Waca Waca

When Googling for children's games, you never know what morsels of merry mentation you might find. Sometimes, they seem to come from deep within. Case in point, Waca Waca, from:

Erin Marie Panttaja
Sugar House Lane
Bellevue, Dublin 8, Ireland
of Media Lab Europe

who writes:

The "Waca" (<) is the thing you hit when you forget to take your finger off of the Shift key at the end of a sentence. Proper pronunciation for the angle-bracket characters <> is "waca waca" Here is some poetry for you.. The text of the poem follows:

<>!*''#
^"'$$-
!*=@$_
%*<>~#4
&[]../
|{,,SYSTEM HALTED


I received this poem over email from my Grandmother last week. It presents a puzzle, challenging the reader to guess a way to read the poem in order to make it sound like a poem. Interpreting the poem is an asynchronous activity, but nonetheless could spawn interaction as users tried to create similar puzzles for one another.


Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,
Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,
Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,
Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,
Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

To which I add:


$$~/
&&.-
''*2
""()U