cognoshanty

The first thing we'll need is some startup captital to buy Jorn's back catalog of snowclones.

fuggin wiki brits don't even realize the etymology is a clever pun on "sno-cone," a frozen snack known in italy as granitta and in South Philadelphia as Italian water-ice

I can never remember what a "snowclone" is supposed to be. Too clever for me. Plain-old "cliché" or "anti-cliché" I can deal with.

This is a good list. Anyone have some additional suggestions? In French maybe? I'm drawing a blank. Well, there's "X M'A TUER" (background). Others?

With millions in profits at stake, I added some extra features. Examples: "It's the X, stupid!" (not economy) and "It's the X, stupid!" (in the New York Times).

1. Find more snowclones.
2. ...
3. Profit!

Variations sur la vengeance:
La vengeance est un plat qui se mange X.
X est un plat qui se mange froid.
X est un plat qui se mange Y.
X est un Y qui se mange Z.

Snowclone is a sweet coinage, even though for some reason I am having trouble slotting it into my automatic lexicon. I am close to seconding Kai's "too clever", because it really feels that way when I'm trying to reconstruct the meaning of snowclone every time I've not had the concept in full conscious view for more than 15 minutes.

I love the idea. And it's always fun to experience oneself drawing such a massive blank, especially when there isn't something really big like a game of scrabble at stake, only millions.

Kai, the degenerescence of "X est un Y qui se V Z" had me laughing. (Hm. "La drogue est un fléau qui se répand vite". "X est un Y qui se V Z" is a step too far.)

I realize that I just used a snowclone on photoshanty, and this underlines a problem I have: I never know/remember the original use, unless it is drilled into me by a funny video with a catchy soundtrack. Hey, maybe that's where we get our millions. Somehow.

The "a * too far" snowclone led me to a religious aid worker's dilemma entitled "a fridge too far", which reminded me, the last I heard (Dec. 24) from Heeyoung, she was working at the Mother Teresa Foundation in Calcutta, ce qui m'en bouche toujours un coin.

In Japanese teen-speak, 全米が泣いた "zenbei ga naita" means "nothing important", though its literal meaning is "the entire United States wept".

Explanation: "When many U.S. films open in Japan, they are accompanied by posters claiming that American viewers were moved to tears. But the such films have little emotional impact on viewers here. So Japanese filmgoers have learned, apparently, to disregard such promotional claims as largely meaningless."

From a Tokyo police teen jargon list covered by プレイボーイ (via 毎日新聞 (via Japundit (via imomus (via rw)))).

Kai, this is all awesome... the money should be rolling in any day now... VCs go wild over snowclones... and gullible investors will think it has something to do with genetics...

your last comment brought tears to my eyes...

I like a good snowclone. I've felt clever coming upon original ones and have used them unabashedly in writing. Are there cases in which using them is acceptable, or should they be absolutely off limits?

Dear Confused, please give examples. I'm sure they're OK. Even plain old clichés are OK. It all depends on how you use them. I have a friend who uses clichés too much and insufficiently self-consciously, in my opinion. But often I don't mind them. And I love proverbs. Especially German ones:
The most stupid farmers harvest the biggest potatoes
The last shirt has no pockets
Eile macht Weile
Einmal ist keinmal
though I can never remember the best ones my grandmother used to come up with.
Wenn der Hahn kräht auf dem Mist, ändert sich das Wetter, oder es bleibt wie es ist.

I'm pleased to announce the (beta) release of the snowcloning bookmarklet:
   Internet Explorer: snowclonr
   Firefox/Mozilla: snowclonr
Drag one of the above links to your browser's toolbar, browse to some web page, select a phrase, and click on the bookmarklet: now you're snowcloning!

I used it on cognoshanty (a post by Erik, pour ne pas le citer) and found this. Not a snowclone, but suitably grand.

ooh fun! I did "some of the more *" and got lots of cute ones. Can you show what other people did slightly less geekily :)?

> less geekily

Je ne comprends pas.

It's perfect I tell you. Perfect! *slams door*

[later]

OK, I'll think about it.

(But it's XHTML Strict, what more do you want??)

Gosh, could I I the friend who uses clichés with insufficient self-consciousness? Self-consciousness has never been my forte. I am quaking in my Blahniks ! (one of my favorite snowcones).

The friends who worry that they might be the un-self-conscious ones can of course stop worrying. I was relieved when I realized that.

I suppose it's better to worry about not worrying than to worry about worrying

*head explodes*

But actually, I was thinking of Greg

So where are the investors and adventure capitalists?

i have a $32.17 microloan burning a hole in my pocket...

Would that pay for a Perl hosting service? You just know this is going to get slashdotted (I mean digged (I mean del.icio.us/populared))) any day now.

Matthew, I know we said we'd try to cut out Jorn from this sweet deal we've got going, but I wonder if we shouldn't at least keep him around as a consultant. Though if we do, someone needs to tell him he's got to stop writing specs as haiku and learn some UML.

Why not just bring him into the deal? After all, stock options flow as fast as we can make them up! We'll give him a cool title... say, "Drift and Accumulation Specialist" or "Snowclone Shoveller" or "Snowclone Geneticist" or "Snowclonosphere Analyst"... load him up with stock options... give him a desk in our converted loft space... 3. Profit!

Erik, you can start working on monitoring cell phone communications and analyze voice patterns for recognizing verbal snowclones--in this way, we can segment our market. Some snowclones are best said ("these aren't the X you're looking for"), whereas others are best written ("I, for one, welcome our new X overlords"). Verbal snowcloners are more likely to drive Ford Tauruses, while those who use snowclones in their writing are more likely to shop at Ikea. Get the picture? Forrester and Jupiter are already knocking at the door! Everyone wants a piece of the snowclone action! I see a possible SNL skit tie-in... and some serious tv commercial potential with this bad boy.

I just heard a guy on the radio say "we are going to die in a meme avalanche of our own making" and he wasn't even kidding.

It was this evening on Open Source, a breezily brainy show on WGBH radio. They were in partnership with edge.org and the theme was "your dangerous ideas", "ideas that are all the more dangerous because they might be true", you know, stuff like all the advances in math being done by computers and nobody really being able to say how theorems get proved, or a day where genetics technology is as widespread as computing is today and hobbyist gene splicers are a reality, or those weird feelings we get thinking about vacuum energy. ("Dude, it's a vacuum but it has energy." "Dude, you're freakin' me out" Human, meet vacuum. Vacuum, human.) They started out like "We'll probe the outer limits of contemporary discourse, the kind of stuff that goes on every day at Edge.org, a wild frontier where acceptable and uncaccetable overlap: eugenics, alien landings, racism, and intelligent design." Most of the time was spent talking about hobbyist gene splicing (Freeman Dyson's dangerous idea; they did have Freeman Dyson on the line and Steven Pinker in the studio), the advent of a completely computer-based mathematics (Steven Strogatz), the malaise of the "inexplicable" world (Lawrence Krauss), aliens not contacting us because they're playing Xbox too (Geoffrey Miller), the evolutionary hardiness of the religious meme (Jesse Bering), "we're drowning in our own culture" (Daniel Dennett), and "we all need a 24-hour timeout" (Leo Chalupa). I have to admit that I listened to almost the whole show, enjoying the doomsaying quite a bit. I don't know about that last idea, though. Sounds almost too dangerous even to me.

Anyway, that Daniel Dennett guy is really worried that overproduction of memes is going to kill us. "Our brains weren't built to process that many memes!"

A Dennett quote from his piece on edge.org:

Whether "we" are mammals or robots in the not so distant future, what will we know and what will we have forgotten forever, as our previously shared intentional objects recede in the churning wake of the great ship that floats on this sea and charges into the future propelled by jets of newly packaged information? What will happen to our cultural landmarks? Presumably our descendants will all still recognize a few reference points (the pyramids of Egypt, arithmetic, the Bible, Paris, Shakespeare, Einstein, Bach . . . ) but as wave after wave of novelty passes over them, what will they lose sight of? The Beatles are truly wonderful, but if their cultural immortality is to be purchased by the loss of such minor 20th century figures as Billie Holiday, Igor Stravinsky, and Georges Brassens [who he?], what will remain of our shared understanding?

The intergenerational mismatches that we all experience in macroscopic versions (great-grandpa's joke falls on deaf ears, because nobody else in the room knows that Nixon's wife was named "Pat") will presumably be multiplied to the point where much of the raw information that we have piled in our digital storehouses is simply incomprehensible to everyone–except that we will have created phalanxes of "smart" Rosetta-stones of one sort or another that can "translate" the alien material into something we (think maybe we) understand.

For linkage on all 'a them:
http://www.radioopensource.org/edgorg-what-is-your-dangerous-idea/

I will be predictable and take the positive-outlook side. Information is pressing upon us, but we still have all our classic refuges: things like sleep, sex and conversation which are hard to infoverload and then food, transit and many others which are still by custom and technological necessity devoid of input. But beyond that there is our taste, will, custom, moral energy call it what you will but it is the thing that makes us human and we know how much we can handle. It seems silly to worry that our doom will come from words or ideas. Our doom if it comes will be from raw physical forces: war, disease, environmental destruction, and such. So if we are to link daydreams and banner ads to species-extinction, I think we need to show demonstrably what ideas and patterns of discourse lead to one of those "horsemen" type things ...

To listen to the show, click here. It took all of my hyper-evolved huge brain to figure that out. Sadly the mp3 doesn't fit in my phone's tiny brain. Must upgrade.

Maybe that's what that proverbial other 90% of our brain is supposed to be doing--processing memes!

While certainly, there is a kind of numbness which can result from the constant pummelling of memage, there is also an excitation and increased connectivity between ideas which may not at first seem to relate. I think the "dangerous idea" of the hyperlink is similar to what happens when an alias on your desktop loses contact with its original file. You're left with an empty, useless, pointer. We're constantly struggling with this--bookmarks or old dead links leading nowhere... If all of our pointers stop pointing, if all our hyperlinks stop linking, if the network goes down... what are we left with?

I just heard MIT Media Lab alum Ebon Fisher give a lecture on his zoacodes. During the lecture, he had trouble with his laptop. After spending a few moments trying to "reconnect" and get things to work, while an entire audience looked on, he apologized and talked to this point. He said that we are all cyborgs. His laptop is a part of his brain. Without it, without the connections and links to information it facilitates, he begins to "feel dumb" and lose the ability to think properly. I've definitely had this happen. When you lose the linkage, you lose part of your brain. What we have created here in this meme pool is a collective mind. The Borg metaphor perhaps isn't as crazy as it first sounded in the early 90's.

Ray Kurzweil used to tell us we were living through the second Industrial Revolution. The first one hugely extended the physical capacities of our bodies. The second one is extending the capacities of our minds.

We usually rolled our eyes when Ray said things, because those things were often addressed to journalists or investors and usually involved predictions of billion-dollar markets in speech recognition within a few years. But I liked that idea.

Oooh, OneLook goes sublexical: snow*, *clone. Sno?: snob, snod, snog, snot. And conceptual. Hmm: cognoscenti is related to "spliff".

We've been language-logged. Time to buy a plane. I'd fancy an Airbus, just to be different and European and too cool for school.

(Not really related, but odd: a siteclone? I found the above link by searching for "kai.carver" on Google, and thereby hangs a tale, and a puzzle. The reason I was egosurfing was that I was looking for an English version of my CV. So I searched for "kai.carver nfactory". This gave results, not just on my web site, but on a version of my web site hosted by "duckserv.net", which didn't respond when I clicked on it. A search on "duckserv" confirmed the strangeness: my "site clone" is the fifth hit. Now, (of course?) duckserv.net doesn't exist anymore, doesn't show up on Google, and a whois search returns nothing. But I made an image capture of the odd Kai=duckserv Google result. This all gives me a slightly creepy feeling...)

(Hmm... Now duckserv.net is back in Google searches. Someone's f**ing with my mind...)

(And, OK, typing "whois duckserv.net" in a DOS command window returns this:

Registrant:
Linkcyber
161 davis street
Oakville, CT 06779
US

Domain name: DUCKSERV.NET

Administrative Contact:
Mauriello, Judith Ducks@smansa.org
161 davis street
Oakville, CT 06779
US
(860)-274-1011
Technical Contact:
Mauriello, Judith Ducks@smansa.org
161 davis street
Oakville, CT 06779
US
(860)-274-1011

Registration Service Provider:
Interland.com, droneteam@interland.com
1-877-467-8464
404-260-2477 (fax)
http://www.interland.com
This company may be contacted for domain login/passwords,
DNS/Nameserver changes, and general domain support questions.

Registrar of Record: TUCOWS, INC.
Record last updated on 01-Jun-2004.
Record expires on 01-Jun-2006.
Record created on 01-Jun-2004.

Domain servers in listed order:
A.NS.INTERLAND.NET 64.226.28.33
B.NS.INTERLAND.NET 69.0.145.33

Domain status: ACTIVE

What gives? Have I been spammed? clonefarmed? snowbugged? linkdroned? blowphished?)

(This is how it begins)