The Slumbering Lungfish Dybbuk Hostel and All-Night Boulangerie

Once upon a time I created a little online toy called the Drug Slang Translator. It was a simple thing, dashed off in an afternoon, which took supplied text or a supplied Web page, and replaced words which are ostensibly used as drug slang with the actual drugs. So for instance, if you entered "Put the horse in the pot" it would spit out "Put the heroin in the marijana."

I liked it okay, but it's not something I'd put on a short list of my best work. That's why I was surprised when I looked at the Brunching stats a while back and found that the Drug Slanger was one of the most popular pages. As it turns out, it all has to do with Google. You see, Brunching has a sort-of high Google PageRank, and when you enter a URL into the Drug Slanger, it spits back a permanent URL for the Drug Slanged version of that page. Direct Google to that URL, and it appears as if Brunching is linking to the page in question. Instant PageRank.

Recently someone took exception to their site being the subject of the Drug Slanger. Now, generally I try to be a good neighbor, and block sites that ask me to. I think it's just polite, the equivalent of respecting robots.txt. It miffs me when someone wheels up the Lawyer Catapult in their first e-mail, but I comply anyway, because I like to be a good neighbor even to people who decide to be surly about it. But, that's time and energy and tsuris I just don't want to deal with. It's like having the register a car that's up on blocks in your garage.

So, for the moment I'm just shutting the page down. Later on, I may reinstate it without the URL option, but frankly I'm a lot more excited about doing stuff in the future than modifying stuff from the past. But if you or someone you love wants to take up the Swedish Man's Burden, I'm making the source code available for free. Honestly, it's crap, I never really worried about efficiency or readability, I was just chasing a deadline. But it does contain the word list I used, so feel free to take that part and re-write it, use it as-is, whatever. I'm hereby putting it into the public domain. I'd LIKE to be credited if you use it, but if I'm not going to put it up myself I'm certainly not going to chase down and hassle people who don't mention me.

[Edit: Changed the link. The gz file wouldn't download correctly.]

pddrugslanger.txt