Fritinancy

July linkfest

Lots of news about Twitter this month; if you don’t care or are already saturated, feel free to scroll down to my Twitterless content.

The bluf: Twitter’s dark overlord, Elon Musk, announced on Saturday, July 23, that “soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.” And lo, by the following day the Twitter logo and name—but not the word “tweet”—had disappeared from the platform, replaced by a grim, spindly “X,” Musk’s favorite letter. (In 2000, he wanted to rebrand PayPal as X. He was ousted as CEO, but bought back X.com and went on to found SpaceX, name the Tesla Model X, and sire a child named, alas, Æ A-Xii.)

It’s not quite the end of Twitter, but it sure ain’t what it used to be. I wrote for Medium about what I’ll miss—and am already missing—about Twitter, which I started using in 2008, a lifetime ago.

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Word of the week: Promptography

What should we call images that look like photographs taken with a camera but that were in fact generated by artificial intelligence?

One answer is promptography, a word proposed by Peruvian photographer Christian Vinces and popularized by Berlin-based artist Boris Eldagsen. It’s a portmanteau of prompt—an instruction given by a human to an AI tool—and photography.

Eldagsen has been in the news lately because in March he won, and then rejected, a prestigious Sony World Photography Award for his black-and-white image titled “PSEUDOMNESIA: The Electrician.”

Pseudomnesia: The Electrician (cropped). See full-size image. Eldgasen writes: “Pseudomnesia is the classic Greek term for a pseudo memory, a fake memory, such as a spurious recollection of events that never took place, as opposed to a memory that is merely inaccurate.”

The year in photos

For my year-end wrap-up I’m letting my pictures do the talking. Pictures with words, that is. My thanks for the inspiration to Nancy Nall, whose blog I’ve enjoyed for many years.

January

Covid boosters became widely available (I got my first booster in September 2021 and my second in March 2022). Humboldt Distillery saw an opportunity to seize the zeitgeist.

Word of the week: Paparazzo

The death, on April 30, of the American photographer Ron Galella brought the fun-to-say Italian borrowing paparazzo back into the news. Galella, who was 91, was a “paparazzo extraordinaire,” the Telegraph and the Guardian headlined. “He personified the paparazzi,” the New York Times obituary reported, using the plural form: “brazen and relentless in chasing the famous, particularly Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.”

Galella himself proudly accepted the title of “paparazzo extraordinaire,” appropriating it for the title of his 2012 memoir.

Advertisement for a 2012 book-signing event for Ron Galella: Paparazzo Extraordinaire via New York Gossip Gal.

April linkfest

Journalist, novelist, and author Kurt Andersen (Spy magazine, Fantasyland, Evil Geniuses) wrote about “how an article about genomic sequencing led to an afternoon playing around with AI branding tools.” The names and logos these tools spat out—Dynester, Aerodynamiq, ModernZeal—led Andersen to muse about how real life is increasingly indistinguishable from science fiction.

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Speaking of science fiction, here’s a list of fictional super-metals, from Adamantium to Zortium.

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If you’re a fan of the New York Times Spelling Bee, you’ll want to try Tylogram, a new word-formation game created by William Shunn, the genius behind Spelling Bee Solver. As with the Bee, you’ll create words for points; slide the tiles around the grid to maximize their value. But it’s even trickier than that! (And fun.)

 

Word of the week: Upskirt

Upskirt: “A video, usually taken in a crowded location such as a shopping mall, that is shot up a woman’s skirt” without the woman’s permission or even knowledge. (Source: Word Spy)

In early May, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie signed a law criminalizing upskirting. Philly.com reported:

Noting concerns for protecting children and privacy in a “highly digital age,” the Republican governor said the law would target “perpetrators of a perverse and growing form of pornography that victimizes vulnerable women and children in a matter of seconds.”

New Jersey’s invasion-of-privacy law prohibits photographing, videotaping, or otherwise recording the image of another person whose intimate parts are exposed without that person's consent and under circumstances in which a reasonable person would not expect to be observed.

The “upskirting” law also makes it a crime to photograph, video, or record photos of clothed intimate parts of another person without consent and under circumstances in which a reasonable person would not expect to have his or her private body parts observed.

Under the new law, the act of photographing or recording those photos is a fourth-degree crime punishable by up to 18 months in prison, a fine of up to $10,000, or both, Christie's office said.

Five “upskirters” were arrested in Manhattan in April. The office of Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance noted that incidences of upskirting increase as the weather grows warmer.

Urban Dictionary’s earliest entry for upskirting is from 2006, but Word Spy found a 1998 mention in the Washington Post:

What began as a small photo gallery on the Internet a couple of years ago has rapidly expanded to more than 40 such “Upskirt” sites, including one devoted entirely to shots taken up skirts in Maryland, said [Alexandria detective Harold] Duquette, who has been tracking the trend.

—Patricia Davis, “Video Peeping Toms Seeing More Trouble,” The Washington Post, June 7, 1998

 

Related: Downblouse.

Word of the Week: Cinemagraph

Cinemagraph: A still photograph in which an element is animated with a small amount of video. A blend of cinema and graph.

Word of the Week: Dronie

Dronie: “A video selfie taken with a drone.” (Kottke.org, April 15, 2014. Selfie, a self-portrait taken with a smartphone and shared on a social-media site, was the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year for 2013.)

Amit Gupta, who co-founded the photo newsletter Photojojo in 2006, was indirectly responsible for the “dronie” coinage when he posted this 15-second video in mid-April:

  >Gupta called it a selfie, but in a comment Alex Dao dubbed it a dronie. (On her own Vimeo page, Dao calls herself “a maker-upper of words.” Shortly after posting the comment, Dao launched a Dronies Channel.) The word caught on quickly in social media and merited mention in other media, too, including Slate, Word Spy, and The Daily Mail (UK).

The day after introducing his readers to “dronie,” Jason Kottke published an update with additional examples and a link to Adam Lisagor’s post about the trend:

There’s a reason that you’re going to see a lot of these from drone flyers like me, and it’s this: once you get past the novelty of taking a camera high up in the air, getting a bird’s eye view of stuff is actually a little boring.

What birds see is actually a little boring. Humans are interesting. Getting close to stuff is interesting. I bet if we could strap tiny cameras to bird heads, most of what we’d want to look at would happen when they fly close to people. If we could, we’d put cameras on bird heads to take pictures of ourselves.

Photojojo has published detailed instructions for making your own dronie (click “How to Make the Perfect Dronie”) and in mid-May will offer in-person dronie lessons and rental drone cameras.

Dronie is a brand-new word, but articles about dronies often include a very old word: gimbal. (Photojojo: “A gimbal holds your camera level as your drone sways left, right, front, or back. It's especially handy on windy days.”) When gimbal entered English in the 16th century, it meant “joints” or “connecting links”; it comes from Old French jumel from Latin gemellus, meaning “twin.” In modern usage, according to the American Heritage Dictionary, a gimbal is:

A device consisting of two rings mounted on axes at right angles to each other so that an object, such as a ship's compass, will remain suspended in a horizontal plane between them regardless of any motion of its support.

 

Twenty-three

Today, March 14, is Pi Day (3.14), at least in countries that express dates in that order. Somewhere in the trillion digits of pi I’m pretty sure there’s a 23, which is my number of the day. Here are some 23-named brands … and some loosely related factoids.

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TechCrunch calls the photo-sharing app 23snaps “a Facebook for families.”

Founded June 2012 in London, England.

 

Why “23snaps”? Here’s the official story:

Did you know that there are 23 pairs of chromosomes that carry all of the genetic information that makes your child the wonderful, unique person they grow to be? One chromosome, like one photograph, is just not enough to tell the whole story.

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When I originally wrote about 23andMe, in 2007, the company was just over a year old and still doing DNA testing for health risks. It has a new logo now.

Founded April 2006 in Mountain View, California.

 

It also has changed its business model. In December 2013, in response to a Food and Drug Administration warning letter, 23andMe suspended its health testing. It now provides only “ancestry-related genetic reports.”

Why “23andMe”? Because “all of us have 23 pairs of chromosomes.”

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Pier 23 Café is on San Francisco’s Embarcadero at, yes, Pier 23. Good food, good music.

Photo via A Tiger in the Kitchen.

 

The restaurant has been owned and operated since 1984 by my Dolphin Club swimming pal Flicka McGurrin, who is also an excellent artist (with 23 pairs of chromosomes).

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“Don’t Trust the B---- in Apt 23,” broadcast on ABC-TV in 2012 and 2013, originally bore an unbowdlerized title.

I’m guessing the b---- has 23 pairs of chromosomes.

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The origin of “23 skidoo,” a phrase associated with the 1920s but in fact a couple of decades older, is shrouded in mystery. Barry Popik’s Big Apple blog discredits three popular theories; the World Wide Words discussion forum shreds seven. It is a dead certainty that the “23” has no relationship to human chromosomes, because their correct number wasn’t determined until 1956.

There is a vintage-clothing store called 23 Skidoo in Campbell, California (Santa Clara County).

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Learn additional interesting facts about the number 23—the smallest prime number that isn’t a twin prime!—in my July 2007 post about 23andMe.

Brand Like a Pirate

Today is International Talk Like a Pirate Day (the 13th annual, by my reckoning), and to mark the occasion I’ve gone on a treasure hunt for pirate-type brands. I’m not dropping a dime on actual piratical deeds, you understand: this is just good clean yo-ho-ho-and-a-bottle-of-rum fun.

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Yarrly has pirate-talk in its very name. Let TechCrunch explain:

[W]hat the world really needs, of course, is an anonymous meme generator with a chain letter-styled remixable twist. Meet Yarrly (to be said with your best pirate voice). Created by London-based Dave Ganly and Holly Clarke outside of their tech day jobs, the Android app lets anyone create two panel images and add text in the style of a meme maker.

Yarrly has some fun with the piracy theme.

Aye, matey—it’s another Name That Ends in -Ly!

But here’s the part the makes branding consultants and trademark lawyers want to walk the plank: each Yarrly remix is called a “yarrly” – lower case. Bad, bad branding!

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Yarr, Pirate Maps is “just like usin’ real google maps, but better – ’cos everythin’ is all piratey and mappy.” Example: when you mouse over a map, the manicule is a skeleton hand. Yarr, Pirate Maps, is not related to Yarrly, as far as I can tell.

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Scurvy was the scourge of real pirates—the bleeding gums, the jaundice, the suppurating wounds—but apparently Sanuk, a Southern California footwear company, likes the sound of “Scurvy” for a men’s casual shoe.*

 

Sanuk Scurvy in “brindle” color, on sale at REI. 

 

* They look like shoes to me, but Sanuk says otherwise:

The company name comes from the Thai word for “happiness.”

I learned of the Scurvy from Jan Freeman, who queried me in an email: “Do you suppose they think ‘scurvy’ is just a pirate word (‘ye scurvy dog’) and have no idea it's a disease?” Actually, Sanuk seems to know exactly what it’s doing. Here’s the product copy on Amazon (probably supplied by the manufacturer):

With a name like Scurvy, it’s got to be good!** In fact, this sidewalk surfer from Sanuk is the epitome of wholesomeness, crafted with vegan sensibilities. With a hand-crafted canvas upper and a “laces or no laces” option it’s like two shoes in one. Inside, a soft canvas liner a contoured footbed makes this shoe a nice place for your foot to be. And down below matey? A herringbone rubber outsole ensures you won't slip while walking the plank.

Still, severe vitamin C deficiency is no joke. I picture the Scurvy being worn by Bleeding Gums Murphy, R.I.P.

 

** A scurvy act of piracy! That “With a name like__” slogan was originally coined by Smucker’s and, of course, parodied by Saturday Night Live in the famous “Jam Hawkers” skit.