From CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU!news Wed Oct 2 10:02:58 PDT 1991 Article: 1585 of su.roger-or-andy Newsgroups: su.roger-or-andy Path: CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU!news From: gangolli@Theory.Stanford.EDU (Anil R. Gangolli) Subject: copied from the Pyramid Visitor Center brochure Message-ID: <1991Oct2.155712.15100@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU> Sender: news@CSD-NewsHost.Stanford.EDU Organization: Computer Science Department, Stanford University Distribution: su Date: Wed, 2 Oct 1991 15:57:12 GMT Lines: 43 My comments in brackets. Pyramid Visitor Center Kearney, Nebraska Situated just outside Kearney, Nebraska, the Great Pyramid measures 1 mile on each side of its square base. Each face is an equilateral triangle. You can determine its height if you play with sqrt(2) and high school trig enough. Thane and the vistor center staff encourage this sort of thing. There is space on the back of this brochure to work it out. Yes, it’s big. Due to its sheer size, it can be discerned with the naked eye from outer space. The Pyramid was funded on a gigantic US “National Debt” lottery jackpot. It was erected as a sign to all future life that somebody with a helluva lot of money and a weird thing for pyramids had some connection to Kearney. Of course, it will last much longer than Kearney. [It also serves as a notice to wandering extraterrestrials that we don't need their help anymore and we can damn well do this sort of thing without them now, thank you. But could you tell us how you do all those neat crop circles? --a.] The flashing lights located on top and at intervals along the Pyramid’s edges are not placed there for decoration, but for the benefit of aircraft as they round the Pyramid en route to Kearney International Airport. Air traffic has increased dramatically since the opening of the vistor center in 1995. DO NOT TRY TO CLIMB THE PYRAMID. Each year several people are injured trying to scale the smooth glass-like faces. Use the internal elevators or any of the several designated footpaths. When touring the interal labyrinths, we suggest that you ALWAYS STAY WITH THE GUIDE. It is easy for the newcomer to get lost. If you should happen to get lost, you will find a marker pen and descriptions of classical maze traversal algorithms in niches at 50 yard intervals along the corridor walls. We hope you enjoy your visit to the Pyramid. You will find souvenirs and postcards at the Gift Shop, near the Visitor Center lobby. 11. Let’s say two Chinese are talking on the phone and one of them asks, “say, I’ve forgotten, how do you spell [i.e. write, draw the character for] “kidney” ?” It seems to me they would have to say something like “OK draw a squiggly shaped thing with a box, then put a slash into the box and make a squiggle....” Or do they send a fax. Please note: no one with any knowledge of Chinese is permitted to reply to this question. When I asked a similar question about Haiku I got 3 unsolicited Mbytes from Crispin. One likes to have as little of that sort of thing as possible. I suppose there are macro squiggles that everybody knows, and you superimpose them? Perhaps improvisation would play a role. 13. In one of the Chronicle columns I was pleased to see that somebody referred to the name “A. Kitman Ho,” (appearing in all the “JFK” adverts) as “an obvious pseudonym.” I had identified it as such a few weeks ago and perhaps Golg can confirm that indeed Gloria and I have been referring to our cat by this name for a few weeks already. It acts as a symbol of all that remains unexplained by the Warren C. In an earlier thread we discussed the spindly semantic nets bound up with THURMOND MUNSON, and indeed the possible confounding of EARL WARREN and WARREN BURGER offers another interesting starting point. Which one is the low-fat thing you can order at McDonald’s? As Jens C has pointed out, it is not necessary to assume global conspiracies, only that someone else other than L.H.O and J.R. were involved. The FBI was embarrassed that Oswald was an informant---nearly everyone associated with the communist party in the 1960’s was an FBI informant---and so J Edgar Hoover was the spearhead for the one-man no-conspiracy forces. Hoover had nothing to gain from an investigation into what (comprehensive) data the FBI held about Inge Arvad and all the other JFK squeezes, enemies, etc. so he blocked the investigation, or rather made it clear to everyone performing it what the final outcome must be. That’s the Knitwear analysis. In any case it was not Castro or the anti Castros, nor was it the CIA, (although it _was_ the CIA in almost every other case). 15. Rene Descartes is on an airplane. A stewardess asks if he wants some coffee. He says “I think not,” and then disappears. T.K.S. 16. “self-reliance” is the gettysburg address of essays. it repays reading in a way approached only by this bboard. there is a rebok commercial in which an (as usual disembodied) voice is reading excerpts from this essay but it is sometimes hard to make out the words. the essay also contains the often quoted bit about there coming the time in the life of every creative person a realization that “imitation is suicide” etc. i place emerson two levels above every other writer but then this is just idle enthusiasm. ralph waldo was on the right track, perhaps because had a cool name etc. S. Reliance excerpts: A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmanent of bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide... There is a mortifying experience in particular, which does not fail to wreak itself also in the general history: I mean the “foolish face of praise,” the forced smile we put on in company where we do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not interest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved by a low usurping willfulness, grow tight about the outlines of the face with the most disagreeable sensation. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Travelling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the Earth. 17. Golg has lamented the dearth of su.roger postings in recent days. Here then is a blast of Emerson from “Man the Reformer.” ...it is for cake that we run in debt; 't is not the intellect, not the heart, not beauty, not worship that costs so much. Why needs any man be rich? Why must he have horses, fine garments, handsome apartments, access to public houses, and places of amusement? Only for want of thought. Give his mind a new image, and he flees into a solitary garden or garret to enjoy it, and is richer with that dream, than the fee of a county could make him. But we are first thoughtless, and then find that we are moneyless. We are first sensual, and then must be rich.... ...I do not wish to be absurd or pendantic in reform. I do not wish to push my criticism on the state of things around me to that extravagant mark, that shall compel me to suicide, or to an absolute isolation from the advantages of civil society. If we suddenly plant our foot, and say,---I will neither eat nor drink nor wear nor touch any food or fabric which I do not know to be innocent, nor deal with any person whose whole manner of life is not clear and rational, we shall stand still. Whose is so? Not mine; not thine; not his. But I think we must clear ourselves each one by the interrogation, whether we have earned our bread to-day by the hearty contribution of our energies to the common benefit? and we must not cease to {\em tend} to the correction of these flagrant wrongs, by laying one stone aright every day.... 18. Just minutes ago (about 11pm wed night) I happened to encounter Joe Euclid (no joke) at the corner of Cowper and Lytton. He asked me if I could “spare a dime.” I gave him fifty cents and he gave me a photocopied sheet with the title line: $1,000,000,000.00 JOE JONAH EUCLID 1991 0410 As we parted Joe said to me that the sheet was “metaphysics and theology.” The document was apparently ONLY WRITTEN JUST TODAY. Here are some excerpts: “If God were actually present anywhere on the surface of the planet Earth, then that would be big news and Peter Arnett and all othe networks would rush to get there....” “From the Practice of thought projection thru the occult there are unintended consequences, but first it seems to be some sort of pressure build-up....” Now I think the first bit is persuasive but I think a bit more explanation could be required for the second bit. The title of the document is THE EVIL WITCHS CONTROL THE GOVERNMENT I will try to post it on Anil's door tomorrow. 19. I think Luther Gibson was some kind of geneticist. He pitched for the St Louis Cardinals and had a good lifetime ERA. The cardinals won the World S in 1967. Curt Flood was on that team. One time when the team was getting off an airplane a reporter thought Flood was the geneticist and asked him a few questions. Curt Flood said he wasnt Gibson. The reporter apologized and Curt said that’s OK, we all look alike. That’s a remark from the 1960’s, something a person doesnt run into very much anymore. As Kareem is supplanted by Michael Jordan so the strong, independent and possibly acerbic black hero has been replaced by race-transcending figures who can be idolized without regard to their race. As a thought experiment imagine Michael J saying in press conference: “oh, and by the way, I think the way blacks are treated in this country, by this gov’t, is unfair.” It touches off a “national debate” of the kind customarily reported in the media yet largely nonexistent in reality but anyway it is not inconceivable tha Pres B would be compelled to offer some sort of reply. There are various methods by which Michael J would be crucified---for example, he could be accused of being counterproductive, or of exploiting his position for political goals. Neither of which is really anything that is necessarily not admirable, the ends justifying the m’s in the Knitwear philosophy. He would be accused of being a political dilettante. He would be invited to appear on the Brinckley show and discuss his ideas with George Will or some equally oily, 1000+ yard per season blowhard. The concept of the dilettante is not a top-level one in the American psyche, so much so that I am not even sure I spelled it correctly. Yet it is effective, the American being particularly susceptible to the idea of Expertise, and to the difference between the amateur and the professional. Michael J would be described as having “entered the National Debate on race,” and his inadequate responses to the shattercane questioning of Sam Donaldson would reveal his inadequacies---he should have stuck with basketball. But all the man did (at the start of this gedanken-exp) was express an opinion, a dangerous one, a truthful one. “Let no person be without his or her opinion” is another Knitwear principle. As for sno-parks, I have no idea. 20. Those latin abbrevs, (eg, ie, etc, et al, cf) are a friendly family. We in the know use them to exclude and intimidate the uninitiated. Still there is always one you dont know now that mutatis mutandis will rear its head later. 21. Now that the Hubble Space telescope is up, I have a question. In the news articles they say things like “the optics are so refined that a firefly may be distinguished at a distance of 10000 miles,” or “it could see the writing on a nickel from across the country.” My question is, how many fireflies and coins do they really expect to find in space!??!? As for the writing on a nickel, isn’t this already known? It seems like these astronomers are in for some big disappointments. I'll bet they don't find a single firefly. 22. TAH’s difficulty is essentially one of measurement. Long sentences are to be measured in years, not words. For example Anil has been at Stanford for about a decade and I don’t know if he has tried to read Absalom, Absalom or Joyce but it could be conjectured that if he has started them, he surely hasn’t finished them yet. I once jumped in with complete writings of William (Bill) Hazlitt and let’s just say that progress is slow. Some of our fellow creatures show a decided tendency toward longwindedness. If you want to read books it is your business to lay aside long hours that might otherwise be devoted to fruitful activity (i.e. writing books). One looks to the future, secure in the knowledge that the novel read today will be completely forgotten tomorrow. So get busy. As the master has said, “this trackless desert of print winds on before us into the purple distance” (quote approx). 23. THINK LOCALLY, ACT GLOBALLY (third meeting: leader---Tom, notetaker---Vicky) ----------------------------------------------- Tom thanked everyone for coming and noted that although the group was still small no one should think we arent going to have an impact in the end. Cicily apologized for being late to last week’s meeting. It turns out her car battery was dead. Mike suggested a tri-continental boycott of Sears and that DieHard brand. Cicily said her battery wasnt a DieHard. Mike apologized and said OK we should consider energy broadly construed. Mike said he could get the names of some energy companies from the phone book. Tom reminded Mike that he was thinking globally and acting locally, not the reverse. Mike said he didnt get it, how can we act globally without at least a little local action first? Tom said that was the challenge we all faced. He then told a long story about Zen and inward reflection, something about a butterfly being stepped on ten million years ago and then Hitler never existing. Mike said that sounded like a bunch of crap. Maybe we should be thinking globally and acting locally? Tom said you can think and act however you want but said Mike should probably go buy that inane bumper sticker if he feels he must embrace absurdist philosophies. 24. Now that we have the complete lyrics to “America, the Beautiful” on the bboard, it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with how stupid these lyrics really are. Here's what I think: there's only one poetic image worth keeping in the whole set of lyrics, and that's the fragment “...from sea to shining sea.” It’s a very nice image of America, sandwiched as it is between the world’s two greatest oceans. When I think of the lyrics, I immediately think of this fragment; it is alliterative and just a nice little phrase. Perhaps even the first line is OK, too. Opening our hymnals, the music begins and we sing: “O Beautiful, for spacious skies, for amber waves of grain...” only to have this passable image shattered by the entirely ridiculous “For purple mountains majesty above the fruited plain.” Even children don’t find it difficult to recognize this line for the piece of silliness it is. It’s hard enough to picture the Purple Mountains; the Fruited Plain is just too much. Do you remember the words to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds?” Please open your hymnals to page 344: Picture yourself in a boat on a river With tangerine trees and marmelade skies Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly, The girl with kaleidoscope eyes... Perhaps these aren’t quite the right words, but it’s not too difficult to fit those purple mountains and fruited plains right into the song—they are equally hallucinogenic. The remaining two lines of the first stanza improve, only to suffer from not making any sense. Did God crown our brotherhood? What does this mean? The nice bit about the shining seas does little to mitigate our confusion. You can stop singing now at the first stanza, feeling a bit confused and suspicious that perhaps someone has played a trick on you. But since we’re in church, the organ swells and the second stanza dispels any reservations we may have held for the lyricist: “O Beautiful for pilgrim’s feet whose stern impassioned stress..” This is a truly odd line of poetry, one of those rare ones poised just on the brink of the line between nonsense and stupidity. Having sung the praises of the Fruited Plain, we now laud the Pilgrim’s Feet. Make those Purple Mountains Delectable, and our song so far is a sort of LSD trip Bunyanesque.... 25. The only thing I have against Stuart Reges is his name. As a Thane Earl I thought I had the heraldic and noble monicker category all sewn up. I come to Stanford and boom whom do I meet but STUART REGES. Since then I have always referred to him privately as Stuart King (you can call me Rex) Reges, but this is just an indication of my bitterness. When he was Vice President of something (education?) there was a meeting I attended where he was also present and all I recall is his complimenting someone (not present) by describing that person as a “crack administrator.” For some reason I found this phrase, “crack administrator,” extremely amusing. It seemed Wodehousian or something. I am not referring to the obvious pun on drugs. S. K ® R would do well to fall back on this phrase, “crack administrator” as a resource should he require it. There is power in phrases like that, the power to intimidate or if not that the power to give one’s interlocutor pause as he or she contemplates their rich suggestiveness. The first person to have struck upon the combo “intestinal fortitude” knew such power. The rest of us can only take up what abandoned weapons others have forged for us. What the hell am I writing about. There is the temptation to pronounce a judgement, to assert some right or principle, to settle the case. The image of the drugs in the backpack is attractive. Is it right or wrong? He might have done something differently, he was OK until he did that, his mistake was this, etc...No, it’s better to stand back and watch. A man who lands on the front page of the Washington Post is doing something right, what is it. Watch and learn. In the first hours after the US invaded Panama there was a rumor in Los Angeles that some sort of spontaneous resistance group had formed in Panama City and that not only the Panamanian defense force but also this impromptu organization was fighting US forces, door to door. It turns out the whole thing was false. But the night of the invasion some reporter tried calling the Panamanian embassy to ask about the resistance force and he dialed the wrong number. Some unemployed guy in South L.A. picked up his phone, heard a reporter ask, “is this the Panamanian embassy,” and he had the genius to say yes, it was, and that yes, there was a resistance effort underway and if the reporter would call back in 10 minutes he could speak with Arturo Lopez of the People’s Organization for the Defence of Panama. Ten minutes later the call came and in a hastily contrived accent this same unemployed man spoke passionately about the outrage of the US invasion and the current progress of the battle etc. He even appeared on several LA TV stations the next evening sporting a fake beard and broken English soliloquies. Now the point of this story is simple, that if you think fast the rewards can be great and also that only real quality people ever make it into the news. You may wish to draw other lessons. 26. We will miss Nils and wish we knew Why he has quit. For he is leaving and with him goes Compassion; wit, And artificial intelligence: A perfect fit For bureaucratic arrangements and That tactful bit. Now that we have all received this poem in our physical mail, I feel it can be safely revealed that the author is our own Anil Gangolli. Abandoning his earlier blank verse style, Golg here pursues the rhyme in a reductionist AAAA scheme with the iambic and alexandrine in emphasis. Quit, wit, fit, bit: what could be more plain, more direct? The split line We will miss Nils and wish we knew // Why he has quit. contains the bifurcation: although Golg takes the plural expression, his emptiness and frustration ("miss Nils" as woman, negation, or the oxymoronic empty vessel) leaves him unable even to complete his thought. The cry Why he has quit. then stands alone, disinterrogatory, more assertion than question. 27. I've been thinking deeply about recent events in the Soviet Union and think this may be the most likely explanation: Gorbachev returns from a seaside sit and while towelling off in the dacha he notices a slight sore throat. Not willing to take unnecessary risks he immediately opts for bedrest and seclusion. He feels better a few days later and voila. So let's not blow the whole thing out of proportion, OK? No event, no matter how catastrophic, is untrivializable. Take any bland 45 year old man with good personal hygiene, put him on TV under a three color computer graphic, and have him say the words “controversy in the Soviet Union”. No problemo. It’s worth thinking about this word, “controversy,” the identification of such forming the basis for the politicization of reporting, No? 28. Golg brought up “proactive.” Once in a meeting I subtly inserted not the word “proactive” but “prozactive” into my carefully woven skein of argument and as I anticipated, I was challenged. Which only goes to show, if you're going to use language as blunt instrument it's best to choose your weapon carefully. Again, I recommend “crack administrator” in bureaucratic settings and “intestinal fortitude” in all others. I had a case of the latter one time and let me tell you, I wasnt out of the bathroom for days. 29. A question for the summer months: what are the fundamental physical limits (if any) that constrain the design of 7-11 soft drink cups, i.e. what is the largest possible Gulp. For example could the wax paper cup be scaled up to hold, say, 5000 gallons of Cola. If so what name would be appropriate for a Gulp of this size. Big Gulp and Super Big Gulp have already been taken. Remaining possibilites include Damn Big Gulp, One hell of a Monstrous Gulp, and Suicide Gulp. “I will have one Planetary Gulp to go please.” Sorry, it is serve yourself and the guy in front of you has only taken on 2400 of his 35000 gallons. One would have to expect such delays, also some difficult control problems on the attempt to lift a Planetary Gulp to your lips. Straws could be used but if so then they would have to be long. Also I dont think it's possible suck up more than 30 feet or so (some obvious political examples excepted) because of airpressure considerations. Trees cheat by squeezing the water up. So inevitably you would have to pick up a Planetary Gulp and the real fun would start as the liquid jostled round inside the cup. The pressure on the side of the cup at its bottom would be the real stress point and inevitably some unlucky drinkers would witness the rupture of the bottom of the cup and be swept inevitably out into the Pacific or the bay, depending on the local topography. 30. Just as the Pinot Noir hits the bloodstream the compositional fluids flow. Certainly several points require comment. First, I applaud the recent su.r* volume (but wonder why this is the first posting today). As a mental exercise let's say we have before us an issue of the Reader's Digest. It goes without saying that we will ignore the “Notes from Medicine” (we expect at least to live to 2002) and the “Drama in Real Life” (unless it has to do with a plane crash or the north pole) but amongst “Humor in Uniform,” “Quotable Quotes,” “It Pays to Enrich your Word Power,” “Life in These United States,” and those little one-liners used to fill out space after articles, what shall we read first? Humor in U. is anachronistic and suggests Beetle Bailey in an unpleasant way. Quotable Q's always includes the damn Santayana blurb and something Bennett Cerfian (Is Sex Necessary?) and otherwise tends to raise one blood temperature in unforeseen and (again) unpleasant ways. We reconsider: perhaps one of the main articles should be read? Is there room in the Ideal Universe for the Iacocca abridgment? I doubt that very much. My mother always excused the presence of the Reader's D. in our home by winking and saying that Grandma had paid for the subscription but now that Grandma is gone one visitor observed that recent issues were still to be found lying about the house. I did not press her for an explanation. The closest she came to an apology was asserting that the R.D. is “the magazine nobody is willing to admit they like.” Was she willing then to admit she likes it? No reply. There are certain mechanisms by which an innocent and otherwise unsuspecting boy acquires the name Thane and to have English professor parents is perhaps the most likely. 31. a) X was once a great king Xerxes Xerxy Perxy Turxy Xerxy Linxy Lurxy Great king Xerxes! b) No sooner had we made our bow to Mr. Cambridge, in his library, than Johnson ran eagerly to one side of the room intent on pouring over the backs of the books. Sir Joshua observed aside, `he runs to the books, as I do to the pictures, but I have the advantage. I can see much more of the pictures than he can of the books.' Johnson, ever ready for contest, instantly started from reverie and answered, `sir, the reason is very plain. Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.' Sir Joshua observed to me the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument. `Yes,' said I, he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his sword; he is through your body in a moment.' c) Smiling is a class indicator---that is, not doing a lot of it. On the street, you will notice that prole women smile more, and smile wider, than those of the middle and upper classes. They are enmeshed in the “have a nice day” culture and are busy effusing a defensive optimism most of the time. d) “Omit needless words!” cries the author on page 21, and into that imperative Will Strunk really put his heart and soul. In the days when I was sitting in his class, he omitted so many needless words, and omitted them so forcibly and with such eagerness and obvious relish, that he often seemed in the position of having short-changed himself, a man left with nothing more to say yet with time to fill. Will Strunk got out of this predicament by a simple trick: he uttered every sentence three times. When he delivered his oration on brevity to the class, he leaned forward over his desk, grasped his lapels in his hands, and a husky, conspiratorial voice said, “Rule Thirteen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!” ...Will Strunk loved the clear, the brief, the bold, and his book is clear, brief, bold. Boldness is perhaps its chief distinguishing mark. On page 24, explaining one of his parallels, he says, “the left-hand version gives the impression that the writer is undecided or timid; he seems unable or afraid to choose one definite form of expression and stick to it.” And his Rule 12 is “Make definite assertions.” That was Will all over. He scorned the vague, the tame, the colorless, the irresolute. He felt it was worse to be irresolute than to be wrong. I remember a day in his class when he leaned far forward in his characteristic pose---the pose of a man about to impart a secret---and croaked, “If you don't know how to pronounce a word, say it loud!” This comical piece of advice struck me as sound at the time, and I still respect it. Why compound ignorance with inaudibility? 32. Has everyone tried their hand at Haiku? You remember good ol' Haiku. Was it Japanese, or Chinese? What were the rules exactly? There were some numbers involved. The first line had to be one word. It was the subject. Or was it one syllable? Hell if I remember. Well, let's go for it, anyway. Haiku was nature poetry, right? So you picked a one syllable nature word to kick things off. “Rocks.” Good enough, good enough! The second line, what was it? Two syllables, or two words? They had to be adjectives, describing the subject. “Hard, unyielding.” Damn good progress so far. That's 2/5 ths of a Haiku poem. We've got our subject; make no mistake about that. “Hard” and “unyielding” are right on the mark too. If some Dunderhead comes at me, trying to say a rock isn't hard and unyielding, I'll be all over him. We need three words now. What did they have to say? Or was it three syllables? “Situate the subject in nature.” Who said that? “In my hand.” That's a double winner, words and syllables! We've got some real momentum rolling now. Four somethings next, further elaborating on the subject in some restricted way. Anybody remember? “I'll throw them now” We need the one word finale. Has to be a nature word. Ha! I've got it. Rocks Hard, unyielding In my hand-- I'll throw them now Duck! 33. T E L L U S A B O U T Y O U R P R E F E R E N C E S Your thoughtful completion of all of the following questions will help to provide us with initial key compatibility factors. Since all the information you provide us will be held in the strictest confidence, please answer openly and honestly. 1. What age person do you wish to meet? I once met a person so old that he could not hear, nor see, nor speak, nor carry on conversation, nor indeed acknowledge even the strongest stimulus and it was then that I discovered: this man is dead, he is dead right here in the bed in front of me. It came as a shock you bet it did. 2. Is religion important to you? (very important, slightly important, or doesn't matter). At Jonestown I knew a woman and we said, this man, this Jim Jones, is CRAZY and if we dont blow this Guyanan paradise we are looking the Kool-Aid right in the face. So we plunged into the jungle with loincloths and daggers saying: if we cannot emerge into civilization then we're cooked, food for Pirhana and fire ants. It was the start of a long adventure, you can believe me. 3. Do you prefer to meet someone who is: a) Single never married b) Divorced with no children c) Divorced with children Now when we decided to get married we needed a blood test and when the doctor came in with the results she said OK, everything looks OK, and that was good because we went for the AIDS test and everything. There's a law that says the doctor must ask “do you have any questions” and so I thought here's a chance to make a little joke so I said “well yes,” and then after a long pause threw out, “say we wanted to have children” pausing intentionally so as to suggest that I couldn't quite ask what I wanted. So the deal is the doctor jumped right in and told us how to do it, right there, and I thought, here is a professional, I couldnt have done that. A chastening experience. 34. The Senators seem to have a hard time remembering that nominee's name. For example someone will start out a sentence with something like “The nominee's lack of a stand on abortion disturbs me. I think Clarence.....(long pause as they seem to be puzzled that `Clarence' is not his last name)....Thomas should clarify his position.” Many variations on this theme, one of which is where the solon will start off with “Thomas” and blunder about trying to figure out the now illusory surname it is to be mated up with. Also what is all this talk about “Harrisment.” As with “hunkering down” language and pronunciation seem to have taken a somewhat unexpected turn. I think they are trying to take the ass out of a perfectly good pronunciation, no? (Possibly offensive, sorry). As Gidi just said, “Sexual Harr_ass_ment was good enough for my grandfather, it was good enough for my father, and it's good enough for me...” TKS 35. Jens C. and I have struck on the following idea or concept. Get some land down by Gilroy or somewhere, buy some old heavy machinery say a bulldozer, dumptruck, front-end loader etc and then charge people by the hour to move some earth around. I can testify that driving a dump truck laden with concrete and other massive objects at 35 miles per hour over uneven terrain is an empowering experience to say the least. It's not unlike driving a small planet. Major Momentum. At the upper end you would be able to the controls of one of those gigantic ball wreckers and start slamming the damn thing into old barns etc. If you are thinking about liability then you are not sharing the vision. The Fry's crowd should like it. I think it was Archimedes who said “give me a front-end loader and a condominium and I'll show you some real damage.” Would environment impact statements be required etc. When a windmill starts going inside the noise can be enough make you want to run for your life. We've got big machines but nobody seems to have much contact with it anymore. As I. A. Richards observed, the internal combustion engine destroyed what was left at the turn of the century of modern man's sense of rhythm. Rock and Roll is 4 beats for this reason. Everyone used to ride horses and that was empowering. Just the phrase, “the man on horseback” is used to mean war or strife etc (is it?). Now the goal seems to be to shelter us from the machine, particularly noise I guess. Steam engines are cool because they start slow and then speed up, this answers human rhythms sleep and wakefulness for example when at a sporting event people clap in unison slowly but the speed inevitably increases still in unison. 36. Date: Mon, 7 Jan 91 23:38:05 -0800 From: Thane E. Plambeck Subject: How pleasant to know Mr. Lear How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! Who has written such volumes of stuff! Some think him ill-tempered and queer, But a few think him pleasant enough. His mind is concrete and fastidious, His nose is remarkably big; His visage is more or less hideous, His beard? It resembles a wig. He has ears, two eyes, and ten fingers, Leastways if you reckon two thumbs; Long ago he was one of the singers, But now he is one of the dumbs. He sits in a beautiful parlour, With hundreds of books on the wall; He drinks a great deal of Marsala, But never gets tipsy at all. He has many friends, laymen and clerical; Old Foss is the name of his cat; His body is perfectly spherical, He weareth a runcible hat. He weeps by the side of the ocean, He weeps on the top of the hill; He purchases pancakes and lotions, And chocolate shrimps from the mill. He reads but cannot speak Spanish, He cannot abide ginger-beer: Ere the days of his pilgrimage vanish, How pleasant to know Mr. Lear! 37. From “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” by Thomas L. Friedman, p96-97: On July 16, 1979, Saddam Hussein, who had been the number two man in Iraqi politics for eleven years, [wanted] to shove aside his superior, the ailing President Ahmad Hasan al-Bakar, and have himself declared President. At the time of his takeover, Saddam was convinced that at least 5 of his closest friends and colleagues in the Iraqi leadership had some reservations about his succession. So, on the eve of his ascension, he had one of them arrested---Muhyi Abd al-Husayn al-Muashhadi, the secretary-general of the Iraqi Baath Party. Al-Mashhadi was then apparently tortured into agreeing to make a confession that he was planning to topple Saddam with some help of some other members of the leadership. Then, on July 22, with real theatrical flair, Saddam convened an extraordinary meeting of the Iraqi Baath Party Regional Congress in order to hear al-Mashadi's confession---live. As al-Mashadi would tell his story and mention the name of someone else in the leadership involved in the bogus plot, that person would have to stand, and then a guard would drag him from the chamber. Al-Mashadi just “happened” to mention as co-conspirators the four other members of Iraq's ruling Revolutionary Command Council---Mohammed Ayish, Mohammed Mahjub, Husayn al-Hamdani, and Ghanim Abd al-Jalil---who Saddam felt were not totally supportive of him. A videotape of the confessions was then distributed to Baath Party branches across Iraq, as well as to army units; a few bootleg copies even made their way to Kuwait and Beirut. A Lebanese friend of mine saw the video and described it as follows: “This guy would be reciting his confession and he would come to a person and say, `And then we went to see Mohammed to ask him to join the conspiracy.' And this Mohammed would have to stand. And you could see this guy crying, his knees shaking, and he could barely stay on his feet. And then this guy would say, `But he refused to help us,' and then this Mohammed would slump back into his chair, exhausted with relief, and they would move on to the next guy. I had nightmares about this video for months...” 38. Subject: RISC philosophy Anil, it's a RISC world and it's leaving you behind. I could explain why that header appeared, but I know how the discussion would go: TP: Well, I knew commands X,Y,and Z but I had forgotten how to do U and V. So I fudged by using X, Y, and Z. What's the harm? You read the message, didn't you? AG: Ah, but I've told you how to use commands U and V, just yesterday! Let me review them again for you, from the basics, so you will remember--- TP: (Eyes glazing) Anil... AG: Fi First, you remember what a bit is, right? Let psi be a random walk on a convex hyperboggsmanifold with carriage control character meta shift x doublestroke big T, and... 39. From somebody's .signature: “The number of bugs in a program is inversely proportional to the length of time you have spent working on the damn thing.” My question: was “proportional” intended here? And more generally, doesn't it seem like most occurrences of “inversely proportional” nowadays should actually just be “proportional” ? 40. 10 jan 1988 : This awesome power of invisibility must not corrupt me. I have resolved to tell no one of my new abilities. After work, went invisible and took some photographs of myself in a mirror. There were no surprises-- only my retinas were visible, and these only barely. Of course you could see the camera. 13 jan 1988 : Went invisible a few times today, but stayed inside. Picking up things not difficult at all now. While visible, went to Safeway and bought some Grape Nuts. I need to toughen the soles of feet--by spreading the cereal on the basement floor and walking on it. 14 jan 1988 : Curious effect today. For several minutes my elbows went visible while the rest of me stayed invisible. No control problems later in the day. The complexity of my power can be daunting. 16 jan 1988 : Rented several movies and books today that deal with invisibility. I find their treatment of the subject banal, even insulting. And of course very far from being realistic. I hope to use my powers to benefit mankind. I'd hoped to a least get one good idea. They are right about how you look with clothes on, as I mentioned before--stupid. 18 jan 1988 : A call today from my boss. When he said “you certainly havent been very visible around here the last few days,” I almost lost it. I must quit my job and work more seriously at developing my skills. 20 jan 1988 : Call it harmonic convergence: today on the radio quiz they asked for a phrase with ten occurences of the same vowel in it. The shortest phrase to win. It came to me -- “indivisible invisibilities.” Is there a relation to the elbow event? Questions, questions, questions. 41. Speaking of soc.singles Jens Christensen told me earlier today that when he was working part time for FMC corp he posted a message to one of those groups in response to a message wherein some man was asking about how he should handle the following problem: that his girlfriend wanted to go out with other men and the man wanted to know, how should he handle it? The earlier replies basically took the Sting-like formulation “if you love someone, set them free” and recommended that the man let the woman have her way, that it was pointless to try anything else etc and the messages rapidly accumulated backing up this point of view. Jens then sent a message saying that was crazy and asked “how will you feel, knowing she is kissing some other guy tonight” and OK as a Knitwear Specialist I am far too cool to come down on either side of this question but to my mind the most interesting thing was that Jens's response won him a lot of personal replies, some attacks yes, but mostly responses from women asking him to elaborate on his point. This recalled for me an incident from my freshman year in college when a special evening seminar entitled something like “Sex and the College Student” generated a very large crowd in the basement of my dorm. Typically the thing was led by some sex-therapist or otherwise incredibly sensitive and enlighted person, I dont remember who, but what I do remember was that most of the men seemed to want to know “how can I get laid” while most of the women seemed to want to know “if I sleep with men will I suffer in some way,” or something like that. In any case, I had more perspective and sympathy with the male point of view than the female I am sure. Anyway this was only about the third week of my Freshman year and what I remember most was my roommate standing up solemnly and saying, “I will never marry a woman who is not a virgin” to my utter shock and amazement, not because I really knew him that well but because by this one remark he shattered the “live and let live” consensus that everyone seemed to be striving for. Now if there is a moral to my remarks I have no idea. Golg Gidi +/-R Andy or Nob? 42. Speaking of the French Rev. I think it was Thoreau who in the course of explaining why it was quite pointless to read newspapers and magazines etc because the new news is the same as the old news, that is to say if you have read one account of the shipwrecked sailboat adrift in the Pacific, or one account of a big fire at a warehouse say, or a train wreck or a bus plunge, anyway you get the idea, you have read them all, Thoreau said, and he summarized by saying, “the last real piece of news was the French Revolution.” Now that was the last century but OK it probably still applies I think. Political philos. doesn't seemed to have advanced much at least, for example if you know Malthus or david ricardo you could be quite the spin doctor on say, the david brinckley show or whatever the hell that show is called, and while we are on the subject I would like to ask, what the hell is the deal with Brinckley's lip. Is it old age or what is that crease anyway. Clearly not your typical cosmetic deal, if they could cover it up with a spackle of cream or something I think they would go for it. 43. Karen Myers once related to me the following story: that in high school she was in an English poetry class in which the teacher was moving around the room from student to student asking each person for their opinion on the poem everyone had just read. The first student talked about a house and a farmer and beautiful imagery, the second thought the whole thing was about a shipwreck, a third person thought it had to do with agriculture in some way and then when it came to Karen she said honestly that she thought the poem was really about a house burning down (which of course it was). I. A. Richards wrote a book called Practical Criticism in which he takes an admirably scientific viewpoint toward this important question, whether all poetry is really garbage after all, and he throws out unlabelled works of the great and nongreat masters, unlabelled, to challenge the reader in the identification, who is who. I watched the last episode of Northern Exposure and one person in that show talks about someone else writing “a lot of pastoral poetry” and this made me think about the big WW, William Wordsworth, and “Michael”, which is the pastoral in the heavyweight category I think. If you have high blood pressure a few readings might calm you down a bit. Like music I guess if you dont like it, it's really no big deal. But if you do then you are vulnerable to Ridiculous Enthusiasms. ....which you might see / And notice not.... ...a straggling heap of unhewn stones.... I would say that there isnt time for poetry really anymore, what was left of it having been pulverized about 1950. For example somebody was writing about the difference between “White Basketball” and “Black Basketball” and they said something like this: black basketball is an exploration of the limits of time and space on the court; white basketball is the pulverization of that time and space. Similarly I would say that time was pulverized about 1950. Gotta go TKS 43. as though it were merely a page photocopied out of some book. Not that it was difficult to read, or hard to follow. She had the idea that she had before her just the right page; it was that way with photocopies. Taking the book in hand, one found the right page, split it backward down over the glass, pressed the button, and flash. Copied. It was easy to forget the original, and many copiers had a sign: “do not forget your original.” Messing around with a copier, your hands got inky. Was it ash? The flash a flame? Could you Xerox a phoenix? “Of course, that's the problem with this new typesetting.” It was a man behind her. This wasn't going to be very interesting. “Yes?” she said. “The problem with this new typesetting is that you have to have something interesting to say. It looks nice, but all the typesetting in the world can't make something interesting.” “Yes,” she said. The man wasn't very interesting. “You were right about that, incidentally.” “Yes?” she said. “Yes. I am working on a Ph.D. at Stanford. Maybe I'll have it by my ten year high school reunion. I've been at Stanford for three years now. I was in England for a year. A math-research kind of thing. Do you like math?” “Sort of.” Was he going to start talking about math? Or about computers? About photocopies? About typesetting? She found herself performing a mental calculation: \[(1978 + 2) + 10 = 1980 + 10 = 1990.\] It was 1989 now, so maybe he was going to finish soon. “I'd like to send you some of my art. They are Xerox copies of very small doodles, blown up to fill a whole page. I'll put them in the envelope,” he said, as though she would know which envelope was meant. She looked down, and there was an envelope, after all. She had the drawings already. They did look like they were Xeroxed. One was a drawing of Beethoven. Another was a sketch of a strange-looking man. “A self portrait?” she asked. “No, my name isn't Beethoven.” It wasn't the picture she was referring to. She didn't want to make it clear, because the other drawing was ugly. “I live in graduate student housing. I wonder if you've ever been to Stanford. If you have, I live in a big place called Escondido village.” How whether or not she had ever been to Stanford could possibly influence where this man lived was a logical point she chose to ignore. “My roommate is a big Canadian guy named Steve. If you ever call, you'll probably end up talking to him, and not me. The number is (415) 856-2677. Leave a message at the beep.” “Let's see, what else might you want to know,” he continued. “I have my bookbag here. I'll tell you what's in it. Maybe you're interested.” “OK, why not,” she thought. “From the top: an empty manila folder; today's New York Times; two tablets of thin-ruled yellow paper; “Semigroups and Combinatorial Applications,” by Gerard Lallement; “Boxed In: The Culture of TV,” by Mark Crispin Miller; “The Watershed: A Biography of Johannes Kepler,” by Arthur Koestler; the February 4 issue of the {\em New Yorker}; another tablet of paper; three mathematics papers; an issue of {\em Chess Life} magazine; “Elmer Gantry,” Sinclair Lewis; several pens, half dried out; a metal stapler $\ldots$ “Do you actually read all these things,” she asked. “Well, no,” although I'm reading some of them. I don't actually carry the bookbag much, anymore; it's too heavy.” The paper had run onto a second page now but curiously stopped 44. OSWALD: Why dost thou use me thus? I know thee not. KENT: Fellow, I know thee. OSWALD: What dost thou know me for? KENT: A knave, a rascal, an eater of broken meats; a base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy worsted-stocking knave; a lily-livered, action- taking, whoreson, glass-gazing, superserviceable, finical rogue; one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a bawd in way of good service, and art nothing but the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pander, and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch; one whom I will beat into clamorous whining if thou deny'st the least syllable of thy addition. [King Lear: 2.2. For this outburst, the bad guys put Kent in the stocks.] 45. Who has been distributing those gigantic square face-wrap sunglasses to everyone over the age of 65? Is it fashion or merely prescription. I find it unsettling. The thyroid thing has increased President B's resemblance to Pat Riley. Agreeing on the hair they could achieve indistinguishability. Each of them is getting entirely too much exercise, and time in the sun. 46. Could demerit points be assessed for researchers who write stupid papers. As in Jeopardy a negative score would be possible. It's always better to remain silent than to say (write) something idiotic. After 4 or 5 really dumb papers there would be banishment for life and mandatory exclusion from the Hall of Fame. Perhaps a half-way house where no conference announcements or Latex software would be available. It's important to break pernicious habits and get started on the right path again. 47. downtown palo alto, the increasingly twenty-four hour environment, is turning into Rodeo Drive or if not that at least La Jolla. Of course that has been the goal all along. The neo-birge-clarkian thing at Ramona and university is scaled out at 50 percent, to see what I mean look at the rest of Ramona, particularly Pearl's and the double rainbow where you will see a human scale is achieved and indeed this is the direction we should be going, birge-clarkian I mean. The thing is too big. Americans always have to remember: “size is not everything.” The corresponding project at High and University is obviously a complete wash out. We have idiots for architects. Go to pearls in the early evening and have dinner there and you will see what all of downtown p.a. should be like. not stanford which is a richarsonian aberration, the largest mexican restaurant in the world. Mission tile has saved many an architectural enterprise. The church, a ski-lodge done in the Baroque style. Heavy timber, deep cut windows and doorways, the oval and the palm trees. Ha. 48. Some critical thoughts and prognostications for 1991: Those who remember that it was George Santayana who said, “those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” are doomed to repeat it. Possible Corollary: by the G.S. principle itself, even those who fail to remember that it was George Santayana who said “those who fail to remember the past are doomed to repeat it,” are doomed to repeat it. The word “kidney” may make a resurgence in 1991. You may try it out for yourself in sentences such as “I don't care for Saddam Hussein, or other rulers of his kidney” Webster offers webster: trying server at next.stanford.edu...connected. kid.ney \'kid-n\ n, pl kidneys (14c) [ME] 1a:one of a pair of vertebrate organs situated in the body cavity near the spinal column that excrete waste products of metabolism, in man are bean-shaped organs about 41 /2 inches long lying behind the peritoneum in a mass of fatty tissue, and consist chiefly of nephrons by which urine is secreted, collected, and discharged into a main cavity whence it is conveyed by the ureter to the bladder 1b: any of various excretory organs of invertebrate animals 2: the kidney of an animal eaten as food 3: sort or kind esp. with regard to temperament 49. Date: Thu, 13 Dec 90 00:28:08 -0800 From: Thane E. Plambeck Subject: One of our finest knits It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now far far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely defencelss against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together, in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is only to be reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q, Q he was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q---R--- Here he knocked his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the rams horn which made the handle of the urn, and proceeded. Then R... He braced himself. He clenched himself. Qualities that would have saved a ship's company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water ---- endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then --- what is R? A shutter, like the leathern eyelid of a lizard, flickered over the intensity of his gaze and obscured the letter R. In that flash of darkness he heard people saying---he was a failure---that R was beyond him. He would never reach R. On to R, once more, R--- Qualities that in a desolate expedition across the icy solitudes of the Polar region would have made him the leader, the guide, the counsellor, whose temper neither sanguine nor despondent, surveys with equanimity what is to be and faces it, came to his help again. R---- The lizard's eye flickered once more. The veins on his forehead bulged. The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed amongst its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and perserving, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six in all, from start to finish; on the other hand the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash---the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R. Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before the morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of whithered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. He stood stock still, by the urn with the geranium flowing over it. How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? Surely the leader of a forlorn hope may ask himself that, and answer, without treachery to the expedition behind him, `One perhaps.' One in a generation. Is he to be blamed if he is not that one? provided he has toiled honestly, given to the best of his power, till he has no more left to give? from To the Lighthouse by V.W. 50. More on the Reges Thing. I haven't been following it but I understand he has been fired. It recalls the Bertrand Russell deal I believe in a pretty direct way, corrupting the young, dangerous and harmful ideas etc. It was Columbia I think? They either fired BR or declined to hire him because of poisonous writings such as Marriage and Morals. What is the recommendation that a student take drugs if not the corruption of the young. It's a dangerous idea, contrary to the Recognized and Agreed Upon Aims of Civil Society (drug war). The phrases “Honor Code” and “Fundamental Standard” recall the “Boy Scout Pledge,” or say “Gray Tuesday” and “Black Friday.” Empty phrases whose unworthiness seems to leap out at you from the page. Behind the scenes some force is always at work, keeping people (boys) in their places. Thought and Mind control is what Euclid calls it and Euclid is right. Holst spent his whole life writing music and thought himself a failure because in his opinion he had never produced anything with the warmth of a Beethoven string quartet. That's humility. Keep it in mind. Ask yourself, “have I produced my string quartet” and if you think you have, then OK you can be an asshole like Beethoven, you can start acting like you know who should be fired etc. But before that (your whole life) suspend judgement, give the benefit of the doubt, and compliment everyone's work. That's the Knitwear Specialists philos. and I recommend it to the Deans and whomever else was involved. O no perhaps I should cross post to su.etc. You start with a fact say, that someone dies of a drug overdose say, then by an astonishingly powerful semantic net, theorem-prover, or contradiction resolver you arrive at the conclusion: Stuart Reges must be fired. Just where is the “if p then q” Stu must be saying. It's time to rally behind our fellow Scientist. Where do I sign up? 51. * * * * * * Next, I am in a sewing machine shop looking for a Knit Picker and I suddenly realize: I can fly. Levitate may be the proper term. Confined by Singers and Elnas but with no attendant in view I somehow know that although my emancipation from gravity is complete, it is not certain what translational abilities I possess. So for the moment I am satisfied to rise a bit above the carpeted floor. That no one seems to notice reassures me, and I descend. I don't want to exaggerate. It was strictly a six to eight inch kind of thing. Yet I am certain that at least floatationally, my power is great, and still largely untapped. Horizontal movement does seems to require that I touch the floor though. * * * * * * Then another meeting with the Pyramid Development Corps. Although it has been “consensus, not unpleasantness” throughout, I am getting a bit tired of the long discussions. Will it be granite or marble? Will we have 2000 or 10000 polishers on the North Face? “We should discuss all possible options...” Blah, blah, blah. One guy said, “it's not like we're trying to make a mountain out of a molehill,” and of course *I* had to be the one to remind him that it _was_ like that, remember, we are a building a pyramid here, OK? You would think that with 15000 dump trucks running non-stop from Colorado to Kearney, hauling rock 24 hours a day, people would get the point: we are moving mountains here, alright? THIS IS A GIGANTIC PYRAMID. I dont know how the PDC people decided on those green jackets; the armpatch looks stupid too. * * * * * * * 52. In junior high I was taught the three major “literary themes:” 1. Man versus man. 2. Man versus nature. 3. Man versus himself. Provided one could also identify A. The protagonist, and B. The antagonist, one had here a powerful analytical tool with which questions of the form “Let's see, now, `Hamlet.' Was that man vs. man, or man vs. himself?” could be answered with a satisfying and sweeping critical finality. Useful also was the distinction between I. External conflict, and II. Internal conflict. In class the issue was introduced something like this: “Now, class, we need to know the difference between external conflict and internal conflict. External conflict is perhaps the simpler concept. Let's say a man takes up a club and hits his neighbor. That's external conflict, pure and simple. Now, what about internal conflict... (hands go up).... (my friend gary sinclair calls out his answer...) “Internal conflict---that would be, like a knife, right?” Which only goes to show that there is no royal road to literary criticism. 53. It is said that in ancient Sumeria, a certain king decreed that a large brazen bull be manufactured. The bull was to be made large enough so that a person could be forced into it, the lid slammed down and the whole apparatus hung over a fire. The king also desired that the throat of the bull be formed so that the screams of the unhappy victim be heard as the lowing of the bull. A famous bronze worker was enlisted for the effort, and he delivered the bull under budget and two weeks in advance. The king thanked him by popping him into the bull as its initial victim. But I digress. Arising this morning from my bed and stumbling into the shower, I lifted the wash rag to my face for a preliminary scrub. The wash rag turned out to be covered with ants. It was a personal trial of the man versus nature variety, but I exterminated all the ants and washed down their trails with an ammonia/Raid mixture. Again: at La Petite Boulangerie this morning, I had a cup of coffee and a cheese croissant. Taking the last swig of coffee I became suddenly aware of a jellyfish-like substance covering half my tongue. I spit it back into the cup. Yet again: as I left LPB, a pigeon shat on my shoulder. Three phyla, each capable of mounting its unique attacks: Insecta, Invertebrata, Birds. Worthy adversaries for man. I am on the lookout for mammals and fish. No bull. 54. Subject: That's right, another ripened contribution Status: R When Anil returns Gidi and I plan to press Golg on this matter of the su.roger-or-andy archive and its eventual publication. I think it may safely be suggested, subject of course to independent verification, that Golg is planning to publish our hard-sweat writings with Dover Publications or somebody after some number years have passed and keep the ill-gotten profits for himself. I of course am not interested in my individual profit, but rather in Fairness In All its Manifestations. Justice is blind, as Jens Christensen's father-in-law, appearing blindfold recently in front of an Iranian court, can testify. Some editing will have to take place, but historians will surely insist that such one-liners as Pang Chen's question (forwarded by Ashok Subra*) “Why must every program have a name?” be preserved for future generations. What we have here is Midrash, or commentary. I am no Talmudic scholar but this is the proper term? We have text, sub-text and analysis. I once read a book by Gershom Sholem called “Jewish Mysticism” and I'm afraid all I took away from the experience is that Abraham Abu-lafia had an interest in permutations. Perhaps more facts were absorbed but this is all that comes to mind. Also, I remember that Gershom was friends with Walter Benjamin, who in turn had a few beers with Franz Kafka. This is what we ex-English majors call “liberal education.” It isn't worth a damn. I draw your attention to “Journey to the West,” a Chinese novel written by Wu Ch'eng-en (c1500--1582). A synopsis: The Buddhist priest Hsuan-tsang (also known as Tripitika) of the Ming Dynasty strikes out on a quest to India in search of holy scriptures. He is accompanied on his pilgrimage by three magical helpers, one of whom is a monkey. Benet calls the book “humorous and fantastic, but at the same time allegorical and deeply religious.” It was partially translated by Arthur Waley in 1943. He titled it “Monkey.” This may be a critical document for the su.rog* community. Can anyone find a copy? Burning retinas on a well-aged, network-rerun and made-for-TV movie a few nights ago it suddenly occurred to me: Montage has gone into eclipse. I'm no Leonard Maltin but I think this device was introduced in “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” to the captivating strains of Raindrops Keep Fallin on my Head. The paradigm is action audio off and swell to music as one's favorite movie characters indulge themselves with chocolates, park-side walks, pigeon feeding or perhaps even sex, and particularly sex in which one feeds various fresh vegetables to one's partner. For example I believe Terminator 2 lacked a montage although the first scene may be Montage-derivative in some sense. * * * * * Nob asked for more examples of Humor in Contemporary Philosophy. Here is something from Thomas Nagel's _Mortal_Questions_, Cambridge Univ Press, 1979, from a footnote to a chapter entitled “Death.” ...I suspect that something essential is omitted from the account of the badness of death by an analysis which treats it as a deprivation of possibilities. My suspicion is supported by the following suggestion of Robert Nozick. We could imagine discovering that people developed from individual spores that had existed indefinitely far in advance of their birth. In this fantasy, birth never occurs naturally more than one hundred years before the permanent end of the spore's existence. But then we discover a way to trigger the premature hatching of these spores, and people are born who have thousands of years of active life before them. Given such a situation, it would be possible to imagine _oneself_ having come into existence thousands of years previously. If we put aside the question whether this would really be the same person, even given the identity of the spore, then the consequence appears to be that a person's birth at a given time _could_ deprive him of many earlier years of possible life. Now while it would be cause for regret that one had been deprived of all those possible years of life by being born too late, the feeling would differ from that which many people have about death. I conclude that something about the future _prospect_ of permanent nothingness is not captured by the analysis in terms of denied possibilities. If so, then Lucretius's argument [Knitwear: that because being dead is like being not born and you dont regret when you werent born, you shouldnt think being dead is so bad, either] still awaits an answer.... TKS: in my opinion, this passage reaches hilarity precisely at the third occurrence of the word `spore,' more precisely at the words, “...even given the identity of the spore.” Maybe the humor has to do with the juxtapostions of phrases like `permanent nothingness' and `denied possibilities' along side the `spores.' If you're looking for good jokes, like me, then its good to to focus on what seems to be known as “The Problem of Personal Identity,” particularly for the brain-exchanging gedankenexperiments, but also for other reasons....(see next message) The symbolism and the ceremonial of the Catholic Church were familiar to him; the mysterious symbols of the Masonic lodge were new. It is entirely characteristic that he at once began to poke fun at certain peculiarities of lodge procedure. The Illuminati, like the “Arcadians” in Rome, were given special names---not fantastic shepherd-names, however, but ancient or Biblical ones. The Duke of Gotha was called “Timoleon;” Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, “Aaron;” the Coadjutor of the Archbishophric of Mainz, “Crescens;” Baron von Knigge, “Philo.” On 15 January 1787, Mozart wrote from Prague to his young friend Gottfried von Jacquin, in Vienna: Now farewell, dearest friend, dearest Hikkiti Horky! That is your name, as you must know. We all invented names for ourselves on the journey. Here they are: I am Punkitititi. My wife is Schabla Pumfa. Hofer is Rozka Pumpa. Stadler is Notschibikitschibi. My servant Joseph is Sagadarata. My dog Goukerl is Schomanntzky. Madame Quallenberg is Runzifunzi. Mlle. Crux is Rambo Schurimuri. Freistaedtler is Gaulimauli. Be so kind so as to tell him his name. Call it paradox, coincidence, or irony, I dont care, but for me, I have always confounded CARLTON FISK and THURMOND MUNSON. Which one died in the plane crash? It's not a good thing, particularly for someone whose father only last night (wednesday) was on the Larry King show correcting LK about baseballiana. Did anyone catch his call ("Kearney, Nebraska, hello!")? YOU ARE (or AREN'T) LISTENING TO THE LARRY KING SHOW. A question: when will a Dame Edna Everidge emerge stateside? Does everyone know the Dame? Please note the previous message contained the word "Possum;" wholly coincidental if ironic and paradoxical. If you don't understand this paragraph that's OK. Re Dr. Seuss: as an ankle-biter I found the Doctor a bit disturbing because of those fishbowls balanced on the end of sticks and the general teetertotteriness of his illustration in general. Is it really true that he coined the word "Nerd?" If so, what references can be given. The Grinch who stole Christmas is OK but as usual the Mephistophelean character takes center stage. Ever since Paradise Lost it has been a big problem. \documentstyle{article} \begin{document} The Emperor needed much sleep, but he could sleep when he wanted to, by day as well as by night...On a campaign he was awakened for everything. Even Prince of Neuch\^{a}tel [Bethier], who received and dispatched and knew of his Majesty's plans, decided nothing...The Emperor occupied himself with the most minute details. He wanted everything to bear the imprint of his genius. He would send to me to receive his orders for headquarters, for the orderly officers, for his staff officers, for the letters, for the couriers, postal service etc. The commanding officers of the guard; the controller of the army commissariat; Larrey, the excellent surgeon-general; all were summoned at least once a day. Nothing escaped his solicitude. Indeed, his foresight might well be called by the name of solicitude, for no detail seemed too humble to receive his attention...he had an astonshing memory for localities. The topography of a country seemed to be modelled in relief in his head. Never did any man combine such a memory with a more creative genius. He seemed to extract men, horses and guns from the very bowels of the earth. The distinctive numbers of his regiments, his army service companies, his baggage battalions, sufficed for everything. He knew where each one was, when it started, when it should arrive at its destination... \vspace{0.15in} J. Hanoteau, (ed.) {\em Memoirs of General de Caulaincourt, Duke of Vicenza} 1812--1813, translated by H. Miles, Cassel, 1935, pp. 599--601. \end{document} From plambeck Sat Dec 15 17:34:26 1990 Return-Path: Received: by Neon.Stanford.EDU (5.61/25-eef) id AA12996; Sat, 15 Dec 90 17:34:25 -0800 Date: Sat, 15 Dec 90 17:34:25 -0800 From: Thane E. Plambeck Full-Name: Thane E. Plambeck Message-Id: <9012160134.AA12996@Neon.Stanford.EDU> To: plambeck@neon.Stanford.EDU Subject: nerd joke Status: R Today's SF Chronicle has the following Jumble words: GOSUB, MOROG, RAYPER, MORRET Now excuse me, but why didn't they scramble GOSUB? hahahahahahahahahahaha Like many people, I think the New York Times is a good newspaper. Here, however, is a short list of its more stupid aspects: 1) The micro-advertisement that always appears somewhere at the bottom of page one. Today, the advertisement reads CALL THE UNIVERSE FROM THE NEWEST AT&T Phone Center at 550 Madison Ave.--ADVT. The whole advertisement occupies about 60 square millimeters. Is this a superstition, or what? 2) Steve Norman drew my attention to the title for section B of the newpaper, “The Living Arts.” What the hell are “The Living Arts?” This is an execrable phrase that ought to be packed onto a barge and dumped somewhere off New Jersey. It's an indigestable synthetic compound--reading it is like drinking some kind of non-biodegradable plastic. Unfortunately, once such phrases are introduced into the environment, they have a way of spreading pervasively into the mind. Walking in Berkeley a week ago, I saw a magnificent building with the words BIOLOGY, ANATOMY, PHYSICS, and CHEMISTRY written in bold letters on the top of it. By some corrosive mental process, I immediately thought of the phrase, “The Living Arts.” We all know how painful this can be. 3) “Sports Monday.” Another caustic compound. Are our lives enriched by this phrase? 4) The Papineau Journal. Papineau is a “tiny town lost in the cornfields” of Illinois, according to today's New York Times. There is a bad drought there; a brief article describes it. The story is interesting, even newsworthy. Yet I feel safe in asserting that no other story about Papineau will appear in the New York Times in the next five years. Why then the title “Papineau Journal?” It's irritating. 5) The Peruvian bus plunge. Periodically, the brakes on a Andes motor coach will give way, and 30 or more people will die. Identifying the nation and body count, the New York Times can find no other headline: 40 DIE IN CHILEAN BUS PLUNGE You are ready to apply the principle yourself. Let's say a coach flies off a ridge near the Matterhorn, and 24 people die. Have you worked out the headline? 24 DIE IN SWISS BUS PLUNGE From today's (14 November 1991) Examiner, page A-13, “Lottery panel announces new games”: [The Lottery panel has announced] a Fantasy Five game that replaces the current Little Lotto game. The game offers more chances of winning than Little Lotto, with most winners receiving prizes of $100,000 or more. Overall odds of winning some prize would be 1 in 9. Little Lotto now features a $500,000 top prize and players pick six numbers from a field of 39. OK let's say I buy 100 tickets for $100. How much should I expect to win? Anil may wish to provide a second moment estimation. TKS. From plambeck Sun Feb 3 16:30:56 1991 Return-Path: Received: by Neon.Stanford.EDU (5.61/25-eef) id AA04353; Sun, 3 Feb 91 16:30:55 -0800 Date: Sun, 3 Feb 91 16:30:55 -0800 From: Thane E. Plambeck Full-Name: Thane E. Plambeck Message-Id: <9102040030.AA04353@Neon.Stanford.EDU> To: plambeck@neon.Stanford.EDU Subject: More lies, vicious innuendo, etc.... Status: R If there are no current su.* messages then the best policy is to reread them. Occasionally for example one finds misspellings or unclear locutions in one's earlier contributions (I have found none in my own, of course). Or upon rereading one may discover remarks such as Nob the Doober's poisonous fling-off remark that “some postings on su.roger don't make any sense.” Now I ask Nob to fling off her mask and put forward names and instances of postings she has found unclear. j'accuse, Nob. Would she have us put up semantic nets? As one philosopher has said, “the truth is a slippery thing, and the tread pattern on the soles of our sneakers makes little difference in the types of fish we may catch.” Yes, I think that sums it up. The Knitwear Specialist r.waldo's Nominalist and Realist: Proportion is almost impossible to human beings. There is no one who does not exaggerate. In conversation, men are encumbered with personality, and talk too much. Subject: Noxious Weed Busting Message-Id: <12280165477.11.PLAMBECK@Sushi.Stanford.EDU> I once worked as a member of a “ground crew” whose assignment was the extermination of noxious weeds. The Nebraska State department of Agriculture has an official list of weeds it classifies as “noxious.” Not every weed is noxious: for example, some familiar weeds, like dandelions, are not. To kill a dandelion is nothing. The noxious weed is a real opponent. You cannot kill a noxious weed with your bare hands. One needs a weapon. On my first day at work, I was introduced to Zane Roper, a seventy year-old man who had been fighting noxious weeds for decades. He gave me a terse summary of noxious weeds and the weapons that would be at our disposal. “We're going to spray Thistles today. You drive the jeep, and I'll walk behind with the gun. Don't get too goddam far ahead of me. Take those jugs of 2-4-D. I'm going back for the long hoes and the keys to the loader; you fill the tank with diesel, put on these gloves, pour in two jugs and start the mixer. On the way out, remind me to tell you what Shattercane and Texas Sand Burr looks like. If Gordon comes by ask him what the hell we're going to do with the tree spade....” I was overwhelmed with the terminology. “Long hoes?” Wasn't 2-4-D some kind of toxic chemical? The names of the weeds seemed particularly sinister. If Zane was going to carry a gun, would I be issued one too? * * * Every year, each of 97 Nebraska counties elects a Weed Control Deputy. The position is not one to be taken lightly. For unto this one person devolves the ultimate responsibility of ensuring that it is people who rule in his county, and not noxious weeds. Nebraska is an agricultural state; in my own county, corn is grown. Living in Nebraska, one might conclude that it is entirely natural that corn should grow there. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Noxious weeds governed Nebraska for 50 million years before the first man with a DeKalb hat arrived. This man has only recently driven the noxious weed into eclipse, and it requires all his ingenuity to keep the weed down. Nebraska farmers are required by law to keep their land free of noxious weeds. Although most succeed, there are inevitable delinquencies and pockets of weeds where even the diligent farmer is overwhelmed. Noxious weed control boards, governed by their deputies, are formed as a sort of agricultural Special Weapons and Tactics team. Zane and I were just a small part of one team, working in one county, concentrating on one principal opponent: the Musk Thistle. A stand of Musk Thistle may be briefly described as a cornfield in hell. Where sweet corn stands straight, green, neatly arranged in rows and wafting in the breeze, the Musk Thistle stands twisted, densely packed, spiky and rigid, with a hideous purplish eye at the top. A corn stalk may grow to nine feet; Musk Thistles can stand twelve. A naked man, standing amongst a few hundred Musk Thistles, could hardly hope to escape alive. He would be cut into fine slices in the attempt. It is a fertile weed: where 200 Thistles stood on Monday, 1000 might stand on Wednesday. There is no animal that can eat a noxious weed. Insects are repelled by them. All of modern agricultural technology is required to defeat just one. Zane had been fighting them his entire adult life. To kill a Musk Thistle, one burns, poisons, and uproots it. All three operations are necessary. A burnt and poisoned thistle will recover. An uprooted thistle will reroot itself. It is therefore unrealistic to hope for ultimate victory over the Thistles, and one must take satis- faction in knowing that he has at least delivered them a blow. Zane's simplified strategy was this: suffocation, poisoning, and wounding. I would drive a jeep pulling a trailer holding a tank filled with a highly toxic mixture of diesel fuel and 2-4-D. We would advance to the frontier of the Thistles and don plastic suits. The tank fed a special spraying gun that was pressurized by an additional engine at the back of the jeep. On Zane's signal I would throw a lever, and he would spray the thistles. I would move in his perimeter, striking as many thistles as possible near their roots with a machete. Diesel fuel will kill a less hardy plant almost immediately. To kill a thistle, a hot day is also required--”to bake them miserable bitches good,” in Zane's phrase. On a good day we could hope to significantly slow the advance of a few thousand thistles on an acre or two. ------- [PHOTO: Recording terminated Sat 16-Jan-88 1:16PM] Subject: Noxious Weed Busting Message-Id: <12280165477.11.PLAMBECK@Sushi.Stanford.EDU> I once worked as a member of a “ground crew” whose assignment was the extermination of noxious weeds. The Nebraska State department of Agriculture has an official list of weeds it classifies as “noxious.” Not every weed is noxious: for example, some familiar weeds, like dandelions, are not. To kill a dandelion is nothing. The noxious weed is a real opponent. You cannot kill a noxious weed with your bare hands. You need a weapon. On my first day at work, I was introduced to Zane Roper, a seventy year-old man who had been fighting noxious weeds for decades. He gave me a terse introduction to noxious weeds and the weapons that would be at our disposal. “We're going to spray Thistles today. You drive the jeep, and I'll walk behind with the gun. Don't get too goddamn far ahead of me. Take those jugs of 2-4-D. I'm going back for the long hoes and the keys to the loader; you fill the tank with diesel, put on these gloves, pour in two jugs and start the mixer. On the way out, remind me to tell you what Shattercane and Texas Sand Burr looks like. If Gordon comes by ask him what the hell we're going to do with the tree spade....” I was overwhelmed by the terminology. “Long hoes?” Wasn't 2-4-D some kind of toxic chemical? The names of the weeds seemed particularly sinister. If Zane was going to carry a gun, would I be issued one too? * * * Every year, each of 97 Nebraska counties elects a Weed Control Deputy. The position is not one to be taken lightly --- the Deputy's responsibility is nothing less than to ensure that it is people who rule in his county, and not noxious weeds. Nebraska is an agricultural state; in my own county, corn is grown. Living in Nebraska, one might conclude that it is entirely natural that corn should grow there. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Noxious weeds governed Nebraska for 50 million years before man arrived. The modern farmer has only recently driven the noxious weed into eclipse, and it requires all his ingenuity to keep the weed down. The first Europeans, hoping to find arable land in the American west, had experienced weeds before: so they thought. They had given names to their European weeds to indicate their qualities--Shepherd's hat, Dandelion, Mock Carrot. Finding a weed in his field, the farmer simply reached down and pulled it out. But when these weed-naive farmers arrived in the Great American high plains, they found the way completely blocked by weeds so horribly unfamiliar that a new genre of hellish names was invented for their description: Binding Grass, Witches Bristle, Shattercane, Musk Thistle, Texas Sand Burr. The agricultural journals kept at the time are filled with long passages about the horrible weeds. Farmers went bankrupt and starved, unable to conquer them. Modern Nebraska farmers are required by law to keep their land free of noxious weeds. Although most succeed, there are inevitable delinquencies and pockets of weeds where even the diligent farmer is overwhelmed. Noxious weed control boards, governed by their deputies, are formed as a sort of agricultural Special Weapons and Tactics team. Zane and I were just a small part of one team, working in one county, concentrating on one principal opponent: the Musk Thistle. A stand of Musk Thistle may be briefly described as a cornfield in hell. Where sweet corn stands straight, green, neatly arranged in rows and wafting in the breeze, the Musk Thistle stands twisted, densely packed, spiky and rigid, with a hideous purplish eye at the top. A corn stalk may grow to nine feet; Musk Thistles can stand twelve. A naked man, standing amongst a few hundred Musk Thistles, could hardly hope to escape alive. He would be cut into fine slices in the attempt. It is a fertile weed: where 200 Thistles stood on Monday, 1000 might stand on Wednesday. There is no animal that can eat a noxious weed. Insects are repelled by them. All of modern agricultural technology is required to defeat just one. To kill a Musk Thistle, I was to learn, one burns, poisons, and uproots it. All three operations are necessary. A burnt and poisoned thistle will recover. An uprooted thistle will reroot itself. One does not hope for victory over the Thistles. The best satisfaction comes in knowing that you have at least delivered them a blow. Zane had been fighting them his entire adult life. After we had loaded all the equipment, Zane paused for a moment and pointed at the ground beneath us. “Do you see that? That's a goddamn watermelon sprout. Looks the world like Witches Bristle, but it isn't. It's the sort of thing we're up against. Try to figure out what's a weed, and what isn't. It looks like a hot day. We'll have the miserable bitches curling by lunch.” I started the jeep and we pulled away from the Weed Shed, pulling 100 gallons of a highly toxic mixture of diesel fuel and 2-4-D. Zane had a crude map drawn on the back of a Malathion advertisement which was to direct us to the site of our first engagement with the Thistles. We had barely driven half a mile into the rolling ranch land when Zane raised his hand--the signal to stop the jeep. “There's a Thistle,” he said in a cool tone. He pointed ahead over the hood of the jeep. I saw a five-foot high stalk with the purple eye fixed on us, and was momentarily transfixed. Still, I gathered my courage and began to get out of the jeep. “Where are you going?” Zane asked. “Run it over with the jeep, then I'll finish it off.” There were to be many times when I would turn to Zane in the jeep, admiring him; this was a man who knew how to kill a weed. I put the jeep into gear and plowed over the Thistle. Pausing triumphantly, I looked to him for my next orders. But Zane was already out of the jeep, standing silently over the now horizontal thistle. He held a freshly-sharpened long hoe in his hand. By the time I had gotten out of the jeep, Zane was working violently over Thistle, in apparent victory yet striking at it sharply with the honed edge of the long hoe, splitting its stalk into dozens of fragments. The original plant was unrecognizable in the pulp of stalk, ooze and thistle-points. Still Zane seemed unsatisfied, and he pointed to the 100 gallon trailer we pulled behind the jeep. “Damn serious,” Zane said quietly, “and about to go to seed. Start the sprayer.” He pointed at the tank we pulled behind the jeep. It fed a special spraying gun that was pressurized by an additional engine at the back of the jeep. On Zane's signal I threw a lever, and he sprayed the near-dead Thistle. Later, on larger stands of weeds, I would move in his perimeter, striking as many thistles as possible near their roots with a machete. Diesel fuel will kill a less hardy plant almost immediately. To kill a thistle, a hot day is also required--”to bake them miserable bitches good,” as Zane would often say. On a good day we could hope to significantly slow the advance of a few thousand thistles on an acre or two. Herbie Husker is a squat cowboy-like figure with a round face and big biceps. Like the Phoenix, he replaced a ten foot, corncob-headed earlier version of himself about 1984 I think. (The Phoenix _did_ have a corn cob head, yes?) My mother made me a quilt on which Herbie commands a square. I preferred the corn cob head guy, whose name, I am shamed to admit, I have forgotten. Speaking of “cob” I remember that in grade school and Junior high we used this word as a synonym for “steal.” For example you could say “John cobbed my Pez” or “Let's cob his eraser...” You get the idea. Anyway I had forgotten this usage until my mother picturesquely used it in a Thanksgiving telephone conversation. Is it a dead midwesternism or does it---like “kidney”---merely suffer disuse? ----- From Robert Nozick's _Philosophical_Explanations_, Harvard 1981: ...it is difficult to discover why the more permanent is the more valuable or meaningful, why permanence or long-lastingness, why duration in itself, should be important. Consider those things people speak of as permanent or eternal. These include (apart from God) numbers, sets, abstract ideas, space-time itself. Would it be better to be one of these things? The question is bizarre: how could a concrete person become an abstract object? Still, would anyone wish they _could_ become the number 14 or the Form of Justice, or the null set? Is anyone pining to lead a setly existence? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - In 1984 I was in Cambridge with Jim Sanks and he recognized Nozick in the line ahead of us at some supermarket. Jim told Nozick he thought he (Nozick) was great, Jim had just read _Philos_Explan_ and thought it was really good, etc. Nozick (who was packing more than the 9 item maximum) looked at Jim like he was insane and didnt reply. So in person RN didnt turn out to be so funny. Is there a lesson? Golg? Anyway: here we've got what philosophy has been reduced to in the last 40 years: a good chuckle. I've been reading some of the latest philosophy and the most interesting thing is that it all seems to share one characteristic: it's damn entertaining, even funny. Perhaps I am viewing the subject through the opaque lenses of a Knitwer Specialist, and am senstive only to jokes? Maybe. But Bertrand R. was quite the joker in his better passages, No? I wish I wrote this Nozick thing, not because it's interesting or wise but because its a damn good chuckler. I just read in a book that after the turn of the 20th century it was the fashion in some circles to call the year 1907 (for example) “Oughty-seven.” We should seize the revisionist initiative in preparation for the next palindromic anno, “Oughty-two.” I invite all to advance the cause: “Oughty-One: A Space Odyssey” would be a good start. Q: What is the correct response when someone calls you on the telephone and asks for you by name? --From “Mind Your Manners” A: Not only is there no “correct” response when this disagreeable thing happens, but there is no real response possible---in the true sense of the word. Anything you say is makeshift. Hundreds of “responses” have been tried by millions of phone users; every one has proved either evasive or ridiculous or rude. Let us say your name is Brinckerhoff. The phone rings and you answer it, and a voice says, “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” You are in an impossible situation. You can say, “This is I,” and be put down for a purist or a poseur. Or you can say, “This is me,” and be taken for a tough. Or, rather desperately, you can reply, “This is he,” or “This is Brinckerhoff,” or “This is Mr. Brinckerhoff,” referring to yourself grandiloquently in the third person, in the manner of dictators and kings. Believe us, when a man starts referring to himself in the third person, the end of the good life is not far off. To the listener you sound either downright silly or deliberately vainglorious. Your “response” has a slightly moldy, undemocratic sound, as when, in the presense of a servant, you refer to your wife as “Mrs. Brinckerhoff” instead of as “Esther.” Now, suppose you go off on an entirely different tack when the phone rings and someone asks for you by name. Suppose you say, with forced cheeriness, “Speaking!” What a pitiful attempt! The word has hardly rolled off your tongue when it becomes meaningless, for you are no longer speaking but are listening---listening, and hoping against hope that it isn't somebody you can't stand. Or let's take a few other conventional “responses” and see how miserably they fail: Voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” Response: “You are.” This is too rude, too familiar. Voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” Response: “Why?” This is evasive, prying. Voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” Response: “Go ahead!” Peremptory, unfriendly. No, there is no “correct” response in this situation. There is no response that is anything but discouraging. It is the most disturbing phase of one's telephonic life. Unquestionably it was not foreseen by Mr. Bell when he was so blithely tinkering with his little magnets and diaphragms. If only a voice could have whispered, “I would like to speak to Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, please,” how much that might have saved the world! Bell would have laid down his tools with a tired sigh, a man who knew when he was licked. --from _The Second Tree from the Corner_, by E B White Q: What is the correct response when someone calls you on the telephone and asks for you by name? --From “Mind Your Manners” A: Not only is there no “correct” response when this disagreeable thing happens, but there is no real response possible---in the true sense of the word. Anything you say is makeshift. Hundreds of “responses” have been tried by millions of phone users; every one has proved either evasive or ridiculous or rude. Let us say your name Brinckerhoff. The phone rings and you answer it, and a voice says, “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” You are in an impossible situation. You can say, “This is I,” and be put down for a purist or a poseur. Or you can say, “This is me,” and be taken for a tough. Or, rather desperately, you can reply, “This is he,” or “This is Brinckerhoff,” or “This is Mr. Brinckerhoff,” referring to yourself grandiloquently in the third person, in the manner of dictators and kings. Believe us, when a man starts referring to himself in the third person, the end of the good life is not far off. To the listener you sound either downright silly or deliberately vainglorious. Your “response” has a slightly moldy, undemocratic sound, as when, in the presense of a servant, you refer to your wife as “Mrs. Brinckerhoff” instead of as “Esther.” Now, suppose you go off on an entirely different tack when the phone rings and someone asks for you by name. Suppose you say, with forced cheeriness, “Speaking!” What a pitiful attempt! The word has hardly rolled off your tongue when it becomes meaningless, for you are no longer speaking but are listening---listening, and hoping against hope that it isn't somebody you can't stand. Or let's take a few other conventional “responses” and see how miserably they fail: Voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” Response: “You are.” This is too rude, too familiar. Voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” Response: “Why?” This is evasive, prying. Voice: “I would like to speak to Mr. Brinckerhoff, please.” Response: “Go ahead!” Peremptory, unfriendly. No, there is no “correct” response in this situation. There is no response that is anything but discouraging. It is the most disturbing phase of one's telephonic life. Unquestionably it was not foreseen by Mr. Bell when he was so blithely tinkering with his little magnets and diaphragms. If only a voice could have whispered, “I would like to speak to Mr. Alexander Graham Bell, please,” how much that might have saved the world! Bell would have laid down his tools with a tired sigh, a man who knew when he was licked. --from _The Second Tree from the Corner_, by E B WhiteFrom plambeck Mon Dec 10 16:14:00 1990 Return-Path: Received: by Neon.Stanford.EDU (5.61/25-eef) id AA24991; Mon, 10 Dec 90 16:13:59 -0800 Date: Mon, 10 Dec 90 16:13:59 -0800 From: Thane E. Plambeck Full-Name: Thane E. Plambeck Message-Id: <9012110013.AA24991@Neon.Stanford.EDU> To: plambeck@neon.Stanford.EDU Subject: Lake House of Tahoe Pizza Status: R Have you ever dined at the Lake House of Tahoe Pizza? This is the correct name. I believe it is on the North shore? Now of course we might have expected The House of Lake Tahoe Pizza or perhaps The Lake Tahoe House of Pizza or maybe The Pizza House of Lake Tahoe but you will not find these in the yellow pages. Other possibilities include The Tahoe Lake House of Pizza which is not unfair because the correct name already suggests “Lake House” as a valid construct. Have I missed any? From @Sunburn.Stanford.EDU:phil@Neon.Stanford.EDU Fri Mar 1 16:51:18 1991 Return-Path: <@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU:phil@Neon.Stanford.EDU> Received: from Sunburn.Stanford.EDU by Neon.Stanford.EDU with SMTP (5.61/25-eef) id AA22749; Fri, 1 Mar 91 16:50:54 -0800 Received: from Neon.Stanford.EDU by Sunburn.Stanford.EDU with SMTP (5.61+IDA/25-eef) id AA06873; Fri, 1 Mar 91 16:50:44 -0800 Received: by Neon.Stanford.EDU (5.61/25-eef) id AA22652; Fri, 1 Mar 91 16:50:24 -0800 Date: Fri, 1 Mar 91 16:50:24 -0800 From: Phil Stubblefield Message-Id: <9103020050.AA22652@Neon.Stanford.EDU> To: myers@cs.Stanford.EDU, plambeck@cs.Stanford.EDU, yoda@intuit.com, young@cs.Stanford.EDU Subject: Plambeck collection Status: R While talking to Karen the other day, I mentioned that I had recently stumbled across a collection of BBoard writings from the Good Ol' Days. She thought it would be nostalgic to see them, so here we go... [BTW, I never really understood the last message, "Attempted Suicide". Anyone want to chance an interpretation? The author, perhaps?] ======================================================================= The Collected BBoard Writings of Thane Plambeck Date: Sun 15 Feb 87 14:32:37-PST Subject: How they drive: A Cali-braskan study (part I) Situation I: A four-way stop sign. |c | |b | |a | The scenario: Cars a, b, and c -------- -------- arrive almost simultaneously, as -------- -------- depicted in the diagram. Their | d| drivers wish to continue down south | | through the intersection. Car d | | arrives just after car a, but before b or c. Car d wants to turn left. The California protocol: Car a, car d, car b, and finally car c: the precedence being determined by arrival times. The Nebraska protocol: Car a, car b, car c, and finally car d, as if we had a stop light rather than a 4-way stop. NOTES: 1) Deadlock if b is Californian, and d is Nebraskan. 2) Starvation impossible in the Nebraska protocol-- there aren't enough cars in Nebraska, except in funeral processions. ------- Date: Sun 15 Feb 87 14:46:11-PST Subject: How they drive: A Cali-braska study (part II) Situation II: A wind-swept icy tundra. Two cars approaching one another at an angle of 37%. Visibility blocked by cows and windmills. The California protocol: Not supported. The Nebraska protocol: Person driving the pickup with more hay in the back taps horn, and proceeds. NOTES: Of any two automobiles in Nebraska, at least one is a pickup. ------- Date: Fri 20 Feb 87 20:56:00-PST Subject: Haiku Has everyone tried their hand at Haiku? You remember good ol' Haiku. Was it Japanese, or Chinese? What were the rules exactly? There were some numbers involved. The first line had to be one word. It was the subject. Or was it one syllable? Hell if I remember. Well, let's go for it, anyway. Haiku was nature poetry, right? So you picked a one syllable nature word to kick things off. “Rocks.” Good enough, good enough! The second line, what was it? Two syllables, or two words? They had to be adjectives, describing the subject. “Hard, unyielding.” Damn good progress so far. That's 2/5 ths of a Haiku poem. We've got our subject; make no mistake about that. “Hard” and “unyielding” are right on the mark too. If some Dunderhead comes at me, trying to say a rock isn't hard and unyielding, I'll be all over him. We need three words now. What did they have to say? Or was it three syllables? “Situate the subject in nature.” Who said that? “In my hand.” That's a double winner, words and syllables! We've got some real momentum rolling now. Four somethings next, further elaborating on the subject in some restricted way. Anybody remember? “I'll throw them now” We need the one word finale. Has to be a nature word. Ha! I've got it. Rocks Hard, unyielding In my hand-- I'll throw them now Duck! ------- Date: Wed 4 Mar 87 14:07:36-PST Subject: Was Rilke a FORTRAN programmer? You literary types--yo! Listen up. What's the most amusing corruption of a poem you can twist into a description of a computer? I, for one, am tired of reading technical documents with quotations from Marcus Aurelius or lines from Blake heading a section on the method of steepest descents. Do technoids really believe that when Shylock asked “Is it so nominated in the bond?” he had computer network problems in distributed naming in mind? If not, why the quotation? Is it because it's really just too embarassing to write a technical document, and one feels obliged to demonstrate to the reader that he or she does more than just write technical documents, and in fact knows something as well? If we're going to cannibalize literature, I say let's do the job right. Milton, for example. Certainly his genius was never greater than when he anticipated the cathode ray tube in Paradise Lost. You remember the lines, of course: ...yet from those phosphors No light; but rather darkness visible... And could anyone fail to recognize the roots of the software crisis in Pope's Essay on Criticism? The lines were memorable: 'Tis hard to say, whether greater want of skill Appear in logic or in programming ill... ------- Date: Sat 14 Mar 87 14:40:21-PST Subject: Noxious Weeds--the top eight. This is a list of the world's worst weeds. I took the commentary from several weed books which are named below. 1. Purple Nutsedge (Cyperus rotundus L.) “Almost uncontrollable. Reproduces both by seeds and by vegetative nutlets that are produced in great numbers at various depths in the soil...” 2. Indian Doob (Cynodon dactylon L.) “A persistent weed...” 3. Panic-grass (Eschinochloa crus-galli L.) 4. Junglerice (Eschinochola colonum L.) “Very troublesome... The rootstalk delights in being fragmented, each piece giving rise to a new, complete plant...” 5. False Guinea-grass (Sorgum Halepense L.) “Once widely advertised and planted. It was one thing to start, quite another to kill it out. Like the English sparrow, it will be with us forever...” 6. Water Hyacinth (Eichornia Crassipes L.) “Makes a gorgeous display but has many objectionable features...” 7. Cogongrass (Imperata cylindrica L.) “The bane of framers in India, Africa, and much of the Far East.” 8. Lantana (Lantana canara L.) References: H. F. Jaques, “How to Know the Weeds,” 1959. Alden S. Crafts, “Modern Weed Control,” 1975. Lawrence Crockett, “Wildly Successful Plants,” 1977. ------- Date: Mon 18 Jan 88 18:32:47-PST Subject: Diary of the Invisible Man 1 jan 1988 : Woke up this morning with a bad hangover. Standing up from my futon, noticed I was invisible from the waist down. Went to take a shower, saw my arms vanish too. In a full length mirror I was able to see only my retinas. Hard to pick up things at first but getting used to it. 3 jan 1988 : Spent yesterday thinking of my new powers. I can turn invisible almost at will. Put on a suit, went invisible and looked just like all the stupid movie invisible men. Resolved to never dress while invisible. Must return to work on the fifth. 4 jan 1988 : Several experiments involving eating and drinking. Food visible in my mouth until I close it. Stays invisible if I open it again. Starting to think of some get rich schemes. Can't decide how obvious my retinas are. 5 jan 1988 : Went to work invisible. Good that I dont have to drive there. Went visible in bathroom, realized that I was naked, and for a moment had trouble vanishing. ------- Date: Thu 21 Jan 88 14:32:02-PST Subject: The greatest poem in the English language Surely Susan Polis Schutz and Stephen Schutz are the masters of that wonderfully deep and inspiring genre we've all come to know as contemporary American poetry. Their wondrous words continue to reach out to us even today. Even so, I still maintain that the greatest poem in the English language is to be found in the works of Dr. Johnson. You will find it tucked away in the (unabridged) Lives of the English poets: I put my hat upon my head And walked into the Strand. And there I met another man Whose hat was in his hand. Worldwide, of course, the greatest poems are those written in the Haiku style. The master Wi-Li-Sho (c. 800 AD) has left us this masterpiece: Bat Flapping Flipperty-flapping Wings flipperty-flappety Flap ------- ------- Date: Tue 26 Jan 88 15:16:52-PST Subject: m o n t y h a l l ' s p r o b l e m Ilan told me this one. Monty Hall offers you the choice of three boxes. Two are empty, but one has a treasure inside. You select your box. Monty Hall shows you one of the other boxes was empty. Monty Hall says, do you want to keep your box, or exchange it for the other box I haven't opened yet? << Fade to Rice-A-Roni >> “Improving my winning chances from 1/3 to 1/2, I will take the other box, Monty.” Right? ------- Date: Wed 27 Jan 88 01:31:58-PST Subject: Diary of a Vanishing Man (continued) 10 jan 1988 : This awesome power of invisibility must not corrupt me. I have resolved to tell no one of my new abilities. After work, went invisible and took some photographs of myself in a mirror. There were no surprises-- only my retinas were visible, and these only barely. Of course you could see the camera. 13 jan 1988 : Went invisible a few times today, but stayed inside. Picking up things not difficult at all now. While visible, went to Safeway and bought some Grape Nuts. I need to toughen the soles of feet--by spreading the cereal on the basement floor and walking on it. 14 jan 1988 : Curious effect today. For several minutes my elbows went visible while the rest of me stayed invisible. No control problems later in the day. The complexity of my power can be daunting. 16 jan 1988 : Rented several movies and books today that deal with invisibility. I find their treatment of the subject banal, even insulting. And of course very far from being realistic. I hope to use my powers to benefit mankind. I'd hoped to a least get one good idea. They are right about how you look with clothes on, as I mentioned before--stupid. 18 jan 1988 : A call today from my boss. When he said “you certainly havent been very visible around here the last few days,” I almost lost it. I must quit my job and work more seriously at developing my skills. 20 jan 1988 : Call it harmonic convergence: today on the radio quiz they asked for a phrase with ten occurences of the same vowel in it. The shortest phrase to win. It came to me -- “indivisible invisibilities.” Is there a relation to the elbow event? Questions, questions, questions. ------- Date: Wed 3 Feb 88 21:04:56-PST Subject: Exploits of a real-life Indiana Jones >From “Giovanni Belzoni: Strong Man Egyptologist,” by Colin Clair. Belzoni was the worst of the antiquities plunderers of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. * * * * * * They made their way along a passage which tunnelled into the mountain, tortuous and irregular, the roof being in places so low that they were obliged to creep along on all fours. At length they came to a large space from which several more passsages branched off, and after some hesitation by the two Arabs they entered one of them, which was very narrow, long and craggy, and along this they slowly and painfully toiled until they reached a spot where two other apertures led to the interior. `This is the place,' said one of the Arabs to Belzoni, who could not understand how a large sarcophagus could possibly have been taken out through such a small aperture. That he was in a burial chamber he was quite certain, for they were continually walking over skulls and scattered bones. But that the sarcophagus could have entered so narrow a recess seemed quite impossible, for Belzoni himself could not get through. One of the Arabs and the interpreter, however, managed to squeeze through and it was agreed that Belzoni and the other Arab should wait until they returned. They had gone a good way, for all trace of their light had disappeared, when Belzoni suddenly heard a loud noise and the distant voice of the interpreter crying out in fright: `O mon Dieu! mon Dieu! je suis perdu!' Then complete and utter silence. Not knowing what had happened Belzoni decided to return to seek help from the other Arabs. Turning to the man with him, he told him to lead the way back, but the Arab, staring at him idiotically, said he did not remember the road to take. Belzoni called repeatedly to the interpreter, but got no answer. The situation was not a pleasant one. He made his way back to the open space where several passages branched off, but all were so alike that he could not decide which was the right one. He decided upon one, and along this they crawled, their guttering candles burning lower and lower, yet he felt it would be dangerous to put one out to save the other in case the remaining one were, by accident, extinguished. Just when they thought they were nearing the outside they found themselves nearing the outside they found themselves up against a blank wall; they had taken the wrong passage! There was nothing left for it but to return to the centre of the labyrinth and try again, after having made a mark on the passage from which they had just emerged. Every moment of delay was dangerous, for their swiftly diminishing candles would soon leave them in the dark.... ------- Date: Wed 17 Feb 88 14:33:34-PST Subject: The NBC news theme tune. Bee-bom dee be DUMB, be bomb dee-dumb. I can picture the executives, having decided that a new theme tune is necessary: EXEC A: OK we need some real music this time--no CBS clanking teletype music. It comes over the statue of liberty or something--no stupid electronic maps. We'll keep it American. Bill, what's American? EXEC B: American music? You mean classical or something? EXEC C: I don't know, Gershwin? EXEC A: Is there anyone else? Bill? EXEC B: I dont know, uh... EXEC C: Copeland! EXEC B: Who? EXEC A: OK let's get this guy on the horn. If he could write something short, something we can flash over the statue of liberty or a sea to shining sea, that would be it...who's his agent? EXEC B: He's not in the flex-o-line. EXEC C: I think he's dead. EXEC A: OK so we get something sounding like it, OK? Bill.... “Be dumb be dumb-dumb, be dumb dumb-dumb” ------- Date: Sun 28 Feb 88 15:27:42-PST Subject: Attempted Suicide E S E d u d I I I S u I c I u S I I I d u d E S E ------- You literary types--yo! Listen up. What's the most amusing corruption of a poem you can twist into a description of a computer? I, for one, am tired of reading technical documents with quotations from Marcus Aurelius or lines from Blake heading a section on the method of steepest descents. Do technoids really believe that when Shylock asked “Is it so nominated in the bond?” he had computer network problems in distributed naming in mind? If not, why the quotation? Is it because it's really just too embarassing to write a technical document, and one feels obliged to demonstrate to the reader that he or she does more than just write technical documents, and in fact knows something as well? If we're going to cannibalize literature, I say let's do the job right. Milton, for example. Certainly his genius was never greater than when he anticipated the cathode ray tube in Paradise Lost. You remember the lines, of course: ...yet from those phosphors No light; but rather darkness visible... And could anyone fail to recognize the roots of the software crisis in Pope's Essay on Criticism? The lines were memorable: 'Tis hard to say, whether greater want of skill Appear in logic or in programming ill... Would R please explain what is meant by the phrase “do the nasty.” Of course it's not hard to stand on the sidelines and carp about other people's musical attachments. Just keep in mind that if anyone asks you what your own tastes are, the answer is “oh, I like all kinds.” Or say that you like jazz and immediately follow up with imaginary groups, perhaps Scarf McGuppy or the Norton Sampson quintet. It takes a strong person to admit he has never heard of the Norton Sampson quintet. There is a coolness factor and sometimes it can be hard to ante up. In the 70s it was at least enough to know that Steely Dan was a group and not a person. Animal, mineral or vegetable? That's a good way to answer when musical topics come up. In Transcendental Meditation they give you a personal mantra not to be repeated to anyone but the secret is that everyone gets the same one (ommmm...) If it is live classical music then a good comment is “the violas seemed a bit scratchy.” Which brings up the Sir Adrian Boult anecdote that everybody knows and which I won't repeat unless someone asks. In various newspapers of record (whatever that means), for example the Examiner, inferior to the Chronicle in its premature use of color yet superior in that the word “cigarette” is spelled correctly, the variant “cigaret” being the kind of sacrifice on the altar of efficiency and wood-pulp conservation at which one has to draw the line---now let's get a grip---in some newspapers, they have a section in which Area Crimes are summarized. It's a damn fine section, in my opinion. I had a one-time Physics tutor, Oxford-Cambridge-Coldstream Guards, who used to pop out with an abrupt "SPOT ON!" at favorable events and otherwise likable things/events, and the Area Crimes summary, were he ever to have seen it, would surely have qualified. There are lessons, for example-- the difference between robbery and burglary is that in the former the victim is confronted---but more interesting are the catchalls used for misdeeds in the none of the above category. For example the Menlo police report 6 cases of "Suspicious Circumstances" in the last week in that city. Maybe you are dining at a fine establishment, Su Hong or something more proletarian and just as you are about to pay, an unfamiliar man in spats appears and offers to pick up your tab. Say it happens again the next night at Star Pizza maybe, anyway, you get the idea---this is the kind of thing that pops into my head---"Suspicious Circumstances." It's only one possibility of course, and perhaps it's not a crime, but the police should probably be looking into it. The Menlo and Palo Alto police are not too busy anyway. I called them because I heard scratching noises outside our apartment and before you could say "Possum" the dispatcher assured me that she had "Three Units Responding." There were spotlights moving up and down the far side of the building and the critter was turned up soon enough. Imprisoned with hardened lawbreakers, that animal will never be the same again. This may not rank up there with the decipherment of Linear B or the discovery of Carbon 60 but surely the repeated occcurrence of “Who's the Boss?” at the top of the TV listings indicates a certain deficiency in the American Critical Facility (this is the proper term?). Or say we are to take the reins of some higher circle in Hell and we decide: yes, it would be good to have noise of some kind, let's not say 1/f noise or static but something irritating in a specific way, something that can really get on a person's nerves, let's say, yes, I've got it: Tony Danza. I think that is what we would decide. We might have Musak in the background or that man Tesh from Entertainment tonight fill in on weekends but it is clear that Danza would be the man for the long haul. There are words you cant quite call cliches but yet seem to come in Siamese adjunction with other words and phrases, and when J. Euclid writes of Thought and Mind control these are the expressions that come to mind---”Sacrilegious” “Ulterior Motive” etc... With every sentence is associated a certain information content and when phrases like “it is so political” arise the baud rate is dropping rapidly to zero. Someone said of Edmund Burke that he was a man with whom it was impossible to spend 30 seconds without the apprehension that he was extraordinary in some way. Hardy sought “Spin” and “Old Brandy.” My opinion of Edmund B.'s “The French Revolution” was (as I was reading it) yes, this is it, this is Truth, this is the clear view, I am persuaded. But in the encyclopedias it is remarked that “His views on the French Revolution must be disregarded,” etc... So what do you make of that? The Nebraska football head coach before Bob Devaney lost his job mostly because he liked to punt on third down. It was called a quick kick in those days, perhaps also in these days. In the time before the Forward Pass was King, defenses would often have all players within 5 or ten yards of the line of scrimmage. The quick kick would sail long over their heads and bounce for about 50 yards. More sports facts: 1) only the last guy on each end of the line of scrimmage can catch a pass. That's why receivers often line up one step off the line of scrimmage. 2) If a defender doesnt turn for the ball on a forward pass, he can't raise his arms to try to knock the ball down. It's called “face guarding” and in my opinion it should not be illegal, especially in the professional game where there is altogether too much tossing the ball around. It would also be kind of amusing to watch the deep safety chasing Jerry Rice, flailing his arms in the hopes of deflecting the ball. No one but Knitwear specialists seems to know about this rule (especially football commentators); often an interference penalty is called not because “there was contact before the ball arrived,” but instead because there was some insufficiently disguised face-guarding taking place. 3) In baseball with a runner at first base, the pitcher can only “throw to the bag.” That's why runners can lead off base so much. It's a balk if the pitcher throws to the first baseman when he is not at the bag. 4) In basketball a “closely guarded” player can have the ball for at most 12 seconds: 4 seconds holding it, 4 seconds dribbling, and then 4 seconds holding it again. It's supposed to be travelling if the (fixed) pivot foot leaves the ground before a dribbler drops the ball from his or her hand the first time. LM Boyd A phone call from the Swede, 7:00am, the middle of the night. The machine answers. The Swede is barking. "Pick up the phone. You won you miserable bitch. The lottery. It's on the TV. Listen to this..." It's a recorded voice: Dog---Thorn---Pisces.... Cheesecake---35---Spritzer.... so I'm thinking, that's it OK, but probably hundreds of people starte