I was cleaning my room when I found this list in a pile of papers:
It’s my handwriting from the last couple years, and it looks faintly familiar, but for the life of me I have no idea what it means or why I wrote it.
… can anyone help figure this one out?
Words that have the same Levenshtein distance from some other specific word?
Or more generally, words whose Levenshtein distances from some other specific word form a subsequence of some well known (e.g.: Fibonacci) sequence?
Well, okay – I’ll bite, though this’ll sound totally far-out.
The Lenhart family http://www.lenhartfamily.org/, especially Godfrey, is connected to a lot of LEGENDS from two centuries ago, including
JOHN Lenhart was in the US Navy, was a Chaplain, and you can get LITHOGRAPHS of him.
Kendra is a boxer – I don’t know, does she have kidnappable children for wifi passwords? Or good LEGS?
For some reason, Heidi Lenhart’s “Then and Now” page redirects to http://w3.eftel.com/home.cms, an australian ISP’s page.
I was hoping ‘Lenhart’ had something to do with parrots, but apparently it means ‘lion’s heart’ (duh!) only and nothing else.
Anywhere close?
……It could be codes from a game that you were playing and had problems.
They’re the names of the T stops for the Infared Line, an unseen band of mass transportation that is only accessible following high acceleration at the ends of the Red line (either the Mattapan or Alewife stations). It can only be breached by an intrepid adventurer with a knowledge of physics, a sense of imagination, and a high speed vehicle small enough to travel inside a subway car. The vehicle would have to be able to accelerate 0 to 20 mph in four seconds. But where would we find such a person?
Maybe it’s a list of words you associate with ‘losing the game’.
I write things like this all the time when I wake up. I write as much from my dream as possible but since it leaves my hed so fast I only manage to write single words or ideas, I end up with alot of papers like this one. As for the x’s, no idea.
Ooh, another idea: names for fighter squadrons (like Rogue Squadron, Red Squadron, Gold Squadron, Wraith Squadron…). “Foxhound Squadron,” “Legends Squadron,” “Lithographer Squadron,” “John’s Squadron,” are all great. So is “Bunting Squadron.” Or Star Destroyer names!
“Victory-I class Star Destroyer Parrot reporting in, sir.”
You wrote gibberish while drunk. So that at a later point you would pick it up and wonder why you had written it.
Then if you were brilliant enough at some point you would remember the above.
I revise my old statement. Instead of ‘leg’ supposing to be ‘legends’ it seems like the ‘ends’ on legends was added later to the text. Therfore, you might end up with leg twice.
Also bob brings up a good point. It could be a handwriting test, writing text with your left hand and then writing with your right hand. It seems like similar handwriting for all of the words but lithographer, legends, resupplying, bunting and leg are at a different tilt, suggesting a different situation.
The two x’s are different because the less sloppy one was written in your dominant hand and the sloppy one was with your non-dominant hand. If you can write that neatly with your non-dominant hand then you could have your answer.
Try Hypnosis.. You may remember.
Well, if my comment’s been awaiting moderation for over 28 hours, it must be close, right? Or is the L**h***t family’s politics against your value systems?
Seems to me like one of two things: Either a list of things that are stuck on your mind at night before bed that you wrote down to let you get some rest, knowing that they are securely printed on paper for future use OR a brainstorming of boredom, seeing what abstract subjects you can jump to. An improbable, but NOT impossible thread can be made to link them all together.
Evening – > Release the hounds! – > Foxhounds
Foxhounds – > Redcoats – > Longjohns – > Johns
Johns – > Jones – > Davey Jones – > Parrot
Parrot – > Audio Recorder – > Lithographer (jump from hearing to writing, bear with me here)
Lithographer – > Written stories – > Legends
Legends – > Epic battles – > when did they resupply? – > resupplying
Resupplying – > keeping stocked – > seige goods – > Comfy base – > Nest-like base – > Bunting’s base – > Bunting
Bunting – > Flight – > landing – > legs – > leg
It’s all so simple!… kind of…
when looking at the list i get nothing, but after reading about halfway through the comments and mulling it over, i was thinking; could it have something to do with photography? i dont really know what a lithograph is, but i know it records information, maybe the words were things that would look like something else if you took a photo of them? of course this only works for items, and not concepts such as “resupplying”… but isn’t it strange that “evening” and “resupplying” are the only ones you cant readily/easily capture on camera? perhaps it was something to do with a particular rule (eg words that came up to prove you’re not a robot) and some of them are exceptions to the rule? the exceptions may be written somewhere significant eg in the other column, or they may just be randomly dispersed throughout the list. however perhaps there’s another piece of paper that is like a key, and would help you determine what the list means…maybe search your room again for other pages that are maybe from the same-ish time?
Steve! said: parrot is an anagram for raptor… not that this helps anything.
Okay, that’s just effing creepy.
I have two theories:
1. As previously mentioned, these are a list of passwords for the levels of some web based flash game. (The presence of the X’s seems to support this as you were possibly working on some logic puzzle.)
2. I have found lists like this in the past and they have either been #1 above, or “set lists” for comedy bits I made up in my head thinking I would be able to use them at some amatuer improv comedy night. Of course, I have never actually done stand-up comedy, and when I find the lists, I do not remember in the slightest the “story” the title is supposed to represent.
If there is anything to be learned from this little experiment, it’s that cleaning is bad. Very, very bad. If you’d just left that little paper in the pile where it belongs, we’d all be going on with our lives right now. Instead, we’re spending valuable time pondering what foxhounds, lithographers, johns and parrots have to do with each other. Except that I wouldn’t want to share an apartment with any of them.
in retrospect, I believe they are all names to future XKCD comics.
“1. As previously mentioned, these are a list of passwords for the levels of some web based flash game. (The presence of the X’s seems to support this as you were possibly working on some logic puzzle.)”
I doubt it, since in that case I would expect them all to appear on some web page somewhere. Also, game passwords tend to be nonsensical alphanumeric combinations of constant length.
All I can think of is that you are the only person i’ve ever met that also starts their s at the bottom, lol
Titles/subjects of possible comics?
Possible comic titles/subjects?
Crap – I hate when my computer’s dumb. Sry about double-post.
Perhaps you were just trying how far a list like this you could give to your friends using ‘now, if you’ll just bear with me for a moment’
“Death by _______” searches.
All these other conclusions seem to be the result of careful calculations and, in some cases, deep and inspired thought (check out mattcoop’s post about 7/8 of the way down). I’m just going to go out on a simplistic limb here and say that these are a list of potential strip themes/ideas? But that’s probably not right.
Let’s try some Google(fight)ing.
“Death by evenings” : 39 results
“Death by foxhounds” : 12 results
“Death by johns” : 163 results
“Death by parrot” : 63 results
“Death by lithographer” : 25 results
“Death by legends” : 66 results
“Death by resupplying” : 0 results
“Death by bunting” : 6 results
So johns wins. Or resupplying, depending on your point of view. I wouldn’t have expected lithographer to beat foxhounds, though.
Hey Russel! Are all these guessings helping you or confusing you more ?
I think this is a test on how much people are willing to waste their time on figuring out what this meaningless list is!
What about longest average distance between letters typed on the keyboard? I’ve always wondered about this. Is the keyboard setup the most efficient possible? Should it actually read eveningsfoxhoundsjohnsparrotlithographerlegendsresupplyingbuntingleg rather than qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm?
This is turning into “All the things you can do with words” List :-ph
Ever played Mad Libs? You seem the type to…And that looks like a madlibs list.
I know! An automatic writing exercise.
That or the worst poem ever.
“What about longest average distance between letters typed on the keyboard? I’ve always wondered about this. Is the keyboard setup the most efficient possible?”
Qwerty was designed to be inefficient. But in either case I doubt the resulting layout would actually form words…
It’s an excerpt of an infinite number of monkeys using an infinite number of typewriters having spent half an infinity typing, well on their way to writing a Shakespeare play.
Well, I’m pretty sure that the two Xs are, indeed, both Xs. But if the top one is an alpha, then you’ve written the Greek exclamation “AX” (in lowercase), which means something like “oh”. In this case, I’m assuming its use is like when one says “oh” for “aha!”.
Therefore, as you were writing this, trying to figure something out, it suddenly clicked, and you gave up writing the rest of the list (though taking time to find out the Greek translation of “oh”). If you’d have finished it, it would still make sense now, but you didn’t need to.
-~-~-~-
You were testing a new pen you’d bought, to see if the line width and overall appearance looked good.
You made two X’s on the paper as a quick preliminary test.
Some time later, after the X’s had dried, you needed to come up with a new idea (for an XKCD strip, or some other creative effort).
You used the same pad of paper and quickly wrote down several random stream-of-consciousness words.
From that, you mentally explored relationships between the words. You got some interesting ideas. You tore that sheet off the pad at that point, and wrote your ideas down on subsequent sheets in the pad.
You liked the results. You saved the sheet containing the random words because it had been valuable for giving you those ideas, and might do so again.
If it was anything that interesting/surprising, I’d think he’d remember it
Maybe they’re a design for quick-launch keys on a keyboard
Like:
parrot=Activate text-to-speech
lithographer=print screen
foxhounds=start Metal Gear
legends=start e-book reader
resupplying=go to eBay/Amazon/Safeway Online/whatever
bunting=start baseball game
johns(the “toilets” meaning)=clear the trash bin? Make the computer do a core dump? Flush buffers?
evening/leg=some meaning only unintelligable to Randall
I don’t know what the list is, but I sure have loved reading the comments. (I read about the first 50 or so; will have to continue later…)
i know what it is. stuff related to treasure hunting. evening so the peg legged parrot shouldered pirates dont see you to sick their foxhounds on you? a bunting is a piece of cloth or flag,lithography could be used to print on the bunting… pirate flag? white flag to surrender? thumbs up? thumbs down? even printing for the map, found on google images, but put onto bunting to make it look cooler? i dunno, johns could just be pants, and resupplying is for… supplies. makes sense to me… kinda.
err, but i like the pen testing idea better… though the two x’s COULD meAN two pieces of treasure… man if anyone decides to do this im in…
Perhaps you were trying to find the fewest number of words/common words that would return only dictionaries or wordlists as Google results?
Have you figured it out yet?
Randall,
I found some more words for your list:
falsehoods
meniscus (or more recognizably its plural possessive),
and my personal favorite: maleability.
Oh no! Spell check tells me that it’s “Malleability” not “maleability”. It doesn’t work any more. Now I’m sad.
I’ll have to keep looking.
i was too lazy to see if any one else came up with this… maybe it’s a mnemonic… they’re all fairly random words, so they would be easy to remember, then you would be able to remember the words they stand for…
It’s a list of words to document his letter-shapes. “g” v. “s.” I’m not sure what parrot and lithographer are doing, but I would guess double “r” shapes versus standing-alone “r” shapes.
@Cesium
Why do we use an inefficient design?
@Anglave
How did you get these?
Cockney Rhyming Slang?
@Alex
Qwerty was originally designed to slow down typists, to stop type-writer keys from jamming, I believe. Then it just kinda caught on, I guess..
Oh Andy.s – Everything should ALWAYS be cokney rhyming slang.
his sally whine is mountain dew a moshpitt over the forgotten dues.