xword faxtx

Back to the Future provided me with all the knowledge I needed to answer that "Tab, for one" = DIETSODA in today's crossword:

Lou: You gonna order something, kid?
Marty McFly: Ah, yeah... Give me - Give me a Tab.
Lou: Tab? I can't give you a tab unless you order something.
Marty McFly: All right, give me a Pepsi Free.
Lou: You want a Pepsi, PAL, you're gonna pay for it.

Wow, that joke is so dated, and therefore so awesome. Mayor Goldie Wilson! I like the sound of that! Nostalge more here :).

[Image source: Pink Tentacle]

Crom!

I have new respect for our governor Arnold Schwarzenegger:

Source: Think Progress.

creative use of animals

I really get a kick out of crazy spy or military operations involving using animals in creative ways. I just read about the CIA project "Acoustic Kitty" on Wikipedia (via):

Acoustic Kitty was a CIA project launched by the Directorate of Science & Technology in the 1960s attempting to use cats in spy missions. A battery and a microphone were implanted into a cat and an antenna into its tail. Due to problems with distraction, the cat's sense of hunger had to be addressed in another operation. Surgical and training expenses are thought to have amounted to over $20 million.

The first cat mission was eavesdropping on two men in a park outside the Soviet compound on Wisconsin Avenue in Washington, D.C.. The cat was released nearby, but was hit and killed by a taxi almost immediately. Shortly thereafter the project was considered a failure and declared to be a total loss.

More details available in the Guardian article "Project: Acoustic Kitty". Here is a severely edited CIA memo about the operation.

Related in that bat rhymes with cat and also in its nefariousness is the "Bat bomb":

Bat bombs were bomb-shaped casings with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target.

...

The plan was to release bat bombs over Japanese cities having widely-dispersed industrial targets. The bats would spread far from the point of release due to the relatively high altitude of their release, then at dawn they would hide in buildings across the city. Shortly thereafter built-in timers would ignite the bombs, causing widespread fires and chaos. The bat bomb idea was conceived by dental surgeon Lytle S. Adams, who submitted it to the White House in January, 1942, where it was subsequently approved by President Roosevelt.^[1] Adams was recruited to research and obtain a suitable supply of bats.

Read more here.

There is also B. F. Skinner's pigeon-guided missiles: Project Pigeon, in which a trained pigeon would be placed inside a missile, and would actively steer the missile toward an intended target:

The control system involved a lens at the front of the missile projecting an image of the target to a screen inside, while a pigeon trained (by operant conditioning) to recognize the target pecked at it. As long as the pecks remained in the center of the screen, the missile would fly straight, but pecks off-center would cause the screen to tilt, which would then, via a connection to the missile's flight controls, cause the missile to change course.

Although skeptical of the idea, the National Defense Research Committee nevertheless contributed $25,000 to the research. However, Skinner's plans to use pigeons in Pelican missiles was considered too eccentric and impractical; although he had some success with the training, he could not get his idea taken seriously. The program was canceled on October 8, 1944, because the military believed that "further prosecution of this project would seriously delay others which in the minds of the Division have more immediate promise of combat application."

[Image sources: Gizmodo, Mental Floss]

hotstuff with a hatpin link of the day: balloon hoax!

Poe's Balloon, 1844	Heene Family's Balloon, 2009

You'll never guess what happened! There was a balloon hoax! Ha ha, but not the one you're thinking of! This one was in 1844! And perpetrated by Edgar Allan Poe! I feel that this is bizarre: In 1844, Edgar Allan Poe published a completely fictitious article in The Sun newspaper in New York about

a lighter-than-air balloon trip by famous European balloonist Monck Mason across the Atlantic Ocean taking 75 hours

with the headline

ASTOUNDING NEWS!

BY EXPRESS VIA NORFOLK:

THE ATLANTIC CROSSED

IN THREE DAYS!

SIGNAL TRIUMPH OF

MR. MONCK MASON'S

FLYING MACHINE!!!

Read the description of the article on Wikipedia or, read the actual article, now referred to as The Balloon Hoax.

I read Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket a while ago. It had a few interesting parts, but a lot of it was rather dry, as Poe really did not want to write a novel and had borrowed long, boring descriptions of like boating procedure from Jeremiah Reynolds' Address on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas to fill space. I seem to remember reading that somewhere, anyways. Audiences at the time thought this made the story more believable. Also, it's kind of like From Dusk till Dawn in that there is kind of a continuous narrative, but the story is very disjointed. In Pym, they travel to the North Pole (or was it the South Pole? Who can keep those straight?), and I guess at the time people had not been to either pole, so it was conceivable to them that ... well, I won't give away the excitement, but some crazy, exciting stuff happened. And yeah, they were confused as to whether it was real or not, kind of like the people who thought The Blair Witch Project was real. Okay, I don't remember why I'm talking about Pym anymore. It just seemed related. Also tangentially related: Five Myths that People Don't Realize Are Admitted Hoaxes, including the Priory of Scion.

what i got out of a portrait of the artist

I finally finished reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It was hard for me to get through. It took me forever. The book spent a lot of time serving as a mouse pad instead of as a font of truth and beauty. There are all kinds of reasons that this was hard for me to get through, but they are not terribly interesting.

Here is what the main point was to me. I could be totally off, and projecting myself into the book (as usual). Maybe that's the point. Anyways, Stephen, particularly almost-adult Stephen, wants to know true stuff about himself: what he actually feels, wants, and believes. Not only does he want to know, but he wants to be able to express this truth, and he's pretty sure that this expression is art. (Recursion: he may not know everything he wants, but he knows that he wants to know and express truth.)

The anecdotes from his life that make up the book can be viewed through this lens. Every idea that is communicated to him by his family, teachers, church, peers, etc. is somewhere between an outright lie and a half-truth. All of these ideas are foisted upon him as fact by people who are somewhere on the spectrum of stupid to self-delusional to lying for personal gain. His father, uncle, and Dante spit politics around him, but these philosophies are not the result of honest thought, but instead of choosing a side and then blindly advocating your team's position. The church inundates his mind (and scares the bejesus out of him) with religious myths and rules. They give him a linear scale on which to judge the worth of his soul: something like [number of church-sanctioned acts of piety] + [number of self-denials] - ([number of sins] - [number of confessions]). He sees hypocrisy in the priests advocating this criterion, as at least earthly rewards in the church are based on an entirely different, less righteous scale. This doesn't seem to cause the personal revelation that a life of piety is not for him; instead, he is repelled by the idea of devoting his life to following rules and ignoring the less rigid, natural beauty of the world. Eventually, this repulsion evolves from not wanting to enter the priesthood to denying his faith. His father, who is slowly losing his standing in society and living more and more in his past, serves as Stephen's window into the dangers of self-delusion. Stephen realizes that he is confused as crap as to how to put together his experiences and feelings with the ideas flying at him from blind politics, ardent religion, or academic esoterica. As an artist, he has moments of inspiration in which he can see through this veil of confusion and doubt. And he has a direction, namely understanding himself and the world. This somehow connects to art -- I don't know if it is that he thinks he can obtain truth by absorbing others' art, or that he can learn by expressing himself through art, or that by exploring the world he will meet similar souls with whom he can carry on some kind of art-conversation. But, art is somehow key to truth.

So, yeah, there are parts of the book that I can identify with, i.e. the confusion and self-doubt. But Stephen, that smug little artist, has flashes of clear understanding, and a direction to go in at the end, while I have nothing of the sort. Then, there are the anecdotes themselves. The book is from another time, and I was not raised religious, nor an observer of vicious political discourse, so each individual anecdote in the book did not resonate with me. But, having finished the book, and being able to draw together (at least what I think) are the main themes of the book, I can make parallels with my own life. I was not raised on religion, but I was raised on television, movies, Nancy Drew books, fairy tales, etc., all full of artificial and identical characters. I was also raised with some rather linear scale of the value of one's self -- some combination of one's popularity with one's peers (sum of the worth of people who like you times amount that they like you), the prestige of one's job (a weighted average of salary, fame, and number of vacation days per year), the superficial characteristics of one's spouse and children, and one's physical appearance. And yeah, I am goddamn confused about what I feel and what I want, and what the point of all this is. Of course, I already knew I was confused, but I suppose I try not to think about it too much and this book brought the fact to the forefront of my thoughts, occasionally, anyways. And maybe from reading this book I got more insight as to where all the confusing factors are coming from -- seeing the confusing factors in Stephen's life, and seeing the parallels in my own. It is also nice to see that things were just as confusing in the early 19, late 1800's, when really people didn't have as much time to sit around and think while machines process our food and daily necessities for us. I'd say to some extent the supposed beauty of Joyce's writing is lost on me, as I often struggled to understand what he was saying, and that really breaks the mood, I think.

So, in conclusion, maybe I got something out of the book. I suppose it will just be incorporated into the entity that is my knowledge of the world, and either evaporate into the ether, or somehow influence my life. Who can say? One thing I can say is I didn't have a lot of fun reading the book. I didn't find it that interesting, at least on a page-by-page level. Yeah, I don't think I'm smart enough to read Joyce, and I will not be making a crack at Ulysses anytime soon.

[Image: Eastern European book cover, courtesy of Dan Meth, via A Journey Around My Skull]

i watched csi miami on purpose

I don't know why I can tolerate CSI Classic but abhor CSI Miami. Actually, I do. CSI Miami is a horrible, horrible show, and CSI Classic isn't too cringe-inducing, and does help dull the painstakingly slow passage of time (I've never tried to sit through CSI NY before). It's not just David "Horatio" Caruso's horrible, horrible acting, but the horrible, horrible writing. A couple weeks ago we watched CSI Miami on the TV with commercials and everything, partly cuz we were trying to figure out what this TV thing is for. (Superiority note: I watch a lot of TV shows, just watch them on the internet cuz I'm hep; we had to get cable recently to keep our internet deal -- our cable is costing us -$20/mo. Also, it is basic cable, which apparently does not include Comedy Central or ESPN?)

So here is the plot of the show, told in forward order, rather than the reverse, uncovered twist after uncovered twist order popular in today's crime dramas. So this lady steals a necklace from the jewelry store she works at, and then drives somewhere, I don't remember why. Anyways, while she's driving, some in-the-closet guy had a liaison with like a prostitute or something. This prostitute tries to blackmail him, and in-the-closet guy kills him while they were sitting in his car on the side of the road. Necklace lady drives by at just the wrong time and sees everything, so in-the-closet guy chases her in his car and drives her off the road, leaving her for dead. But, she is not dead! And her abusive ex-husband then randomly drives by and sees her smashed car. He pulls over, and reaches through the broken dash window to kill her by banging her over the head with a gun. He then drives away, cuz a third criminal is driving by the wreck. She sees the wrecked car, and decides to rob the necklace lady. She reaches through the hole in the dash window to steal the million-bajillion dollar diamond necklace that necklace lady happens to have with her, somehow allowing one diamond to fall off the necklace, providing a vital clue! Sometime during this lady's no good, very bad drive, her jewelry store boss goes by her house looking for the necklace, and kicks her door in his frustration at her not answering the door (he ends up being like suspect number 17 in all of this).

Anyways, yeah, so the plot is just appalling. But I could deal with that! Well, maybe I couldn't, but the writers also make every line of dialog excruciatingly bad. In the lab, where science is techno-music cool (as in CSI Classic), the characters explain the evidence and their procedures in the most obnoxious way. It is always one character being completely ignorant of what's going on at all, so the other character will be like, "This is blah blah blah", explaining one part of the procedure. Then, the once-ignorant character will be like, "Ah yes, and then blah blah blah", continuing the exposition, the roles of ignorant and knowledgeable switching so that the audience who couldn't possibly tolerate one character speaking two sentences in a row will have their attention kept. Then, there are the painful scenes where the goodness of Horatio are exposed. Did you know Horatio loves children? There were multiple scenes where he was talking extra-slow to the necklace lady's son to gain his trust and calm him. It is beyond words for me to explain how painful this was to watch.

So, in conclusion, CSI Miami: terrible, terrible show.

windows tips!

Two things:

1. McAfee Site Adviser + Firefox v. 3.5.3 = crash. Firefox had been crashing a few times a day for me. Since I disabled the McAfee Site Adviser, it hasn't crashed.
2. I use the savefig.m function to write pdfs from Matlab. This uses Ghostscript, and I just installed Ghostscript v. 8.70. Ghostscript was producing pdfs in version 1.5. I usually collect all the pdfs I generate into a single pdf using Latex + includegraphics. I was having trouble with this, as the pdfTeX (installed through MiKTex) apparently is only compatible with version 1.4 pdfs. Here is the warning I was getting:

   pdfTeX warning: pdflatex (file *****): PDF inclusion: found PDF version <1.5>, but at most version <1.4> allowed

   So the solution was to change the compatibility level in the compression settings to "-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4" (line 109 of the file).

I don't know who these tips will be useful for, but ... I felt like writing them down.

hotstuff with a hatpin links of the day

• This is kind of crazy: people in Japan are using Obama's speeches as English-learning tools, according to the NYTimes article "Obama Becomes Japan’s English Teacher". I mean, it makes some sense, cuz "'Mr. Obama’s English is easy to understand because he pronounces words clearly and speaks at a relatively slow clip'" and "Mr. Obama sets his range of vocabulary wide enough to accommodate the highly educated and the less educated". According to the article, one compilation of Obama's speeches has sold half a million copies. Example comical titles of some of the language-learning productions include “Speech Training: Learning to Deliver English Speech, Obama Style” and “Yes, I Can With Obama: 40 Magical English Phrases From Presidential E-mails”. So, there's that. I'm a bit disturbed by the claim that some people find the speeches moving even though they don't understand English: "“Some even said the only phrase they caught was, ‘Yes, we can.’ They said they were in tears nonetheless.”" I don't know if that means I'm being brainwashed by the melodic flow of Obama's voice or if some Japanese people are crazy. Anyways, read the article: "Obama Becomes Japan’s English Teacher".


• Beatleinfomania: The BBC Radio 2 series called "The Record Producers" has an interesting interview with George Martin. Here's the blurb from the website:
  

  Richard Allinson and Steve Levine examine his work as a producer, arranger and, through his experiments with sound, technical innovator. Highlights include the first chance to hear newly restored versions of the original master tapes for Please Please Me, along with analysis of the original multi-track of Come Together.

  This programme also gives Radio 2 listeners the opportunity to hear some of the Beatles most famous songs in a new way. Because of the limitations of tape machines during the 1960s, it was necessary to either record or mix various instruments and voices onto the same track. Once they'd been committed to tape there was no way of separating them. But now, through the use of revolutionary software, listeners can hear some of these parts in isolation for the very first time.

  In his exclusive interview, Sir George talks about various aspects of the studio and recording process, the albums Sgt Pepper and Abbey Road, along with a number of songs, including Strawberry Fields Forever, Tomorrow Never Knows and Rain.

  Breaking the recorded songs down into their individual components, and describing the process involved in achieving that Beatles sound really gives one respect for the complex awesomeness of the recordings. I don't know how someone does that. Those people are not like me. Also, I didn't realize how important George Martin was in the production of some of the songs, e.g. Strawberry Fields Forever.
  

  The audio for this show is no longer being streamed from the BBC website, but through some googling I found it here. Don't know how long it'll be there, so get it while it's hot!

  [Image: Please Please Me (1963) - PMC 1202 - MONO from The Beatles Virtual Museum]
  

xword faxtx

Today's crossword was toilet-themed. Classy. New facts to me:

• "Four-baggers" are home runs (HRS)
• "Woad and anil" are DYES
• DIDOS are pranks
• SALADA is a brand of green tea
• A STALAG was a German prison camp, and the setting for "Hogan's Heroes"
• ACTA are "court records"
• The ASTROS were the first team to play on artificial turf (duh, I guess)
• ASHY is a word and, as far as I can tell, is the same as ashen.
  
• Elzie SEGAR created Popeye.

That is all I have to say about that.

[Image: Illustration by Josef Lada, illustrator, via A Journey Around My Skull]

xword faxtx

Things I learned today from the puzzle:

• I am better at puns and tricky cluing than knowing stuff.
  
• "Japan's national diet" refers to Japan's legislature and is BICAMERAL. I think diet should be capitalized.
  
• "Reeve" now means some sort of administrative official, but in feudalistic times, the Reeve was the overseer of the Manor. I guess I should know this from The Canterbury Tales. Actually, the webpage for this Chaucer class at Harvard looks pretty interesting, as it has interlinear translations of all the stories: English E-115b.
• NINA is a song by Noel Coward about "Senorita Nina from Argentina". He was old-timey.

Otherwise, not much new to me today, as the puzzle was more about tricky cluing than tricky knowledge.

[Image: FRED TOMASELLI, Glassy, 2006, via]

hotstuff with a hatpin: google suggests makes me giggle, no exit makes me cackle, self-awareness makes me uncomfortable

Something to do: I don't know why, but "Google suggests" faux-pas's always make me giggle. The Huff Post has a list of them today: Most Inappropriate Google Suggests of All Time. Here's another list from a couple weeks ago: 11 Things Google Should Atone for on its 11th Anniversary. Try them out and giggle for yourself!

Something to read: The New Republic's latest article on Betsy McCaughey, No Exit. I was not aware of the whole sordid history of her political career during the '90's. She sounds like the most unpleasant kind of loon, and a lot like Sarah Palin, but perhaps smarter. The article starts out a bit insulting, describing the way this 60-year-old woman dressed as like an "on-the-prowl cougar" because she wears "short, high-slit skirts, revealing blouses, and spike heels". I have trouble believing that she was actually wearing truly revealing clothing. Come on, she's 60! Anyways, after that, the article was informative to me, and fun to read. I was aware of her TNR article during the 90's, and her more recent health care reform misinformation, and I saw her performance on The Daily Show. But the stories of her stint as lieutenant governor of New York and her campaign for governor were quite interesting and entertaining. I recommend it.

Something to let fester in your mind: I read a long time ago about how people distance themselves from people they are talking about by saying things like "Your friend Tiberius called" rather than saying "Tiberius called". The example I read about was how Bill Clinton used "this woman" instead of Monica Lewinsky back in the day. I do this distancing all the time cuz I am shy and feel the need to distance myself from everyone but my closest friends and family. And now that I am aware of it, I notice it and cringe at my own cowardice. I told Kyle about this earlier today, and have succeeded in making him self-conscious as well. I hate being aware of stuff.

[Image from Huffington Post]

nyt xword faxtx

Lots of new stuff for me today in the NYT xword:

• PETESEEGER has been called "America's Tuning Fork", whatever that means. I learned these facts before today: Pete Seeger is not related to Bob Seger (note the spelling difference), but is related to Mike Seeger, who died recently.
  
• SANTACLAUS does not read my letters! ("Letter greeting never read by it's intended recipient"). Just kidding, I've never written a letter to Santa. I once wrote a letter to my little brother pretending to be Santa, though ... I was trying to give him the gift of childhood wonder for Xmas.
  
• A PASEO is not just a mall, but also a "scenic walk".
• There aren't just I-beams and T-bars, but also LBARS ("angle irons").
  
• The "all-time strike-out leader" is not Nolan Ryan (aka The Ryan Express) but Reggie Jackson (aka MROCTOBER), who apparently has struck out 2,597 times.

[Image: Schiehallion in Perthshire, Scotland, guardian.co.uk]

hotstuff with a hatpin links of the day

If you haven't read the New Yorker piece "Trial by Fire" about the execution of Todd Willingham, you should. It is terribly disturbing, and everyone should be able to put a human face on the permanency of wrongful execution. Today, Ta-Nehisi Coates posted some videos from Nightline and CNN, with interviews with the prosecutor (now a judge (!)) and the fire investigator, who are both still adamant in their self-delusional fantasies.

On a lighter note, Virginia has the greatest state flag I've ever seen:

This is one point in favor of moving to Virginia. More good flags are listed on BuzzFeed. I am also partial to the Benin Empire's flag.

Other stuff to look at: Einstein's letter, in which he writes:

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this. ... For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition.

Okay, that's it for today! Back to work for me!

time and time again

Here are some things I learned from today's NYT xword puzzle:

• Pretty much every word in the English language can be followed by TIME to form a compound word or phrase.
• Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote DRED, the novel on which the film Judge "I am the law!" Dredd was based. That would have been funnier if Dred and Dredd were spelled the same way. Maybe not.
  
• RATTER is a word, and it means what it sounds like.
• I think this was in yesterday's as well -- you can "pinch" a TOE. I have no idea what that means. I tried googling, does not appear to be a common phrase. Perhaps that is how you catch a tiger by the toe? You know, in a toe pinch?
  
• The duke of Wallachia from 1436-1447 was a dragon named VLAD (Vlad II Dracul). He was the father of Vlad the Impaler (aka Dracula) and Radu the Handsome.

[Images from Dino Buzzati's Poema a fumetti (1969), Poem Strip (NYRB, 2009), via A Journey Around My Skull]

xword faxtx: thou liest!

Mad Art Nouveau fantasy illustrations by the Belgian artist, Jean de Bosschère, from his 1921 book, 'Weird Islands', available from the Internet Archive in various formats, via Bibliodyssey.

Here is a Shakespeare quote I learned today:

Thou LIEST, most ignorant monster: I am in case to
justle a constable. Why, thou deboshed fish thou,
was there ever man a coward that hath drunk so much
sack as I to-day? Wilt thou tell a monstrous lie,
being but half a fish and half a monster?

-- Trinculo, The Tempest, Act III, Scene II.
So, LIEST, a word. And, Trinculo, a name. Who knew?

Other things I learned today:
BABA: some kind of nasty sounding cake
AXIL: the angle of a plant's armpit (we needed a word for that! and you needed to know it!).

So, lots of valuable learning today!

photosketch

Composition results, Chen et al., Siggraph Asia, 2009

Today's link: PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage, published in SIGGRAPH Asia, 2009, appeared on a number of mainstream blogs today. Looks like a cool interface! There is no demo available, so it is hard to say how well it works. The basic idea is summarized in this video:

PhotoSketch: Internet Image Montage from tao chen on Vimeo.

The user specifies a background type, then sketches and names a few foreground objects. The background image is chosen based on flickr, google, or yahoo tags, consistency clustering, and an "uncluttered region" heuristic. The foreground images and segments were chosen using flickr etc. tags, a saliency heuristic, grab-cut, and, importantly, the sketched outline. They seem to put a lot of effort into the stitching & blending step. In any case, implementation aside, it is a pretty impressive end-to-end system, even with a limited set of object types. They tested it with novice users, which is impressive. Maybe that's the standard for SIGGRAPH -- certainly not for vision conferences. I'm guessing the system is still far from being deployable to the masses at this point, so "nutbastard" will have to wait to get his Death Star-zombie-Monty Python-nerd epic rendered. But, I look forward to it when it is ready for the mainstream!

xword faxtx: uncommon letter patterns

I took his portrait. That was the last I saw of him. All that washed ashore was a hat and a Cohiba, justfab

Like yesterday, this is the theme of today's NYT xword puzzle, but I thought these were interesting, useful facts. Each of the following triplets of letters only occur in one common English word. Try to guess what it is, then click the link for the answer! Fun!!!

• MPG
• SPB
• ADQ
• KSG
• ZKR

hotstuff with a hatpin: thom yorke's new band at the echoplex

Here are videos from Thom Yorke & Flea's new band's secret, rehearsal show at the Echoplex on Oct. 2. I was wondering what they would play, the band having been formed very recently. Apparently, they are playing songs from The Eraser mainly. The first video I watched had some pretty funky, rather Joy Division-esque dancing. I haven't watched all of these, since I am currently listening to Marquee Moon, and was busying myself with NPR Exclusive First Listens earlier today (I like this one by Noah and the Whale which you can listen to til tomorrow, tho I don't approve of their band name). Oh, I was also listening to the AV Club's playlist of 42 10+ minute "pop" songs worth my time.

Also, I haven't watched any of these, but here are some videos from the bigger show last night at the Orpheum:

xword faxtx: large denomination bills + fancy marbles

"more marble macro madness" by iMatthew

Today, I learned that William McKinley is on the $500 bill, Grover Cleveland is on the $1,000 bill, James Madison is on the $5,000 bill, and some guy named Salmon P. Chase managed to get his likeness on the $10,000 bill. Also, these large denomination bills are no longer printed, and "as of May 30, 2009, there were only 336 of the $10,000 bills in circulation; 342 remaining $5,000 bills; and 165,372 $1,000 bills still being used" [Wikipedia].

I also learned that TAWS are fancy marbles.

Writing numbers with commas in them reminds me of an exercise we had to do when I went to school in France. We each had our own little personal chalkboard (which I absolutely loved, I don't know why), and the teacher (aka maitre) would dictate a number and we would have to write it down. This was probably much harder for me than for the average student, as I was still learning French at the time. Anyways, everyone laughed at me cuz I put commas in my number, and in Europe they've gotten commas and periods completely confused, as far as numbers go. Useful information for you if you're ever required to participate in a number dictation exercise.

Also, when I was bored out of my mind cuz my teacher put me in the back of the class and mainly ignored me, I would entertain myself by thinking about scratching my fingernails along my own personal chalkboard, it being interesting to me that I could, on demand, give myself goosebumps.

The other thing I entertained myself with was writing stupid horror stories that usually involved people moving to places with some fancy sounding French name that nobody thought to translate, and then at the very end of the story they would find out that the fancy sounding French name actually translated to like House of the Murderous Plants or something equally stupid, so really they shouldn't be surprised that all the plants had come to life and tried to murder them. I remember writing a story called "The Tilted Angel" cuz the angel on our Christmas tree gave me the willies and I figured it was not unreasonable to imagine it coming to life and murdering people. I must have been a rather macabre child.

One more thing I remember vividly about sitting in the back of my classroom in France, ignored and bored out of my mind: that my English-French dictionary was like the best smelling thing of all time. It was my Mom's French-English dictionary from college, and smelled of yellowing paper, I suppose. We had covered it in blue plastic to keep it from falling apart. It is wrong that I have such warm feelings toward a dictionary.

Okay, that is the end of my memories of murdering time in my classroom in France ... for now (cue foreboding music now)!

hotstuff with a hatpin: everything dfw wrote for harper's

Shortly after David Foster Wallace died, Harper's posted everything he ever wrote for them:
David Foster Wallace: In Memoriam. I stayed up late last night reading "Shipping Out" aka "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". Be sure to read "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" before you see the movie scripted and directed by Jim from The Office (?).

xword faxtx

L'Ange du Foyeur, Max Ernst

here's a fact from today's nyt xword:

Godzilla contemporary that was a giant flying turtle: GAMERA. (I could have put a pic of Gamera, but it really wasn't as exciting as the above painting by Max Ernst, who also starred in today's puzzle).

have you heard about his word?

here is a good word i learned just this minute:
sybaritic: "characterized by or loving luxury or sensuous pleasure"
as in

Celebrity's brochure does not lie or exaggerate, however, in the luxury department, and I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the m.v. Nadir.

-- Wallace, "Shipping Out"

hotstuff with a hatpin link of the day

Hello! I'm going to try to post one thing I like to this blog everyday. Let's see how many days that lasts for! I'm betting on less than 5. Yeah, so this feature will be called the "hotstuff with a hatpin" link of the day. Here is why. First, I like naming things. If I ever have children, you can be sure that at least one motivation was to be able to give them cool names. I was leaning toward "Bazooka", but that name was stolen by Children of Men. Children of Men was a good movie, but I don't want my children to be named after a stupid joke in it.

Anyways, yeah, so second reason this is called the "hotstuff with a hatpin" link of the day. Kyle is trying to start a blog, and we were trying to come up with a name for it from random Beatles or Radiohead or Pink Floyd songs. I've suggested Down to the Bits (response: "That's pretty good."), Kicking Edgar Allan Poe ("Maybe if the blog were about Edgar Allan Poe."), Charade You Are ("Kind of insulting to the reader, no?"), Misguided and a Little Naive (haven't suggested this one yet, but I know what the response will be: "Too long"), Hypocrite Opportunist, Pointless Snide Remarks, Laugh Until My Head Comes Off, Howling Down the Chimney, ... okay, I'll stop listing now. I don't know why it has to be a song lyric. I think cuz he likes my "Bread and Butter for a Smile" which I spent zero time coming up with. Anyways, he's probably going to go with "Mojo Filter", the only issue with this one being that Mojo is the abbreviation Mother Jones uses.

Yeah, so, obviously, I figured I'd give my new, probably ephemeral blog feature a cool, hip name, so we get ... Hotstuff with a Hatpin! Yay! Also, I prefer hotstuff to be one word, rather than two. I cannot explain this. Okay, you really needed all that explanation of the name of this stupid feature. So, at long last, here's your Hotstuff with a Hatpin link for today:


Video: "You are being shagged by a rare parrot".

PS There are more links in the sidebar under "stuff i red" (these links are grabbed from my Google Reader feed).