Parody Singularity

Some posts take a lot of building up to, but here we go...

1. Somebody did a quizz a while back in which he typed some lyrics into an English-to-Japanese translation programme which translates the results back and forth until the result translates as itself. You then had to guess what the original lyric was. I can't find it again, not after an hour of scrolling and searching, but you get the idea. (I thought it was James Higham but he says it wasn't - see first comment).

UPDATE: t'was John B on 7 August, well done Tim W for remembering!

2. Ross was the Undisputed World Champion of the World Victimhood Poker Series earlier this month.

3. With a nod to the concept in (1), this prompted me to ask him "Can you reduce the whole process to a computer programme and sell it to Comment Is Free? Then we could play that game where you feed the CiF article back into the programme and see how long it takes before the 'opinion piece' translates into itself?", to which he replied "I've been doing that for years, you don't actually believe Julie Bindel & Gary Younge are real people do you?"

4. Tim Worstall discovered a New Phrase a week ago, being "Parody horizon", defined as follows: "When something has crossed the parody horizon, it becomes impossible to parody (that, of course, is a common idiom) for the simple reason that any parody would be indistinguishable from the original."

5. As I like reading about quantum physics and black holes and stuff, I left the following comment: "If “parody horizon” is like an “event horizon” in physics (something to do with black holes), then presumably there is also such a concept as “parody singularity”, which would be the technical term for something which is identical to a parody of itself. And which is, presumably, zero-dimensional and impossible to escape."

6. The whole concept turned full circle today. In James Higham's Brit Blog Roundup 241, under the sub-heading "Feminism" he links to a post titled Women still under-represented in climate debate, which kicks off as follows: "Out of 146 national delegations at the UN climate talks on Tuesday, only seven were headed by women. Oxfam says this is an example of how women’s voices are still absent from the debate on climate change and what to do about it, even though - particularly the poorest, most marginalised - women will be worst affected, IPS reports."

7. I assumed, from that excerpt, that it was a parody (and left a comment accordingly), but having read the full article, I'm just not sure any more. The article mentions, without apparent irony, "Ursula Rakova from Papua New Guinea, who formed an NGO, Sailing the Waves on Our Own, to relocate and build houses for people displaced by rising sea-levels."

Now, if there were such a thing as "rising sea levels" (as opposed to towns that are sinking in the mud, like New Orleans or Venice; or towns that are built far too close to the shore line, like Manila, or in areas prone to flooding, like Boscastle; or land masses that are tilting into the sea, like the South East of England), wouldn't our cousins on the other side of the North Sea, i.e. the Dutch, sixty per cent of whom live on land that is below sea level, be screaming blue murder?

8. To conclude, this has been an interesting journey, but I'm not sure where it's headed any more.