Friday, February 02, 2007

Anagrams

Just so this blog doesn't turn into an obsessive one-topic rant, here's something completely different.
I discovered a cool tool on the Web recently which basically generates all possible anagrams of any word or phrase (upto 23 letters) you enter. I spent ages playing with it ("Get a life!" you may say, or at least "Get a real job!").

  • "Luke Mastin" gives, among pages and pages of less worthy suggestions, "Tsunami Elk" (which I rather like), "An Emu's Kilt" and "I Talk Menus".

  • My daughter's name "Elena Mastin" was even better with "A Silent Name", "Net me A Snail","Tense Animal", "Enamel Saint", "Sent An Email", "Insane Metal", "Mean Ants Lie", "An Elm Is Neat" and "Men Eat Nails".

  • Curiously, my wife's name "Julie Wood" generated only 5 results, none of which made any sense...

There is also an Anagram Hall of Fame which lists many of the longer, more dramatic and appropriate anagrams people have discovered over the years, including the following:
  • "Clint Eastwood" = "Old West action".

  • "The countryside" = "No city dust here".

  • "Desperation" = "A rope ends it".

  • "The Morse Code" = "Here come dots".

  • "A domesticated animal" = "Docile, as a man tamed it".

  • "Eleven plus two" = "Twelve plus one".

  • "To be or not to be: that is the question - whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" = "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten".

  • "Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the universe" = "A masquerade can cover a sense of what is real to deceive us; to be unjaded and not lost, we must, then, determine truth".

(Who figures these things out?)

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