(Geeky) URL du Jour

2006-11-13

One of the cooler Perl scripts I've seen in awhile is snowclone.pl, written by a guy billing himself as "the Tensor". The script hits up the Google for "snowclones," phrases that are mutants from original clichés, punchlines, or slogans.

For example, Simpsons fans will recognize Kent Brockman's line, from a newscast where he mistakenly thought giant ants were about to take over the world: "I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords." Snowcloners fill in a different words for "insect": I, for one, welcome our new San Franciscan Democrat overlords.

People averse to a Unixlike command line will want to look away at this point, but an example usage would be


% ./snowclone.pl "honey I X the Y" > t2

… and your snowclones will be saved in the specified file, and (at least in this case) you'd probably also want to say "Honey, I didn't let the kids read the dirty snowclones." But "Honey, I cooled the planet" is unexpectedly big.

Being not especially creative in this sort of thing, I also tried "X is the greatest thing since Y". Very few came up with anything besides "sliced bread" for Y, although "Red Sky is the best thing since Brokeback Mountain" gets the "Heh" award here.

Check the links for more examples.


Last Modified 2024-01-23 2:06 PM EDT