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Cyber salad

Wednesday, 07 December, 2005

• Gift wrapping ideas from Knitty;
• Knecklace;
• Toasty Pocket Creatures;
• Cthulhu Plush Slippers (via Guan);
• “How the World was Saved” (Cyberiad short story).

An exercept from The Cyberiard. In this particular story, there is a guy named Trurl who built a poetry machine and he invited his friend, Klapaucius, over to try to it out:

“Just a minute,” said Klapaucius, annoyed. He was trying to think of a request as difficult as possible, aware that any argument on the quality of the verse the machine might be able to produce would be hard if not impossible to settle either way. Suddenly he brightened and said:

“Have it compose a poem—a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the less s!!”

“And why not throw in a full exposition of the general theory of nonlinear automata while you're at it?” growled Trurl. “You can't give it such idiotic—”

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming

Sightlessly seeking

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

(Stanislaw Lem, “The First Sally (A)”, The Cyberiad, translated from the Polish by Michael Kandel, Secker and Warburg, London, 1975, pp.50-51. Originally published in Polish under the title Cyberiada by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krackow, 1967.)

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