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One thing I don't write about very often here is buying stuff. Not that I never buy anything. I just don't enjoy shopping, and so I avoid it whenever possible, and when it isn't, I generally get it over with as quickly as possible. I wasn't always like this: I've just grown less and less materialistic (in spirit, if not in actual fact) with age. Also, I don't think shopping makes good copy. Even the house we bought a couple years ago only rated two entries. However: When getting ready to make a major purchase, does this happen to you? You do a bunch of research, without ever really having a specific buying date in mind, but at some point, your interest passes a certain threshold, and zOMG suddenly you have to have the thing this very moment? That happens to me, albeit very rarely. Last Monday we bought a car. More accurately, Kathy bought a car and I helped pay for it. (Fair enough: she did the same for me four years ago.) She'd been looking at new hybrids for more than a year, ever since her company announced that the first one hundred employees to buy a Prius would receive a thousand-dollar kickback. Her then-current car had seen better years—thirteen of ’em, to be precise—and got no better mileage in the city than a Hummer H3 does on the highway. But she wasn't ready to commit quite yet. While the idea simmered in the back of her mind, the sister-in-law bought a Civic hybrid (not a true hybrid, really, but an “assisted” hybrid), and Kathy decided she liked it better than the Prius. But she still didn't really have the motivation to start looking. Our December was almost miraculously free of snow, but right after New Year's, we started getting about six inches a night, and Kathy started driving my car to work because her tires were bald, on account of her not wanting to buy brand new tires for a car she was about to sell anyway. Meanwhile, she started tentatively contacting dealerships to find out where she might get a deal on a 2010 Civic hybrid. Kathy reached the tipping point last Monday. She informed me that she'd dickered an incredible bargain at the same place I'd bought my car, and that we were heading down there immediately after dinner. We'll have plenty of time, I learned, because they were open 'til nine. We drove home through the initial half hour of what looked to be building up toward the winter's major blizzard. I did not like the weather at all, but I caught the gleam in her eyes and knew better than to suggest that, instead of driving thirty miles each way in a snowstorm, we might sip a cup of hot chocolate inside our nice, warm house, which in all likelihood wouldn't slide into a ditch at the least convenient moment. Off we went into the snowy darkness, and not a moment too soon. I officially start getting nervous about the road conditions when I can see the glitter from fresh snowflakes just where the tires from the previous car had passed. And that went double when driving our trade-in—the car with four venerable, molecule-thick-treaded tires. I know then that the snow is really beginning to stick. Of course we had that even when we started out, and all through the long, nerve-wracking journey, the snow got bolder and bolder about accumulating on the highway. It was a lonely trip, too: our entire universe was a double cone of horizontal white streaks, extending some fifty yards ahead of us. At last we arrived, and all the floodlights are on across the entire lot. We were under a brilliant dome of pure blue-white light. The snow was drifting down thick and slow, as if the dealership were throwing us a ticker-tape parade. While I was trying to remember which Apollo mission we’d just returned from, I noticed the entire staff crowded up against the big bay windows, wondering who the hell was crazy enough to go car shopping on such a night. Because we didn't get there until 7:30, it was nearly 10:00 by the time we checked everything out and signed all the paperwork. As if on cue, the snow shut off the moment we hit the road with our brand new tires. I was completely tuckered out from the harrowing drive down, but Kathy was overjoyed. “This is the first time I've ever had a new car!” In typical, totally insensitive fashion, I pointed out that by the time we got home she wouldn't have a new car anymore. That took the wind out of her sails. To make amends I noted that, for a while at least, she will still have a car that is newer than any other car she's ever owned. As it happens, she's never had a car with fewer than 85,000 miles on it—so she can enjoy her relatively new car for six or seven years to come.
( More along these lines… )Tags: random_shit
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All this "post your bra color on Facebook" craziness got me to thinking about how I first got interested in colors, courtesy of a color set that, if they were martyrs for a cause, would be called "the Crayola 64." The company has phased particular hues in and out of its repertoire, but the set I consider to be canonical held steady pretty much all the way through my childhood. Anyway, I decided to try to name as many of the Crayola 64, as they were defined circa 1980*, as I could from memories that have lain dormant three decades hence. I started with the eighteen "rainbow" colors, which for me were a gimme. (Because I loved to draw rainbow outlines around everything, they were also the workhorse crayons in my set. When I put my crayons away in their special tray, I always lined them up first. Nobody I grew up with could figure out the intermediate rainbow hues, like "orange-red" and "blue-violet." It's actually easy, as long as you keep in mind that the dominant color comes second.) Without too much more thought I brought the list up to 40 colors, but then hit a wall; ten minutes of subconscious mindsweeping while I goofed around on the computer netted mere merely five more. Here are the 45 colors I could name within this short period of time. I've typed the names all-lower-case, just as they appeared on the wrappers: Rainbow Series: red, orange-red, red-orange, orange, yellow-orange, orange-yellow, yellow, green-yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, green-blue, blue, violet-blue, blue-violet, violet (purple), red-violet, violet-red Rainbow Variations: brick red, indian red**, peach, lemon yellow, chartreuse, ultramarine, sea green, forest green, cornflower, navy blue, midnight blue, periwinkle, indigo, plum, mulberry, lavender, hot magenta, pink, salmon Off the Rainbow: gold, silver, gray, black, brown, raw umber, burnt sienna, tan As it happens, two of the colors I named—chartreuse and hot magenta—don't count because they belong to the set of eight fluorescent colors* added to the classic 64 during the 70s. The 21 colors I missed: apricot, bittersweet, carnation pink, mahogany, maize, maroon, melon, olive green, orchid, pine green, spring green, thistle, turquoise blue, aquamarine, blue-gray, burnt orange, cadet blue, copper, goldenrod, raw sienna, and sepia. Looks like I didn't do so well with the earth tones. I can't believe I missed goldenrod; it's one of my favorite colors, in or out of the Crayola 64. Sadly, several of the Rainbow Series have been retired. It just wouldn't be a real Crayola set without all eighteen. If I ever get an overwhelming urge to color, I'll have to fly to Utah and hunt up our old stash of crayons in Dad's house. Look here for the chronology of all colors available from Crayola, beginning in 1903 with the Ancient Eight: six rainbow shades, brown and black. _________________________ *Our set included eight special "fluorescent" hues, for a total of 72, but the fluorescents were never really part of the canon. Also, something about the consistency of the wax made them a pain in the ass to color with. They shared this property with the metallic colors—gold, silver and copper. **Crayola insists that Indian Red was named after a pigment from (East) India, and not after the stereotypical Native American skin tone. The hue was later renamed Chestnut. Tags: ancient_memories
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Recently, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) burgundy posed a very interesting question, which I'll paraphrase as, "When you rate something from one to five stars, what kind of distribution do you use? Normal (bell-shaped curve)? Uniform (20% in each category, i.e., quintiles)? Something else?" I've done a fair amount of one-to-five-star rating on Amazon.com and on GoodReads, and for both I keep in mind an underlying normal distribution. Five categories works very conveniently with the bell curve because you can approximate it quite faithfully with five bins of probability 5%, 25%, 40%, 25% and 5% (Plate 1). The inspiration for this is slicing the distribution in four places: the mean ± 0.5 SD and ± 1.5 SD. (The actual probabilities of the resulting five bins, shown as the height of the rectangles in Plate 1, are 6.7%, 24.2%, 38.3%, 24.2% and 6.7%).  If you prefer percentiles, the breaks between categories occur at the 5th, 30th, 70th and 95th. In practice my ratings average well over three stars, because (taking GoodReads as an example) my normal distribution is based not on what I actually read, but on the entire universe of books that I might be interested in. I tend to filter out most of the one-star books bevore I ever crack the cover, just from reading reviews or hearing people I know talk about them. What's strange is that if the number of categories is raised to ten, I'd immediately change to a uniform distribution with 10% in each (deciles). Why? For one thing, it's too much of a pain to remember that many normal quantiles (not to mention that the most extreme values would account for something like 0.01% of all ratings). Also, I think the decimal system has too strong a grip on my brain, but I don't think that's so important, because I'd do the same things with two, four or eight categories. I reckon that five categories evoke the normal distribution because it's an odd number—best for making a sharp peak—and a small one.
Y'know how sometimes people try to squeeze far too much onto a vanity license plate, so that the resulting text is horribly jumbled but somehow still readable? I keep seeing one that clearly means to say "Chef's Choice." I forget which actual letters appeared on the plate, but they almost had to be all consonants. Pretty impressive; but the words chef's choice got stuck in my brain. For some reason I started thinking about the words with the two different ch sounds swapped: " Tchef's Shoice." Well, why not? There is a precedent. Long ago, the Ævil Girlfiend always had a bottle of "Herbal Hair Conditioner" in her shower. I always pronounced it in my mind as "Hhhh-erbal Air Conditioner."
Here's another good way to bend words, courtesy of the brother. All you need to do is pronounce English ck like sk. Kathy and I use this one all the time. "Want some cra skers?" "No, thanks, the chi sken will be enough." Tags: maths, random_shit, wurds
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Shopping for music on Amazon, I'm occasionally surprised by which parts of songs they choose to post as samples. It's reasonable to assume that Amazon wants to choose either the most identifiable or the catchiest bit, and preferably both. So why was the sample for "Light My Fire" by the Doors taken from the middle of the five-minute instrumental interlude? Anyone who'd only heard the "single" version wouldn't even recognize it. On the other hand, I happened to play that clip precisely to find out whether the instrumental interlude was included on the album I was looking at. Perhaps the folks at Amazon know what they're about, after all. I'm enough of a Sixties fanatic that I just couldn't abide the thought of a watered-down version of such a classic song. I insist on the complete, seven-minute version.
One of the huge stumbling blocks of "Intelligent Design" creationism is that it is so easy to find examples of unintelligent design in nature that make perfect sense in the light of evolution. Here are 96 of God's least clever designs. Many of them are inefficient structures in one animal lineage that exist despite a more efficient, analogous structure in a different lineage. The mammalian retina, for instance, is built inside out, with the photoreceptors in back, so we have to look through the retinal blood vessels and all image-processing and supporting cells; whereas the octopus eye has it the right way round. Why use a half-assed design when a fully assed design is available?
The medical school building at the University of Utah has a really strange staircase. It runs from the top floor to the basement level in an single stairwell, but it's interrupted at the ground floor by a wall. To get from an upper floor to the basement, it is necessary to leave the stairway through a door, and re-enter it through another door three feet from the first one. It's like you have to get a transfer. Why? Knock a hole in that wall and the two halves would be reunited, and there wouldn't be a huge traffic jam on the first floor between every class period. What I remember best about this weird arrangement, though, is that the two adjacent doors (reading from left to right) were labeled "STAIRS DOWN" and "STAIRS UP". I always thought that "STAIRS DOWN" should be read with an air of infinite dejection and defeat: "Stairs… down. [sigh]" In contrast, "STAIRS UP" should carry a sense of pure delight: "Stairs— up! [perky!]"
( One more, with pix. )Tags: flip_it_over, random_shit
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From the “Things We Reliably Say in Certain Situations” Collection:One of the many diversions that kept me sane my year in medical school was burning drip-wax candles. There was nothing special about the candles themselves; I bought them two for a dollar at Pic ’n’ Save. But any old candle can be made to act like a drip-wax candle by bending the wick downward in just the right way so that it melts faster than it burns. Getting the wax to dispense more or less evenly all the way around, while creating aesthetically pleasing drip columns, required nearly constant maintenance. (I started burning drip-wax candles as something to do while studying, but I soon had to restrict my wax dripping to mealtimes because I couldn’t study at all while I was gravity-sculpting my candles.) My preferred wax-guiding implement was an ancient paring knife that once belonged to Mom. Its stainless-steel tip resisted blackening and corrosion by the candle flame, and the short blade allowed fine work by the not-too-steady hands of a medical student half drunk on phenol* fumes. My good friend Primer Miguel (of “ At least it’s something” fame, from high school) was also interested in drip-wax candles. I worked exclusively with tapers, both for their versatility and because I was creating wax sculptures on slender beer and wine bottles. Miguel pursued an entirely different class of wax-dripping: he started with a massive log of a candle, and cut channels in the top edge to guide the wax pool this way and that, as his fancy dictated. Naturally, such work called for a heftier blade than my little paring knife. He used a really big paring knife. One evening we were shooting the bull, and Miguel was absently working his drip-wax candle. He left the room for a few minutes—I forget why, but he was gone long enough that I got bored and started carving my own channel in the wide expanse of hard candle around the molten wax pool. Just then I heard Miguel coming back, so I hastily put down the knife and tried to look innocent. He took the briefest glance at the candle, picked up the knife, pointed with it to my shallow channel, and asked “Did you do this?” Without waiting for an answer, he made a stabbing motion in my direction. There was no rancor involved. He was merely meting out the mandatory punishment for cutting channels in Primer Miguel’s candle without the owner’s permission. To this day, when one of us is cooking, and the other takes over for a short while, when the primary cook returns it is customary, if a knife is within easy reach, to gesture at the food in preparation and ask, “Did you do this?”, followed by a gentle knife thrust of about three or four inches in the other’s direction. There are other situations involving knives in which “Did you do this?” is acceptable—for example, when opening boxes sealed with strapping tape. _____________________ *The characteristic smell of gross anatomy labs is traditionally ascribed to formaldehyde, but nowadays the cadaver preservative is mostly phenol. Not as nasty as formaldehyde, but still poisonous enough to earn a 3 on the NFPA 704 health scale. Toxicity notwithstanding, it shows up in some surprising places. I can no longer stand even the thought of Chloraseptic—you know, that sore-throat-relieving spray. Its active ingredient is phenol (1.4%), and the classic menthol version smells like a hydroponic mint farm housed in a gross anatomy lab. Tags: things_we_say
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One thing that makes working on Saturday bearable is the old-time radio show I Haven’t a Clue on WJCU-FM. Every Saturday at 2 PM, DJ Art Funni plays all sorts of vintage radio programs from the early and mid-20th century—both classics like Green Hornet and Amos and Andy and really weird, obscure stuff like Chandu the Magician—with an occasional novelty record or jazz tune for variety. Sometimes the period advertisements are as entertaining as the actual shows. Many of the episodes come intact with the original advertising; sometimes just to add to the authenticity, I suspect, but often because the sales pitches were written right into the script. About two-thirds of the "prime-time" serials were underwritten by tobacco companies. The tobacco ads are some of the most hilarious: "More doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette! Your ‘T-Zone’ will tell you how mild and flavorful Camels are! T for Taste; T for Throat." Occasionally, one of these antique ads will trigger one of my own memories. A couple weeks ago, one program was studded with spots for Colgate Tooth Powder. Hey, I used that when I was a kid! Tooth powder was a semi-modernized version of baking soda (though I don’t know whether it actually contained sodium bicarbonate). It looked like baking soda but was a little heavier. With the benefit of hindsight, I suppose that tooth powder was essentially baking soda with ground up Altoids mixed in. For about four hours after I brushed with tooth powder, I couldn’t taste anything but peppermint. It was kind of challenging because the powder resisted getting wet, and of course it wouldn’t adhere to the toothbrush until it got wet. The standard protocol was to pour a little heap near the edge of the sink, and grind your pre-wetted toothbrush into it until enough stuck to last a for a few strokes. It dissipated quickly once you started brushing, so it was necessary to re-prime the toothbrush several times. Also, if you didn’t get your toothbrush wet enough, you got a snowy plume down the front of your shirt. This is what life was like in pre-technological America. Colgate tooth powder was sold in metal cans that looked just like hip flasks. Here’s a picture I scrounged from the Web.  That plastic cap just lifts off; it’s held to the can entirely by friction. Inverting a can of tooth powder was to invite disaster. The weird thing is that I can’t remember when tooth powder disappeared from my life. I think that by high school I was using regular old toothpaste; but why did we switch? Where went the tooth powder? I was pleased to discover that Colgate tooth powder is still available, albeit only in India. I’m tempted, just for the nostalgia value, but I bet the formula has changed in the last 30 years. Brushing with an adulterated form of the One True Tooth Powder would forever taint my childhood memories. Best just to savor the recollection. Tags: ancient_memories
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For the first six weeks of AP English* our teacher terrorized us with The Poetry Packet™. She handed it out the first day of class, and announced that we were to complete the numerous exercises therein on our own time, in addition to all the other assignments and reading we had to do, and at the beginning of Week 7 we were to submit the gigantic sheaf of papers we will have painstakingly amassed by then. I leafed through the packet and began to wonder whether freshman English was really all that bad. It covered all the basics of poetry—forms, meter, rhyme schemes—and none of the fun aspects. Naturally, every week we received a dire warning of the grisly fate that awaited anyone who put off work on their Poetry Packet™ for too long. And also naturally, being a senior in high school, I didn’t even look at it until half our allotted time had passed, and didn’t work on it seriously until the last week. But I managed to complete it only staying up a little past my usual bedtime on Sunday night. My best friends, who in Spanish class acquired the names Primer y Otro Miguel, didn’t even start the thing until fairly late the very last night. I didn’t see them at all until AP English, the period after lunch. They trudged in like a pair of zombies. Otro Miguel, his hands slightly trembling, showed me a mass of crumpled papers, on which he had scrawled mysterious, undecipherable writings I hoped had something to do with poetry. In response to my uproarious laughter, he felt compelled to defend his masterwork of procrastination: “At least it’s something.” “At least it’s something” became the leitmotif of AP English. It evolved a sense of infinite weariness, with a dramatic pause after the second word, and a grand exhalation with the last. “At least…it’s something.” Los Miguel turned in many a half-assed assignment during that year, and even I, the goody-two-shoes of the group, managed a few. But at least…they were something.
( I told that story to tell you this one… )
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If you’re in the mood for a laugh, take a peek at the doctoral dissertation (2.2-Mb .pdf document) penned by creationist nutcase and convicted tax-evader Kent Hovind, a.k.a. “Dr. Dino.” Hovind received his doctorate (D.Min.) in Christian Education from Patriot Bible University, a diploma mill somewhere in the wilds of Colorado. It’s worth a brief look just as an ego boost. Check out the simplistic, repetitive, grade-school writing style, and you’ll say, “Shit—I could write a better doctoral thesis while dead.” For example: The technical definition of evolution means “change.” There is no question that things do change. All change is directed either downward toward less order if left to themselves, or upward with a master-mind behind it.” My AP English teacher had a term for this kind of vacuous prose, important-sounding but completely devoid of meaning: “solemn vapors.” The introduction serves its purpose admirably by foreshadowing the horrors to come, and by revealing the author’s complete lack of coherence and organization. It lists ten chapters criticizing evolution and a further six answering “legitimate questions” about Biblical creationism, yet the dissertation itself only contains four sections, which are not numbered but correspond to Chapters one through four [lowercase numbers apparently intentional]. I was really excited about reading Chapter eight, too, as I wanted to learn “the truth about cave men.” There isn’t that much to say about the substance—it’s just a tired old rehash of the usual creationist fallacies and out-of-context quotes from Darwin, Gould and others, liberally (heh!) spiced with equally out-of-context Bible passages (which happen to be the only source material properly attributed, except maybe a Newsweek article or two). For sheer hilarity, there isn’t anything I can say about Hovind’s attempts at a logical argument that could possibly rival the arguments themselves. A parody this absurd would be derided as an obvious, over-the-top fake. (I suppose it really could be a forgery, but it fits too well in the context of Hovind’s other demented ramblings to be very easily dismissed. Also, the National Center for Science Education, America's leading defender of teaching evolution in public schools, has a copy on file, and it purportedly matches the one I've linked to.) By no means should you initiate a drinking game in which you take a sip every time you read some variation on “Evolution is (just) a(nother) religion” in the second chapter, “The Religion of Evolution” (starting on p. 47 of the .pdf; the pages are not numbered, except for every tenth page, which bears a handwritten number in the lower right corner). You won’t remember anything after ten pages or so—even with the diluted camel piss that serves for beer in Utah. A sample of the illuminating discourse you’ll find therein: The tides have totally shifted and we are now teaching only evolution. This is Scopes in reverse. The same bigotry that they objected against they now condone since the tales [sic] are turned. Even though they can, most public school teachers [sic] don’t mention creation. They have been told that it is against the law to talk about creation because it is a religious subject. Evolution is religious also. None of the many, many, flaws—save one—is unique to this particular thesis. Through carelessness or collusion, plenty of dissertations that are poorly written and poorly argued have slipped through review and defense to be canonized in anonymous university libraries the world over. What makes this work really stand out, even above all the other academic atrocities, is an appearance of the author’s bad poetry. Really bad poetry. Agonizingly, brain-numbingly bad poetry (pp. 82-83; all typos and grammatical errors in the original). As I was thinking on this subject, I wrote a poem to try to explain this, comparing blind men and atheists.
( Warning: clicking here may cost you a few IQ points. ) Tags: scary_fundies
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We always had cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving when I was growing up. I never understood exactly why it was there, but I did groove on how Mom served it—as a corrugated, plum-colored cylinder straight from the can, jiggling and sliding around in a shallow bowl. Best of all, on one end the sauce cylinder would bear the imprint of the expiration date that had been stamped into the can. I always asked for a slice with “the numbers.” I was all about numbers when I was a kid. Kathy and I have continued the tradition of serving cranberry sauce in its original shape, but it isn’t the same anymore. The expiration date is now printed on, instead of stamped into the metal. So, no numbers. Sigh.
Dear Annoying Postdoc at Work—a mathematics exercise for you: Given that your snarky comment about how much Mountain Dew I drink (which, by the way, is far less than you seem to think) wasn’t funny the first time, prove using mathematical induction that it is also not funny on the kth utterance of exactly the same comment ∀ k ∈ ℤ, k > 1. Also: Please stop reminding me of my socially clueless, teenaged self. Having learned my lesson from a thousand painfully awkward experiences, I yearn to cease reliving them from the other person’s perspective.
In retrospect, it should have been pretty clear that the chemical name for Vitamin C— ascorbic acid—literally means “no scurvy” (L: scorbutus). It’s kind of embarrassing, to a dedicated science geek, to have had to read about it in a book. Isaac Asimov, in his Words of Science and the History Behind Them, also noted the following about vitamin C: The American Medical Association frowns on chemical names that mention the disease against which they are effective since this may encourage self-dosing. They have suggested cevitaminic acid as an alternative (from “C vitamin”) but this name just hasn’t caught on. He wrote that in 1959, a few years before Linus Pauling popularized the notion of taking Vitamin C against the common cold. Ask current high-school students what Vitamin C is good for, and I’ll bet far more will say “colds” than “scurvy.” In their defense, scurvy is practically nonexistent in American society nowadays, and if one hears about it at all, it’s generally in combination with pirates and wind-powered seafaring.* On a related note, anyone remember way back when “baby aspirin” was consumed by actual children? These days, about 99.9% of baby aspirin is taken long-term as an anticoagulant (“blood thinner”). I don’t think children are supposed to take real aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid) at all anymore. *I remember hearing a few years ago about an brought to an American hospital with a perplexing set of seemingly unrelated symptoms. After much deliberation the doctors realized that they were dealing with a classic case of scurvy. It turned out that for the previous several months the kid had been eating practically nothing but Domino’s Pizza, which gives you an idea of its nutritional content. I couldn’t find a reference to that story, but here is a similar case of a child who had lived on “biscuits, Pop-Tarts ® (Kellogg's C, Battle Creek, Mich), cheese pizza, and water.” Aren’t Pop-Tarts ® supposed to be vitamin-fortified? “Ah,” says the chemist, “but Vitamin C is heat-labile, so if you toast your Pop-Tarts ® you’ll kill it all off.” That’s why I eat my Pop-Tarts ® raw, to Kathy’s disgust: I don’t want to suddenly break out with pellagra or rickets or some nasty shit because I’m incinerating my major source of vitamins. (Kidding: in actuality, i Flintstoni provide that service.) Tags: random_shit, wurds
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I only found out last week that for a couple of decades I’ve been misquoting my favorite lines from Steely Dan’s “Do It Again.” I’d always thought they went Now you swear you’re kickin’ Vegas
That you’re not a gamblin’ man
Then you find you’re back in Vegas
With a handle in your handBut actually, the first line is, “Now you swear and kick and beg us”. It’s a clever rhyme, but what does the “kick” have to do with the rest of it?
Las Vegas is our standard “escape” vacation. When we want to completely forget about our usual lives or a couple days, but don’t feel like accomplishing anything, that’s where we’ll find ourselves, as we did this weekend. LV hotels will offer you fantastic deals if you show a little loyalty. We get free rooms on weeknights and drastically reduced rates on the weekends, plus (typically) a $30 food voucher. And we’re not even big gamblers or anything. The only reason we show on their gambling radar at all is that I play vast amounts of video poker, which is formally considered a slot machine even though the house advantage on video poker is minuscule compared to slots. I’ve mastered the strategy for video poker (regular Jacks or Better and its more big-pay-oriented sibling, Double Double Bonus Poker) well enough that I can play well and zone out at the same time. For me it’s a kind of active meditation: I deal and hold, deal and hold while letting my subconscious take me wherever it wishes. Consequently, I can offline and generate good karma with the hotel simultaneously.
The California Hotel in downtown LV still amuses me. For some reason, despite the name, they cater heavily to Hawaiian tourists. The banks of video poker machines all have names like Pau Hana Poker and Shaka Five Way. (The latter used to be festooned with a pair neon signs of perpetually back-and-forth tilting hands with thumb and pinky fingers extended, in the universal “Hang Loose” sign.) A new promotion is the Diamond Head Jackpot quarter video poker: Any sequential royal flush in diamonds, ascending or descending, pays a whopping $25,000. (The probability of such an event, assuming optimal strategy for standard Jacks or Better, is about 1 in 10 million.) We don’t gamble at the Cal. The real payoff of its Hawaiian theme, for us, is the food—for its overall deliciousness as well as the novelty. How many mainland American coffee shops do you know of whose salad bars prominently feature edamame, sushi and that delectable, bland Hawaiian macaroni salad? Not to mention a gigantic, misshapen football of wasabi—with no explanation or warning whatsoever? You’ve heard of the Tar Baby from B’rer Rabbit—this is the Wasabi Baby: get stuck to it and before you can free yourself, your sinuses are toast. Among the available breakfast meats are grilled Spam and Portuguese sausage. Just this trip I discovered that in addition to the Hawaiian fast-food joint upstairs, the small burgz-’n’-dogz snack bar on the main floor also sells cans of Hawaiian Sun guava nectar—and it seems to be open nearly 24 hours. Doesn’t sound like much but I can’t possibly overemphasize the value of an ice-cold guava nectar on the rocks late at night, to slake the near-deadly thirst after taking on 10 g of sodium from a pub-style dinner.
When I was a postdoc in Seattle, a colleague—who, like us, visited LV frequently—frequently voiced his opinion that the Circus Circus Hotel's buffet was the most vile, disgusting place to eat on the face of the planet. (And he had spent his childhood in Nigeria.) We both really liked classic rock, too, so when “Do It Again” came on the radio once I couldn’t resist getting in a dig: Now you swear you’re kickin’ Vegas
That you’re not a total jerk-us.
Then you find yourself in Vegas
Eating lunch at Circus Circus!
Here’s this trip’s Las Vegas Decadence Scoreboard: Free virgin strawberry daiquiris: 15 Cases of acute acid stomach from drinking too many of the previous item: 2 Cans of guava nectar: 3 (Only 3? Yeah, but they weren’t free, or even cheap) Hot fudge sundaes with Kona Coffee ice cream: 1 Most money paid for a meal for two after discounts & perks: About $15 Least paid: $0 Net gambling win: $20 Hours of fun had: Many
Flying Southwest Airlines from the Midwest generally involves a transfer at Chicago Midway. For a truly harrowing experience, all you need to do is watch out the window on final approach to any of Midway’s runways. We landed on Runway 4R on our way back from LV. The last minute coming in scared the bejesus out of me, and I have a private pilot license. A half mile or so out, we passed over a large railroad yard and industrial park. Alreay, the tall clusters of orange security lamps seemed to rise halfway to the airplane, but I knew from experience it was an optical illusion; we were still a couple hundred feet up. I began to worry when we passed the industrial park, and instead of the airport’s perimeter field, we began to cross over a residential neighborhood. We’re now practically skimming our wheels on roofs, and still the houses continue to hurtle past underneath. I couldn’t quite read the license plates of the last three cars before the retaining wall shot past, but I could tell which state they were from! I’ve been connecting flights in Chicago regularly for a quarter century now, and I still can’t wrap my mind around how bloody huge the city is. On approach to Midway, I look out and see a grid of orange lines. My brain automatically sets the scale according to how big it things a city should be, and so I perceive that the squares of the grid are city blocks. But when we get close each “block” resolves a square grid of its own; and I realize the bright lines are merely the major streets, set fully eight blocks apart. A moment of disorientation, and then it’s like stepping into the Total Perspective Vortex. During the day, I’ve experienced the same sudden shift of scale, but with completely different visual cues. The residential areas in the central part of Chicago, near Midway, at first seem to be composed of closely-spaced houses, but a closer look reveals the “houses” to be endless rows upon rows of three-story apartment buildings packed in like books on a bookshelf. I find the whole scene horribly depressing. Not because of the density issue—we need more high-density residential areas and less suburban sprawl—but because of the mind-numbing monotony. I can't imagine living where the most exciting part of one’s environment is the inability to fly a kite more than twelve feet in the air for fear it may get entangled in the landing gear of a commercial jet. Tags: las_vegas
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My graduate advisor, R., went to college with a complete lunatic (“CL”). He must have had just a touch of sociopathy—not so much that he couldn’t function in society, but enough to generate, from time to time, spectacular incidents of compulsive irresponsibility.
Laboratories, with their ready availability of implements of destruction, seemed to bring out CL’s worst behavior, which at times bordered on criminal. R. was unlucky enough to be paired with CL in biology lab. He conducted the first half of their two-man worm dissection with meticulous care, while CL dank* around, and having finished, handed it off to CL for continuation. CL grinned evilly, grasped a scalpel in a clenched fist, and began furiously stabbing the half-dissected worm like a maniac on a killing spree: STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-…. Formaldehyde droplets and worm bits flew everywhere.
Naturally, the professor chose that exact moment to stroll by and inspect their handiwork.
Things could have gone worse, as CL’s chemistry lab partner found out. As in the biology class, the innocent lab partner (a.k.a. the “victim”) initiated the actual work, carefully measuring and mixing, while CL idly heated one end of a glass rod over a Bunsen burner. When asked for a clean stirrer, CL casually presented the nearly molten end of his glass rod to his partner.
When asked why the hell he’d done it, CL would only offer the following explanation: “Hot glass looks just the same as cold glass.” Astonishingly, he wasn’t expelled for that stunt.
I hadn’t thought of that story in perhaps over a decade. A couple nights ago, however, we had pasta shells stuffed with a mélange of Italian sausage and ricotta cheese. Five minutes before dinner was ready, I donned my oven mitts, took the piping hot casserole dish out of the oven, sprinkled mozzarella onto the bubbling morass inside, and returned the dish uncovered, tossing the clear glass lid into the sink.
I don’t know what prompted Kathy to start washing the dishes just then. She’s a believer in CL’s hot glass/cold glass theorem, now, too. I wasn’t fast enough to catch her before she grabbed the casserole lid; so I spent the next several minutes apologizing profusely whilst she ran cold water over her singed fingers. Luckily she didn’t even get a noticeable burn. Reflexes still in working order!
____________________
*dank: past tense of dink
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My graduate advisor, R., went to college with a complete lunatic (“CL”). He must have had just a touch of sociopathy—not so much that he couldn’t function in society, but enough to generate, from time to time, spectacular incidents of compulsive irresponsibility.
Laboratories, with their ready availability of implements of destruction, seemed to bring out CL’s worst behavior, which at times bordered on criminal. R. was unlucky enough to be paired with CL in biology lab. He conducted the first half of their two-man worm dissection with meticulous care, while CL dank* around, and having finished, handed it off to CL for continuation. CL grinned evilly, grasped a scalpel in a clenched fist, and began furiously stabbing the half-dissected worm like a maniac on a killing spree: STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-STAB-…. Formaldehyde droplets and worm bits flew everywhere.
Naturally, the professor chose that exact moment to stroll by and inspect their handiwork.
Things could have gone worse, as CL’s chemistry lab partner found out. As in the biology class, the innocent lab partner (a.k.a. the “victim”) initiated the actual work, carefully measuring and mixing, while CL idly heated one end of a glass rod over a Bunsen burner. When asked for a clean stirrer, CL casually presented the nearly molten end of his glass rod to his partner.
When asked why the hell he’d done it, CL would only offer the following explanation: “Hot glass looks just the same as cold glass.” Astonishingly, he wasn’t expelled for that stunt.
I hadn’t thought of that story in perhaps over a decade. A couple nights ago, however, we had pasta shells stuffed with a mélange of Italian sausage and ricotta cheese. Five minutes before dinner was ready, I donned my oven mitts, took the piping hot casserole dish out of the oven, sprinkled mozzarella onto the bubbling morass inside, and returned the dish uncovered, tossing the clear glass lid into the sink.
I don’t know what prompted Kathy to start washing the dishes just then. She’s a believer in CL’s hot glass/cold glass theorem, now, too. I wasn’t fast enough to catch her before she grabbed the casserole lid; so I spent the next several minutes apologizing profusely whilst she ran cold water over her singed fingers. Luckily she didn’t even get a noticeable burn. Reflexes still in working order!
____________________
*dank: past tense of dink
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Today's Cool Words:acaciaI've always loved the sound of this word. Exotic, yet easy to say. It's also a very pretty word: all curves and loops, with a dot over the i to offset the single straight letter. I like the actual tree, too, with its sprawling branches supporting a wide crown of leaves. To someone raised among evergreens, the most striking feature of an acacia is its almost perfectly flat top. Nature's Own Bus-stop Shelter. The street next to my hotel in Honolulu was lined with acacias. I made a daily pilgrimage to the mall down the street for lunch via the top parking level, almost level with their tops. That made for a very pleasant walk, mall parking lot notwithstanding. gibbousGibbous can mean "convex" or "hunchbacked", but I've only seen it used in conjunction (heh!) with celestial bodies, in which case it means "more than half illuminated (but not full)." The word has no connection with gibbon, although I often involuntarily make the link in my mind. Waxing gibbous is my second favorite phase of the moon, after, of course, the sliver moon.
Any item offered for sale or as a prize in a contest, whose description includes the word merchandise, is something I can automatically assume I don't want, even for free. This is doubly true of "logo merchandise."
I attended a department mixer this evening at a local bar-and-video-games joint called the Boneyard. I somehow wound up playing Dance Dance Revolution with a couple of grad students and my friend Laura. If they were surprised I was willing to play, they were astonished when I, the oldest by a decade and a DDR virgin, smoked everybody. Nobody had a chance to warn them that they shouldn't mess with an longtime Parappa the Rapper enthusiast.
At one point we tried to imagine my boss, age 77, playing DDR. The most difficult part was to choose an appropriate song. Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata would just about do the trick. The little arrows would crawl up the screen at the rate of about one pixel every five seconds.
I find myself at a rather awkward time of life. I still identify more strongly with the senior graduate students than with the faculty who are my own age, and for the usual reason: my colleagues' lives are entirely focused on their children. That's as it should be—but it still means I have no friends my own age within 75 miles of home. My faculty position and somewhat advanced age keep me from making friends among the graduate students, like I did at the U of Washington (with one exception, but she's no longer a grad student, and wasn't in my department). I'm not so old that playing DDR with grad students pushes any boundaries of creepiness. And as long as I wear a hat, I look somewhat younger than I am. In ten years, it would most definitely emit creepy vibes, but with luck, in ten years my age group will all have sent their kids off to college, and can begin to talk about something else again. Tags: random_shit, words_i_detest, wurds
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24 October, 5:15 PM Hawai‘i-Aleutian Standard Time:Surprisingly, the ass-kickingest guava nectar I drank in Hawai‘i was the Meadow Gold brand. It contains fully 20% guava juice, while Hawaiian Sun and Aloha both run about 12%. The drawback is that you have to buy it in cardboard cartons, like milk, but that’s a problem only if you have to drink it straight from the carton (like I’m doing right now in the hotel lobby). The plan was to have a huge meal and a big-ass Coke with crushed ice a couple hours before I boarded the airport shuttle, and then not to eat or drink anything for the next 15 hours. The first part went well, but I overdid it with the salt, and now I’m gasping. Hence the quart of guava nectar I’m currently guzzling. I still have more than three hours before takeoff to balance the sodium books. I have having to get up every hour to use that horrible, cramped, smelly airplane bathroom. Forgot to tip the carton of guava nectar to mix it up before I opened it. Consequently, the last third is nearly pure, undiluted guava purée. Yum. It takes me back to our hike from the Seven Sacred Pools of Kipahulu on the Hana side of Maui, when we walked through a wild guava grove. Guava is not native to Hawai‘i—all the more the pity. For some reason I think of them as the Seven Sacred Pools of Fred. I don’t know why. Wait—yes, I do. In high school band class, when it was too close to Christmas to expect anyone to behave, our band director showed us The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. The brother and his friends called it The Seventh Voyage of Fred, for reasons they weren’t inclined to share with the rest of us, if they even knew what they were. Thought I would work for a couple hours before leaving for the airport, in the hotel “business center”—a cubbyhole next to the gift shop with a few desks and computers. Since none of the computers work, I assumed I’d find some privacy. For the first five minutes I was right; but then about two thousand Japanese high school students congregated just outside and held a shouting contest. Some things, like laughter, are the same in any culture. Add raucous teenage conversation to the list. I’m probably getting sick. Not that I feel like I’m getting sick; I’m speaking from a purely statistical viewpoint. Chances are, one of the myriad viruses bombarding my respiratory tract over the last seven days got through. Can only hope it is satisfied to incubate asymptomatically until I at least get home. Don’t want to stage an encore of my colleague’s performance on the way out here. 25 October, 9:30 AM Central Daylight Time (11 hours later):Oh fuck. Fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck. Seven hours into our seven-and-a-half-hour flight from Honolulu to Houston, we’ve entered a holding pattern south of Midland/Odessa on account of thunderstorms at our destination. The display at the front of the cabin shows that we’re drawing a big oval racetrack, about a hundred miles (160 km) per lap, across the oil fields of West Texas. At our altitude there’s a 60-MPH (100-km/h) gale from the southwest, which has tilted our racetrack just a little clockwise from horizontal. Our pattern is holding steady with respect to the ground, which means that our contrail must look like an enormous, sky-spanning Slinky drifting to the northeast. Too bad nobody on the ground can see it; nothing visible below us right now but a big plain of cloud. Okay, we’ve finally broken the holding pattern, and the first officer has assured us that we’re headed to Houston. No chance I’ll make my connection. Can only hope that my next flight is as delayed as this one. First time I saw it, I though the animated map of our flight’s progress was the coolest thing in the world. Now I’m not so sure. Now we’re drawing big bends and loops and waves all over Texas, and we settle into our assigned place in line for landing. Can’t imagine how many other planes are out here, making racetracks of their own. I think we have first priority. Don’t care to hear how much of a fuel reserve we have after eight and a half hours in the air. Heh. We just drew a big ampersand north of Austin. 50 October, 5:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time (18 1/2 hours later):Down in Cleveland, only three hours late. Should consider myself lucky, though I’ve been awake for 28 hours and have two more to go before I can hit the hay. All in all I feel nowhere near as horrible as I’d expected. Yay me, world traveler. Tags: meeting
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The rental prices for this vendor booth are ludicrous. US $14 for a waste basket? $54 for a grey chair with what appear to be semen stains? (A chair with arms, and presumably no semen stains, is an extra $33.50.) $45 for vacuuming a 90-sq.-ft. (8.4-m 2) booth one time? The only reasonably priced item on the list is the warehouse storage for our stuff, and that’s only a quarter of the total cost. I spent about a half an hour attempting to connect to the crappy-ass “free WiFi” at the convention hall. During the five minutes my laptop claimed I was on, my successful Net traffic totaled about 300 bytes. Worse yet, the convention WiFi poisoned my computer so that I then couldn’t connect back at the hotel, which had been working fine. What the hell? Hawai‘i is not the third world; we should have mastered the technology here by now. At least I wasn’t charged for this exercise in frustration. A 7-Eleven is located literally across the street from the convention center. Life-saving, it has been. Our $14 wastebasket (apparently there is an extra charge for emptying it, which we didn’t pay) is half full of discarded 40-oz. (1.2-ℓ) Slurpee cups. Pretty soon I’ll have to start stacking the cups together so they’ll fit. My boss said he’d attend the vendor booth for most of the six hours on each of the days the exhibits were open. Actually did about an hour and a half on each of the first two days. Sigh. I actually abandoned the booth during the research poster sessions, after putting out extra candy. Reckoned that people could grab the candy as they walked by just as easily if I weren’t there. Note to self: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups are far more highly prized as treats than Tootsie Roll Pops; and they don’t melt in the Hawaiian climate as we’d feared. Had drinks and dinner with my colleagues from Seattle. Was delighted to hear them cuss. It blows my mind how conservative my current department is, given that it’s full of scientists with advanced degrees in a field that depends crucially on modern theories of human evolution. Even the known liberals among my coworkers seldom use expletives, no matter what the provocation. A pity. Forgetting we were having a reunion dinner at a Thai restaurant last night, I had Thai curry for lunch. As it happened, it didn’t matter, as I promptly dumped my entire lunch in my lap. I didn’t even get to taste it. My Hawaiian shirt somehow survived unscathed. Not so, my formerly white socks and sneakers. Even after I washed up in the nearest rest room, I looked like I had some bizarre kidney disease. (Yes, Terri-ちゃん, I did think of the “curry panda” escapade in Panda Ko-panda.) Every speaker in this session could moonlight as an auctioneer. Even the non-native English speakers. I scratched my head and inadvertently bought an antique mahogany table for $58,000. The meeting program guide warned us to wear fairly warm clothing because the meeting rooms were air-conditioned. Glad I ignored that advice. The whole complex is open to the outside; the rooms are cooler, but cooler is, of course, a relative term. Going to the talks means only that I can stop sweating for a little while. On the other hand, the air conditioning in my hotel room is really good. Even at the lowest setting I have to bundle up like a raccoon in its raccocoon. I’d wondered why the beds had four sheets and a comforter in this climate. Now I know. One definite improvement in this year's meeting compared to two years ago: they're really enforcing the " no flash photography in the meeting rooms" rule. Only saw one flash go off during a talk. A couple of bouncers converged on the source, and just for good measure the photographer got chewed out over the PA system by a moderator. In 2007 some of the lectures looked more like a press conference—or an artillery barrage. Last day and I’m really burned out. Will go to one more lecture, but only because it’s a former coworker talking about a subject I'm interested in. Tags: meeting
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(All times Hawai‘i-Aleutian Standard) 06:15 Awakened. Ah, yes: 11 h sleep can cure almost anything that isn’t growing in you. 06:45 Checked e-mail. Letter from colleague, now safely home, with instructions on how to set up vendor booth. He still doesn’t know what hit him: is still assuming an abrupt onset of the ’flu, but doesn’t have a fever now. Instructions are unnecessarily complicated. 07:30 Out in search of breakfast. Receptionist says there’s a grocery store in the adjoining mall, just past the Macy’s. Found the grocery store just past Macy’s, separated by one floor and about a half mile of shops. Ala Moana is the largest outdoor mall I’ve ever seen. And all the little fountain pools are also koi ponds. How cool is that? Continental breakfast is $11 at the hotel, but I can prorate these bagels and cream cheese to about $1.50 per day. Starting tomorrow, that is; for today, it’s two huge-ass chocolate raised donuts, as fresh and fluffy as a cloud. 08:30 Played around on the ’Net; found a Kinko’s (now FedEx™ Business Solutions To Maximize Personal Productivity and a Whole Shitload of Other Meaningless Corporate Jargon Center) only a block away. Am ahead of schedule. 09:00 Made copies of flyers and shit for the vendor booth. Printed out all the shipping receipts colleague had brought as far as Houston and took back home. The six-hour time difference is working to my advantage, as my home support team has until early afternoon to find something I need first thing in the morning. 09:20 Off to the convention center. Had a difficult time convincing the exhibiton registrar that I was now officially in charge of the booth. Received red-bordered name tag and the awesome power it entails. Vendors get their own special lounge, perpetually stocked with muffins and sweet rolls. Must remind self to sign up as a vendor next year, even if I don’t staff the booth. 09:45 Began unpacking the materials for the booth, and discovered that colleague’s instructions weren’t needlessly complicated after all. After a careful inventory, decided to go back to hotel, review e-mailed instructions, and continue on to an OfficeMax or the equivalent and obtain a tool for breaching the quarter-inch-thick layer of strapping tape in which all the boxes and crates were entombed, and a few kilometers of strapping tape. 10:25 Nearest OfficeMax 1.4 miles (2.2 km) away. Temperature already in the low 80s °F (upper 20s °C) and rising, humidity 99.5% and holding. Answered a few more e-mails and slathered SPF 30 on the bald spot. Also bought a couple of Hawaiian shirts and a boss straw hat. Figured it’s time to act my (rather advanced) age. 11:35 After 25 min fast march, arrived at OfficeMax. New Hawaiian shirt uniformly damp but not dripping. Strangely, in Honolulu only the side streets have street signs. It’s assumed that everyone knows the names of all the major thoroughfares. Good thing I have excellent visual-spatial memory. 12:05 Stopped at the mall food court on the way back. Thai chicken curry yum yum, Coke with crushed ice yum yum yum yum yum. Dehydration may be my greatest foe. Discovered how to identify the overpriced stores at the mall by the quantity of air conditioning. The chillier the blast of wind issuing from the entrance, the pricier the goods. Sneaky. Almost worked on me. Would have worked, but I hate clothes shopping with a passion (Hawaiian clothing excepted). 12:50 Now properly armed, tackled the setup for the vendor booth. Main problem was the curved backdrop on which we hang our big poster . Wire frame is as complicated as a spider web, and just about as flimsy. It somehow unfolds in all three dimensions at once, and probably in others, as well. Five vertical metal bars with joints like spider’s legs, listed as “optional,” aren’t. Sheets of black carpet attach to the metal bars by magnets, and are aligned by use of minuscule pegs that can’t compete with the magnets, so impossible to fit everything together perfectly. After much trial and error, achieved an imperfect but acceptable result; okay as long a nobody shines a light behind the display and reveals the gaps. Eight-foot by six-foot (240 × 180 cm) advertising poster attaches to carpet by “male” Velcro, which for adhesion far outperforms the magnets. Had to realign the carpet with the poster attached. If the carpet by itself was impossible to get straight, this was impossible squared. Did I mention that the carpet far outweighed the aluminum frame, so the entire thing was just about to fall over on me the whole time? To review: Velcro >> magnets >> minuscule pegs. Entire thing now held together by gravity and weak strip magnets. An earthquake of magnitude 0.2 will bring it to the ground. Hope that O‘ahu not as geologically active as it was a million years ago. 14:20 Still haven’t unpacked the monitor, but no loss since I don’t know what it’s for. Called it quits. Time for another guava nectar. 16:15 It’s raining about two hundred yards offshore. If the sun will only peep out for a second we’d have a killer rainbow. Tags: meeting
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Well, this meeting has turned out far more exciting than I’d expected. And a lot less fun. The first half-hour of our first leg of the flight out went okay, insofar as having to get up at 6:00 AM is ever “okay.” But I’d just started to drift off to sleep, when I heard a loud, “Are you feeling all right?” I thought I was being addressed, as I was hunched over the tray attached to the seat in front of me. (That’s the only way I can sleep on airplanes, and it only works if the seat ahead is fully upright. There are disadvantages to being tall.) But in fact it was my colleague, whom I'll call Ken (not his real name), sitting two seats away on my row. He was leaning forward, pale as ash, his head resting against the seat in front of him. Rivers of sweat were running down his face. I’d heard the term “breaking out in a cold sweat,” and have done so myself, but this was in another league entirely: he was almost projectile sweating. A rain of perspiration droplets pattered audibly onto the carpet. ( More... )Tags: meeting, sliver_moon
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For the record: I have not abandoned this LiveJournal. Several non-work-related projects have occupied all my free time over the last six weeks or so, and for the next two weeks work-related projects will do the same. Sad, that; I'm itching to write another travelogue. But for just a moment, I would like to show you something that occurred to me while I was shaving this afternoon. For some reason, every company that makes shaving cream simultaneously discontinued the lemon-lime scent, and in desperation I tried Edge Gel, in the hopes that something totally alien would perhaps be a little less disappointing than my treasured thick foam in a horrible second-rate scent. My container of deep turquoise gel (which doesn't smell too bad, all things considered) bears this product logo:  Amusingly, when we flip that baby over, the brand name—though it now forms a completely different word—can still be read:  Abpa Gel may never replace good ol' Gillette Foamy, but I think I can get to where I can stand it. Come to think of it, that font isn't so far off from the Mao Uietunow (Mountain Dew) font. Recently, the label on my second-favorite soft drink was shorted to "Mtn Dew." I guess that reading the entire word Mountain must severely tax the attention span of your average radical teenager. I don't particularly care for this slick-modern-corporate-but-nonetheless-s lightly-edgy style of logo, but it's still a vast improvement over the Xtreme Ugly fad of the 90s, whose stench lingers on even to this day. Tags: flip_it_over, wurds
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Occasionally I am stricken with a hunger that only a gyros sandwich can cure. Once, not too long ago, it hit me while we were on our way to another restaurant. This was our conversation in the car: "No, wait—we have to go to that gyros place just past the freeway!" "Sure?" "Oh, yes—but if they don't have the rotating cylinder of meat, the deal's off." "Rotating meat? In Cleveland?" "Sure, why not?" "You won't find anything that authentic in this town." "A man can dream, can't he?" "Bet you they won't have it." "Five bucks?" "Okay." "Okay." In Kathy's defense, we've eaten at several purportedly Greek restaurants around here, and every one served gyros with paper-thin, rounded rectangles of meat, all identical in size and shape as if cut with a laser. Obviously they'd been yanked from a freezer and slapped on the grill a few seconds—just long enough to absorb whatever carcinogens were at that point just about to bake into the metal. Yet the hole-in-the-wall joint we'd noted on an earlier foraging mission had that informal, sincere look of an establishment that would never sacrifice authenticity for convenience. My hopes soared as we entered and caught the jangly sounds of a bouzouki issuing from a low-fi speaker. The speaker, resting uncomfortably atop a soft-drink cooler, was glazed with condensed grease. Now here, I thought, was a genuine Greek fast-food eatery, where just breathing the air a few minutes exceeds the legal limit for daily saturated fat intake. Even better, a lighted sign above the counter hawked "Fresh-cut Fries," complete with a faded picture of mouth-watering, eight-inch potato spears, delectably square in cross-section and glistening with secret oils from the Mediterranean. And they had the rotating cylinder of meat. Wordlessly, Kathy handed me a five-dollar bill. A medical lab tech, fresh off her shift at the Cleveland Clinic, came in while we were waiting. Her name badge bore an almost unpronounceably Greek name. I cocked an ear, for I expected to hear an authentic Greek pronunciation of " gyros." (The proprietor was a tight-lipped fellow who spoke in shrugs and subsonic grunts, so no help there.) (One of my greatest linguistic pet peeves is pronouncing the Greek word gyros like the English word gyros—"jye-rows." You can even compound the horror by leaving off the final s, which belongs there in the singular. Yeah, yeah, I know—it's an accepted English pronunciation, but so is "Kerry-Okie," and that one pissed me off even before I learned anything about Japanese diction. Now, saying "yee-ros" gets you in the ballpark, but I won't settle for an English cop-out if I can hear and reasonably approximate the real deal.) I assumed an attitude of listening readiness. Our Greek customer spoke. "Can I have a deluxe jye-rows?" AAAAARGH!
I was horribly disappointed, but you need not be: you can hear, on Wikipedia, the word gyros pronounced in Greek. Please note: Wikipedia has sensibly encoded sounds as ".ogg" files, which practically no computer on Earth has been play without special software since Ogg the caveman hacked the first PC out of flint; although Firefox 3.5 will somehow play them if you first go to the file page, as linked here. The initial sound is a voiced palatal fricative, a phoneme that (as far as I know) doesn't occur in English. (Think of a breathy "y" with a just a hint of "zh".) I have heard it, however, in the Mexican Spanish pronunciation of yo ("I"). Actually, the y of yo varies quite a bit between Mexican Spanish and Central American Spanish. In junior high school we had a student teacher from Ecuador who said " yo" with a perfect English "j" sound at the beginning. She'd get all mad at us, too, when we answered her example of " Yo digo la verdad" with "Joe digo la verdad." And since we were all beginners, we felt really stupid. How hard could it be to say " yo"? Perhaps they say "jye-row" in Ecuador, as well. Tags: wurds
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Here's a tongue twister for you. Say the following ten times quickly: Cinnamon synonym.A quick Google search shows that I'm not the first to make have discovered it. I keep thinking I'm edging closer to an original thought, only to be struck down time and time again by the cold, unfeeling, all-seeing eye of Google.
If you want to see a large room full of teenagers sit in absolute silence for two and a half hours, just go see the latest Harry Potter film a couple days after it's first released. That was the most polite movie crowd I've seen—perhaps ever—in a public theater, and Kathy and I were by 20 years the oldest people there.
Like everyone else in North America, I missed the spectacular total eclipse Wednesday, but a couple weeks back I saw something almost as unusual: a funny Get Fuzzy strip. And not only was it funny—it was quite clever and sophisticated, too. Here it is:  Impressive—the punchline is far more effective if spoken in classical Latin! And the dog is supposed to be the amiably clueless member of the family. As a long-time cat owner, I can appreciate the scentiment. Okay, I'm being a bit harsh with Get Fuzzy. I don't often find it amusing, but it still falls into the better half of all widely syndicated comics. For originality it still beats all to hell the heavily commercialized "favorites"— Garfield, Cathy, The Family Circus and their ilk (the older Peanuts excepted).
Here's a riddle that only an old Dungeons and Dragons player will understand. (And it only took me a quarter century to think of it). How can you add one letter to a Gummi Bear to obtain a classic D&D monster from the very first version of the game? Note: What you add the letter to is not the actual words Gummi Bear, but a two-word synonym. I'll be amazed if anyone gets this. The answer is at bottom, behind the cut.
And now, yet another gem from the Treasury of Things We Say in Certain Situations: Kathy and I recently took an initiative to get more vegetables in our diet. We've been keeping a supply of cucumber salad handy—just sliced cucumbers and onions soaked in approximately half-strength vinegar with a dash of Good Seasons Italian Dressing mix, and refrigerated. Whenever it's time to start a new batch, we recount a famous conversation in Love Is Hell, between the hero, Binky the Rabbit, and his girlfriend, Sheba, under the heading "Do not make jocular marriage proposals if you don't want to get clobbered": Binky: "Will you mar—" Sheba: "Oh, yes!" Binky: "—inate this steak for me?" We've been saying this for at least a dozen years—"Will you mar—" "Yes!" "—inate this steak for me?"—anytime we need to soak any kind of food in any kind of sauce, marinade or other liquid medium. The strange thing is that Kathy has never seen the original comic, and yet she recites it as avidly as I do. That's what's great about Things We Say in Certain Situations: the essence of the quote, completely detached from its original context, is self-sustaining. ( Answer to the riddle… )Tags: random_shit, wurds
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One unfortunate consequence of all this lovely cool weather we've been having is that the stargazing has been even crappier than usual. It's getting to the point that the early-morning sliver moons are just about the only ones I see anymore. Last Monday's one-and-a-half-day sliver moon was a case in point. I almost set my alarm for 5:15, knowing that in the unlikely event that the Nightly Rainstorm broke up early enough, I'd have a chance to see the sliver moon, Venus and Mars all in one patch of sky. And that I did. The sliver moon, bathed in dawn's early light, had just barely popped over the horizon. The bright star Aldebaran, actually brighter than Mars was, added a second red pinpoint to the tableau.
Later that morning there appeared in our paper a rare sliver-moon-related comic:  A careful look at the Moon here reveals a surprising fact about the Born Loser, assuming it's shortly after sunset, and that he and Wilberforce haven't been up all night watching Dennis Hopper movies: he lives in the Southern Hemisphere! If he lived in the temperate latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, the "horns" of the waxing crescent would point up and to the left, and not to the right. I find this but of speculation far more intriguing than anything I have ever read in the comic that was actually intended by the artist (unless he drew the Moon backwards intentionally, as a test of our sliver-moon-watching skills, in which case I'm really impressed). Tags: sliver_moon
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I owe cutiepi314 thanks for suggesting that I update the Idiotic Table of the Conservatives. The original dates back to a few months after the 2004 presidential election, and with all the fresh, new crazies that have slithered into prominence since then, it really needed a good overhaul.  Click here for smallish but readable version, 1024 × 870Click here for humongous version, 3072 × 2611(see below for key) As before, I aimed for a decent mix of neocons, religious nuts, pundits, flat-taxers, corporate stooges, bigots, rabid pro-lifers (mostly the same group as the religious nuts) and outrageous hypocrites. A staunch defender of science, I packed the table fairly heavily with creationists, "Intelligent Design" advocates (i.e., creationists), and any person or group active in climate change denial. I took a slightly different approach for the new version. Initially, I preserved all the chemical symbols from the Periodic Table and chose names to fit. In a few cases, the connections were rather tenuous: the letters of the chemical symbol appeared somewhere in the name, but didn't even come close to evoking that name. I've now moved to a more flexible approach, requiring a much clearer correspondence between symbols and names—usually as the initials or as the first two letters of the first or last name—but changed the symbols where necessary (albeit by as little as possible). One clever exception, for which I thank samwibatt, was assigning the symbol Au to Bernie Goldberg. Nonetheless, I wanted to adhere to the Periodic Table closely enough that nobody but a chemist would notice the difference at first glance. Thus, in the most familiar portions of the Table—the first two rows, the first two columns and the noble gases—I kept all the actual symbols, with one exception. The largest changes were to the rare earth metals (the bottom two rows of fourteen) and the most newly discovered named elements, 104-112 (element 112 is new to Version 2.0, and as yet has only a provisional name). This time, I expanded the list to include several organizations, such as the American Family Association, where the names fit well and were far more recognizable than their leaders' names. And one corporation: the conversion of Xenon to Exxon was far too natural to resist, though ExxonMobil is only an indirect player in the lovely sewage explosion that is right-wing American politics (via a number of libertarian and conservative think tanks). I counted Libertarians in with conservatives, since the former have been more than happy to cooperate with the Bushies' agenda to obliterate any restrictions on corporate greed. Of course, the list is rather topical. I'll need to do another complete overhaul in honor of the 2012 election, at the latest, after a new generation of laughable fools takes center stage. Also, I must apologize for my Americentrism. My knowledge of foreign government and politics is just about nil. I embrace even American politics, in which I have much more of a vested interest, only with the same reluctance with which I would embrace a tornado full of barbed wire. In fact, there was a time when I would have refused to admit I knew even this much about contemporary politics. Because of the restrictions I'd placed on names, not to mention my own lack of imagination, I'd padded Version 1 of the Idiotic Table with some fifteen neocons whose names meant nothing to me. I've kept two or three, just because when I read up on what they've been doing in the last four years, I gained an entirely new appreciation for just how evil the Bush administration was. The Project for the New American Century was pretty much running the country for about six years. Take, for example, Paula Dobriansky. Four years ago I had her pegged primarily as a PNAC member, but since then her bio has accrued a rather humorous footnote. Part of her job in the State Department was to attend international conferences on climate change and obstruct any progress in reaching agreements to reduce CO 2 emissions. At the Bali summit on climate change in 2007, when she attempted to pull her usual tricks, she was booed off the stage by the delegates from developing nations. (I wonder whether these delegates sensed vulnerability in the Bush administration after the disastrous 2006 election, and decided they weren't going to take the hypocritical bullshit anymore.) If you don't recognize a name, a quick trip to Wikipedia may uncover some disturbing facts about who's been in charge. (Michelle Malkin is a graduate of Oberlin?!? Oh, my aching alma mater.) Anyway, if you have any suggestions for individuals, companies or organizations that are deserving to be included in such disreputable company, I welcome them. Below (behind the cut) is a key with symbol, element (in parentheses if I changed the symbol), name and significance for each entry. ( Click here for key )Tags: evolution, fundies, general_science, politics
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Previous 
The "Talking science" Badge.