If Maury Povich Were in Charge

[Nester]

If Maury Povich Were in Charge


"How many bastards
born today?"

"Twenty-three
per second, sir". Narrowed eyes.
"They brought Blue Eyes back." Widened.
"Spit from his shot glass."

"Can we take it all?”

"Servers are spread too wide:
bulk insertions with multiple packets.
We risk SQL injection,
a virus, a bug."

"Algorithms?"

"Lived too much for naive Bayes;
not enough for neural nets."

"Nearest neighbor?"

"Won't converge: this much P
is an NP problem."

"Who's waiting?"

"A small potentate; six pashas;
the Lindbergh baby."
Arched.
"Spit from his sippy cup."




“I wish GoogleDoc would abort.”

“They tried. We asked them to try again.”
Questioning?
“Fail”.

[Tracy Mitchell]

I gotta say I am both intrigued and flummoxed by this poem. It appears that there are either two or three people engaged in a conversation which makes perfect sense to them, but not to me. Given the title, I have strong preconceptions for the poem which don’t seem to be met. Perhaps I am taking the reference to Povich wrongly.

I also question whether Maury is even one of the speakers.

Stanza 2 - is that about Sinatra being cloned?
S.3 - is that about digital insemination?

I get the Bayes reference, neural nets, pashas, etc. But N? NP? Application or relevance of SQL? I don’t take umbrage at the fact of what appears to be the generous seeding of jargon. I realize there are lots of gaps in my knowledge and I am usually comfortable having to google something to understand some elements of a poem.

For this poem, however, google didn’t enlighten me, didn’t fill in the gaps. For that reason, much of this is beyond me.

Sorry.

T

[Mattp]

Nester - are you using computers as a metaphor for all society? I'm not sure - I'm intrigued but a little confused. In my experience poetry can accommodate some unusual forms, and I think you've fallen under the umbrella of what is poetic (maybe barely). I do think you need to make this a little more available to the laymen. I think this would confuse most people. It's inventive though - well done on that.

Hope this is helpful.

- Matt

[Nester]

Nester - are you using computers as a metaphor for all society? I'm not sure - I'm intrigued but a little confused. In my experience poetry can accommodate some unusual forms, and I think you've fallen under the umbrella of what is poetic (maybe barely). I do think you need to make this a little more available to the laymen. I think this would confuse most people. It's inventive though - well done on that.

Hope this is helpful.

- Matt

Thanks, Teagan and Matt, for your comments. Teagan, I'm happy you got at least some of the references: I realized about a day after posting this that the vast majority of people are going to have no idea what I'm talking about. The basic idea is "Maury Povich has uses Big Data to settle paternity questions." "SQL injection", "multiple packets", etc. are networking terms that to me sounded somewhat risque. P and NP are two types of problem domains in computer science: the question of whether they are equal (i.e. "does P=NP?") gets a lot of play in popular tech media. I just meant that too much Paternity is an NP problem (i.e. a problem not solvable in a reasonable amount of time by modern technology). The second stanza is about cloning Sinatra: Maury wonders why so many kids are being born, and his assistant says that it's because they cloned Ol' Blue Eyes (known for his romantic effects).

Yeah, I should have thought that one through a bit more...thanks again to both of you for taking the time to read and comment.