Vanquished!

Not only do I have a job, I have a commute. Every time I work, I drive about half an hour to get there. There is really only one problem with this: the radio in our Ford Ka has some kind of short circuit that causes it to click off every now and then. Usually we can turn it back on, but sometimes it stays off for the duration of the car trip (like when we moved from Montpellier to Nice. . . yeah, three hours with no music).

Anyway, yesterday, as I was driving home, I was lucky enough to be listening to the radio (Europe 2). The host came on and talked about an artificial intelligence program on the internet. "You think of anything and then it asks you twenty questions about the thing. The scary thing is that it really guesses it!" she explained. "You can find it at the website trois w point vaincu point net." ("Vaincu" means something like defeated, vanquished, beaten. Sounds fun!)

It seemed pretty interesting, so when I got home, I typed it www.vaincu.net. Hmmm. . . this address doesn't seem to exist!

"Jube? How do you spell vaincu?" I asked.

"Vaincu? Comme vaincre?" he asked me. "V-a-i-n-c-u."

Hmmm. . . still no luck. I tried www.vaincue.net, although I didn't think that making it feminine would change anything (besides being pretty sexist!). Finally, I turned to google in desperation.

I searched "vaincu intelligence artificielle," but that didn't work. The presenter had mentioned that the program was American, so I tried "artificial intelligence" or something like that. This time, I figured it out.

www.20Q.net

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!! "Vingt q!" I told Jube, "like twenty!"

"What, twenty asses (vingt culs)??"

Ha, ha, ha.