I’m not sure why I bothered to write a joke that is in the form of a joke but is not funny. I am further bothered by the fact that I am posting it.

It was in response to a news item that a Ford dealership in Chatom, Alabama, was offering a free Bible, flag, and hunting rifle with each car purchased.

Here goes, and remember that this won’t actually be funny.

So, a Jew, a Canadian, and an eco-activist walk into a car dealership. The salesperson says, “We’re having a special sale. If you buy a car, you get three special gifts: A bible, a flag, and a rifle.”

The Jew asks “What type of bible?”

“King James,” says the salesperson.

“That’s not my type of bible,” the Jew says, and walks out.

The Canadian says, “I’m ok with the bible, but what type of flag?”

“American.”

“That’s not my type of flag,” the Canadian says, and walks out.

The eco-hippie pacifist seems not to notice and asks to be shown the most powerful, least eco-friendly car.

“Sure,” says the salesperson, slightly worried. “It’s this one. But don’t you want to know what type of rifle it is?”

“Is it high powered?” 

“It would take down a moose.”

“That’s all I need to know” says the eco-activist

“But aren’t you going to say that it’s not your  type  of rifle and leave?”

“Nope, it’s exactly my type of rifle.” says the eco-activist as she turns and puts a slug through the engine block of the car.   

“But that’s definitely not my type of car.”

YES THAT IS THE END OF THE “JOKE.”

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My new book (Everyday Chaos, HBR Press, May 2019) has a few hundred footnotes with links to online sources. Because Web sites change and links rot, I decided to link to Perma.cc‘s pages instead . Perma.cc is a product of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, which I used to co-direct with Kim Dulin, but Perma is a Jonathan Zittrain project from after I left.

When you give Perma.cc a link to a page on the Web, it comes back with a link to a page on the Perma.cc site. That page has an archive copy of the original page exactly as it was when you supplied the link. It also makes a screen capture of that original page. And of course it includes a link to the original. It also promises to maintain the Perma.cc copy and screen capture in perpetuity — a promise backed by the Harvard Law Library and dozens of other libraries. So, when you give a reader a Perma link, they are taken to the Perma.cc page where they’ll always find the archived copy and the screen capture, no matter what happens to the original site. Also, the service is free for everyone, for real. Plus, the site doesn’t require users to supply any information about themselves. Also, there are no ads.

So that’s why my book’s references are to Perma.cc.

But, over the course of the six years I spent writing this book, my references suffered some link rot on my side. Before I got around to creating the Perma links, I managed to make all the obvious errors and some not so obvious. As a result, now that I’m at the copyediting stage, I wanted to check all the Perma links.

I had already compiled a bibliography as a spreadsheet. (The book will point to the Perma.cc page for that spreadsheet.) So, I selected the Title and Perma Link columns, copied the content, and stuck it into a text document. Each line contains the page’s headline and then the Perma link.

Perma.cc has an API that made it simple to write a script that looks up each Perma link and prints out the title it’s recorded next to the title of the page that I intend to be linked. If there’s a problem with Perma link, such as a double “https://https://” (a mistake I managed to introduce about a dozen times), or if the Perma link is private and not accessible to the public, it notes the problem. The human brain is good at scanning this sort of info, looking for inconsistencies.

Here’s the script. I used PHP because I happen to know it better than a less embarrassing choice such as Python and because I have no shame.

Run this script in a browser and it will create a page with the results. (The script is available at GitHub.)

Thanks, Perma.cc!

By the way, and mainly because I keep losing track of this info, the table of code was created by a little service cleverly called Convert JS to Table.

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Why is this card guaranteed to lose? You might notice a pattern in it…

…

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An earlier draft of Descartes’ Meditations has been discovered, which will inevitably lead to a new round of unfunny jokes under the rubric of “Descartes’ First Draft.” I can’t wait :(

The draft is a big discovery. Camilla Shumaker at Research Frontiers reports that Jeremy Hyman, a philosophy instructor at the University of Arkansas, came across a reference to the manuscript and hied off to a municipal library in Toulouse … a gamble, but he apparently felt he had nothing left Toulouse.

And so it begins…

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Inspired by fabulously wrong paint colors that Janelle Shane’s generated by running existing paint names through a machine learning system, and then by an hilarious experiment in dog breed names by my friend Matthew Battles, I decided to run some data through a beginner’s machine learning algorithm by karpathy.

I fed a list of cocktail names in as data to an unaltered copy of karpathy’s code. After several hundred thousand iterations, here’s a highly curated list of results:

Then I added to the original list of cocktails a list of Western philosophers. After about 1.4 million iterations, here’s a curated list:

Yes, we need not worry about human bartenders, cocktail designers, or philosophers being replaced by this particular algorithm. On the other hand, this is algorithm consists of a handful of lines of code and was applied blindly by a person dumber than it. Presumably SkyNet — or the next version of Microsoft Clippy — will be significantly more sophisticated than that.

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Xpeditr has really overestimated the size of my wine cellar.

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(An unauthorized, unapproved homage to The Cluetrain Manifesto).

A powerful global reaccommodation has begun. Corporations are rediscovering themselves in their muscular masculinity. For we are the makers, the takers, and above all else, we are the winners. Customers, employees, the needy, the vulnerable are, by definition, the losers. Each one of them would gladly trade their seat for one of the tufted leather chairs in our CEO’s office. Instead, make sure your pathetic seatbacks are returned to their upright position, your trays are stowed, and you’re buckled in. For this is your pilot speaking, and we’re ready to fly the friendly skies of “PUT YOUR HANDS WHERE I CAN SEE THEM, MOTHERFUCKER!”

1. Markets are reaccommodations.

2. There’s the crew and there’s the screwed. Deal with it.

3. When jack-booted thugs rough up paying passengers and drag them from your plane, it’s time for the CEO to step up and declare that there’s two sides to every story.

4. There’s no customer need that cannot be met by a bag of off-brand peanuts.

5. Customers of course have rights. But only once they have lawyers.

6. Think of it like this: Boarding a airplane is like opening a shrink-wrapped product, an act that involuntarily voids all your rights. Except boarding a plane means also giving up the shreds of human dignity we didn’t already strip from you during the nudie scan, the TSA ritual ball or tit squeeze, the routine totally un-profiled examination of the darker-hued among us, the lack of sufficient seats in the boarding area, the unexplained delays, and the segregation into social strata announced over the PA. Also, I think we may have missed a spot in your rectum.

7. Costs have gone up while fuel prices and basic services have gone down, yet more and more people are flying. Therefore, passengers must love us more than ever. You can’t argue with math!

8. Virtually no other industry uses overbooking as a routine best practice because they don’t love their customers are much as we do.

9. “First they came for my free crappy meal, and I said nothing. Then they came for my carry-ons, and I said nothing. Then they just said ‘Fuck it’ and came for the guy sitting next to me and dragged him off the plane by the ankles. And I said something, and I video-ed it and I posted it.” Sorry, I couldn’t hear you. I’ve got a corporate reputation to maintain.

10. Every act of corporate brutality can be fixed by combining the power of euphemism with the audacity of neologism, catalyzed by a really expensive blue suit.

11. It’s great to know that we’re making our employees so proud! Right, gang? Gang?

12. Hey, it’s us against them, where “them” are the customers, right, gang? Oh, c’mon, gang, quit kidding around!

13. You know who’s the victim here? The shareholders. How about some sympathy for them, eh?

14. Y’know, it’d be a lot easier for us to fly empty planes and not have to deal with you all. You’re welcome. Ingrates.

15. Hey, catch! Here’s your guitar. Sorry-not-sorry for the crushing.

16. Have a bag of last year’s peanuts, on us.

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“There is nothing that has not already been said on the Internet” has zero hits at Google. Until now.

For I am the Destroyer of Paradoxes.

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I’m thinking that this Lamy 2000 pen on Amazon

isn’t really a one-inch cube…

…that weighs 4.2lbs.

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