It's easy to generate random words, or even ones that seem patterned on a particular language. But there's something just right about the words that emerge from Soybomb.com's Nonsense Word Generator: each is marvelously silly, yet seems to have meaning and history.

This page generates nonsense words based on a frequency list of phonemes as they occur in legitimate English words. Occasionally an actual word may show up but it should mostly generate pronounceable gibberish.

It reminds me a lot of Adams, Lloyd and Cantor's Meaning of Liff: if ever they ever run out of odd place names to assign to experiences and things for which we have no words, this will surely come in handy. Every time I reload it it gives me a word I want to assign a definition to:

Cremplications noun The results of attempting to communicate in a foreign language one has not learned.

Snughlin noun A fluffy garment that looks cosy when ordered from the internet or a catalog, but turns out to be made of nylon insulation.

Physion noun A subatomic particle found in branding consultants.

Remember them old IRC games where a bot would pose a challenge, everyone would have to answer it in a minute, and then vote on the best response? That, but for this! Read the rest

Easypoem asks you a few questions, then generates a charming verse for your entertainment and that of your friends. Here's the one is made for me:

stood a space house

is this thing on

In the space stood a house, tardigrade looked through the window, saw a capybara disapproving past and he knocked upon the door "tardigrade, tardigrade let me in," "I would like to have a drink" "capybara, capybara come inside," "and let's have a cup of Sutter Home"

The NSA turned down a ProPublica Freedom of Information Act request because it says it lacks the ability to search all the email within its internal network, so it can't answer a question like "What conversations took place between the NSA and National Geographic in the lead-up to a positive story about the Agency?" It can only search one user's mail at a time, not all 30,000 NSA employees.

"There's no central method to search an email at this time with the way our records are set up, unfortunately," NSA Freedom of Information Act officer Cindy Blacker told me last week.

The system is “a little antiquated and archaic," she added.

NSA Says It Can’t Search Its Own Emails

(via Reddit) Read the rest

The 1980s had many surreal and outré comic-book stars. I recall particularly following The Tick, Concrete, and Nexus. They were respectively a nigh-invulnerable, possibly mentally ill superhero with a chubby accountant sidekick in a moth-themed flying suit; a writer whose brain was transplanted by aliens (themselves possibly escaped slaves) into a nearly invulnerable rock-like body often performing missions of mercy; and a man (later others, including men, women, and children) picked by a nearly omnipotent being residing in the center of a planet to atone the genocide of his father by being forced to be an almost indestructible and thoroughly powerful superhero, lest he face disabling pain.

You catch the theme here, right? Omnipotence, invulnerability, superhero—all but the Tick reluctant. Into that mix, Flaming Carrot was something altogether different. Read the rest