3.25.2006
new dress. comes with plastic wrap.
This one is another Chicago street find. I like the way the
plastic looks in the photograph - so billowy. Do you think the
photo-taker owned the store? Did the owner leave the plastic wrap
on the dress in the window so that it was easier to sell
later?
Completely Unrelated:
There's a monthly email from the people who do the Ig Nobel Prizes for wacky research, and they usually have a limerick contest. Here are some nice ones from a while ago.
The judges in the first and last annual Feigned Depressed, Sleepy Voice Limerick Contest have chosen the winners, who in some sense explored the research report:
"Feigned Depression and Feigned Sleepiness: A Voice Acoustical Analysis,"
Nicole Reilly, Michael S. Cannizzaro, Brian T. Harel and Peter
J. Snyder, Brain and Cognition, vol. 55, 2004, pp. 383-6.
The winners will each receive a free, sonorous issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. Here are the triumphant poets and their limericks:
INVESTIGATOR RICHARD GRANGER:
Her children's yawned lack of ambition
Aroused Nicole Reilly's suspicion.
By studying faking
She got those kids waking
and published in Brain and Cognition.
INVESTIGATOR MIRIAM BLOOM:
If depression's a thing you would feign,
'Tis writ it will all be in vain.
Your claim is refutable,
Your voice is quite scrutable--
Or so Reilly et al. ascertain.
INVESTIGATOR ANGELA MARTIN:
If you're faking that you are depressed
Or in desperate need of some rest,
Your voice may be slow
But Reilly will know
That you're really just feigning, at best.
And here is the view expressed by this year's
IMPROBABLE LIMERICK LAUREATE,
MARTIN I. EIGER:
When people pretend they're depressed,
Or when they pretend they need rest,
Their speech rates will change,
But never the range
Of pitches they use. Who'd've guessed?
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