Home of the Soul Cookie

OneLook Reverse Dictionary

OneLook’s reverse dictionary lets you describe a concept and get back a list of words and phrases related to that concept. Your description can be a few words, a sentence, a question, or even just a single word. Just type it into the box above and you’ll get back a list of related terms with the best matches shown first.

I can’t begin to tell you how many times the reverse dictionary has helped me find the word that’s been hiding on the tip of my tongue.

For example, plug in “back of your throat” and the first result is, appropriately, uvula.

This is awesome.

The editor in me finds this hilarious:

TORONTO—It could be the most costly piece of punctuation in Canada.

A grammatical blunder may force Rogers Communications Inc. to pay an extra $2.13 million to use utility poles in the Maritimes after the placement of a comma in a contract permitted the deal’s cancellation.

The full scoop, including the passage of text with the extra comma, is available at the Fort Frances Times Online.

Of the divorcé
  on the occasion of what would have been
    his tenth wedding anniversary:

I am a shell,
  hollow,
    walking and talking as if I were a real boy.

Wounds I thought healed are opened anew,
  a feast for the vultures,
    by my spirals of lamentation.

Grief and bitterness and loneliness have taken root
  in the home and hearth of the heart
    where love and joy once dwelt.

I flail about, discordant,
  a pilgrim in search of an acceptance
    I won’t even grant myself.

And of she who once loved me
  (or loved me not, I haven’t the petals to tell)
    I wonder what has become.

With breaths alternating twixt sighs and sobs,
  laughter and curses, empathy and bile,
    I madly dance upon the razor edge of the three-fold law.

My psychosis, my mental Brigadoon,
  is that this is all just fodder for the middle act,
    the turning point that’ll drive it all to resolution.

But there’s no snappy closing, no convenient wrap-up,
  no music to take us out to commercial:
    just “stay tuned for the ongoing story.”

I now have a role-playing game credit to my name!

I was one of the proofreaders on Sean K Reynolds’ new monster book “Hungry Little Monsters,” a charity fundraiser D&D/D20 monster book for FoodForAll.org.

This is a real product with some big-name contributors, including Dave Mattingly, Matt Forbeck, Scott Bennie, and Ed Greenwood. Sean himself even created several beasties for the book.

The only downside? A glitch kept my name off the title page, but even that’s going to be remedied shortly. Expect lots of Look! That’s me!’s after I print it out.

Now, to work on those author/designer credits…

In other news, I’ve convinced work to let me do an ongoing geek/pop culture blog for them, beginning with my trip to the Comic-Con!

I’m very excited about getting my words and POV out in front of a large audience. Nothing’s going to be changing here at the Home of the Soul Cookie, with the possible exception that my long-delayed plans to start a podcast might just get folded into what I’m doing for work. It’s too early to tell.

Some of our departments staff writers have tackled writing blogs with varying amounts of success. I’m hoping to be able to lead by example and to better acquaint them with some of the vernacular of blogging (and how it differs from writing a column or article for print).

Speaking of Karyne’s performance, in our after-the-fact discussions (via email, of course), she mentioned that she was glad I’d come to the Friday show since there’d been some line flubs in Saturday’s penultimate performance.

That got me thinking, and I came up with a Top Ten list that I sent to her. It was a quick little thing, and I like how it came out, so I share it now with you.
Read More…

Dear Asshat,

I applaud your bold, living-on-the-edge decision to drive without any sort of automotive illumination with the conditions as thorougly foggy as they are.

And how clever of you to hang out in my blind spot like that! Your mother must be very proud.

I appreciate the sense of humor and good cheer you exhibited by not honking until after I’d realized you were in the way of my lane change and had moved back. Speeding up and giving me the one-fingered “Howdy!” were the perfect punctutations of your “goodwill ambassador” worldview.

I salute you, fellow motorist, and sincerely wish for you to get everything you have coming.

Yours very truly,
the driver of that white Altima

I just returned from seeing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (H2G2), and while I wouldn’t describe it as terrible (it’s still loads more watchable than, say, Highlander 2), I would describe it as profoundly disappointing.

Now, understand that I first read the H2G2 series when I was in seventh grade. I’ve read the first four books in the “trilogy” time and again. (I have - but have not read - the fifth and sixth books.) I’ve enjoyed the TV movie. And I’ve passed many a long hour on car trips listening to the original radio programs on tape. There’s a certain feel, a particular rhythm and energy common to the various incarnations of the H2G2 series.

That selfsame style of rhythm and energy are so sorely missing from this cinematic adaptation.

One of the things I’ve grown to love in the series are its very quotable bits, the little H2G2 mantras, the enjoyment of which I likely share with other aficionados of the series:

• “Ford, you’re turning into a penguin. Stop it.”
• “I wonder if it will be friends with me?”
• The entire “disused lavatory”/”Beware of leopard” bit

Most of them are gone, excised completely or gutted so intensely as to make them all but neutered.

• Upon arriving on the starship Heart of Gold, Ford and Arthur find themselves briefly in the form of couches. Couches!
• The H2G2 script tags an entirely unnecessary “Hello, ground!” onto the end of the falling sperm whale’s soliloquy.
• Arthur had to “go down to the cellar.”
     (beat)
  No, really, that’s all there was to it.

There were other tweaks, too, that stripped away some of the cleverness of the originals. Remember Ford (or Arthur, depending on which version you first encountered) convincing Prosser to take Arthur’s place in front of the bulldozer at the beginning? That’s gone, replaced with Ford passing around brewskis to the construction crew. How about Arthur trying to wrangle up a decent cuppa tea? Gone, replaced with a vendomaticked cup o’ something green and smoking.

And that brings me to another issue I have with the movie: The changes to Arthur Dent.

As in the H2G2s that have come before, Arthur is our “everyman” character, our gateway into the vast reaches beyond this unfashionable Western Spiral Arm of the Milky Way. But always before, Arthur has been capable of action - whether ranting and raving and threatening to stomp into tiny little bits the workmen demolishing his home, or actively engaging Eddie in making a decent cuppa. But the movie has him bouncing around from situation to situation, incapable of taking any actions (even the wrong ones Arthur was so apt to take).

It’s like they removed all the periods and exclamation points in Arthur’s emotional makeup and replaced ‘em with a perpetual question mark.

Any additional time the filmmakers could’ve spent in staying truer to the source material was wasted on pointless additions. The entire Humma Kavula and Vogsphere sequences? Added nothing, IMHO, to the story, particularly not at the cost of the “good bits.”

And that’s not easy for me to say; I wholeheartedly believe that a movie version of something has the right and the responsibility to chart its own course - movies are not books are not comics are not radio shows. This movie definitely goes its own way. Pity that it’s so distinctly the wrong way.

Moreover, it’s dispiriting to realize just how much the filmmakers truly seem to love the source material. Don’t believe me? Just look at how many really great homages and in-jokes did show up: Simon Jones, the original Dentarthurdent, as the voice and image of the lethal Magrathean answering machine; the TV version’s Marvin, as one of the queue-dwellers on Vogsphere; the I-still-love-it-to-this-day H2G2 theme song, played over the first appearance of the Guide proper in the movie. There’s even a flash of Douglas Adams’ face as the movie fades to a “For Douglas” dedication at the end.

All nice touches, but in the end the movie simply doesn’t live up to the tradition set by the H2G2s that have come before. And I, for one, am saddened by that.

Now hand me my Joo Jantas and that Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster; I think I’m gonna need ‘em.

Take the Soul Cookie’s handy quiz and find out!

What type of blood does your celebrity have?

1. I don’t know.
2. I’ll guess O+ (it’s the most common).
3. After his emergency appendectomy in ‘97, me and a much of the posters to alt.celebrity.be-mine.now.now.now figured out it was AB-.
4. Delicious.

What type of vehicle does your celebrity drive?

1. Something pretty cool, I’ll bet.
2. He talked about his Hummer in the latest issue of People.
3. I bought his old car on eBay! Glee!
4. A 2004 Suburban with the Off-Road Suspension & Appearance package. 6,419 miles on it as of this morning. Leather interiors that bear his scent.

What’s the biggest mistake your celebrity has ever made?

1. Leaving his hit drama to pursue a nonexistent film career.
2. Aliens vs. Predator vs. Howard the Duck. I shall speak of it no more.
3. Marrying… That Woman.
4. Not understanding that I will not be ignored!