Comments on: Weak sauce. You’re not even trying!

By: jayesjay

jayesjay — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:47:58 +0000

There’s an article in Wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETAOIN_SHRDLU
that explains ETAOIN SHRDLU were the first two vertical columns on the left side of the keyboard.
I can’t find my copy of the Denys Parsons books, so I got that slightly wrong.
The stuff about Parsons can be found on http://everything2.com/title/Funny+Ha+Ha+and+Funny+Peculiar

By: jayesjay

jayesjay — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:43:08 +0000

IMHO it’s highly noticeable junk text, meant to be removed or substituted by proper text. I suspect someone at the signwriters meant to add more words, “I’ll put them in later…”, and forgot.
There was a series of paperback collections of misprints, howlers and oddities from newspapers and magazine, compiled by Denys Parsons in 1965. Parsons explains in his introductions that a creature called Gobfrey Shrdlu is responsible for all these strange goings on.
He said that “gobfreyshrdlu” was the sort of character string that could be produced by running the fingers along a row of a newspaper Linotype typesetting machine (it didn’t use a qwerty keyboard). The copyist would do this to generate a line of type that could be easily seen in the type matrix after casting, and extracted at that point. That sort of funny character string is intentional, but should not have been left in.

By: Krynn

Krynn — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 03:35:40 +0000

Yes, it would be.

By: jinxed

jinxed — Sat, 23 Jan 2010 04:48:50 +0000

ugh. *hurls* John, that was a down-right, revolving, horribly dreadful pun. Follow me back to dreadful pun h3ll

By: Sparrow

Sparrow — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:04:45 +0000

For the win!
(I was thinking “must be Cthulhu’s older brother!”)

By: Ignatz

Ignatz — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 19:49:11 +0000

Would “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn” be an improvement?

By: amethyst

amethyst — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 18:39:48 +0000

The Lemurs have obviously hired teh itteh bitteh translation team. Consists of small kitten walking down the keyboard. So hard to find good help these days.

By: giggidy

giggidy — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:40:37 +0000

its a riddle! unscramble the words now!

By: oic

oic — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 15:25:49 +0000

It’s all written in new internet acronyms.

By: Devil Dan

Devil Dan — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:32:52 +0000

It wasn’t? *deletes shool project*

By: graspee

graspee — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 02:20:15 +0000

I like the way the lemur on the right is looking down at the nonsense like “WTF is that lol”. (Lemurs talk like that).

By: ?

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:23:07 +0000

Qwerty

By: caithleen

caithleen — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 00:13:54 +0000

so thats all the toe tipping i heard before the bangs on the floor !
I still wanna know what they ment to say.

By: dr handle

dr handle — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 23:03:57 +0000

They got the lemurs to walk on the keyboard to produce this souvenir item. So cute – it was really popular! Mind you, the same strategy didn’t work out so well for the hippos.

By: Bhazor

Bhazor — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 21:38:36 +0000

That’s essentially what Welsh looks like to me.

By: JohnB

JohnB — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 20:51:32 +0000

Whoever “translated” into “English” was definitely lamer!

By: la conejita

la conejita — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:48:11 +0000

Would this be considered Engrish? Or just lame-ur?

By: JohnB

JohnB — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 19:33:45 +0000

Orly? Except for the “w” and the “e,” which occurred in succession and are right next to each other on the board, every one of those symbols can be found on the “home row” of a qwerty keyboard. Look at the frequency of the symbols asdfjkl;, all of which do not require moving one’s hands off the keys they normally rest on. I’d bet a large sum of money that that was done on a standard qwerty.

By: jamisings

jamisings — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:24:16 +0000

Shoot, wrong picture. Sorry! Meant this for Kung Fu noodles!

By: jamisings

jamisings — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:22:24 +0000

By: v000

v000 — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:30:36 +0000

Keyboarding exercise?

By: paws4thot

paws4thot — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:15:28 +0000

I think it’s a 6-rotor version of an Enigma cypher?

By: bluejade

bluejade — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 12:06:40 +0000

Where’s the code book?