Sinister: Re: E-Files

[Nick Dastoor]

In response to:

>> Is Elvis a cat?
>> The way elvis is described in this song makes him out to sound like
a cat !!

Cross Katrina shouted:

>READ THE ARCHIVES !!! :)

And then apologised nicely

When I started on this list I noticed people referring in an oblique
way to this whole cat/Elvis thing.  But doing a search on the archives
didn't actually help much because:

1. If you search for 'cat' you get everything with the three letters
c-a-t in them (including catalogue, the person with the e-mail address
'yummycats' etc.)

2. 'Elvis' is obviously mentioned all over the place

3. Since the search engine is pretty crude this is all you can do. 
Ideally, you could do clever Boolean searches like "Elvis AND (cat or
dog", or else have some kind of nice natural-language interface with
clever relevance-ranking algorithms behind it.  But sledgehammers and
nuts come to mind, and we should be grateful that we've got anything
at all.

4. Finally, on trawling chronologically through the early archives, I
realised that the real elvis/cat debate happened in the prehistory of
Sinister, when there was another mailing list that was beset by
technical hitches (I think I'm remembering that right - apologises if
not)

So my point is I don't think we shouldn't always tell people off for
not looking in the archives just because something has come up before
- it can be hard to find things.

God I'm boring.

Nick

P.S. Talking of the E-files, I was most excited to see it is shown on
Sunday mornings on BBC1.  Imagine my disappointment when I found that
it was not a series about Elvis sightings but a pretty tedious one on
European issues, focussing last week on the impact of closer political
union on pension provisions. Bah.
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