Chapter XLV: Who's Space?

Over the past three years, a website popular with teenagers and sexual predators has emerged called "http://www.myspace.com/" or MySpace, as it is colloquially known. Registered members are able to create a "profile" page wherein they post pictures of themselves committing arson. When hyperlinking to a MySpace profile from some other online social networking construct, it is considered "cool" to incorporate the words "My Space" into a larger sentence or phrase. Examples of this include "MySpaceShip" and the increasingly ubiquitous "Fuck your place, let's go to MySpace."

But you know all that.

In any case, I was perusing a MySpace profile today that linked to a applet titled "How Will You Be Defined In The Dictionary?" Basically you type in your name and it makes up a definition. For example, 'Jerry' returns [noun] Pretentiously academian." 'Tryptofantasmic' returns "[adjective] Extremely extreme!" Finally, 'George W. Bush' is defined as "[Noun] A person with a sixth sense for detecting the presence of goblins."

I always think too much about this shit, so it occurred to me that those definitions are actually fairly relevant. In my academic writings, I have been known to wax pretentious, what with the sprinkling about of 'ipso facto' and 'as it were.' 'Tryptofantasmic' does have a superlative sound to it, and George W. Bush is very paranoid; goblins can be interpreted as a metaphor for WMD.

Of course, I was pretty sure these correlations were coincidental, so I entered real words into the form, to prove to myself that the so-called dictionary didn't actually process what was being typed. However, when I entered 'ugly' it was defined as "[noun] A person who has the ability to be invisible," which, again, is within two degrees of interpretability. Next, though, 'octegenarian' came up as "[adjective] Extremely promiscuous, sexually" and that's just...ugh. So QED.

Image of the Day: Et tu, Brute?
You may recall this image with a different caption (cf. Chapter XXIX). A week ago, I opened a caption contest thread on a forum I post to, and this was the best one. I am almost inspired to create more gummy bear art tailored to other Shakesperean quotes.