Mark Van Dine has a cool WordPress site with some funny graphics. I thought this was was particularly catchy. See if you can solve the message. Here’s a hint, if you can find the key, the answer will be clear.

Wonder if anyone is writing crypto-poetry? (No, I don’t mean the infamous “Banned Code Lives in Poetry and Song” since that is code turned into poetry rather than the other way around)

Oh, and for a really good laugh, check out his thoughts on his father’s new book called “If Instead of Apes We Had Come from Grapes, We Wouldn’t Just yet Be Wineâ€?. Here’s an excerpt from the book itself:

Things appear for reasons.
Reasons appear for things.

The ring announces there’s a bell,
so there’s a bell. And sure as hell,
if there is a bell… it rings

It’s a call to mate or to salivate
or to fold with a pair of kings.
To the ding-ding jingling clang or gong,
the trains pull out and the planes take wing,
the boxers box and the singers sing
and everyone sings along:
jingles for soap and for soda pop,
so the shippers ship and the shoppers shop.
It’s all arranged at the stock exchange,
and you can’t sit still for long.

2. Nature & Nurture

If cradle training taught you well,
you learned which bell’s for you:
when you counted ribs or the bars on cribs,
noting nipples, inscribing bibs
with what was what and who was who,
learned on your fingers the proper things
your own bell tells when you hear it ring,
how you go to hell if you hear the bell
and you don’t know what to do.

But how, pray tell, do the ringers of bells
know when it’s time to ring?

Well,

Things appear for reasons.
Reasons appear for things.

Yeah, the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Music anyone?
(i.e. Rose Rouge by St. Germain)

Cheesy names for brute-force login tools, yes,
but who said security geeks need to be good at marketing?
Check out the comparison here.

Medusa
by Louise Bogan

I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, — a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.

When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.

This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.

The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.

And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.

Now, auditors unite and go turn those passwords into dust…