February 23, 2006

Trent Reznor Prize nomination

Tim Macdonald has nominated a candidate for the Trent Reznor Prize for Tricky Embedding.

It's a bit of dialog from R.K. Milholland's 2/15/2006 Something Positive strip. Davan MacIntire comes in the door and has this exchange with his father Fred:

Davan: Hey Dad. I'm back from dropping Peejee off at the airport. I'm just gonna go get the mail and then we can head over to the book store.
Fred: I already got the mail. Your boss mailed ya your paycheck.
Davan: Really? Where is it?
Fred: Mom's holdin' on to it for ya.
Davan: Uh, Dad... I don't really see how -- [sees the check under his mother's funeral urn] Damn it, Dad! You've gotta stop using Mom's urn to mark where you left things! It's just ... really weird.
Fred: Yeah, you're right. I'd hate to make payin' a man an idiotic sum of money to burn my wife into a fine powder and stick her in a $400 bowlin' trophy 'cuz she requested it into somethin' weird.
Davan: Dad, I have some wonderful news. I'm positive it won't be Alzheimer's that kills you.

In the last line, I think that Davan is making a hyperbolic joke about his father's tendency to irritate him: "keep talking like that and I'll kill you". But in fact there's some evidence connecting high values of "idea density" and "grammatical complexity" with resistance to Alzheimer's.

Posted by Mark Liberman at February 23, 2006 03:19 PM