Entries from October 2006 ↓

Here are some tips on how to dress up as your favorite programming language for halloween.

C

Not much to this costume, basically just a thong and a bunch of pointer references that you malloc() houses into. You move from house to house on a very thin tightrope with no supports and no net. You do so very very quickly. If you fall off, you explode.

C++

Find some other costume you like and extend it. Redefine the “>=”, “>”, and “=” operators to act like “<”, to thwart all those stingy spinsters who refuse to give you more than one piece of candy. Walk the tightrope from house to house, almost as quickly as you would in a C costume, but explode just as loudly if you fall.

Perl

The Perl costume is pretty easy. Just tear apart of bunch of other costumes and sew their pieces into a new one, a sort of motley bastard costume that’s so chaotic and complicated and butt-ugly that only a very select few will be able to look at it for any length of time. Those select few will absolutely love you, though, and will give you twenty times more candy than they do the others, so it works out.

Java

The great thing about the Java costume is that it works at pretty much every household you visit. The bad thing is that you have to move about 100 times slower than the kids in the C costume, and pause often to garbage collect. Also, you can’t just accept() candy, you have to build a CandyAcceptor(), using the factory pattern, and then build a hierarchy of acceptors using the Command pattern, each of which is uniquely suited to the particular brand of candy you’re given.

Lisp

Get a bunch of friends to dress up as parentheses, and have them bracket you constantly as you move from house to house. Collect candy recursively, depth-first, by traversing all the way down to the last house then unwinding back up the stack to the first. Make sure the house with the best candy is the last branch node of your domicile tree.

Javascript

Everybody will hate you when you put this costume on, but they’ll give you candy because they think you’re their only option. However — you will be incapable of accepting this candy using the normal means (open bag, wait, close bag) because of some early design mistakes, but there will be literally thousands of ways to hack around this. For example, you could set fire to a house, and then lay a tripwire so that when its residents coming screaming out they’ll fall and the candy in their arms will go sailing through the air into a field of mousetraps you set a little bit down the road, which will go off and in the process hurl the candy into another high rainbow arc which will fall into a giant funnel that leads into a complicated series of roller coaster tunnels that propel that candy through the neighborhood and empty out into your bedroom window. This mechanism will seem very natural to you.

But it will only work with one house. You’ll need to find a different way to do it for each of the others.

Dear Mr President:

Merry Christmas, sir! It’s been quite a year here at the Department of Coercion. As you know, we’ve successfully coerced 4000 enemy combatants since January 1, which averages out to 10 successful coercions a day. A record!

Even better, we’ve been able to extract an average of 3 confessions from each coercee. Some of our more terrorist-loving liberal activist judges have called the validity of some of these confessions into question, but our tireless Minister of Facts was nevertheless able to give them the platform they deserved.

For example: the confession that led to the successful arrest of the Thirty Dirty Democrats (and what a triumph that was!) came from a terrorist who had no tongue — at least, he had no tongue by the time he confessed. He had no working fingers, either, so he had to moan his confession into a tape recorder. But our crack team of moan-interpreters had a transcript of his revelations ready in no time, and the Minister of Facts disseminated it to all of our Fact Outlets within the hour! What a glorious day that was! If you’ll remember, that confession helped us reduce the number of friends-of-Osama in the Congress down to two, both of whom retired in disgrace soon afterwards, when the Ministry of Facts discovered some facts about them.

But I write you today with sobering news. I’m sorry to report that the enemy combatants have somehow manged to penetrate deeper into our society since you signed the I Love America Enemy Combatant Vanquishment Act of 2014. I don’t know how this has happened: you valiantly reclassified college professors, liberal bloggers, sodomites, atheists and the city of Hollywood as enemy combatants, and dealt with them appropriately; and yet their kind have still managed to infiltrate our tolerant and peace-loving society.

It is time for another recalibration. I am not suggesting that we coerce American citizens, of course. We are a free country, and our people have rights. But I do believe that the definition of enemy combatants must be expanded, and made more flexible. The terrorists know how to worm their way around simple, static labels. We must be able to think on our feet.

I have therefore enclosed a bill that my colleagues and I drafted, called the America The Land of the Free Terrorist Obliteration Act of 2017. In it, we propose that the term “enemy combatants” be redefined as “those people who the president defines as enemy combatants”. This is a simple concept that all of the good people of America can understand, and get behind. It will also make capturing these evil men much easier. If you see a terrorist posing as a schoolteacher, for example, or a crossing guard, or a little girl, or a protester at one of your People Rallies, then you can arrest him immediately, and have him coerced within 24 hours.

I urge you to put this bill into the hands of one of your congressmen as soon as possible. We cannot let this threat languish. The terrorists will never rest in their efforts to rob us of our freedoms.

Also, we’re running out of people to coerce.

Sincerely,

The Coercer General

Thankfully, the SexyBack obsession seems to be passing, though something else has taken its place, just as viral but infinitely more worthy: Don’t Feel Like Dancin’, by The Scissor Sisters. I defy you to suppress your autonomic booty-gyration instincts while listening to this song.