But the World’s Ugliest Dog Contest has clearly lost all credibility.

Figure 1. Kings don’t dress this well

The tune is forgettable. But tell me the dude hasn’t got it. There’s no better way to become comfortable in your own skin than spending fifteen years of your life wearing nothing but a loincloth on national television, throwing other people around. (Via Microkhan.)

Figure 1. The champion in his prime

Why is it that it’s always a man you hear about, with a new scheme to procedurally generate romance novels?

Dustin Hoffman:

One of the constants in my life is that I’ve never been bored, ever. Depressed, yes. I’ve been very depressed. I think it’s a natural condition. I think we want life to be more than it is, somehow. But I don’t know how you can be bored. Sometimes, you will be with someone who you feel is boring and I, as an actor, would say, “What is the quality that makes that person boring to me?” And that’s interesting, to deconstruct it.

Me, so far I’ve only made it as far as Damn, am I ever this boring? Gotta watch out for that.

(Via This Recording.)

Abigail Nussbaum on The Left Hand of Darkness:

Beyond its datedness, however, I find it difficult to accept the notion of The Left Hand of Darkness as a feminist novel.

I’ve read and reread the paragraph in which this sentence appears several times now, and the best I can come up with is that I must not understand the English language as well as I thought I did.

In scenes 1 and 2, two software engineers, thomas ptacek and mike tracy, have been interviewing a job candidate. We pick up at the beginning of scene 3…

3. INT. OFFICE CONFERENCE ROOM - AFTERNOON

A room in the same office, roughly the same size, with an oversized brown kitchen table in the middle, littered with paper and McDonalds wrappers. Thomas and Mike sit at the table, talking to a CONFERENCE PHONE.

CONFERENCE PHONE

So how’d he do?

THOMAS PTACEK

Pretty much aced it.

MIKE TRACY

What? He bombed the cookie part. He used ECB, MD5, and Triple DES!

THOMAS PTACEK

I’m impressed that he could spell ECB, MD5, or Triple DES. And it wouldn’t have mattered if he had used CBC, SHA-256, and AES-256. His code still would have been broken.

CONFERENCE PHONE

How so?

THOMAS PTACEK

He didn’t authenticate the message. Encryption isn’t —-

MIKE TRACY

(Chanting)

Encryption - isn’t - authentication.

CONFERENCE PHONE

Don’t you mean integrity?

THOMAS PTACEK

No, Dave, I mean authentication. They’re called message authentication codes.

CONFERENCE PHONE

Ok, Tom. But he screwed that up?

THOMAS PTACEK

Yeah, but who cares? I’m surprised he even knew what CBC was. But we just asked that to see how he thinks. We’re never going to let him implement crypto code anyways.

CONFERENCE PHONE

I guess we don’t even let you write crypto code.

THOMAS PTACEK

Sure, and when I asked him about processes and threads…

MIKE TRACY

Can I stop you both here for a second?

THOMAS PTACEK

Yeah?

MIKE TRACY

This room is pretty fucking boring. We’re in a screenplay, right?

THOMAS PTACEK

Oh, yeah, you’re right. Let’s fix that.

(Shouting)

Wings of silver!

CONFERENCE PHONE

Nerves of steel!

MIKE TRACY

Thundercats go!

EXT. HURTLING THROUGH SPACE - CONTINUOUS

The office melts away around them, revealing a starfield hurtling past as if moving at awesome speed. Meanwhile, the conference phone transforms into a UNICORN WITH LASER HORN.

DAVE THE LASER UNICORN

It’s “Silverhawks”, jackass.

THOMAS PTACEK

Where were we?

(There’s kind of an interesting lesson in how not to use encryption in web app authentication as well, but mostly I just admire the technique.)