collaborative geek humour

[gusl]

Last night I witnessed (and possibly participated in) a great example of my type of geek humour. It was a spontaneous collaborative joke, with 3 or 4 people making suggestions.

A modern couple gets married, and decides they will come up with an entirely new surname. They decide that this will be done during the ceremony, using the input of the guests present. This is done by ______.

To avoid extreme ridiculousness in their new name, they introduce a constraint, namely ______.

I can't remember the exact suggestions... but I'm curious to see what my LJ readers come up with.

Comments

[chipuni.livejournal.com]

1. Throwing phonemes into a blender.
2. Insisting on three vowels. Even if none of them touch consonants.

[gregh1983]

They decide that this will be done during the ceremony, using the input of the guests present. This is done by

asking various guests, one at a time, to specify the next letter of the name.

To avoid extreme ridiculousness in their new name, they introduce a constraint, namely

that any guest, when proposing a letter, must demonstrate its viability by also naming an English word in which the previous three named letters are followed by the proposed next one. (That is, the guest must prove that the newest proposed four-gram exists in an English word.)

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

K-means clustering.
That the new name doesn't contain either of their old surnames.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

can you elucidate what you're clustering and how it produces a surname?

[tedesson.livejournal.com]

Well, then it wouldn't be a snappy comeback :)

How about something along the lines of the Divide up Grandma's stuff episode from Cryptonomicon where everyone at the wedding was given a chance to pick 4 syllables from a bag (without replacement, but with possible duplicates), and they had to place each of the syllables on a grid where one axis was I like<-> I dislike and the other axis was The couple might like <-> the couple might dislike. And then, to give some weighting, in the center of the cluster of 4 syllables, the guest would place a token, in the value of their wedding gift. All syllables in the 3 quadrants other than like/like are discarded. And the name generated from the remaining, weighted by gift, or if none remaining, from a draw from the bag.

Spin, rinse, repeat.

[darius.livejournal.com]

Take each guest's proposal and add the letters in corresponding positions mod 26. Find the surname in the phonebook most likely to produce the result as a spelling mistake. The proposals would have to be independent to keep the last one from just picking the answer (unless they're constrained to be 'real names'?).

I'll bet you guys had much funnier suggestions.

[cwarner.livejournal.com]

This is what Andrew and I (mostly jokingly) considered for our wedding :)