Survey Says
Rick pointed out that in the poll accompanying this
Science News For Kids article, one in four schoolchildren picked Golem 1 as the best name for a robot vehicle. (Doubtless these children represent the brightest and best-informed quartile of the class.) Only Sandstorm was a more popular name.
Not a bad result, considering we were not actually mentioned in the article at all, which is all about fricking Sandstorm.
Easy Money
Today I made $20 (in the form of an Amazon gift certificate) for reading a poem at the Second Annual Poetry Jam at everyone's favorite think tank. It's sad how the librarian organizers have to bribe people to read poems. They also distributed $5 gift certificates liberally among the audience as door prizes. Between the readers and the audience, I think more than half the people there left with some kind of quasi-cash prize.
My poem was "Eddie Don't Like Furniture." Except that I could not find my tape of the poem, and I could not find the complete text on the Internet (at least, I don't think so), so I think I was missing a verse or two. But it was well received anyway.
Also today, I put fifty cents into a newspaper rack in an attempt to buy a Los Angeles Times. When I pulled on the door it did not open and made the little clunk noise that means, "Thanks for the fifty cents, sucker." I shook the newspaper rack angrily. It still did not give me my newspaper, but $1.75 fell out of the change slot.
This makes up a little bit for all the newspaper racks that have stolen my money in the past.
Googlet? Definiton?
There should be a sniglet meaning a word that is sufficiently
recondite that a Google search for that word mostly turns up dictionary entries, i.e., explanations of what the word means are more often sought and given than natural uses of the word.
Suggestions?
Update: Depending on how you count, it may be difficult for definitions to exceed natural uses of the word-- at most, they could roughly tie. If every instance of
reading a word can count as a natural use, then presumably only a subset of those will result in someone looking up the definition.
Upperdate: But that would be a very poor way to count. Probably it is better to count natural uses at the user, rather than the reader, and consider dictionary look-ups as independent of natural uses.
Big Blue Bus
I was not in love with the mass transit today.
First of all a #1 Big Blue Bus drove right by me without stopping at Fourth and Santa Monica. I guess that #1 Big Blue Bus stop does not count despite the big sign. Why does the bus not stop there after stopping at the seemingly-identical stand at Third and Santa Monica? I do not know. I walked a block west and got the next bus ten minutes later.
Then the bus took a horrifyingly long time to get to UCLA. Every light had to change twice before the bus crawled through. I'm not positive that driving a car would have been faster but it couldn't have been any slower. Walking would have been faster. I was half an hour late to my appointment.
Then on the return trip on the #3 bus we had to wait to get on the bus while the driver took his OSHA-mandated ten-minute break or something. Come on. Switch drivers! There's got to be a better way.
P.S. Movie trivia: the first bus to blow up in the movie
Speed is a Big Blue Bus. I forget what number it is.
Minor Tale of the Golem
I'm conscious that I don't actually tell many Tales of the Golem here. And this one may not be particularly gripping, but I was pleasantly surprised that Golem 1 passed its biannual smog test without any problems. Two years ago, the place where I took it told me that they would charge me twice the posted rate to test it, and their normal money-back-if-you-fail guarantee did not apply (but, to their surprise, the truck did pass).
This time I had to go to a test-only center. And the two people being tested in front of me both failed. But the big dirty black truck with the modified engine passed. Yay.
Since I was already past the deadline by which I should have done all this, I expedited the re-registration process by going to the AAA Automobile Club of Southern California. The AAA office is interesting because it is like a less sullen version of the DMV. Carpet on the floor, colorful paint on the walls. You still have to wait around in a holding area for fricking forever, but they are apologetic about it and thank you for waiting.
Meanwhile, the UCLA facilities people won't let us wash the truck at the bay where all the UCLA vehicles get washed. Boo hiss. But I found a hose-it-down-yourself car wash on Lincoln that is kind of fun to use.
Book Stick Thing
Okay, let's see.
You are a character in Fahrenheit 451. Which book would you choose to memorize to preserve it from the fire?My first thought was
Cat's Cradle which I usually say is my favorite book, but on second thought I'm going to go with
The Forgotten Revolution: How Science Was Born in 300 BC and Why It Had to Be Reborn by Lucio Russo.
Because, probably lots and lots of people would memorize
Cat's Cradle, but hardly anybody by comparison has read
The Forgotten Revolution or likes it as much as I do.
Plus, it's quite fitting, because if
The Forgotten Revolution is right, then European civilization really did go through a sort of Fahrenheit 451 scenario with the most important books being burned or lost.
Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?You
think that I'm going to say Buffy the Vampire Slayer. ("When times get tough he/ Just hides behind his Buffy/ Now watch him getting huffy/ 'Cause he knows that I know...") And I suppose there's some truth to that, but let's be realistic, how much do we have in common? Is there any future to our relationship? No, the girl only has eyes for vampires.
So, it might be more healthy for me to give up on the Slayer and get back in touch with Lisa Miller from
NewsRadio.
If television characters don't count, only characters from books, then... I don't think I'd call it a crush, but
Elizabeth Bennet seems like a catch, I'd date her.
Anyway, according to
Jurgen, every woman ever loved by a man was a fictional character. [rim shot]
The last book you bought is:Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris.
The last book you read:The last book I read any part of was
The Infrared & Electro-Optical Systems Handbook, Volume 1: Sources of Radiation.
The last book I read cover to cover was the Sedaris.
What are you currently reading?I'm a couple of pages from the end of re-reading
Slaughterhouse Five: Or, the Children's Crusade, A Duty-Dance with Death by Kurt Vonnegut... Wait... Okay, I just finished it.
I'm a few pages from the end of
Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice by James Branch Cabell. I guess this is American fantasy literature the way they wrote it in 1919, and boy, is it strange. I can barely imagine anything like that being written or published today. Pilgrims-Progress-style allegory has really gone out of style. Perhaps the writer closest to that style today would be Neil Gaiman. It isn't much of a coincidence that I decided to read
Jurgen after seeing Neil Gaiman and Michael Swanwick each mention their interest in James Branch Cabell.
I'm two hundred fifty pages into
Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, which means three hundred seventy pages to go. British fantasy literature the way they wrote it in 2001. I got it because it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award and it was nominated for various other awards. It's okay but I'm not really wild about it. I may not bother to finish it in the near future.
Perhaps I'll go back and finish
A Devil's Chaplain: Reflections on Hope, Lies, Science, and Love, a collection of essays by Richard Dawkins. I set it down six months ago (!) but I'm still conscious of it sitting there.
Five books you would take to a deserted island:Structures: Or Why Things Don't Fall Down by J.E. Gordon. Because I like it. And okay, it might be at least slightly useful in building a house or something on the deserted island. But I'm not going to fill the rest of my list with survival manuals and boat-building textbooks and so forth.
Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter. Because I think it is probably a rewarding book to read with close attention, and one could re-read it several times and still get more out of it. And if I might be stuck on this island for a long time...
History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, complete and unabridged in six volumes. To make double sure that I don't run out of reading material.
The Complete Novels of Jane Austen. Some lighter entertainment.
Lanark: A Life in Four Books by Alasdair Gray. Because I haven't read it and I guess I should have at least one thing along that I've never read at all.
I find it slightly amusing how many of these books had subtitles.
Who are you going to pass this stick to and why?No one, because although I sometimes enjoy taking these little quizzes, I don't like the chain-letter part where it demands that you go forth and multiply it, like a flu virus or an organized religion or a grandparent.
That said, if you want to supply your own answers, Constant Reader, who am I to stop you?
Maybe
Maribeth would like to do it.
An Odd Thing
When the clocks went an hour forward at 2:00 a.m. last Sunday, our VCR clock automatically adjusted to 3:00 right away. I happened to be awake and I saw it happen. But when I looked at it again a day later, it had reverted back from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time.
But now, three or four days later, it has corrected again and is back on Daylight Saving Time. Go figure.
The Smallest Possible Amount of Media Exposure
I thought that Golem would be in the April issue of
Popular Science and I was disappointed to flip through it at the newstand and not find anything.
Well, it turns out that I
did get a mention (page 38). In a text box with rather small print. Which is not mentioned at all in the table of contents, so that it can only be found by paging through the magazine.
For this article I first spoke to the
Popular Science reporter, then the fact checker called back. Among their distorted facts were, "in last year's race, you had a 2005 Dodge Ram," and, "what stopped you was that you had a speed limit such that you couldn't go more than 5 miles per hour." The funny thing about these statements is that not only are they false, but you can tell just by reading them that they are false. They could not possibly be true.
Oh well. At least they spelled my name right.
The Knights Who Say Ni
Last year on April 1, the RAND Corporation showed
Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, which demonstrated our keen sense of humor and that we could take a joke, et cetera, since
Dr. Strangelove makes fun of the "Bland Corporation."
So this year they tried to repeat the fun by showing
Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which, uh, doesn't make any reference to RAND whatsoever and thus doesn't make any particular sense as a choice, but uh, what the hell. Great movie.
Anyway. There I am in the middle of the day watching
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And I noticed that when King Arthur first meets the Knights Who Say Ni, he asks them, "What is
it that you want?" And later, the Head Knight Who Until Recently Said Ni says, "
It is a good shrubbery," and, "You must place
it here by this shrubbery." Only a few lines later do we discover that the Knights Who Said Ni are allergic to the word
it and they start making a fuss about hearing
it.
Remarkably, this is not yet listed as "trivia" or a "goof" in the Internet Movie Database. Although, unremarkably, some people have mentioned it on the great wide Internet before me.
