My lolcat version of Oscar the "psychic" nursing home cat. Image from the Daily Mail article.

Yeah, so i can has cheezburger and hobotopia beat me to the LOLcat-ifying punch. I have a day job people! This might shock you, but kenspeckle here isn't raking in $4,000 per week per ad like your favorite LOLcat fix is.

Anyway, by now we've all heard of Oscar, the nursing home cat featured in The New England Journal of Medicine for his tendency to curl up with patients a few hours before their death with an uncanny consistency [via drudge, boing boing].

The scientific explanation is that cats and other animals are more in tune than humans with the chemical and hormonal ebbs and flows of life through their sense of smell. Which explains *how* Oscar might know of patients' imminent death, but "what the cat might get out of it" still puzzles the veterinarian interviewed in the Daily Mail article (quoted right above the "official witch" of Salem, MA).

I like to think that some cats just have an instinct to comfort at these mysterious biochemical signs of distress, and I have a hilarious, albeit highly personally embarassing story, behind that belief.

Sometime in middle school, my best friend (proud owner of two cats) had a slumber party for her birthday at which we watched a handful of movies rented by her mother for the occasion. At this point I still wasn't really allowed to watch television in my own home, so I was pretty unaccustomed to the pretend violence and special effects most kids are completely inured to at that age. Knowing this, my friend and her mother had purposefully chosen movies from the comedy section.

Among them was License to Drive, which is officially supposed to be a "teen comedy/adventure," but for some reason a few of the chase scenes evoked pure terror in my ultra-innocent psyche. Right before I (*cringe*) started crying, one of my friend's cats, usually aloof like Oscar, jumped directly into my lap and started purring his little heart out.

It's one of the few things I remember from middle school at all.

If you're trying to open a new business in NYC, you've pretty much spent all your startup capital on your lease, so you'd better plan to do your marketing up low-budge style. For inspiration on how to combine low-budget local marketing and utter hilarity sure to pique your demographic's interest (provided they have, you know, a sense of humor and an interest in the contradictory), observe the brilliant campaign of a new restaurant opening in my neighborhood.

I've noticed some folks working in the storefront on the northeast corner of 100th Street and Lexington Avenue over the past few weeks without much curiosity, until last week, when they raised the hilarious banner pictured above, reading "WWW.NAMEOURPLACE.COM WIN $1,000."

But I didn't actually remember to check out NAMEOURPLACE.COM (despite the gratuitous caps lock) until I got the intriguing and curiously designed postcard pictured at right a few days later. In case you're a human who can't read the image, it says:

!!NAME OUR PLACE!!

A newborn burger bar & vegetarian place is opening on the corner of 100th St. & Lexington Ave. We want you to come up with the name and we will give you $1,000 Dollars.

WWW.NAMEOURPLACE.COM

Well. A burger bar and a vegetarian place, all in one restaurant! I had to see what that was about, so I strolled on over to nameourplace.com to find out more. Alas, aside from the same winning color scheme you see on the postcard, delightful money clip art, and the headline "HOLY HAMBURGER!" the website provides only more unanswered questions.

Do the restaurant's owners equate being "A new Burger Place and eco-friendly brand" with being vegetarian? Do they really think an identity that's "a high concept over cliché" can be had for a measly $1K? What is a "Burger Continental"? Burgers for breakfast? And who chose the Winnie-the-Pooh capitalization style as part of this high concept brand?

Anyway, I must say that for all my cheekiness, this marketing campaign has me hooked. I'm definitely going to check this place out when it opens—that is, if they at least offer veggie burgers as part of their "eco-friendly brand." I mean, how awesome does this dining experience sound:

Enjoy the experience of old fashion style, the warm colors and the lovely music in spanish harlem. You can sit on the bar and refresh yourself with a pint of beer while watching your burgers grilling or just sit in a table and sip your milk shake away. Try to be as creative as you can.

I mean, except for that last sentence. I think they're referring to the naming contest there, not your milkshake-sippin' style.

If you thought my OuLiPo love was a little kooky, just wait 'till you check out OuMyPo [thanks, Sean!]. That's short for "Ouvroir de MySpace Potentielle," which means exactly what you think it means: Workshop of Potential MySpace.

OuMyPo "seeks to uncover new MySpace structures, patterns and behaviors," such as:

the "F+7″ method: Replace every friend in your "Top Friends" list with the friend seven entries after that person in your "My Friends" list

…and…

try the "Pimp My MySpace HTML Lipogram" whereby you cannot use any HTML codes containing the letters h, t, m, or l when constructing your page

According to the first comment on this post on Poetry Foundation's blog harriet, OuMyPo is the work of one Luke McGowan, though this is otherwise unverifiable, at least through google.

If this all sounds absurdly silly, consider the fact that my younger brother spends an amount of creative energy on his MySpace (well, now Facebook) profile comprable to that which I spent rewriting bad pop-punk song lyrics to make fun of my high school, drawing terrible cartoons featuring myself and my two best friends as the dubious superheros "the triangle girls," and compiling an epic compendium of (then-)hilarious quotes from friends, family, and teachers alike.

OuFaPo, anyone?

Yes, it's that time again: the quasi-annual kenspeckle redesign. This time featuring fabulous dropdown menus that do not work in IE 5 (because if you use IE 5, it's really time to upgrade), famfamfam's awesome silk icons, and squeaky-clean xhtml strict code that I hopefully will not ruin with future experimental blog posts.

I've also turned off automated del.icio.us posting. "But now how will I find out what you've been clicking on?" you may wonder. Fear not, dear reader. For those who actually visit my newly beautified site in their browsers, I've returned my del.icio.us linkroll to the sidebar. For the many subscribers, daily del.icio.us summaries are now spliced in with feedburner's link splicer.

Automated del.icio.us posting has really deteriorated the quality of posting by sating my freshness fetish without actually providing any even remotely interesting content. Plus it totally detracted from the joy I get from del.icio.us to have the following internal monologue before bookmarking anything: "Is this really worthy of a post? Will I find enough other del.icio.us links to make a reasonable link post? Will I get home in time to delete the post if not? Have I made an actual post anytime in the past month? Why me?"

Clearly not a good situation.

Anyway, as with kenspeckle 2.0, the launch of kenspeckle 2.5 will be celebrated with the release of even more fascinating kenspeckle search data. Enjoy.

Oh, and PS: The rss-fearing among you can now subscribe by email.

Questions Well-Answered

› why hire a proofreader: If the hair-raising images of that un-proofread Wheat Thins box don't answer that question, I'm not sure what does.

› coolness+market: I consider kenspeckle, like, my own coolness market.

› origin of the name sperber: This person certainly came to the right place.

› sparsile word origin: I got that one covered.

› "literary theory" infp: I can't even comment on this one. It's way too perfect.

› "jury duty" manhattan lunch break: Yes. It's long. You can eat in Chinatown. I envy you, lucky jurors.

Unanswerable Questions

› yips and ocd: Not sure exactly where this searcher is going with that theory, but I think I can appreciate the connection.

› outdoor skating rinks in ajax: I'm not sure what this means, but I would certainly love to see an outdoor skating rink in ajax.

› semiotics wheat thins: Gives you something to think about over that snack, at any rate.

› white chocolate flow chart: Sounds tasty.

› getting rid of strawberry blonde: A better question might be, "Um, why would you even want to get rid of strawberry blonde"? It's a great hair color—I wish I had it naturally.

› sealand antisemitism: I think Sealand's population is a little too small to have an anti-Semitism problem, don't you? Are there even Jewish folks there?

Yes, I might be the biggest nerd alive. (And, yes, I know, I'm late and the LOL backlash has begun.) But after stumbling across those loltheorists, I couldn't help but think, don't the non-theoretical writers who provided the material that inspired all that literary theory to begin with deserve as much LOL love as their theorist counterparts?

Yes, of course they do! And what authors offer better LOL fodder than members of the OULIPO—the mostly French cliqué of writers and mathematicians who unleashed their creativity by writing under unusual (and generally mathematically significant) constraints. OULIPO, in case you were wondering, is an acronym, and the words it stands for in French translate roughly to "workshop of potential literature."

Anyway, here's my lolOULIPO:

Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition does not include the letter "e" even once in 300 pages.

Raymond Queneau, whose collection of ten sonnets is printed on paper that's sliced to allow the reader to flip through individual lines, providing a hundred thousand billion unique sonnets.

Italo Calvino, whose novel If on a Winter's Night a Traveler includes the reader as a character.

Now, so you don't think I've totally gone bananas with this LOL nonsense, here's a handful of the best OULIPO materials to be found online:

interactive Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
Create your own sonnet (of the hundred thousand billion available) in French and English.

OULIPO collection
A special issue of the online literary mag drunken boat. From the introductory essay, "OULIPO at 45" by OULIPO president Paul Fournel:

…the role assigned to Oulipo is simply that of proposing a constraint, giving a model of that constraint, and thus, allowing it to meet the text that will take on its form. […] There is no ideal Oulipian text. The proposed structure is like that of the sonnet, into which Shakespeare, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé may choose to pour their singular talent.

Into the Maze
An essay by poet/translator Mónica de la Torre. Quote: "the more difficult the task, the better it feels to achieve it."

official OULIPO site
For francophones only.

Whee! I've been tagged in a tell-us-about-yourself meme by Anne Helmond. Not exactly an arduous task for a shameless egomaniac like myself.

Here are "the rules" of the meme:

• We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
• Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
• People who are tagged need to write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

8 things about me:

1. According to this version of the Jungian personality test, I'm an INFP. The INFP personality generally fits me, but have some qualms about the "introvert" label. When I'm around other people (especially at work), I tend to play the part of an extrovert—and I usually enjoy it, but I get burnt out quickly and need time to myself to recover. And I definitely don't seek out social situations. I think I'm actually an antisocial extrovert.

Crif Dogs "eat me" sign, as photographed by flickr user urbanblitz

2. Although I grew up in Florida, I'm proud to report that my family has roots here in NYC. My paternal grandfather was born in Manhattan, not in a hospital, but in the back of a candy store that his parents ran at 115 St. Marks Place, now the site of a clothing boutique.

You might get a better idea of where it's located if I mention that it's right next door to Crif Dogs, of the famous "eat me" sign. When I took my dad here a few years back, he caught sight of the sign as we approached. "Of course," he shouted, assuming this must be the indicator of his father's birth site, "It says 'eat me'! That's perfect."

3. Googling "lauren sperber" turns up people who are not me. I actually have the gall to find this somewhat inappropriate.

4. My favorite poem is "Poems of Our Climate" by Wallace Stevens. It goes like this:

I.
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations—one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II.
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged
Still one would want more, one would need more
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III.
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

5. The fact that my flickr badge, badger badge, and embedded video code keep my xhtml from validating makes me feel sad inside.

6. I used to dye my hair incessantly. First it was My So-Called Life purplish-red, then auburn, then strawberry blonde, then strawberry blonde with highlights, then blonde, then blonder, then make-your-mother-cry magenta (which obliged me to straighten my very curly hair daily), then bleach blonde, then strawberry blonde, then auburn for quite awhile.

I finally dyed it a few shades too dark of a brown about a year and a half ago and haven't touched it since. It's mellowed to a medium brownish that I like to fancy has some reddish highlights. This is probably not the case.

7. Re Anne's #7: I have been struggling to remember the last time I went more than 24 hours—or even a full 24 hours!—without the internet, and, although it terrifies me to type this, I literally can't remember when that was. I think I need a vacation.

8. I have a million witty t-shirt ideas, but no clue what to do with them. CaféPress and Spreadshirt have crazy markups cost more than I, personally, would like to pay for a t-shirt (thanks, Jana!), but I don't exactly have time to make them myself. Solutions, anyone?

tagged: Sean, wordart, Lorna, Britta, that nondescript cat, Patrick, kbam, Grey