ISTL Christmas Greetings 1996 by Geoff Nunberg

Greetings, Friends!

The season's here and so's our greeting,
While '96 is quickly fleeting.
No need for us to give our name;
For we're preceded by our fame.
"The lab that pops!" "The lab that clicks!"
"The lab in pods 2/3-through-6!"
So gather now around the log,
And pour yourselves a nip of nog,
Then settle in, and raise a glass
(The booze is virtual, alas!),
And toast with us the things we've done,
As I recount them one by one.

An aquavit, for those who dare,
To pledge our pilot, peerless Per,
Whose fame's far-flung and deeds are legion
(At least to those who speak Norwegian).
He flogs our products, cuts our flab;
He keeps a roof above the lab,
And battles, when we feel the pinch,
The depredations of the grinch.

Best wishes for the holiday
From all of us in QCA.
When floods of data grow so huge
That you feel drowned in the deluge,
And every query brings your way
Another 750k, 
Who should you call to clear the dreck?
Why Schuetze, Hearst, and Kupiec!
With Francine Chen, of course, and duly
Bringing up the rear, Yours Truly.
The quantitative tools we muster
Can help you to retrieve or cluster;
And when the search begins to bore you,
We'll summarize the content for you.
There's no technique that we can't tap
To pick the pearls and cut the crap.

Now pour once more, and toast with me
The people in NLTT,
Where Kaplan, Newman, and Maxwell 
Bend all their efforts to dispel
The mysteries of human yammer
With lexical-functional grammar.
And even if you've got a tin ear,
If you'll but learn your logic linear,
Syntactic structure soon seems simple,
(Or so I'm told by Ms Dalrymple). 
While with one click, Shemtov and Kay
Turn English into le francais,
(At least it ought to work that way).

But hark! Who's caroling from afar?
Those jolly folks from UIR!
They've pitched a cone tree in the yard,
Decked out by Mackinlay and Card,
Eric Hoppe and Bill York,
Have labelled every node and fork,
While Walter, Erickson, and Rao
Festoon with pointers every bough. 
Now gobble down your Christmas porridge,
While merrily the Web we forage;
Then raise a glass of ice-cold Stoli,
And deck the halls with Pete Pirolli!
The world's a wondrous sight to see
When it's tricked out in full 3-D,
And tools like browsers hyperbolic
Make Paul Klee out of Jackson Pollock.
And as the carolers' voices join,
You needn't fumble for a coin;
As soon as the last notes are stilled,
Thanks to Mark Stefik, you'll be billed.
So wish them all the season's cheer,
And visualize a happy year.

Wassail, Ken Fishkin!; Skoal, Ken Pier!,
Cheers, Bay-Wei Chang and Eric Bier!
You toil from dawn to daylight's ebb,
Reticulating on the Web.
You bust your chops to write for us
Parsers in Python and C++.
Your applets, swooping from the blue,
Steal cycles from my cpu.
You dazzle us with your technique
In six new demos every week. 

Hail Tom Moran's intrepid crew: 
Van Melle, Kimber, Patrick Chiu,
Beverly H. and Polle Z.,
And all who bring us Tivoli,
They daily practice writing big,
With Hebel as their guinea pig.
They capture meetings on the fly;
The tiniest gesture won't get by.
No detail's too minute or sordid--
Pick your nose and they'll record it.

I've season's greetings here for you
From DID, indeed I do,
Where Bloomberg, Kopec, and Les Niles,
Will OCR your image files.
They'll dot each 'i'  and cross each 't',
Exterminating entropy --
And toast Phil Chou, who'll never rest
Till every Star Trek's been compressed,
And the entire series fits
In 10k's worth of teeny bits.

Let's give a little Christmas tchatchke
To Janssen, Davidson, and Brotschke,
And to Dan Larner and Steve Putz,
Who indefagitably futz,
Who fiddle, flame, and sometimes fret
To get our work out on the Net,
With ISTL's house curmudgeon,
Masinter, in a constant dudgeon.
They'll soon be lining Xerox' palm
By launching documents.com:
You'll pay your money, take your tix,
And get a text file from your pix,
Then click another time to see
A seven-sentence summary.
(And who knows? In a few years' time, 
Perhaps they'll set your docs to rhyme.)

Let's toast, on everyone's behalf,
Our valiant operations staff.
There's Dunham, Gable, and Sarpangal,
Who all our snafus disentangle.
(Nor would I leave out Bridget Tracy,
Who keeps the servers spare and spacy.)
Patricia Sheehan sends you cheer --
But don't expense it till next year;
And Jeanette Figueroa's glad
To wish you Feliz Navidad!

But time has come, I apprehend,
To bring this opus to an end,
And if you missed a verse or two,
We've put it on the Web for you;
Go to our home page, and download
istl-slash-christmas ode.
And let me close, for all the lab,
With hopes your holidays are fab,
And that, beneath the toe of mistle,
You'll spare a buss for us of ISTL.