you might invest in a taste-tester, or better yet, don’t dine with him and never leave him alone with your pet.

NET LOSS

by Rob Lopresti

You may consider this a public service announcement. It has come to my attention that some of you are users of that dubious device known as the World Wide Web. It is my sad duty to inform you that some of the information found thereon is not reliable.

(For example, it is not my duty and I ain’t sad about it, but that’s not the point.)

I have pointed out in the past that even printed reference books can be sources of dubious data, but today we are going to pick on the Web, specifically for its remarkable and flourishing assortment of hoaxes.

The first one I remember encountering, and still one of my favorites, was the National Texture Administration. This webpage earnestly declared the NTA to be the branch of the U.S. Department of the Interior with responsibility for texturing the United States so that the surfaces were not all flat and smooth.

The page showed maps indicating how much of the country had been texturized in each decade, and included photos by Ansel Adams showing (it claimed) the process of texturizing Yosemite National Park.

It was insane and I loved it. Then one day it vanished, so completely and suddenly that I can only assume that some government lawyers had A Little Talk with the creator about unauthorized use of the Interior Department seal. Or maybe the lawyers worked for Ansel Adams’ family?

On beyond texture

Ah well. The NTA has been decommissioned but there are many other weird and wonderful sites out there. Many of the ones listed below were identified in this article by my friend, brother librarian, and fellow mystery writer Paul Piper.

You might want to look at these pages without reading my comments first, to see if you can spot the problem. Or not. Enjoy.

Mankato, Minnesota. This may be the most famous hoax blog. Come to Mankato and see the Great Pyramids! Visit the submarine docks! Read the outraged letter from the genuine Mankato Chamber of Commerce!

A Concise Grammar of Feorran I sometimes show this to classes of college students who have trouble figuring out why I have a problem with this detailed and scholarly examination of the language of the noble people of . . . Antarctica.

Clones-R-Us. They are the original. Accept no, uh, substitutes.

Save the Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus. Please help us rescue this endangered species. Very endangered. I have lived in the northwest for decades and I can’t even remember the last time I saw an octopus in a tree.

California’s Velcro Crop Under Pressure. Urgent agricultural/fashion news.

Origami boulders. Yes, it’s wadded up paper. You got a problem with that? Be sure to read the letters from baffled viewers.

World Trade Organization is not who runs this site.

Boilerplate. The touching story of a Victorian robot. This website fooled comic actor Chris Elliot who included Boilerplate in his comic novel about nineteenth century England. (He says he thought BP was a Victorian hoax.)

Luddite Industries. Replace that tacky plastic box with a nice wooden computer.

Kresky TV. One has to wonder about the dedication (and priorities) of fans who create loving websites saluting long-gone TV shows, with bios of each actor and detailed guides to each episode. Now imagine doing that for a series that never existed. Something is being satirized here but I’m not sure if it is fansites, or TV, or people who read TV fansites. As Brian McDonough said about the project to convert the works of Shakespeare back into “the original Klingon,” “ . . . on the evolutionary scale of having too much time on one’s hands, you and I are mere plankton.”

Dihydrogen Monoxide Research Division. I show this to ecology students because it makes an important point: everything on this page is true. Dihydrogen Monoxide (DHMO) is found in tumors and superfund sites. Breathing in even a small amount can kill you. It is an element of acid rain and greenhouse gases. You may be more familiar with this menace by its chemical formula: H₂O.

SOLVING A PICTORIAL MYSTERY

Not all mysteries involve crimes. The painting below, called “The Linder Gallery”, attracted the attention of Michael John Gorman, curator of Trinity College’s Science Gallery in Dublin. He has written a book on it and created a website exploring it that you may peruse here.

He provides a cursory explanation of the various clues in the painting in the video posted below the painting.