Zounds! Something's terribly amiss in the world of entertainment metafilter web sites. Faithful viewer Dave Murray wrote in to mention some disturbing incompatibilities with The Dialectizer. You know about this handy little toy, right? Basically, you pick a dialect (such as, say, Redneck), enter the URL of any other web site on the 'net (like, for example, http://www.whitehouse.gov/), click "Dialectize!" and bickety-bam-- you get the White House page with altered text like "Whut in tarnation's Noo: Whut in tarnation's happenin' at th' White House." It's all in good fun.

Unfortunately, there's been a bit of a copyright flap recently, since The Dialectizer is effectively altering other site's content without permission. In response to various threats of legal action, the site's proprietor has enabled other webmasters to "block" their sites from being dialectized. And what Dave found out was that "Apple.com has requested a block so that 'The Thoughts of Chairman Steve' cannot be rendered as if by Elmer Fudd." Now, that's not terribly surprising, since it's a known fact that the Apple of today isn't exactly known for its sense of humor-- especially when it comes to humor at its own expense. But what is surprising is that Dave was also unable to dialectize AtAT into "Swedish Chef" or any other mode.

What's this? AtAT afraid to be laughed at? Not hardly. Believe us, we definitely didn't block our site from The Dialectizer's magic; if anything, we're annoyed that it doesn't work. Apparently our server is "incompatible" with the service. Now, we're using WebSTAR, the premier web server software for the Mac platform (yes, a Mac site served from a Mac-- they're rare, but there are a few of us out here), so we decided to try to dialectize a few other WebSTAR-served sites. MacInTouch? No go. The Army's home page? Nope. So basically, it does indeed look like WebSTAR just won't work with The Dialectizer. Which means that a large percentage of Mac-served sites out there aren't open to this particular brand of parody.

So the question is, how much did Steve Jobs pony up to ensure that most web sites served by his company's computers could not be viewed in Pig Latin? Oh, sure, it could just be unintentional, but really, how likely is that? Oh, well. At least you can always cut and paste any text you want into The Dialectizer. It's not as much fun as seeing a whole site transformed, graphics and all, boot et leest it's oone-a vey tu see-a AtAT in "Svedeesh Cheff" mude-a.