Arnold Zwicky's Blog

The linguist Bert Vaux (information below) has been playing with AI resources for some time; most recently he’s been using head shots of various people — the hot young Brad Pitt and the famously scowling Vladimir Lenin, for example — as elements in AI compositions, today producing this entertaining ad, in which VL goes places VL has never gone before:

(#1) The major contribution to this work is a genuine Bon Ami cleanser print ad from 1949 (which BV posted on Facebook along with #1; I’ll reproduce it below)

For this image I provided a musical text, a burlesque of a wonderful comic song:

You can do such a lot with V. Lenin,
You can use every part of him too.
For work or for pleasure, he’s a triumph he’s a treasure
Oh there’s nothing that V. Lenin cannot do

Yes, I will also reproduce the original of this text.

Bert Vaux, who is he? From the sketchy Wikipedia article, with amendments by me:

Bert Vaux (born November 19, 1968 [in Houston TX]) is an American linguist [Univ.of Chicago BA, Harvard Univ. PhD], currently a professor of phonology and morphology at the University of Cambridge [in England]. Previously, he taught for nine years at Harvard and three years at University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Vaux specializes in phonological theory, dialectology, field methodology, and languages of the Caucasus [especially Armenian].

He is also, as you can see, notably playful.

The 1949 magazine ad. For Bon Ami cleanser, not Boraxo, and with a female wielder of the cleanser:

(#2) With the ad setting somewhat altered in #1, but with the text and its formating untouched

The original of the burlesque. From my 8/1/13 posting “The Luffa and the Wompom”:

In the NYT Magazine on Sunday (July 28th), a “Who Made That?” column (by Pagan Kennedy) on the Loofah Mitt. That leads us to the Luffa plant, source of a vegetable and also loofah sponges. And that takes us to the incredibly multifunctional plant the Wompom, as celebrated in song by Flanders and Swann.

… The Luffa plant is dual-purpose. Flanders and Swann’s Wompom is a true multi-purpose plant. A performance here.

The lyrics, for your appreciation [beginning]:

You can do such a lot with a Wompom,
You can use every part of it too.
For work or for pleasure,
It’s a triumph, it’s a treasure,
Oh there’s nothing that a Wompom cannot do.

I am also a playful person.

This entry was posted on June 14, 2025 at 6:31 pm and is filed under AI, Language play, Linguists, Nonsense, Parodies, Silliness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.