Every so often, I look at our DVD collection and say to myself, "I really ought to catalog those one of these days", and then fail to do so because, quite frankly, it's a tedious task, and I usually have more appealing things to do than write down a couple hundred DVD titles.

This morning on TotalFark, someone linked to this item and asked if anyone had any experience with it; it's a barcode scanner for cataloging DVD collections (scan in the UPC symbols from your DVDs, then connect it to your computer and use the accompanying software to look up all the UPC symbols).

Now, one of my work projects involves the use of a USB handheld barcode scanner. And Amazon lets you look up products by their UPC symbols. So I plugged the barcode scanner into my Eee PC and scanned all the DVDs into a text editor, then wrote a short PHP script to read the list and look up each UPC symbol on Amazon, grab the title out of the results page, and write it to another file.

Less than half an hour's worth of work, including the time it took to scan 253 DVD boxes, and I had our whole collection cataloged. (Three UPC symbols weren't in the Amazon database, so I had to type those titles in manually, like a savage.)

Go ahead, laugh at our tastes in film and television.

I've long been fascinated by shibboleths, the words or phrases which identify people as belonging to a particular group or subculture. The word itself (which literally refers to "a part of a plant containing grain") gained that particular linguistic meaning from the inspiring Biblical tale of the Gileadites, who ferreted out their enemy, the Ephraimites, by demanding that anyone trying to cross the river Jordan say the word "shibboleth". As the Ephraimites' dialect didn't include the "sh" phoneme, anyone who pronounced it "sibboleth" was summarily slaughtered.

I was first introduced to the concept, though, in the novel The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, by Jimmy Breslin. Early in the novel, we're told that one of the main characters had a great fondness for a tale of a Sicilian shibboleth:

What Baccala wanted to do at first was not good. "Ciciri," he muttered one night. The three people with him at dinner became nervous. The word ciciri means bean, but to Baccala the meaning is much deeper. The only history he knows of is the rebellion of Sicilians in Palermo in 1282 against the French. A French soldier tried to rape a housewife in front of her husband in Palermo. The husband killed the soldier and all Palermo took to the streets. They surrounded French soldiers and told them to say the word ciciri. It is supposed to be an impossible set of syllables for the French tongue to handle. So the people of Palermo, with a great shout, slit the throats of the soldiers. Baccala, who knows the story by heart, loves to talk about the part where the hero of the uprising, Nicola Pancia, boarded a French ship in the harbor and had seventy French sergeants and their wives and children thrown overboard. Nicola Pancia and his men hung over the side and cheered each time a baby drowned.

"The baby makes-a bubbles in the water," Baccala always says, crying from laughter.

In more recent history, each time Baccala mutters this particular word, somebody in Brooklyn gets invited on a deep-sea fishing trip from Sheepshead Bay. Out in the ocean, a rope is put around the man's neck. The other end of the rope is attached to an old jukebox. The jukebox is thrown overboard. The man invariably follows.

(The word "shibboleth" always sounds to me like a name out of the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual. I suppose it doesn't help that J.R.R. Tolkien wrote an essay named The Shibboleth of Fëanor - which, again, sounds to me more like a mythical beast than a linguistic term.)

One of the things that fascinated me about Scientology was the overwhelming quantity of shibboleths it spawned. From words made up out of whole cloth, to common words repurposed to mean something entirely different within the context of the cult's vernacular, to Hubbard's randomly affected British pronunciation of certain words, it's exceptionally difficult for a "wog" to reproduce their bizarre speech well enough to fool an actual member of the cult. (Not impossible - but that's a story for another time.)

The analysis of Left Behind that I've been reading has revealed some of the shibboleths of the "premillenial dispensationalist" subculture, so that's been quite interesting to me as well. Some of this group's jargon was discussed (at least in the blogosphere) when Mike Huckabee was still in the Presidential race - like George W. Bush, he peppered his campaign speeches with "code words" intended to convey to the Religious Right that he was one of them, words and phrases which seemed merely strange (or even completely innocuous) to anyone outside the group.

Like most subcultures, the SCA has its shibboleths, too. When I was in college, a knight moved to a neighboring SCA group from the West Kingdom, and was eagerly fêted by the people there, as he was the only Peer in their group. But something about him bothered a few of us; he didn't sound right. He called some things by the wrong names, and was baffled by some of the common words of SCA parlance. That led us to dig deeper, and ask "innocent" questions which revealed that he "couldn't remember" the name of the Crown who had knighted him just three years previously - at the tender age of sixteen - nor the name of the group he'd played in out West, nor even the names of anyone back there who could vouch for him. (He was, not surprisingly, angry at being unmasked - yet, oddly, the people in his group who'd been deceived were furious with us for depriving them of their "knight".)

Years later, in Trimaris, another false Peer moved in... but he knew the shibboleths, and remained undetected for some time. (A situation disappointing for several reasons, only one of which was his duplicity... but that too is a story for another time.)

Just received an email on an SCA mailing list I'm on, asking for documentation of period zombies.

I can't wait to see that ArtSci entry.

She really has no class, does she?

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

Apart from the obvious racial "work ethic" implication in that quote (resentment? pandering to racists?), the final phrase is curious. It sounds like she was attempting to invoke the (typically right-wing) specter of anti-intellectualism, yet worded it so artlessly that it ended up sounding somewhat contemptuous of her own supporters. (Not to mention that college students - who, obviously, have not yet "completed college" - tend to be strong Obama supporters.)

Sure, LOLcats are amusing. But LOL Manuscripts are where it's at for the true Renaissance nerd.

So I turned the Test for Husbands and Wives into an online quiz thingy, and posted it on TotalFark this morning (and then, after it passed the server stress test, I posted it to my LiveJournal account, where it started propagating pretty quickly). It's been fun watching it spread, of course, but one fact about it became immediately clear:

It's much harder to get a good score as a wife than as a husband.

Dr. George W. Crane, who created the test, polled six hundred husbands and six hundred wives, asking for the "chief merits and demerits" about their spouses, then collected the top fifty of each. So although there is some overlap in the questions, there are some praises and complaints unique to each test, which reflect his respondents' expectations on what makes a good or bad husband or wife.

For example, men seem to have complained frequently that their wives squeezed the toothpaste from the top; women complained about their husbands reading the newspaper at the table. (Shockingly, men leaving the toilet seat up didn't make it into the top fifty complaints about husbands.) So the nature of the questions is somewhat inequal between the genders.

But then Dr. Crane weighted the questions to give more importance to the things he thought made for a better relationship. Most questions netted only one merit or demerit point, but some were worth five, ten or (in one case, whether or not the husband brought the wife to orgasm during marital congress) twenty points.

A perfect husband, who'd got no demerits and every one of the merits, nets 131 points. There's no top score for a perfect wife, since one of the questions ("Has minor children to care for") is worth five points per child. (Obviously, any wife who has not given her husband a child is imperfect.) With only one child, her score is a mere 105. If she has seven kids, she can beat the score of a perfect husband.

There's a similar disparity in the demerits. A husband can have a total of 90 demerit points, but a wife can rack up 102 negative points.

Yet both are gauged according to the same scale: below 24 points makes one a very poor spouse (or "Failure", as Dr. Crane kindly comments); 25-41 points is poor, 42-58 points is average, 59-75 is superior, and 76 or higher is very superior.

The scale for a husband gives him a much better chance at being "very superior" - a full quarter of the total point range (-90 through 131) lies in "very superior" territory. For woman with only one child, however, only the top fourteen percent of the point range is "very superior". The "failure" range is similarly disparate; only the bottom 51% of a man's range is "very poor", whereas a woman has to get above 60% before she's not a failure.

Societal attitudes aside, no wonder the guys taking this test today are scoring so much better than the women. It was weighted against the distaff sex from the start.

But hey, it says I'm a "very superior" husband, so I think I'll enjoy my male privilege for a while. Karen, get into the kitchen and make me some pie! And for God's sake, don't do it in your stocking feet this time!

Despite the weekly promise in the credits that ONE WILL BE REVEALED, Battlestar Galactica is taking its sweet time in divulging which character is the twelfth humaniform Cylon model.

Producer Ron Moore stated that the final Cylon was not pictured in the "Last Supper" Season 4 promotional photo. Apart from the known Cylons, it depicted Laura Roslin, Lee Adama, Gaius Baltar, Kara Thrace, Karl Agathon and William Adama.

Of the regular characters, that leaves Felix Gaeta and Anastasia Dualla; recurring characters include Dr. Cottle and Tom Zarek, plus all the Viper pilots.

Moore also said that hints as to the Cylon's identity had been dropped throughout the series. With that in mind, I read through their biographies on the Battlestar Wiki. The two strongest possibilities are Gaeta and Dualla.

First, there's Dualla's name. Anastasia, according to the wiki, is ancient Greek for resurrection, and her last name may derive from Latin dualis (two, duo, dual; of two parts) - certainly suggestive of a Cylon masquerading as human, at the very least. Also, she conspired with Saul Tigh and Tory Foster, two of the Final Five (though neither of them knew it yet), to rig the election between Baltar and Roslin. And only four of the eleven known models are female. She hasn't had much screen time this season; holding her back for a surprise reveal? Or focusing attention on more important characters?

Gaeta is extremely good with computers - on more than one occasion proposing technological courses of action which seemed novel to his coworkers (parallel processing, firewalls, wiping the drives and reloading from backups). On New Caprica, he ferried information to the Resistance (led by three of the Final Five). And at the end of the most recent episode, he bore more than a passing resemblance to the Hybrids within the Cylon base stars: lying immobile, taking no heed of anyone around him, while singing a song containing apparent nonsense phrases amongst the narrative. And his leg would make a good parallel with Tigh's eye.

So, I don't know. I'm pretty sure it's one of those two. Assuming, of course, that there aren't thirteen models, one for every human colony. If it isn't revealed in next week's half-season finale, I guess I'll just have to Netflix the first three seasons and re-watch them for clues.

Who do you think it is, if you watch the show?

It was great being in Tallahassee again, seeing old faces and enjoying the heat. I could have done without spending seven and a half hours on Sunday just waiting around in an office to do a five-minute job, without even the Internets to divert me. Fortunately, I had brought my Eee PC, upon which I had loaded a number of diversions.

During the week I met with friends, learned a new game, ate at a new restaurant and in general had a much better time than I normally do on business trips, which usually entail being sent to places where I don't really know anybody.