On Facebook today, a report on a Google AI search on “Lynneguist hospital” that inspired the bot to satisfy the search term by giving Lynne Murphy a medical degree:
[LM:] Adding medical qualifications to my cv.
I mean, here’s the evidence.
Archive for November, 2025
Lynneguist, MD
November 13, 2025
Things left undone
November 12, 2025From my 9/19 posting “An eventful day”:
On one front, considerable unease about the long, all-consuming, and physically debilitating project of dispossession of things in my condo. So I sent out a request (reproduced below) for leads on people who have accomplished what I hope to get out of all of that.
From that request:
I need some information about assisted living facilities (NOT retirement communities). Specifically, I need to hear, in detail, about anyone who has gone into an alf while maintaining a professional, academic, or artistic career. What I really want is to talk to such a person about how they managed that.
And then from the 9/19 posting:
The short answer is that, yes, people like me have indeed carried on their careers in an alf. I have direct leads to several of these people. (Of course, everybody’s story is different, but this outcome is clearly possible.)
Yummy grub from around the planet
November 12, 2025In full:
Thanks for all the good conversation and yummy grub from around the planet
My first report on a two-day visit from my old friend Ellen Kaisse, who flew in from Seattle to San Jose. Intended as help in my preparing to move to an assisted living facility — and we got some of that in — but for me it became mostly a wonderful time talking about our lives these days and trying to recover accurate memories of our pasts (so that there will be at least one more posting about the fragility and pliability of memory) — a vacation from my anxieties and sorrows, punctuated by three breaks for food (two lunches and one dinner), carefully chosen to be favorites of mine — I am now an experienced browser of restaurants for home delivery — that I was pretty sure Ellen had never had before and would also fit her dietary constraints (she doesn’t eat mammals).
This is the food report.
The balloon trainee
November 12, 2025Yesterday’s Wayno / Piraro Bizarro shows us a budding balloon artist at the very beginning of his career, where he creates the simplest of balloon animals, before advancing to the balloon dog:
(#1) The raw material of balloon sculpture is cylindrical balloons, which can then be twisted and tied together; this trainee has the cylindrical balloons, but as yet has had no practice in manipulating them, so he offers for sale the unprocessed balloons, which the buyer just has to imagine as different roughly cylindrical animals — here an earthworm, here a snake, here (where we break up in laughter) a lowly nematode (most nematodes are tiny, less than 2.5 mm long) (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 5 in this strip — see this Page)
It’s a jungle out there
November 12, 2025Yesterday’s most puzzling item that turned up on my e-mail Junk site for my moderation (a small but significant amount of stuff is incorrectly labeled as Junk and has to be rescued; the rest I hand-delete):
headers (items with embedded links are underlined):
Outreach Team
Are you accepting paid guest post on arnoldzwicky.org
To: arnoldzwicky.org
Reply-to: Outreach Team
body of text (in its entirety, verbatim):
Hello,
I hope you are doing well.
I’m reaching out to explore the possibility of contributing a guest post to your website, along with a permanent do-follow link.
Could you let me know the available opportunities and relevant details?
I look forward to your response.Best regards,
Thank you!
My first response was astonishment. I get an enormous number of requests to do guest postings on my blog, but most of them have some bit of credibility, and some are very cleverly framed. But this one is essentially a detail-free message. Does anyone ever reply to such messages?
Ah, but then I looked at the links and investigated further.
Like a Spanish cow
November 11, 2025Very briefly noted, this morning’s morning name, the stock insult in French:
parler français comme une vache espagnole, literally ‘to speak French like a Spanish cow’, conveying ‘to speak French badly’
I heard this first from Ann Daingerfield Zwicky and our good friend Benita Bendon Campbell, It’s vivid and silly, and then English like a Spanish cow can be adapted as a critique of someone’s linguistic abilities in French or English or, I assume, any language. Cows being linguistically quite limited, and Spaniards being one of the nationalities French people are inclined to mock (though I would have expected the cow to be Italian, Dutch, or German; or of some exotic despised nationality, like Turkish or Chinese).
Gods and tables
November 10, 2025In e-mail from Tony Velasquez on 11/8:
your 11/7 blog post about category errors and the potential for making jokes with them … reminded me of something I’m reading, How God Becomes Real, by Tanya Luhrmann …, who argues that knowing … that a god exists uses a different ontological attitude than knowing … that a table exists. She also points out that this attitude toward the spiritual has a lot of affinity with the sort of ontological attitude taken in play. It’s interesting to me to think that the attitude toward category errors you take that leads you to create jokes is opposed to a very different attitude to what could be called the category error, on Luhrmann’s thinking, that spiritual beings are real in the same sense that tables are real — an attitude that, instead of leading to play or jokes, often leads to violence and war.
A.Z.
November 8, 2025Back on Thursday 11/6, amid the hour-long marathon of signing and notarizing documents, the jaunty house notary remarked, with surprise and delight, that she’d never had an A.Z. before, never in 25 years on the job. (There are a fair number worldwide, but, it seems, very few in the US — and there have apparently only ever been two Arnold Zwickys, the other being my father.) On a quick ramble through my memory, I found only three Americans:
Two Bizarros
November 7, 2025Yesterday’s Wayno/ Piraro Bizarro:
(#1) The coupled life, with cook and diner; cooks — I was the diner and helper in Ann’s and my life, the cook in Jacques’s and my life, and I can say that the cook is often anxious about pleasing their audience, the diner (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are 3 in this strip — see this Page)
Now, highlights of an exchange between Wayno and me that starts out being about this cartoon.
Category errors as a joke form
November 7, 2025Let’s dive right in, to a back-and-forth on Facebook yesterday between Gadi Niram and me:
— GN: Pick a color from 1 to 10. [AZ thinks: obviously, lavender 7 — something that’s both a color and also a number from 1 to 10]
— AZ [actual reply]: parsley [something from yet a third, hitherto unmentioned, category, herbs] … alternatively: Benjamin Harrison [US Presidents] [separately, continuing the Still Another Category theme, Sophie Silberpup suggested: antelope, in the animals category]
[now breaking out into the form of three-part solutions to the mystery in the board game Clue] titanium, in 753 BC, with a ball-peen hammer [titanium, located in 753 BC, killed the victim using a ball-peen hammer]
— GN: You crack me up, dude!
— AZ: Three more shots [each a triple: responsible person or thing, location in space or time, instrument or accompaniment], dude, and then I rest.
Minerva, in Flagstaff, with a night-blooming cereus … a jackalope, in Ursa Major, with John Waters … the ulna, in Narnia, with Moomins
I note that the responses seem to be crystallizing, developing some internal organization, over time. Starting to approach poetry, rather than pleasurable nonsense.
Not that there’s anything wrong with pleasurable nonsense.