Hsin-Hao Yu's Personal Blog

Some friends and I ran into a trivia question about an ice cream named after Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. A friend said that it must be a pun, so I suggested “Grapeful Dead”. The answer, of course, was “Cherry Garcia”.

Thomas Pynchon likes to talk about Godzilla in his novels. In Inherent Vice, there is a funny scene where the main character Doc told his girlfriend Penny that the 1964 Japanese movie Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster was a remake of the 1953 romantic comedy Roman Holiday. Later that night, Doc caught Penny sobbing at the TV, because she watched the Japanese monster movie as a romance. Pynchon is good at writing this type of plot that is ridiculous but oddly touching. I watched the Ghidora movie after reading Inherent Vice. It is obviously nowhere near a remake of Roman Holiday (we are talking about a movie that is mostly about actors in rubber suits fighting other actors in rubber suits), but the writers must have lifted some plot elements from Roman Holiday.

Idea: a Python dialect called Pynchon (after Thomas Pynchon). A pynchonic code is probably not very pythonic. Brevity is highly discouraged. Variable names should be all puns. In fact, Pynchon should be a concatenative language like Forth. This way, statements can be chained together into a longer and longer statement… until the entire program is one single statement.

A parody of Jorge Luis Borges’s essay “A New Refutation of Time”: “The Third Refutation of Ordinality”. Or maybe “10 Arguments Against Cardinality”.

Anthropologists discovered that islanders in South Pacific have been using blockchains for thousands of years. All transactions are recorded by carving patterns on tree trunks, whose integrity is enforced by solving hard problems such as 12/5.

Really. Hey, like Godzilla always sez to Mothra — why don’t we go eat some place? — Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

Choose your next private key carefully, Mr. Bond. It may be your last. Do you expect me to talk? No. I expect you to prime.

No worries, it’s on the house, as the TV antenna man always sez — Thomas Pynchon in Inherent Vice