Mark Twain was too easy, clearly. Let's try something less widely read, in schools at least. Something a little racier, perhaps.
Once again, the text is downloaded raw from Project Gutenberg, pasted into a Word document (I'm using Word 2007, in case that makes a difference); the Gutenberg preamble and notes are stripped out; then I click the "Summarize" button and ask for 100 words. No further editing of any kind has taken place.
I think this one is pretty tough, although it's certainly a famous book, probably available in the classics section of any big bookshop. But let's see...
Summary
"Sweet-heart, do you want a place?
what pain could stand before a pleasure so transporting? The present possession was all my little head could find room for.
Then, who can express the fire his eyes glistened, his hands glowed with! whilst sighs of pleasure, and tender broken exclamations, were all the praises he could utter. the unnumbered kisses! You would ask me, perhaps, whether all this time I enjoyed any perception of pleasure? A little eternity in love!
I felt the prodigious keen edge, with which love, presiding over this act, points the pleasure: love!
As a rule, I don't like to blog about what every other blogger and his dog are blogging about. It feels silly, redundant, like voting for a major party or watching Lost. After all, what's the odds of me thinking of something that no-one else has spotted?
But some stories are too funny to pass up.
You've heard of the spate of "spontaneous" tax protests by the name of "tea parties" taking place across the US? Where people who were quite happy to support Bush while he ran up the national debt in times of plenty, are now violently against Obama doing the same thing in a slump? People who are so impoverished that they're turning out in their hundreds to throw away (presumably) perfectly good tea?
Oh dear, I'm getting off track already. There's so much to laugh at, so much to scoff at, so much to just sneer at with the contempt it deserves, if I can muster that much. I know the history, I know what these people are trying to do, and if I could spit in their faces from here, they'd be even wetter than they already are. But what tickled me here, and I'm indebted to my friend Jantar for pointing it out, was the story of one protest in Lafayette Square, Washington, DC, which came unstuck when the protesters, belatedly, discovered that they needed a permit to dump teabags.
So much for the spirit of civil unrest.
Another protest in the city, reportedly, was nixed by the Secret Service, despite having been given the OK by the cops. (If I were the local plod, I'd be writing some extremely sarcastic letters to the Washington Post on that subject.)
It seems to me that nobody has their heart in this "protest". Where are the people who are willing to get arrested, even go to jail, for their beliefs? Even that tree-hugging pansy Thoreau did that much. But then, Thoreau honestly believed that he was opposing an unjust state. These guys aren't even trying, because they don't believe in what they're doing. They're not desperate, they're not even angry, they're just being played by politicians.
I first used e-mail as a student, in the mid 1980s. Sadly I wasn't a particularly visionary type of student, and I didn't take much interest in it.
In 1997, when I got my first dial-up connection at home, things were different. By then nobody could miss what e-mail was, and I took to it like a banker to money. Within six months I had e-mail contacts on five continents, a good proportion of whom I considered "friends".
Combined with Usenet, the medium suited me to perfection. I now had a public profile and an active private correspondence. I loved to take my time writing, rewriting and polishing to put the perfect gloss on whatever I wanted to say. "Spinning", it might be called, and the medium was beautifully tailored to that. (Alas, this is no longer the case. Somehow I don't have that kind of time any more. Nowadays, even blog posts feel hurried.)
In that first rush of enthusiasm, I naïvely thought that e-mail was free; and as freely, I gave my address to everyone as my preferred contact method. Better, I thought, that I should receive junk mail in electronic form, rather than tree-eating paper.
What I hadn't thought through - and in retrospect it seems horrifyingly obvious, but the world looked different back then - was the economics of e-mail technology. It never occurred to me that people would send me e-mail without even caring whether I read it or not.
The story of my personal battle with spam is stirring, but long, and its ending is not happy. I have seldom managed to convey the depth of my hatred for spammers. I'm not talking just about pornographers, fraudsters, Nigerians offering money - that subject is quiteexhaustivelydocumented elsewhere - but the daily deluge of unwanted mails about the most tedious of subjects - drugs, holidays, used cars, penis enlargement, jobs in Chicago, Ukrainian brides, Bollywood movies, home-education courses in everything from acupuncture to zoophilia...
All of which is a long-winded way of introducing a story I noticed today: spam is "killing the environment", apparently.
That's a headline I can greet with qualified pleasure. Extremely qualified. We're talking fully bonded, industry-certified, Masters-educated pleasure here. It's nice to see an attack on the (still occasionally touted) fallacy that junk e-mail is environmentally benign, compared with junk paper through the door. But this study is commissioned by McAfee, who can't resist the temptation to imply that the problem could be solved by using their software.
Yeah, right. That's like treating depression by drinking yourself into a stupor.
No, the treatment for spam - if there is one - has to be legal, not technical, and it has to be directed at the people who pay for it, not those who send it. It's the economics of e-mail that creates the problem, and that's what has to be changed. For the recipients to have to buy and maintain spam filters - that's no better than paying protection money.
Remember how, last year, there was a spate of horror stories about how products made in China weren't necessarily, let's say, up to code with all those pesky rules and regulations that we cossetted Westerners insist on? Things like products not containing more than a limited amount of lethal poison.
I thought then, and I still think, that this ruckus was thinly-disguised protectionism. When I was a kid, I had a number of toys made of lead. It's an excellent material - cheap, easy to mould, satisfyingly heavy and durable. To say nothing of the paints, which (we took it for granted) would contain lead, if nothing worse. I assume that's why my parents kept shouting at me when I ate it.
Which is why, this Easter, my reaction to stories of nasty egg-related experiences was more smugness than horror. Summary: some Easter chocolate products have been found to contain creepy-crawlies.
We're talking respected brands here. Cadbury's and M&Ms are the two that have failed to keep their names out of the story - I don't know what others may be involved. Nor do I know where these products were made. But I'd bet good money it's not China.
This is not what I call consumer protection. When you bit into your Easter egg, did you think "what this really needs is something living inside it"?
Of course it could be that someone is simply taking the symbolic significance of the Easter egg a bit too literally. But more likely, they're just careless.
Food handling is a curious blind spot in the factories and supermarkets of New Zealand. We are resigned to carefully sorting through the mildewed, crushed and parasite-infested fruit; cautiously wiping the leaking blood off badly packaged meats; gently testing the temperature of milk by hand; glumly inspecting the mold on the inside of vacuum packs of cheddar; religiously checking the dates on short-life products such as coleslaw and dips. I've seen shelf stackers in the supermarkets piling crates on top of soft fruit without a thought. If I saw any of this in Tesco's in England, I would expect the section manager to be sacked on the spot; here, it never occurs to anyone that there is even an issue.
Don't get me wrong: our food is excellent. New Zealand is justly famed for its farming. Our restaurants compare well with any of the 15 or so countries I've experienced. We had roast lamb for an Easter feast - finest New Zealand-grown baby sheep - and I can officially pronounce it delicious. And the wine! - New Zealand wine, as anyone who's been paying even the slightest attention must know by now, is the best in the world. Even Foodtown can't screw that up.
It's not that hard, people. This is 2009: problems like this were already boring in the 1980s, when I studied production engineering. If you can't do it, resign, and give your job to someone who gives a damn'.
Jane Austen didn't seem that popular, so let's try a quite different Literary Classic this time. To add a little zest to the wossname, I'm not telling you what it is. You should be able to work out the protagonist's first name without too much difficulty; bragging rights go to the first commenter who correctly guesses his second name, which has been redacted in the one place it occurs below.
Herewith the second classic, as abbreviated by MS Word in 100 words:
Summary
"TOM!"
"TOM!"
You TOM!"
No Tom. Tom!"
Tom said:
Tom said:
"Can't, Mars Tom. Tom exhibited. "Tom."
Tom lay thinking. "Tom! Say, Tom!" "Here, Tom! TOM! Tom moaned out:
Tom's dying!"
"You, Tom! Tom said:
Tom said:
"Oh, Tom! Tom said:
"Tom! Tom called:
"Hold! Presently Tom said:
Then Tom whispered:
Tom [Surname] swears
"Please, Tom. "DO, Tom!"
Tom quailed. Tom said:
Tom's cheeks burned. Tom said:
Tom hurried up. Tom shuddered.
Tom's followed. "Try harder, Tom! "Tom! "Don't Tom! Tom whispered:
Tom shouted. "Tom, Tom, we're lost! Tom was grateful. "Tom!"
Auckland is a hilly place, and property values tend to go up and down with the terrain.
Take One Tree Hill, for instance. Its peak - the spiritual heart of the city - is surrounded by Cornwall Park, a ravishingly beautiful slice of tamed nature in the city, a favourite spot for family outings and picnics. The park itself is lined with picturesque cottages whose owners enjoy the doubtful privilege of paying ground rent, which (as far as I can make out) is spent on maintaining the park - which explains why these beautiful houses, which should be priced in the $1-2 million range, in fact tend to go for about one-fifth as much. The ground rent keeps the area pretty exclusive, despite the bargains.
Then comes the sharply sloping "suburb" of One Tree Hill itself. Within easy walking distance of the park, it's a well established, leafy residential area where new building is rare - the subdivision here was done decades ago. Which is good, because it makes for a quieter neighbourhood and puts off landlords on the make. But as you go further down the slope, the scene changes rapidly. By the time you reach Waitangi Road to the south, boy-racer cars, graffiti and quite un-neighbourly wire fences are increasingly in evidence. Head eastward, towards the gruesome commercial zoning around Great South Road, and the picture takes a turn for the grimy.
To the south, it's not far before you hit the huge, sprawling suburb of Onehunga. Overlooking Manukau Harbour to the south, this was once the domain of ships' officers; and again the best houses are on the tops of the hills.
Yesterday we'd picked out 3 Quadrant Road, Onehunga as a possible target. It might have stood a chance. Looks nice enough. Unfortunately it's at the foot of a hill, and the road there took us past this gratuitous palace, just as it was holding its open home. Having half an hour to kill, we thought we might as well stop by.
It was a bit like touring a stately home.
Then we went on down to the house we could afford. It was a steep hill, and it took its toll. By the time we got to the foot, it hardly needed the packing factory across the road to put us off the house - which was probably pleasant enough, in itself, before - the old story - someone built another house in its back garden.
The Maoris, it strikes me now, were right. It was a mistake to let these pakeha buggers buy land. Let them live on it by all means, but once they started buying and selling it they got ambitious, and that's been the ruin of it.
I love April Fool's Day. One day a year, I can read the news and simply assume that if it's patently deranged, it's not for real.
"Anti-globalisation protesters at G20 summit"
How can anyone admit to being "anti-globalisation"? That's basically "pro-poverty". Oh wait, it's April Fool's - phew, for a moment I thought they might be serious.
"Miss Universe enjoys hospitality at Guantanamo Bay"
Oh, the irony. A, get this, Venezuelan beauty queen upholding "a longstanding relationship with the USO" by holidaying at the Caribbean's most notorious prison camp. How gullible do they think we are?
"Government steps in to limit power price rises"
In a world of global warming and frequent outages caused by transmission problems, how stupid do you have to be to encourage people to use more electricity? Because that's what the NZ government is doing. Thank goodness it's April Fool's.
"US Justice Dept moves to drop Ted Stevens's conviction"
So let's get this straight: the poster boy for Republican corruption was squeaky-clean all along? Good one. Can you just "toss out" a conviction?
Sadly, now it's 2 April, and I have to face the unpalatable fact that all of these stories were, apparently, true.
Addendum: Since posting this, the BBC has completely ripped off my idea. Thanks guys. Makes me feel like a real journalist again.
