Today that luzer Mentifex lost a skirmish with the People's Republic of China. Here's how it went down. Boarding a bus and taking a seat, across the aisle from me I saw the most beautiful Mata Hari I had ever seen. Somehow the Spy Agency in Peking had given her the most amazing coiffure (that's hairdo to you progggers :-) with lush dark hair down the left side of her face and bangs reaching to her eyebrows. And she was the Chinese version of Hot Lips Houlihan, where only her field supervisor knew A) if her lips were naturally of a raspberry color, or sticked with lipstick; and B) whether the lipstick was poison. So as not to lurch sideways and possibly lose control of The World's Most Valuable Computer resting on my kneecaps, I switched cathedrally to an empty broadseat at right angles to tiny Miss Birdsong. Should her codename be "Gumchu" or "Redlips"? Because she was chewing imperialist Western gum while she pecked at a mobile device with her fingernails brightly colored in Chi-Com red. A more respectful name for her shall be Agent Birdsong. She may have already been filing her report to Shenzhen or Peking: "Yes; target Mentifex has been acquired."
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Meme-ebook/dp/B007ZI66FS in the "Espionage" portion of Chapter Eighteen describes how the AI Ministry of Tokyo previously sent a Ninja Geisha against Mentifex back in 2009 and got from him everything he knew about AI at that time. Now the stakes are much higher, because Mentifex AI is far advanced in English, German and Russian.
Some doofus guy got on the bus and started telling a story about King Arthur to anybody who would listen. Gumchu Redlips becamse distracted from her device and began glancing towards the back of the bus, each time resting her eyes millisecondly on the attentive face of target Mentifex. Towards the end of the line, Mentifex knew he had to get off and buy groceries. Just when he reached for the aluminum pole to stand up, Agent Birdsong briefly held hands with Mentifex because she was reaching for the same pole. "Sumimasen" I muttered, because maybe she was Japanese, but it had no effect. As we both stood up, "Are you from Japan?" I asked. "No, China," as we approached the stairwell. "Taiwan or mainland?" I took it one step further. "From Canton," she whispered.
We stepped out into the bright spring sunlight and exchanged life stories, hers crafted by the Ministry of Espionage in Peking and mine assembled from the Annals of Luzerdom. "Ni hao," I tried to impress her with some Chinese, and "Quay DiAr" for "Hurry up". Still in shock at her extreme, almost Laotian
beauty, I forgot to sing to her the opening lines of "The East Is Red" in Chinese.
Only one month she has been here, trying to bag the center of German, Russian and American AI development. She started to write my e-mail into her mobile device, but from the Mentifex nerd-pocket I withdrew a buy-ten-get-one-free drink-card
from
http://www.thebountycaffe.com and I wrote down the pertinent Mentifex contact info. The card had two punches already, which I sacrificed in the interests of spreading Mentifex AI to mainland China. We adjourned sine die, but not before she told me that her superiors had given her a list of seven possible English "nems" (names) and she had chosen one that most resembled "Birdsong." They must have fully briefed her on the tastes and peculiarities of Mentifex, because our long talk revealed that neither of us likes spicy Szechuan cuisine. I close now with a word of advice from The Prog Advisor: If you code AI, be prepared to have the major world powers send dangerous swallows against you.