MegaMilestone and the Loebner Prize

Greetings from sodom
how we lie awake, always hungry in bed?

In the news: Alice wins the Loebner Prize for the third time. "The Loebner Prize was started in 1990. It hands medals and cash prizes to the inventors of computer programs that can maintain the most life-like dialogue." Hooray for Alice!

In other news, my copy of Jason Hutchens' old non-winner of the Loebner Prize, MegaHAL, now has more than a megabyte of data in his training file, which gives him a brain size of over 20 megabytes. Now HAL can make less sense than ever before! He sounds just like the best sort of postmodern poet.

Today i saw a purple cow,
i am merlin
a film star, its glamorous globe of fire,
dressed up in this valley the spiritual traveler disappears,
and windows flash with television blues.
the dove's soft song about roses,
i drowned him over and over, the same sea, the same,
actin' funny but i love would still be troublesome.

i always waken, listening
to travel. None of these, fixed instead
on two strong legs.
it is a place now,
for on this hill of clouds, draped in her hidden place.

( More MegaPoems inside )

One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately

List found here. How many of these albums do you own? I don't own all that many albums, but I own a few of these.

7. The Police--Synchronicity "To enjoy Synchronicity is to consider one's self to be socially enlightened without having to dredge up any real empathy." Or perhaps it's to enjoy catchy pop songs, maybe even to wander around singing "Murder by Numbers" to anyone who complains about your owning a copy of Synchronicity. I'm just saying.

24. Nine Inch Nails--Pretty Hate Machine. I've mentioned before that three albums helped me get through the early '90s when my health started to go downhill: For entirely different reasons, Bel Canto's Birds of Passage, Peter Himmelman's From Strength to Strength, and Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine. Boys and girls, music can save your life. That said, I'm still not sure how I feel about the fact that musesfool says "The Only Time" reminds her of me.

I do not actually own a copy of 42. The Police--Zenyatta Mondatta, but I do have to say that "Everything else is overwhelmed by the shallow ball of ego that is Sting" does not strike me as a compelling reason to toss any album. I like Sting's shallow ball of ego. I think it's fun to toss around like a big beach ball of melody. Or something like that. For the record, I've got albums by another Policeman as well--Stewart Copeland, the drummer. Too bad guitarist Andy Summers' music never thrilled me as much somehow.

I have never owned the Celine Dion album listed at 45 and hopefully never will. Got to agree with at least one thing on the list.

67. Paula Cole--This Fire
"Ah, step by grueling step through Paula's therapy sessions. She's angry! She's repressed. She's angry! She's happy. She's outraged...(see track listing for sense of closure)." Heh. I don't disagree with a word of this and will mock Paula Cole's lyrics mercilessly (are we sure she's a native speaker of English?), but I do love the music.

90. Sting--Ten Summoner's Tales
"Next he'll be doing country-western, and I ain't buyin' it." Sting actually has done country-western music, you know, but it was in 7/4 time.