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Twelve Months, 850 Languages, 63 Fonts, No Waiting
Or: Thank God for Google Noto!


7/14/2021

Cleopatra Engraving642

It's the sort of thing where if you don't do it, somebody else
eventually will.

I'm talking about publishing a 470-page book that catalogs the names
of the months of the Gregorian calendar, and offers another 50,000
words worth of other fun facts and insights, for 850 languages and
dialects. The rarer and more exotic, the better. Many of these
languages could vanish at any moment, so time's a-wastin'.

*    *    *

x>R+metalsWay back in the dialup years, I started a site I called
Curious Notions. In the fullness of time, its features would include
a 70-scale temperature converter; an article describing the absolute,
hands-down rarest gemstone no one else seems to be writing about;
Mary Had a Little Lamb rewritten using only the left-hand letters of
the keyboard; the current distances to the sun and the moon, plus
their velocities, in real-time; and many others. Trivia and
significa, you might call it.

By 2010 or so it had also begun to display today's date in an
ever-increasing number of languages. An adjacent TV monitor icon on
some would link to a YouTube video to let you hear them.

As the entries in that latter section's database swelled into the
hundreds, I knew I had to channel that mission creep into a book
somehow. One where you get to see all twelve months instead of just
one at a time, but more significantly, get a closer feel for some of
the diverse cultures behind those languages. Out of a total of around
6000 spoken throughout the world, here would be 850 -- many of which,
largely unheard-of.

My close associate and severest critic, Kukisvoomchor, rose to the
challenge. Just like that 70-scale temperature converter, I assured
him, this book would be something unique.

Consort Now unlike a simple date display, the book would open with an
Introduction explaining its format and hinting at some of the
surprises in store. Each language in the main listings would come
with a profile describing it. Further on, there would be a section
called Lingo Factinos (What's a palochka? Is it dangerous?), a
Glossary (should you be unclear on the meaning of "dextrosinistral"),
and an Appendix (both to help out with the transliterations and, say,
to help you bone up on the names Zoroastrian Armenians used for each
day in the month). Finally, it would offer not one Index but two, for
those who know Sudovian as Yotvingian instead, and for others who
wish to check out the Uto-Aztecan language family all by itself.

Resources included online minority language newsletters showing
months in their mastheads, articles, localization tables (a gold
mine), cold contacts with university linguistics departments, YouTube
videos, minority language souvenir calendars, Wikipedia pages
(especially their foreign language versions), Peace Corps language
primers, tourist phrasebooks, and questions and answers posted in
online forums.

Dictionaries? Yes and no. We deliberately short shrifted most of the
major languages in favor of the exotic, endangered, or just plain
dead and buried. Most lexicons for those, such as they exist, aren't
anywhere big enough to accommodate such minutia as Gregorian month
names. Or maybe one will throw you a bone for February and April and
you'll need to use those to hopscotch to other sources. Or maybe this
other dictionary is just one-way, Abkhaz to Russian, say, and while
you may know Russian months, you have three hundred pages of
un-selectable image scans from which to pick them out. Ready, set,
go.

Certain underlying abilities do help out, like those to read and use
non-Roman scripts and transcribe into or out of them. A substantial
knowledge base also comes in handy, Londara as you can think of more
angles for your Google searches, better interpolate missing data
through deductive reasoning, and more confidently referee conflicting
sources. Trouble with Makassarese? You happen to recall Bugis is a
close relative and might solve your problem. New Church Slavonic's
uber-special psili pneumata diacritic renders like an ordinary acute
accent in the font you're using? You'll choose another font -- just
for that character -- to display the proper horizontal thumbtack
shape. Those sorts of things.

*    *    *

Kukisvoomchor owns neither Quark nor Adobe InDesign. This project
called for a different approach, anyway. While it promises 850
languages and dialects, it over-delivers on that. Assiniboine,
Chechen, Ingush, and Turkmen show alternate terminologies. That
boosts the total to 860 entries, two to a page. And they and the
indexes have to cross-reference each other like crazy.

Care to block all these out by hand, one by one? Because their
profiles can take up between one and five lines, and their month
entries might force rubberized line spacing, their total heights are
bespoken and likely to change repeatedly as you correct and revise.

True, you might have that nice, neat page perfectly cut in half, both
top and bottom sets offering three lines of profile info and month
lists using ordinary Roman alphabet text with no problematic
diacritics or other irregularities poking up or down.

But that didn't often happen and we didn't want it to. This book
needed to be a novelty. The more visually arresting and technically
challenging its typography, the better. Crazy Burmese ascenders and
descenders, Coastal Salish's diacritics aflutter, all threatening to
clobber each other into illegibility? Bring 'em on! Plus, to stay
lively and accommodate different types and quantities of information,
those profiles needed to vary in format.

Colorful Samples2


So in summary, we needed to:

1. Compose all those lists, two languages to a page, and apply global
or local corrections at will

2. Add and remove foreign writing systems as needed -- some coded,
others created as images

3. Switch entire language entries in and out when and where we found
worthier candidates

4. Despite many unusual challenges, achieve a typographical quality
that will surpass most of what's gone before in that genre

In the Bantu language Makonde, Kenga sombo sako ni nyundo gweka
undaona matatizo kwa stali zako. ("If your tool is only a hammer, you
will see all problems as nails.")

The nails: 470 pages, a total of 72,100 words. The tool: Several
thousand lines of PHP and pipe-delimited flat file data, all
hand-compiled.

Data Record For Komi. Since This Entry In The Book Incorporates
Images For Its Komi Script Content (which In This Case I Had To
Design And Draw Out By Hand), The Sixth Field Entry, "komi," Tells
The Program Where To Find Them. Komi's Month Names, Which Consist Of
An Image, The Cyrillic Term, And A Square Bracketed Transliteration,
Start At Field Nine. Below: The Result.Data record for Komi. Since
this entry in the book incorporates images for its Komi script
content (which in this case I had to design and draw out by hand),
the sixth field entry, "komi," tells the program where to find them.
Komi's month names, which consist of an image, the Cyrillic term, and
a square-bracketed transliteration, start at field nine. Below: The
result. Komi Page

Blank 642

With all that, assemble an arbitrarily long web page for a browser
window and save it out as a properly paginated pdf. Along the way,
dust off some HTML tools anathema to best web practices practically
since John Kerry got swift-boated: tables and inline CSS, to be
precise. LOTS of inline CSS. Even spacer gifs will get into the act --
to position the frontispiece and its mate at the back and to crank
out the required blank pages.

So it's up to your algorithms (that's an Arabic word) to grind out
all that outrageous code and allow you plenty of tweaking privileges
at the same time. This applies not only to your tabulated month
listings but all seven other sections mentioned above. Like that
proverbial mallard in the pond, you're effecting an elegant and
engaging read on top while paddling like mad underneath.

The body copy you see both here and in the book is set in Cardo,
designed by David J. Perry for epigraphers. These are biblical
scholars, archaeologists, and other academic types who need to write
out every conceivable character and diacritic from the extended Roman
alphabet, no matter how obscure, along with other scripts like
Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Greek, and Old Italic (for Etruscan, Oscan,
Picene, Messapic, whatever).

Italics So if you wonder why on earth Cardo offers 2879 characters,
there you go. Above, you can also see some of the artistry of Perry's
typeface -- the way his letterforms like f and g refashion into their
italics, and those ligatures for the many letter combinations like
ct, st, fi, fj, and so forth. That was exactly the timeless,
storybook-like quality we sought.

The book's remaining fonts cover the foreign scripts it needed, along
with the International Phonetic Alphabet. What we couldn't find, we
drew and displayed as images. Several of these scripts rarely -- or
practically never -- see print. As mentioned earlier, many needed a
lot more room above and below the line and threatened to overrun
their page's available vertical space. Those we gave negative margins
in CSS so they could freely overlap their upstairs and downstairs
neighbors and avoid wresting line-spacing control from their
accompanying text.

There have been adventures.

Someone in a forum asked about some advertising text in an
Arabic-looking script that may or may not have represented some other
language like Persian, Urdu, or whatever. Others also wondered. I
volunteered some quick rules of thumb to distinguish Arabic from
non-Arabic on sight.

Apparently, several readers excoriated me so abusively that the
moderators deleted all their comments -- which I never saw -- but left
mine untouched. My resulting minus-15 score from that imbroglio
slowly crept back up toward zero but never quite emerged into the
black.

Ubykh

Far cheerier was what took place when I contacted a translation
service to help fill in some of the blanks I had for Ubykh, an
extinct Northwest Caucasian language of mind-boggling complexity. As
shown above, they responded with a photocopy of that page from my
original edition. How flattered I was! But since there was no
progress, I've left Ubykh's entry out of the newer one. One hates to
be erroneous.

On several occasions, my joy in discovering an especially exotic
language crashed when I discovered it to have been concocted for a
novel or video game.

I should point out, though, that the Dalecarlian/Elfdalian used in
the game Minecraft and shown in the book on page 79 is rock solid. I
was corresponding with a Swedish-based advisor for my temperature
converter some years back. I digressed and asked if he happened to
know anyone who spoke Dalecarlian, a North Germanic language that
developed in relative isolation in his country. Why yes, he said, one
of his old college professors. That was my source for it.

Mascots

So, aqui lo tenemos.

As I write, The Twelve Months of the Year in 850 Languages and
Dialects: Second Edition is print-on-demand. That makes the physical
book's production cost higher than it should be, so we're working on
that. Meanwhile, there is a super-cheap pdf version available.

Book Photo

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30 billion years ago you lost your car keys.


10/22/2020

BangA But after overturning every couch cushion and checking through
your other pants and jacket, you found them 30 billion years minus 20
minutes ago. Could that be literally possible?

There's a variation on the Big Bang theory called the Big Bounce.
This one assumes there's enough dark matter-induced gravity in the
universe to slow its Big Bang expansion to a standstill, eventually,
and then reverse it toward what's called the Big Crunch. Ultimately,
the entire universe squeezes back into the dimensionless point from
whence it arose. Everything then starts out all over again with the
next Big Bang and the cycle continues, ad infinitum.

So here's my own variation ON that variation: The Big Rerun. For
that, each succeeding universe is absolutely identical -- down to
every elementary particle and atom, including you and me. Even time
itself is duplicated.

BangC There are all sorts of estimates for the cyclical period of any
hypothetical Big Bounce, but for the sake of discussion let's call it
30 billion years. The Big Rerun aspect of it means you are reborn and
live your life over and over, exactly the same way in every detail,
with 30-billion-year intermissions in between.

Since you're nonexistent most of that time, your memory doesn't carry
over and you have no way of knowing any of this is happening.

Now physicists normally scowl at perpetual Big Bounce scenarios in
general because they would violate the second law of thermodynamics:
As energy is transferred or transformed, more and more of it gets
wasted and, along with that, there is a natural tendency for order to
degenerate into disorder. Everything eventually decays and rusts
away, in other words, and that process cannot be reversed. One Bang
is all you get.

But really, could you trust any physical law, including that one, to
apply to an entire universe progressively crushing itself into an
infinitely dense point? Are you kidding? After all, some of the most
cherished physical laws break down even under the conditions of a
black hole -- a veritable Garden of Earthly Delights in comparison.

~~~

So maybe we're all immortal after all.

Thirty billion years seems like a heck of a long time to wait between
each rerun. But since the last Big Bang, about 14 billion years went
by before you were born. Did that bother you?

Bang Total

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Apocalyptic forest fires? Send in the drones.


10/21/2020

Fire DronesA You've probably read how the robot singularity -- that
is, the coming era when AI-driven automatons can perpetually maintain
and build more of themselves -- will make lots of pie-in-the-sky
macro-engineering projects feasible that would have otherwise been
entirely out of the question:

Recycling our landfill contents and gathering up all that plastic
trash clogging the oceans? Raising (or razing) 200-story buildings in
half the time without risking a single construction worker? Boring
transcontinental tunnels for supersonic coast-to-coast rail? Mining
asteroids on a mass production basis? Those kinds of things.

So just as reasonably, we could dispatch autonomous drones, by the
tens of thousands if necessary, to extinguish brush fires before they
annihilate everything still standing in the world's tinderbox
regions. Which they otherwise will.

If your opening requirement would be intelligent and exquisitely
precise positional control, fine. Do you think this should be good
enough?

Fire DronesB In principle, such drones would fill up on water from
the nearest lake, river, or ocean, blast it into the fire where it
will do the most good, then go back for more. Around the clock if
needed, until it's out.

~~~

For now, firefighting drones are still pretty novel and see most of
their action in showcased demonstrations. The balance of them
currently have to trail a fire hose to supply their water.

To transport their OWN water, they'll need to be both robust enough
to carry a useful supply of it and sufficiently autonomous to keep
refilling themselves and returning. Or maybe instead they could
organize into bucket brigades to service dedicated water-blasters
that remain on-site -- especially where the nearest drink is many
miles off.

Someday soon we'll be able to manage that. Then off they'll charge,
in huge, angry red swarms, quenching brush fires and penetrating far
more deeply and effectively into the flames while they're at it than
any human pilot would dare. And with radar, laser range-finding, and
other tools at their disposal, even the thickest smoke won't hamper
them.

Fire DronesC When their batteries run low, they'll either dock like
Roombas to the nearest charging ports or, better yet, send their
gofers out for fresh cells to switch in so they can operate without
interruption. It will all come down to how big a squadron we can
field at a time and supply with sufficient energy and water. We
already do that with our two-legged firefighters anyway, but more
wastefully by orders of magnitude and at the risk of their lives.

~~~

Of course we'll have to ground all flights in the area while they
operate. Humans in aircraft don't particularly enjoy missing drones
by mere inches every few seconds, but the drones themselves won't
mind that a bit.

Then once the fire is out, do you think maybe they might wait until
dark and choreograph their own aerial, multicolored light show in
celebration?

Fire Drones Total

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Half-baked idea No. 1:
Automated Snowbound Extrication System (SES) for cars


5/10/2020

Tire Whenever I'm in a wintry climate, I just love it when someone
comes in and complains, "My car is stuck in the driveway." Just hand
over the keys. I'm not any kind of mastermind and honestly don't know
any more about the subject than anyone else, but I CAN free a car
stuck in the snow, without external help, at least two thirds of the
time. Often after the owner has given up.

As long as there isn't pure glare ice under the tires or a steep
grade tilting away from where I need to exit, and as long as the
wheels can move the car at least a smidgen at the outset, chances are
good to excellent. It's just a matter of taking advantage of the fact
that snow is both movable and compressible.

You're creating a rut that gets longer and longer; now and again not
even by an inch, other times much more. You're also widening it from
the occasional turning. Eventually you have enough room to get the
running start you need, if you accelerate gingerly without spinning
the tires, to get out.

Nowadays many or most vehicles offer features like ABS and traction
control -- and in some cases can park and even drive themselves. So an
engineering team should certainly be able to develop software that
would not only get you out of a snow trap, but quicker and more
efficiently than any human driver.

The SES would be entirely hands-off. Just sit back and let the car do
its thing. With feedback from the wheels it knows EXACTLY when to
switch directions and how to steer. It figures in the
temperature-dependent consistency of the snow, jockeys between
reverse and forward gears so smoothly you can scarcely feel it,
feathers the acceleration to move the car as fast as possible at
mid-stroke without sliding, and perhaps even vibrates the suspension
or the wheels at times if that might contribute.

Snow200 Who knows, maybe it could stand a better chance with some of
the tougher cases described above. To deal with a patch of glare ice,
say, it would know how slowly to rotate the wheels* to maintain their
grip -- moving the vehicle an inch or less per second if necessary
until it's safely out. No telling what such a system might be capable
of. It would demand nothing beyond what the vehicle can physically
offer, but then combine that with super-human planning, calculation,
and precision.

Just get someone to push or call AAA? Motorists will invariably
maroon themselves in snow in the middle of nowhere, in deadly cold,
without passersby or an operating cell phone. An SES would literally
be a life saver.
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* Since no surface is perfectly frictionless, there will always be a
non-zero speed a tire can roll on it -- and pull a load -- without
going into a spin.

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Odd, entirely unrelated facts #6


5/31/2019

Patterson Veteran character actor Hank Patterson (1888-1975), best
remembered as Mr. Ziffel in the US sitcoms Petticoat Junction and
Green Acres (1963-1971), originally aspired to be a classical concert
pianist. One of his earliest appearances as an actor was in the 1939
Civil War film The Arizona Kid starring Roy Rogers and Gabby Hayes.
Since Patterson had gone essentially deaf by the time he was cast in
Green Acres, a dialog coach had to lie on the floor off-camera and
cue him by tapping his leg with a yardstick. Patterson's great niece
is actress Tea Leoni.

Maxpixel.netmaxpixel.net There is a condition known as Bonnet's
Syndrome. In its classical form -- typically triggered by a stroke or
other brain injury -- it causes halucinatory human or animal
characters dressed in brightly colored costumes, often wearing hats
and/or clownlike attire, to appear and move around. It occurs when
there's a gap in the visual field and the mind tries to fill it in.
Even while healthy and perfectly dope-free, many or most of us can
experience a super-mild form of Bonnet's Syndrome under certain
conditions while gazing for long periods at a blank surface. As the
visual receptors in the retina tire from lack of stimulation and stop
firing, the antics begin in the form of wavy lines, spots, or other
artifacts -- even cartoon-like characters.

Red Flower Speaking of hallucinations, there's a dark red variety of
honey from Turkey called deli bal. This "Mad" honey offers elevated
levels of the psychoactive compound grayanotoxin that gets in there
when its bees visit certain species of rhododendrons. Historically,
deli bal has been mixed with wine for recreational purposes and even
employed as a form of chemical warfare by soldiers leaving combs of
it around for their enemies to discover and consume. The honey can be
lethal to many animals. Though in large doses it can pose a danger to
humans in the form of abnormally low blood pressure, nausea, blurred
vision and slowed heartbeat, fatalities have been rare.

Guy The term "guy" for a boy or man -- and less formally, it seems,
for pretty much anyone -- was inspired by Guy Fawkes, who famously
tried to blow up the English Parliament in 1605. Similarly, the word
"kid" originally referred only to a baby goat. The surname Kidd, as
in the famous captain-cum-pirate William Kidd (ca. 1645-1701), shares
that derivation. The word began to appear as a slang term for a child
in the 1500s and by the 19th century was firmly established as such.
Bob Keeshan, who played Captain Kangaroo on a children's TV show from
1955 to 1984, strongly discouraged people from referring to children
as kids as he felt it demeaned them.

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I have a theory about that


3/21/2019

Credit: Gage Skidmore CC 3.0Credit: Gage Skidmore CC 3.0 1.
High-profile deniers of climate change, and by extension the enormity
of environmental despoilment in general, are for the most part aware
of the real situation. The most influential among them tend to be
industrialists involved with fossil fuels, uncontrolled logging, and
similarly destructive and unsustainable enterprises.

They're just being fatalistic and working to maximize their fortunes
while they can. They know full well that by the time conditions
become untenable they'll either be lavishly retired or dead. Publicly
they characterize the environmental problem as a "liberal" myth or
hoax, since that's literally the only way they can explain themselves
without leaking their true motives.

2. All human behaviors, no matter how aberrant at one end or noble at
the other, are part of an extremely intricate, collective survival
strategy that has refined itself over millions of years. The
rationales for some behaviors such as childhood bullying and how they
contribute toward that goal might be hard for us to explain readily --
nature doesn't care how well we understand it -- but ultimately
there's a functional purpose for them.

3. Physiognomy, the pseudoscience of determining personality traits
from one's facial features, has long been discredited. But there's
such as thing as reverse physiognomy. To a greater or lesser extent,
people unconsciously tend to adjust their behavior to correspond -- at
least in a stereotypical sense -- to their appearance.

4. Some say only humans are conscious and self-aware. Others extend
this talent to their dogs and other cherished mammals; others, to
those blackbirds that steal quarters from car washes; and so forth.
So where does the line get drawn? Most likely, nowhere. All living
things are conscious. The cockroaches. Your potato crops. The very
grass you walk on.

We now know, for instance, that trees and other plant life enjoy a
range of senses that don't necessarily correspond to ours, that they
respond actively to their surroundings, and that they communicate and
issue danger warnings to each other at least electrically through the
soil and chemically through the air. Caltech researchers have
recently shown that even humans can sense magnetic fields, so there
may well be biospheric information traffic in that realm also.

Stopwatch What obscures our realization of that consciousness is our
sense of time. To trees, we move at best in a blur if not invisibly.
An hour to a human is like a minute to a tree. Think of that science
fiction trope of the hero drinking a magic potion that speeds him up
so much that the rest of the world and everyone else in it appears to
freeze. This allows him, provided he doesn't get lazy and linger in
one spot too long, to rob that bank unobserved.

Flies, for example, are the opposite. A few seconds to us creaks
along more like a minute to them. That's why they're so hard to swat.
The best strategy here is to take advantage of a fly's sped-up time
scale. If you approach it from the front, ve-e-e-e-ry slowly, it
can't perceive the movement of your hand because it's thinking too
fast. When you finally get within a few inches of its head, where you
might even see it start to wonder what your game is, WHACK! It will
notice you then, but too late for it to turn around.

5. If all you care about is losing weight, all diets, from the most
hair-brained to the soberest, AMA-sanctioned, "work." The theories
and philosophies behind them may differ wildly, but they all force
you to restrict your menu choices and, in many cases, eat foods you
wouldn't otherwise. This adds an element of monotony and
predictability that makes eating a less pleasurable activity than it
was before. Your appetite falters and you take in fewer calories.
Even if it's as little as a 10% difference, this adds up over time.

Goat So you'll go ahead and chow down on those rice cakes, watercress
sandwiches, bananas, and blanched artichoke hearts all washed down
with iced organic goat milk. You might seriously compromise your
health on some of those diets, but in any case the pounds will melt
away. Then you'll eventually tire of whatever diet you got sucked
into and your body will return to its original state. The only real
solution would be to readjust your microbiome -- specifically the
proportions of the hundreds of varieties of microbes in your GI tract
-- but the science isn't there yet.

6. Upon meeting, for the first time, a politician running for state
or federal office, ask one question: To the best of your knowledge,
would the policies you favor decrease or increase income disparity?
Those falling into the first category will say so immediately. The
others will evade the question.

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Some clerihews


11/26/2018

bentley The clerihew was named after its inventor, novelist Edmund
Clerihew Bentley (1875-1950). It's a biographical quatrain, rhyming
aabb, with the subject at or near the top.

Original by Bentley:

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

My own answer to this might be something like:

Said Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
"I'm going out for linguini.
If you must brush off entreaters,
Say I'm designing St. Peter's."

Ornament Separator Let's try these out:

No right to an attorney

Chieftain Vercingetorix
Gained nothing from his rhetorix.
Caesar listened to him
Then he slew him.

Imhotep

Imhotep the vizier
Could scarcely have been busier,
Nor any project grandioser
Than his stepped pyramid for Zoser.




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Animals calling in Latin


9/13/2018

Geta Geta, Roman Emperor between 209 and 211 CE, liked to quiz people
on the finer points of language and grammar. From the section of
Augustan Histories discussing him, this would be his answer guide for
the Classical Latin terms that refer to the noises various animals
make. In English, for example, we would say dogs bark and ducks
quack.


Bears                 urcant
                      1. stridunt
Birds, small          2. pipiunt
                      3. zinzilulant
Blackbirds            1. zinziant
                      2. grocant
Camels                blatterant
Cows                  mugiunt
Dogs                  latrant
Ducks                 tetrissitant
Elephants             barriunt
Frogs                 coaxant
                      1. gingriunt
Geese                 2. glicciunt
                      3. sclingunt
Hens, when incubating glocidant
Horses                hinniunt
Lambs                 balant
Leopards              1. feliunt
                      2. rictant
Lynxes                urcant
Mice                  mintriunt
Owls                  cuccubiunt
Panthers              cauriunt
Peacocks              paupulant
Rams                  blatterant
Shrews                desticant
Snakes                sibilant
Sparrowhawks          plipiant
Storks                crotolant
Swans                 drensant
Weasels               drindrant
Wild boars            quiritant
Wolves                ululant



A few of these verbs reference the name of the animal. For example,
the word for bear was ursa/vrsa, peacock was pauo/pavo, and to us a
hinny is the foal of a stallion and a female donkey. Also, as snakes
hiss, sibilant is the modern English term for any hissing sound in
speech like S or SH.

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Odd, entirely unrelated facts #5


8/18/2018

Glider Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was a glider pilot in her
early years, concentrating on long distance tows. Her accomplishment
of a record 200-mile-long tow in 1931 became the inspiration for the
troop-carrying gliders used in World War II. For that she was honored
with the Bishop Wright Air Industry Award in 1984.

The woman feeding the birds in the 1964 film Mary Poppins was played
by Oscar winner Jane Darwell, best remembered as Ma Joad in The
Grapes of Wrath from 1940. Walt Disney brought her out of retirement
for the role. She had originally planned to be an opera singer.

Lysol disinfectant was first introduced in 1889 to combat a colera
epidemic in Germany. Drinking Lysol was cited as the single most
popular suicide method in Australia in 1911. From the late 1920s
until the availability of "the pill" in the 1960s, watered-down Lysol
was widely used, albeit mistakenly, for birth control. Ads from the
era aimed toward married women say, reassuringly, "Yet needs no
poison label!"

We English speakers don't say "oneteen, twoteen" for eleven and
twelve. That's because we rely instead on old Germanic terms for "one
left" and "two left" describing those extra items beyond ten. All
Germanic languages follow this pattern (for example elf and twaalf
for Dutch), then revert to the logical sequence for thirteen
through nineteen.

Anchovy The Caesar Salad was invented on July 4, 1924 at the San
Diego eatery owned by Italian-American restaurateur Caesar Cardini
and his brother Alex. It originally called for croutons, romaine
lettuce (whole leaves that were meant to be eaten by hand), coddled
egg, Parmesan cheese, olive oil, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and
black pepper. Cardini himself always insisted anchovies not be added,
since the macerated anchovy in the Worstershire sauce sufficed.

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My name is Weena. I work Tuesdays and Thursdays


5/15/2018

Weena You hear this all the time: "Hi-tech is where it's at! You
folks who can't find good work, my best advice to you is this: Hit
the books. Go back to school and pick up some of those shiny new
computer-oriented 21st century skills so you can compete in today's
job market. Speak SQL, Python, and jQuery and you'll be able to write
your own ticket!"

Really? Let's take a look. For this or that individual with certain
types of aptitudes, such a thing might well be worth looking into. In
terms of making so much as a dent in our ever-growing double whammy
of underemployment and income disparity, though, it's snake oil.

The fundamental purpose of automation is to turn out the same goods
and services faster and with ever-fewer resources, especially the
two-legged kind. Cost-cutting is always good. If we don't do it, our
competitors will.

But a looming disaster out there threatens to destroy us, and it's
right on schedule.

We're entering the Post-Work Era, courtesy of Artificial
Intelligence-driven robotics. You can talk of "skill gaps" and
retrain people this way and that way, but without a drastic
restructuring of the economy and of society as a whole there will be
absolutely no work for most of the population well before
mid-century.

Picture Chuck's Chewy Chocolate Easter Bunnies, LLC, circa 2030, run
with excruciating efficiency by Chuck, Jamie the accountant, and a
couple of programmers, Chris and Sandy. A gang of self-repairing
robots out on the factory floor expertly crafts hundreds of styles of
rabbits, hares, and similarly cute rodents in twelve varieties of
chocolate and loads them into a fleet of drone trucks for
round-the-clock delivery.

Aside from the executive compensations in the front office,
production costs now consist almost solely of raw materials and
energy.

Poverty 200 In a free market, most personal livelihoods derive from
inefficiency. Get rid of that, and there won't be any work for C3EB's
customers and consequently nobody -- aside from Chuck, Jamie, Chris,
Sandy, and an ever-shrinking clique of equally lonely fellow
entrepreneurs -- to buy its products. And as natural market forces
continue apace, get rid of it we will.

We'll see driverless trucking within the next several years -- some
predict even by 2022. As I write [Update: 2020], Amazon's delivery
drones have just been certified by the FAA. In the US, trucking
currently employs 3.5 million people. Construction, equally destined
to cybernize, another 9 million.

Now further, guess who will fulfill those orders before they leave
the dock, maintain our infrastructure, and recycle all our trash. And
what will become of the garment workers who currently stitch up our
Dockers? Or the assembly line personnel who build our Ford Fusions
and convert our cows into Big Macs? Humans out, robots in. And when
people lose their wages, there goes the market.

So here's that restructuring: Through corporate taxes, pay everyone a
minimum, unconditional stipend -- nowadays referred to as a Universal
Basic Income (UBI). What you're doing is spreading the benefits of
all that efficiency more evenly, at least enough so everyone can
maintain an acceptable standard of living whether there's a job
available for them or not.

Income Chart
Since the same goods and services are pouring out the door as before,
in ever greater quality and abundance, there's nothing artificial
about those paychecks. At its core, wealth -- hence, money -- is
productivity. See that ever-growing gap bridged by the green arrow in
the chart? That's where your UBI comes from. It's the income
redistribution that will deliver us from oblivion.

A UBI, for example, would have allowed us to weather the COVID
epidemic and shorten its duration drastically. It would cushion the
financial impact of earthquakes, hurricanes, and fires. It would have
your back as a default disability insurance and eliminate the need
for low-income-oriented social programs. It would also encourage R &
D, like orphan drug development, that wouldn't necessarily see an
immediate profit.

But here's where things get even better. We'd still have
rank-and-file employment, but most of it would lean toward the
concierge-oriented, human touch end. The very thing technology has
been progressively robbing us of.

Jack and Sally would ride with the Chuck's Chewy Chocolate Easter
Bunnies drone truck to meet and shoot the breeze with its customers
along the route. In hospitals, where perfectly attentive automatons
lift, bathe, monitor, and otherwise attend to their patients (and
yes, whereWaiter Pouring Wine AI-driven hardware performs surgery far
more intricately, swiftly, and reliably than any human could),
staffers could devote themselves to the fun jobs. Cleanup in Room
413? No human required. A comfort crew could circulate to say hello,
natter with the patients, arrange the flowers, man the string quartet
in the lobby, wrangle the visitors, and even (gasp!) answer some
phones.

Phone greeting jobs, in fact, may well see a renaissance and displace
most of that depersonalizing "If you'd like a company directory,
press 9" we'd so much like to get rid of anyway. To keep involuntary
unemployment as low as possible, many work weeks would get
super-short. You might show up for two hours a day, or maybe all day
but only on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Or if you're happy with your UBI or simply despair of finding work,
never. People will work because they want to, not because they must.
We'll lead a poverty-free existence resembling that of Weena and the
rest of the Eloi in H.G. Wells's 1895 novella The Time Machine and
its movie adaptations -- but only in its best parts. There won't be
any Morlocks to eat us and also, unlike our vacuous analogs, we'll
still create, wonder, learn, care, explore, and love just as we
always have.

Now we'd expect most objections to a UBI to fall into one of four
categories:

1. Ideological: It's simply wrong to pay people "not to work."

2. Pragmatic but misguided: We don't have the money to do that.

3. Fear: Those corporate taxes will kill us.

4. Defeatist/Fatalist: Human greed will never let it happen.

The answer to the first would be, fine. You're perfectly free to
forfeit your UBI, but don't come crawling back when you get automated
out of your livelihood and can no longer keep the wolf from the door.
Plus that money doesn't just vanish. As its recipients spend it on
goods and services, it circulates through the economy over and over.

Number two is what I call ceteris paribus ("all other things being
equal") thinking and it's a common knee-jerk habit among political
regressives. For proposals like a UBI, they'll scream bloody murder
over the front-end cost and ignore the trillions we currently spend --
on all the social programs and attendant bureaucracies -- that it
would displace. We do now and will even more in the future have
sufficient resources to keep everyone alive, well, and reasonably
comfortable if we care enough to.

Number three is the first cousin of number two. Many assume higher
taxes are always bad and that all other things remain equal. But they
aren't and they don't. In this case, our rate of return on those
taxes is effectively infinite since they sustain an entire economy
and avert a dystopia. That's good.

For four, the only thing that matters is the net quality of your
life, not how much money you have. Your kazillionaires will sacrifice
a few commas and zeros from their income streams to support those
heavier taxes. But because of their marketplace positions, they'll
still land the biggest bucks and their personal living standard will
remain higher than average and similar to that to which they were
accustomed. Even cushier, actually, what with self-sufficient robots
at everyone's beck and call, including theirs.

Weena Space

However well it works in practice, idyllically or less so, sooner or
later we'll be forced to implement a UBI or the economy will simply
implode. Best to start easing into it now. Pay everyone, say, $600
monthly to start and $800 next year. The longer we wait, the more
painful the transition. I'll bet other societies throughout the
universe, such as they might exist, have had to deal with this very
same challenge.

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Odd, entirely unrelated facts #4


5/12/2018

Human head hair grows at, typically, four-tenths of a millimeter per
day. If you have 100,000 hairs, that comes to about 40 meters (130
feet) of hair you're extruding every 24 hours. A finger nail grows
only a quarter the speed of a hair, plus you have far fewer of them.
In total, your fingers and toes collectively produce a bit over a
millimeter of nail each day.

Kjv The King James Bible was published in 1611 before English
spelling was standardized. Consequently a word like he could also
appear as hee or hie. The letters U and V were being distinguished
from each other by this time, though in the opposite way we
eventually settled on: trust was spelled trvst, live was spelled
liue. There was no distinction between I and J, though for Roman
numerals with trailing units the final I was printed with that curve:
xviij. The project took about seven years. By year three the 50-odd
translators still hadn't been paid for their work so they went on
strike until The Most High and Mightie &c himself relented. The first
edition was received poorly.

It's not you: For all practical purposes the human body per se does
not generate disagreeable odors. Those such as bad breath, sebaceous
and apocrine body odor, the sulfurous components of intestinal gas,
and that swamp foot you reel back from when you finally get to take
your shoes off at the end of the day are compounds excreted instead
by the many varieties of microbes that live with us symbiotically. We
depend on some of those thousands of species and sub-species for our
survival as quite a few of them process nutrients we wouldn't
otherwise be able to absorb while others defend us against attack
from pathogens.

Awww...Awww... Researchers at Arizona State University have determined
experimentally that puppies are at their cutest (to humans, anyway)
at around four months of age. That's also approximately when their
mothers wean them. Since domestic dogs, even those who have gone
feral, have depended on human contact to thrive as a species, this
ability to bond with us at an early age likely evolved as a survival
benefit. As reinforcement, many domestic varieties have been either
consciously or unconsciously bred to retain a childlike appearance
throughout adulthood. Even wild canines such as foxes, when
experimentally domesticated, sport floppier ears and more rounded
snouts after only three or four generations. Nature's pulling a mind
game on us!

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Pop culture factinos on Richard The Third


5/9/2018

OlivierOlivier I've just finished publishing the lipogram section on
Curious Notions. Since its last entry involves my shameless
butchering of William Shakespeare's Richard The Third, I thought I'd
share some notes I collected sometime back on the play's film
versions. There have been at least four motion pictures based more or
less directly on it (1912, 1955, 1995, and 2008) along with a number
of others focusing on various parts of the story.

WaltonWalton The absolute barnburner among all of these is 1955's
Richard III starring Laurence Olivier (who also produced and
directed), Ralph Richardson, Claire Bloom, Cedric Hardwicke, and John
Gielgud. Sir William Turner Walton, who collaborated with Olivier on
three other films, wrote the score for Richard III which like some of
his others is so towering it's more often than not performed and
savored entirely on its own.

HardwickeHardwicke Sir Cedric has always been one of my favorites. He
shows up in approximately eighty films, and I particularly enjoyed
him in Richard III as well as in Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Ten Commandments.

He also appeared on TV in the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episode Wet
Saturday as a patriarch sanitizing a murder scene his snivelling
daughter threatens to blow the lid off of, and on the original
Twilight Zone as the tyrannical Uncle Simon who builds Robby the
Robot so he can continue browbeating his niece in proxy from beyond
the grave. His son is Edward Cedric Hardwicke, now 78, Lord Stanley
in the 1995 film version of Richard III.

Young soon-to-be-murdered Edward V was played in the 1955 film by
Paul Huson who, most atypically, went on to establish himself as an
authority on the occult and write a number of books on it.

PricePrice Vincent Price starred as King Richard in Roger Corman's
1962 Tower of London in which he gleefully smothers his nephews
played by Eugene Martin (who like Paul Huson above still busies
himself in film if not necessarily witchcraft) and Donald Losby
(later a familiar face in many TV shows of the 60s and 70s).Richard
Signature

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Little Hollywood story No. 3: To Willy Loman


4/27/2018

Way back during the Carter administration I sold encyclopedias
door-to-door in Los Angeles. Or to be more precise, I rarely sold
encyclopedias door-to-door in Los Angeles.

Farrah I had been shopping my art portfolio around town in those
days. I wrangled interviews with such disparate prospects as the
studios of Saul Bass, a company making shower curtains looking for
someone to design their patterns, the Farrah Fawcett Fan Club, and a
white goods store where the sales manager staged a phone call for my
benefit as I entered his office ("Is he worth it? No? Then GET RID OF
HIM!!" ). I also got a letter from Larry Flynt Enterprises inviting
me to drop by but chickened out just in time for him to get shot.

Now this particular help wanted directed me to the Taft Building at
the corner of Hollywood and Vine, across from the Pantages Theatre.
The Taft is best known for having housed the Hayes office that
enforced the Motion Picture Code from 1930 to 1968. For the job:
Young folks right out of school welcome? Check! No experience
necessary? Check!

They held a five-day class for us to practice our pitch on "Mr and
Mrs Jones," then cut us into groups who would pile into cars each
midafternoon and fan out to young, childbearing neighborhoods
calculated by the Home Office to be at least slightly less hostile
toward door-to-door peddlers than usual. At the time, Monty Python
had aired a piece showing "an unsuccessful encyclopedia salesman"
(obviously a mannequin) leaping from a high-rise. Ho, ho.

When you canvass "the field" for hours and hours, knocking on doors
by the dozen while simultaneously trying to remain invisible to
apartment managers, your chief preoccupations come down to water and
restroom opportunities. We couldn't be direct while introducing
ourselves, which would have been, "Hi. I'm selling a set of
encyclopedias for about six hundred forty dollars, growing to maybe
twice that if you opt for easy monthly payments that go on forever.
May I come in?"

Rather, you were there to talk about education, to "ask a few
questions," to reply "I can help you out, there" should they
explicitly demand to know what you're up to, and to reveal the
contents of your increasingly wondered-about satchel but only if you
can get into their living room and adjudge them "qualified" (meaning
did they have a phone and a checking account at the very minimum). We
strove to be scrupulously honest, though, and never say anything that
wasn't, at least technically or obliquely, true. At one presentation
I gave to a couple, the wife gave a little smirk and said, "Hmm.
Every time we ask you a pointed question you give us a non-answer.
I'm a lawyer and I give non-answers for a living."

Downtowngal [CC]Downtowngal [CC] I only averaged a half dozen or so
sales a month, though I do recall one couple in particular who did
readily sign on the dotted line. In sales, you grab onto what's
handed to you. The husband mentioned he had recently arrived from
Egypt. I brought up my childhood King Tut-nuttery and also asked him
how on earth you pronounce those mysterious emphatic consonants S and
D and T and Z in the Arabic alphabet. Sold!!

Epiphany: The sort of people who would appreciate our Merit Students
Encyclopedia -- which was, quite honestly, wonderful -- already owned a
set of Britannicas or the like plus typically dozens or hundreds of
books beyond that and therefore had no need for it, while those who
could have benefitted the most were of the incurious type who
couldn't care less which side their spleen was on, how fast
hummingbirds beat their wings, or why the capital of Bolivia has such
little use for a fire department.

Like 98 percent of the people who sign on, I saw the futility of
trying to scrape by on about eighty dollars a week and quit long
after I should have. As it happened I would revisit the Taft Building
a couple of years later, to have two wisdom teeth pulled by a Sayeed
Ali, DDS, also late of Egypt, while I was working on the TV series
Buck Rogers. Through the miracle of the modern Internet, I now know
Clark Gable also went to a dentist there.

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Low counterparts of things usually high


12/22/2014

Low treason Rebelling against one's boss or, if a slave, one's master

Low explosive An explosive, typically a gunpowder, whose expansion
velocity is generally subsonic

Low Holy Days Celebration periods in the Jewish calendar of secondary
importance, such as the Shabbat Hagadol and Yom Rishon Hagadol

Low energy physics The areas of physics not directly involving
atomic-scale dimensions, substantial radioactivity, or
relativistic speeds

Low Sierra The Sierra Nevada region in the western U.S. of medium
altitude -- 7000-8500 feet (2100-2600 meters) on the east side and
3000-7000 (900-2100) on the west. This is the sole habitat of the
celebrated sequoia.

Low CLowC The note two octaves below high C or one below middle C,
sounding at approximately 130.813 Hz*. Expressed in technical
literature as C [3], this is also the lowest note on the viola and
the banjo.

Low German Alluding roughly to altitude, the West Germanic languages
and dialects spoken in northern Germany and some eastern regions of
the Netherlands. Less formally the term can expand to include Dutch
and Frisian and their dialects.

Low temperature superconductor A substance that needs to be cooled to
30 K (-243 degC or -406 degF) or lower to conduct electricity without
resistance. In other words, the easier superconductors to procure
since any metal will superconduct if you get it cold enough.

Low tension line Informally, a power line carrying 1000 volts or
less. (The high tension Ekibastuz-Kokshetau line in Kazakhstan holds
the world's record at the other extreme, 1.15 million volts.)

Low horse The figurative position of someone boasting or arrogantly
making an assertion, but doing so while intoxicated or relying on
faulty information. (Not especially common, but attested at least as
far back as 1930.)

Low altar A secondary, shorter altar in a house of worship placed
forward of the main (high) altar. As the officiant can stand between
the two and face the congregation, the structure can serve as a kind
of lectern. In a temporal context the term can refer to a coffee
table or a low-slung chest of drawers.
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* Here's how you arrive at this number: Take the twelfth root of 2,
raise it to the 21st power, then divide that result into 440 (the
standard frequency of A [4]). This is because C [3] is 21 half steps
below A [4], and in our 12-tone even-tempered scale each half step
multiplies (if going up) or divides (if going down) a frequency by
the twelfth root of 2.

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Odd, entirely unrelated facts #3


5/11/2014

A man named Quintus Pompeius Senecio Roscius Murena Coelius Sextus
Julius Frontinus Silius Decianus Gaius Julius Eurycles Herculaneus
Lucius Vibullius Pius Augustanus Alpinus Bellicus Sollers Julius Aper
Ducenius Proculus Rutilianus Rufinus Silius Valens Valerius Niger
Claudius Fuscus Saxa Amyntianus Sosius Priscus was appointed Roman
consul in 169. His name repeats "Julius" three times and "Silius"
twice. He was known as Quintus Pompeius Senecio Sosius Priscus for
short.

Peach Melba (peaches served with raspberry sauce and vanilla ice
cream) and Melba toast were named after legendary soprano Nellie
Melba. Born Helen Porter Mitchell, she had chosen her stage name to
honor her birthplace of Melbourne, Australia. Melbourne had in turn
been named after British Prime Minister William Lamb, 2nd Viscount
Melbourne, whose title referred to Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire, UK.
That site's name evolved from an Old English term for a mill stream
or spring and was first mentioned in the Domesday book of 1086.

Ivy Baker Priest William Windom, great grandfather of TV actor
William Windom (My World... and Welcome to It), was U.S. Secretary of
the Treasury in 1881 and from 1889 to 1891. Ivy Baker Priest, mother
of actress Pat Priest (best known for having played Marilyn on The
Munsters), was U.S. Treasurer from 1953 to 1961. Ivy Baker Priest
appeared as the mystery guest on the TV show What's My Line? in
August 1954.

You often see old-time newsreel footage of what was originally
represented to be the Titanic departing for America in which there
are spooky blobs wiggling around on surfaces where you would expect
to see the name of the ship. That's because all genuine moving
footage of the Titanic's departure and voyage was lost with it along
with its cinematographer, first-class passenger William Harbeck. To
sidestep that inconvenient detail the newsreel producers of the day
took footage of its sister ship Olympic and had someone paint out its
name frame-by-frame. It's theoretically possible that any nitrate
film at the wreck site is still physically intact and viewable,
should anyone manage to retrieve it.

Two anagrams of "Ronald Wilson Reagan" are "No, darlings, no ERA law"
and "insane Anglo warlord." An anagram of "Reaganomics" is "A con
game, sir."

Kerosene was originally marketed as a substitute for whale oil in
lamps. It's a mixture of molecular chains containing between 6 and 16
atoms of carbon, more or less. Gasoline, whose carbon chains average
about 20 per cent shorter, was originally discarded as a worthless
byproduct of kerosene production though some was bottled and sold off
at the time under the trade name Petrol as an effective -- if
horrendously dangerous -- head lice cure.

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Little Hollywood story No. 2


11/1/2013

One busy Friday evening I found myself working the cash register at
the Hamburger Hamlet at 6914 Hollywood Blvd, right across from Mann's
Chinese Theater.

Promotional Still From 20th Century Fox (1970)Promotional still from
20th Century Fox (1970) To the left you see Rex Reed and Raquel Welch
negotiating that very same eatery's terrazzo steps about eight years
earlier, so you can do the math. Back then you had to phone in
customers' credit card numbers to validate them and then do your
ka-chunk ka-chunk with a mechanical imprinter. Hamburger Hamlet was
founded by actor Harry Lewis (you might have seen him in the film Key
Largo as one of Edward G. Robinson's henchmen, the one who keeps
making the wisecracks) and his wife Marilyn.

Now a week and a half before, I had thrown in the towel from the
strain of that very same job at the Pasadena outlet. The
stroke-inducing pace of it, not to mention my inability to scarf down
my complimentary dinner fast enough that after a few interruptions to
ring up more customers the food would still be there when I ran back,
had done me in. The manager said she was sorry I had quit and all,
but her Hollywood counterpart Omar had no cashier to work that
particular night and so could I please, please drive over there and
come through for them just this once.

It turned out to be a singular experience.

LewisLewis Like me, Omar had lately arrived from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Small world. Both he and his senior waitress were glad to help out
when my work load got out of hand. There was also plenty of
bittersweet diversion. A customer went wild in the bar section and
police had to be called to help Omar eighty-six him, a garishly
made-up woman sat at the counter nursing her coffee and muttering to
herself ("They told me I was going to be an actress..." one could
speculate) for almost five hours before she left, and at around
half-past ten two cars collided just outside and their drivers exited
and started duking it out.

When the disturbance threatened to work its way toward our front door
Omar got ready to lock it. At that point I noticed the bottom glass
section had been boarded over, which he explained had taken place
earlier in the week when a potential customer crashed through it an
hour after closing time to ask for a hamburger.

Ornament Separator
Other memories of that same corner linger, like the time the Popeye
cast and crew had my yellow VW Rabbit towed away late one night while
I was watching their competition Flash Gordon at the Chinese.

Rabbit I had parked it legally enough on Orange Drive. But to
accommodate the limousines shuttling celebrants to the Popeye wrap
party I knew nothing about, the management installed temporary NO
PARKING -- TOW AWAY signs along that stretch shortly thereafter while
I was inside the theater ogling Ornella Muti.

Choice #1: Commit to a midnight stroll twelve blocks northeast to my
apartment and then see to getting the car back the next day, likely
with added storage fees. Side streets, dark, no witnesses.

Choice #2: Brave a similarly unnerving trek southward, but this time
only ten blocks, to the impound garage. (The facility stood just
across an alley from where many of us had produced art for a Star
Trek movie, but I was in no mood to reminisce.)

I yielded to #2, plus the eighty-dollar extortion. The attendant, a
lanky, bespectacled sort in a white short-sleeved dress shirt, lept
between me and the car and did the windmill thing with his arms to
make sure I didn't try to escape with it.

Coda: Popeye was critically panned.

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"The untrue contriving eftsoons of another feigned lad"


8/5/2013

Edgar The AEtheling Was One Busy Beaver.Edgar the AEtheling was one
busy beaver. Timeline mission No. 5 takes us to the Kingdom
of England.

First of all, William the Conqueror did not directly succeed his
former ally and dinner companion Harold Godwinson. Edmund Ironside's
teenaged grandson Edgar the AEtheling ("throne-worthy") actually held
the strongest genealogical claim to the English throne back when
Edward the Confessor died childless in January of 1066. But the
committee of Anglo-Saxon nobles known as the Witan adjudged him too
young and instead crowned Harold, Edward's brother-in-law.

It took 71 days for William to kill Harold at the Battle of Hastings
on 14 October; subdue Dover, Canterbury, and Winchester; and then
hack his way to London to take the crown on Christmas. During that
interval the Witan -- albeit with waning enthusiasm -- recognized Edgar
as King.

Ironside To Rufus B

William took Edgar back with him to Normandy in 1067. Edgar wouldn't
reign over much of anything for the remaining sixty years of his life
-- though scarcely for lack of trying. Alternating between
throne-seeking and running for cover, pledging fealty and then
reneging, his peregrinations continued roughly as follows: to
Scotland in 1068; England, 1069; Scotland, 1070; Flanders, 1072;
Scotland again, 1074; later, back to England; to Sicily and Italy in
1086; Scotland again, 1091; back to Normandy, then England, and
finally back to Scotland by 1093; England again, then Scotland in
1097; Jerusalem (Why not?) in 1102; Normandy, 1106; and finally back
to Scotland in 1120 to die peacefully around 1126.

Ornament Separator

Rufus To Henry Iiic

England came very close to crowning its first female sovereign upon
the death of Henry I. Henry's eldest legitimate son, William, had
drowned in 1120 when his vessel foundered in the English Channel.
Daughter Matilda consequently moved to the front of the line. But
when Henry succumbed to his legendary "surfeit of lampreys" in late
1135 Matilda was busy in France and his nephew Stephen of Blois
stepped in before her supporters could stop him.

15th Century Rendering Of Queen Matilda, Whose Resume Also Includes
Holy Roman Empress As She Was Henry V Of Germany's widow15th century
rendering of Queen Matilda, whose resume also includes Holy Roman
Empress as she was Henry V of Germany's widow Stephen was a usurper,
granted, but otherwise a pushover. "When traitors saw that Stephen
was a good-humored, kindly, and easygoing man who inflicted no
punishment," the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle tells us, "they committed all
manner of horrible crimes." Stephen had his hands full putting down
one rebellion after another. During a six-month gap you can see in
the circle above, Matilda's forces imprisoned him and proclaimed her
as Queen. Moneyers of Stephen's era muddled the legends on their
coins to avoid the personal risk of taking sides.

Stephen declared his son Eustace co-regent but outlived him. A
similar situation played out with his successor Henry II and his son
Henry, Jr., remembered as The Young King. Louis the Lion (later Louis
VIII of France) claimed the throne in 1216 while King John still had
four months to live; but 10,000 silver marks and other fabulous
prizes persuaded him to renounce it in favor of Henry III.

Ornament Separator

Henry V Elizabeth I Skipping forward a couple of centuries we can
spot the musical chairs between Henry VI and Edward IV and then the
brief showing of Edward V, the elder of the two princes in the Tower
of London widely believed to have been murdered by order of
usurper Richard III.

In the second circled area we find Henry VII fending off his own
insurrectionists. Intrigues against Henry tended to involve pre-Tudor
holdovers who hoped to reverse his victory over Richard III at
Bosworth Field. Rationales grew out of revisionist scenarios
featuring the Tower Princes and/or the Earl of Warwick and other
second-stringers. The two standout pretenders were Lambert Simnel and
the "feigned lad" of Henry's description in our title,
Perkin Warbeck.

Henry VIIHenry VII Simnel's supporters crowned him "Edward VI" in
Dublin on 24 May 1487 and passed him off as the 17th Earl of Warwick,
whom Richard III had supposedly anointed as his rightful successor.
All this was news to Henry who, last he checked, was holding the real
17th Earl of Warwick in the Tower. Henry's forces trounced Simnel's
on 16 June at the Battle of Stoke Field. Realizing the ten-year-old
Simnel was little more than a Yorkist puppet, he pardoned him and
gave him a job in the royal kitchen.

Perkin Warbeck fared less well. In 1491 word reached Henry that
Richard Duke of York, the younger of the Tower Princes, had somehow
survived and vowed to overthrow him. The Royal Army captured Warbeck
in Cornwall in 1497. Henry put him and his wife under a kind of
honorary house arrest on the palace grounds; but when Warbeck abused
that leniency by dusting off his old plot and scheming with the
[genuine] Earl of Warwick, Henry hanged them both.

Ornament Separator

Charles I George Ii The lilac bar highlights the singular moment in
English history -- late October 1683 to early February 1685 -- when
eight past, present, and future autocrats lived simultaneously. It
skips over "James III" and "Charles III" who were pretenders and
therefore show striped reigns.

Richard Cromwell succeeded his father Oliver as Lord Protector and
held the post for almost nine months, but his heart wasn't in it and
he yielded to what ultimately resulted in the Restoration. Since
Richard lived to the age of 85, his "career ratio" (time in office
divided by total lifespan) hits the lowest of any undisputed English
autocrat at 0.008. Henry III, who ascended the throne aged 9 years
and 18 days, still holds the highest at 0.861.

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"I am but a simple priest."


4/4/2013

A Cool Looking But Totally Imaginary Portrait Of Benedict IXA
cool-looking but totally imaginary portrait of Benedict IX Our fourth
timeline machine installment will examine the Roman Catholic popes --
also known as bishops of Rome.

Since these chronologies lack any real precision up until the year
1000 or so, I won't graph anything before that. Where records show no
birth year, I'll approximate a pope's pre-accession interval by
assuming the average age of an electee (about 64 years) and shade it
in green stripes. Again, pretenders -- within this genre known as
antipopes -- will show blue-striped terms.

Let's first zoom in to the very prince of pontifical chaos and
mayhem, Theophylactus. He was a scion of the Tusculuns, the richest
and most powerful family in Rome at the time. Popes Benedict VII and
VIII; John XI, XII, and XIX; and Sergius III were paternal uncles.
His father installed him as Pope Benedict IX (second bar from the
top) in October 1032.

Benedict Ix Graph2b

In 1036 an opposing faction drove Benedict out of Rome for the short
time approximated by the tiny green gap. John, Bishop of Sabina,
ousted him unequivocally in a bloody coup in September 1044 and
reigned as Sylvester III. But Benedict was just warming up. He raised
an army, and by the following April retook the papacy. Come May,
though, he had second thoughts and sold it -- for around 20,000 troy
ounces of gold, according to some sources -- to his godfather John
Gratian who became Gregory VI.

But Benedict returned later that same year. The record doesn't say
whether or not Gregory got his money back, but in either case
Benedict considered himself Pope again. (I'm giving him antipope
stripes for this period because Gregory continued to be recognized.)
In December 1046 the Council of Sutri ejected both Gregory and
Benedict and installed Clement II. When Clement died from lead
poisoning a year later, back came Benedict. He enjoyed another eight
months until he was deposed for good, in favor of Damasus II, on 17
July 1048.

Pope Streak C1240 The interval highlighted by the thin lilac bar to
the left is unique as it saw one sitting and 16 future pontiffs
living simultaneously. You can also see that among them Celestine IV
served only 17 days before he died in November 1241.

This graph also shows two major vacancies. The first, between the
death of Clement IV on 29 November 1268 and the election of Gregory X
on 1 September 1271, remains the longest on record at 1006 days.

Up until this era the cardinals would deliberate intermittently on
papal candidates but otherwise go about their daily lives. But by
late 1269 the French/Italian deadlock had dragged on for almost a
year, so officials of the host city of Viterbo sequestered them.
Further along they snatched the roof from the building to let in the
rain and cut the occupants' menu choices to bread and water. Two of
the cardinals present during this ordeal died and a third cited
health problems and resigned.

Papal Western Schism2b

The celebrated Western Schism opened in 1378 when the Catholic church
split into two factions, that of Rome and of Avignon, and each
recognized its own pope. In June 1409 Pisa got into the act and three
popes coexisted during the time shown by the darker highlight. Though
the Schism is generally recognized to have ended with the election of
Martin V toward the end of 1417, Avignon-based Benedict XIII flipped
the Council the bird and kept up his pretense until he died at 95.

Further antipope shuffles continued until almost 1450, which included
two Benedict XIVs in succession. Both were Antipope Benedict
XIII partisans. The first, born Bernard Garnier, operated from a lair
and died sometime in 1430, at which point the four cardinals he had
created elected a successor who awarded himself the same name and
Roman numeral. Some accounts have this Antipope Benedict XIVb
captured by [at that point former] Antipope Clement VIII in 1433 and
spending his last days imprisoned in the Chateau Foix.

Celestine V: Ordered Never To Retire, But Did It AnywayCelestine V:
Ordered never to retire, but did it anyway As we've learned from
recent news stories concerning Benedict XVI, papal retirements are
rare -- some 3.5% of the total -- and usually involuntary. Excluding
antipopes, the timeline machine reports the following:

Benedict IX's nemesis Sylvester III (~6534 days), Benedict IX himself
(~2907 days), Gregory XII (837 days), Martin I (821 days),
Benedict IX's godfather Gregory VI (~560 days), Celestine V (523
days), Benedict V (376 days), John XVIII (a few months or less),
Silverius (~3 months), and Pontian (~2 weeks).


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They made me... Tsar! (Yeah, that's it.)


3/26/2013

Where would Russian art, literature, and opera be without the Time of
Troubles (1598-1613)?

Ivan Susanin, Hero Of The Time Of TroublesIvan Susanin, hero of the
Time of Troubles England's Henry VIII had nothing on Ivan the
Terrible, whose own family values ran, as far as his wives were
concerned, as follows.

Anastasia: Believed poisoned by Boyars
Maria #1: Believed poisoned by Ivan
Marfa: Accidentally poisoned by her mother
Anna #1: Infertile, and so banished to the nunnery
Anna #2: Banished to the nunnery, later tortured to death
Vasilisa: Forced to watch her paramour impaled, then off to the
cloisters
Maria #2: Figment of someone's imagination (Ivans?)
Maria #3: Survived (but wound up in a nunnery anyway)

Three of those valiant souls produced eight children, but out of that
brood only Feodor and Dmitry survived their dad. The elder Feodor
acceded, but though adored by his subjects he was incapacitated in
vaguely documented ways and entirely ineffectual.

Russian Streak00 His brother-in-law Boris Godunov graciously filled
that power vacuum and, upon Feodor's death at 40, seized the throne
officially.

Ivan IV's younger son Dmitry most likely met his end through
Godunov's henchmen in May 1591, but once Godunov himself was out of
the picture three Dmitry Ivanovich impostors emerged in rapid
succession to exploit that ambiguity. Among them False Dmitry I was
by all accounts the most convincing, but ten months into his pretense
a mob shot him, cremated him, then combined his ashes with gunpowder
and fired him out of a cannon aimed toward Poland.

For the record, Russia also saw its largest royal crowd-sourcing
during this era with ten simultaneously living emperors and
emperors-to-be between 12 July 1596 and 7 January 1598. (I'm
generously including Irina Godunova, Feodor I's widow, who in
principle served as empress for about a week before checking in -- by
her own volition, in this case -- to another nunnery.)
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Russian Endb Here's a chart extending from 1755 to the present,
showing the last six Russian emperors and arguably a few more. Again,
pretenders -- more fairly referred to in this case as claimants, since
all carry unassailable pedigrees -- are indicated by stripes on their
styled reigns.

Grand Duke MichaelGrand Duke Michael In an alternate universe, Russia
would have had a democratically elected Emperor: Grand Duke Michael
Alexandrovich Romanov, youngest son of Alexander III, who would have
been Michael II. When Nicholas II abdicated on 15 March 1917 at the
Pskov railway station he signed the throne over to his son Alexei
("Baby"). Toward midnight he had second thoughts in light of Alexei's
hemophilia, though, and shifted that onus to brother Michael with a
decree backdated to 3 PM. The latter immediately made it known he
would only accede on the condition that the Russian people agree "by
universal, direct, equal and secret suffrage."

Russian End Closeup96 Nicholas had been conceding most of the old
Divine Right orthodoxy lately and might eventually have approved. In
any event Michael found himself under several variations of house
arrest and imprisonment over the next few months. Finally, despite
his wife Natalia Brasova's repeated personal appeals to Lenin,
Trotsky, and other Bolshevik officials, five secret police agents
rousted him from his hotel room and shot him on 12 June 1918. Natalia
lived, first in London and then Paris, until 1952.

Next: The Vatican

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Too many Carolingians


3/17/2013

Homage To Clovis Ii I couldn't resist the temptation to run my
graphic timeline machine (which you'll recognize from the previous
blog entry) on chronological listings of autocrats in past centuries
to see what kinds of patterns pop out.

US presidents past, present, and prospective can play hardball but
unless they've had a very bad day tend to draw the line at intramural
murder and kidnapping. Royalty and nobility haven't always been quite
so circumspect -- or until the last century stood such a fighting
chance against serious injury or disease -- so let the fun begin. For
educational purposes only, of course.

Let's start with France.

French Streak01 Carolingian France shows a logjam of seven
simultaneously living kings and future kings between 867 and
approximately 882. For reference, you're seeing the last half of
Charlemagne's 46-year tenure at the top.

From 867 through most of 877 there was Charles II and kings-to-be
Louis II and III, Carloman II, Charles the Fat, Odo, and Robert I. By
882 Charles II and Louis II were gone but Charles III the Simple and
(possibly -- his birth year is a wild guess) Rudolph Rudolph had
come aboard.

Having weathered this entire period, Robert would finally get his
chance but reign a scant 352 days before being killed by the forces
of his predecessor Charles III. Charles himself lost that battle,
though, and spent the rest of his days in a dungeon.
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French Streak02b

Jumping forward eight and a half centuries, here are the last hundred
years of the French autocracy. Its other two periods of
seven-stacking occurred at that time: 1785-1793 (Louis XVI, the
theoretical Louis XVII, Napoleon, Louis XVIII, Charles X, Louis XIX,
Louis-Philippe) and 1811-1821 (losing Louis XVI and XVII and gaining
Napoleons II and III).

Louis XVI and his family made a break for the Austrian border in June
1791 (Marie Antoinette was a sister of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II)
but he was recognized from his portrait on all the coins and hauled
back to Paris. He remained king, at least officially, until 21
September 1792; so his "retirement" from that point until his date
with the guillotine lasted 122 days.

Louis Xvii B Royalists recognized his sole surviving son as Louis
XVII. The boy succumbed in captivity to tuberculosis on 8 June, 1795
and chief surgeon Philippe-Jean Pelletan preserved his heart the
following day; but for the next couple of generations dozens of
claimants came forward as Le dauphin perdu. Some of them spun some
pretty good yarns. Over the holiday season of 1999-2000 mitochondrial
DNA from Marie Antoinette's hair and from that heart was compared by
two independent laboratories and the samples matched as closely as
one would expect between mother and child.

In the second lavender area you can spot the musical chairs between
Napoleon, Louis XVIII, and Napoleon II ("King of Rome"). It's
interesting to note Napoleon's cumulative exile (2487 days) ran fully
two thirds the length of his career as emperor (3709 days). The
second Napoleon, twice emperor but both times probably unaware of it,
spent the balance of his life in Austria and died at 21
of tuberculosis.

"Henry V""Henry V" The gray ellipse indicates the singular moment
during the July Revolution of 1830 when, with the encouragement of
angry mobs, Charles X abdicated and Louis-Philippe and his supporters
took to the throne. Some recognized Charles's son Louis Antoine as
Charles's successor Louis XIX. In any event the son abdicated some
twenty minutes into his own supposed reign in favor of his nephew the
Duke of Bordeaux who, until his death in 1883, stood by as pretender
Henry V.

Next: The Russian Empire

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So many presidents, so little time


3/6/2013

First 9

Unlikely as it might seem, there have been four separate moments in
history during which no fewer than eighteen U.S. presidents -- former,
sitting, and future -- were all living. The first nine presidents of
the longest (1479 days) of those streaks are pictured above; the
remaining nine, at the bottom of this entry.

Here's a chart I generated starting on the left side with the 1732
birth of George Washington and extending to 2016 when President
Omama's second term finishes and assuming all four of his current
living predecessors stay that way.

Green indicates lifespan; blue, terms of office. (Note the two
separate blue blocks in Grover "Big Steve" Cleveland's timeline where
he bookended one-termer Benjamin Harrison.)

President Chart Indicator2 The lilac bar highlights that 1479-day
period. It extended from Grover Cleveland's birth on March 18, 1837
to William Henry Harrison's death on April 4, 1841. The following
were alive at that time: John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin
Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, James Polk, Zachary
Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James "Old Buck" Buchanan,
Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, U.S. Grant, Rutherford Hayes, James
Garfield, Chester Alan Arthur, Cleveland himself, and
Benjamin Harrison. A touch wider and it would have taken in Madison
and McKinley.

The chart yields some other intriguing perspectives. One thing you
can see in there, for example, is that when Abraham Lincoln was born
(1809) all his future predecessors except George Washington were
still alive. Warren G. Harding would be the first U.S. president
after Lincoln not to have had a living memory of him.

On a related subject, the following presidential siblings or
half-siblings aside from those of Barack Obama and George W. Bush are
still with us as I write: Bill Clinton's half-sister Sharon Lee
Pettijohn (born 1941) and brother Roger (1956), George H.W. Bush's
sister Nancy Walker Bush Ellis (1926) and brothers Jonathan James
Bush (1931) and William Henry Trotter "Bucky" Bush (1938), Richard
Addison Ford (1924), Edward Nixon (1930), and Jean Kennedy Smith 
(1928).

Second 9




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Odd, entirely unrelated facts #2


8/25/2012

John B. "Jack" Kelly, Sr, perhaps best remembered nowadays as the
father of actress and later Monaco princess Grace Kelly, won three
Olympic gold medals for rowing during the 1920s. As a brickwork
contractor, he ensured payment by secretly installing a sheet of
glass inside his clients' chimneys to block the draft. When the check
cleared he'd have an employee drop a brick down the chimney from
the top.

Ja Da The title song from Arlo Guthrie's 1967 album (and later 1969
film) "Alice's Restaurant" exactly parallels, in its phrasing and
8-measure structure, the 1918 song "Ja-Da" by Bob Carleton. If you
play them together they harmonize and counterpoint precisely.

Actor Eddie Albert first appeared on television on 6 November 1936
for a live presentation of his 40-minute play "The Love Nest." The
show, also featuring the Ink Spots and comedian Ed Wynn, emanated
from Radio City in New York at 346 lines of resolution. ("Green
Acres" premiered almost 29 years later on 15 September 1965.)

History's first charge card transaction took place on 8 February 1950
at Major's Cabin Grill adjacent to the Empire State Building in New
York City. The party consisted of attorney Frank McNamara, loan
company executive Ralph Schneider, and press agent Matty Simmons who
later founded The National Lampoon. The card was Diner's Club (#
1000).

Author, commentator, spy novelist, and National Review founder
William F. Buckley, Jr's first language as a child was Spanish. His
second was French.

Incandescent light bulbs convert only a small fraction of their
energy input to light, but that extra energy isn't necessarily
wasted. If the bulbs are indoors and the weather is cool enough for
the furnace to run, they simply share some of that burden. Modern
LEDs generate virtually no heat, but that can actually be a problem
for such applications as traffic lights since during the winter the
snow and ice won't melt off.

Ushabti Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan was such an enthusiastic
archaeology buff he rarely hesitated to help himself to any little
treasures he'd come across. Throughout his lifetime he amassed a
spectacular collection this way. Shortly after the Six-Day War of
1967 Dayan sneaked alone into a dig near Holon, south of Tel Aviv, to
try his luck. The dirt caved in on him, leaving only one hand
visible. Children happened onto the hand sometime later and directed
rescuers to dig him out.

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Little Hollywood story No. 1


6/16/2012

Cigar Smoker Back in 1986 I was working at an animation facility in
Burbank, California when we got a job to design and shoot a bunch of
writhing pink tunnels for the live action fantasy film Howard
the Duck.

I won't mention names, but a certain concern in northern California
had more work than it could comfortably handle at that moment and so
farmed this project out to us through our art director on the
condition that we keep the whole thing a deep, dark secret and expect
no screen credit. Plus there would be hell to pay if they could see
any "ridging" (superfine stripes caused by equipment vibration or
rattle) in the textures on the final product. The code name they
instructed us to use for the film was "Huey."

It was an exasperating effort involving half a dozen of us but we
eventually turned out between 20 and 30 tunnel sequences and several
of them wound up in the final film. I had high hopes for "Huey"
because I remembered the title character as the wry, cigar-chomping,
wisecracking waterfowl not entirely dissimilar to Bobby London's
Dirty Duck who appeared regularly in the National Lampoon's funny
pages during the 70s.

Shortly before Howard the Duck was released to the public we were
welcomed to attend a screening at the Alfred Hitchcock Theater at
Universal City. The room was packed and I was told Stephen Spielberg
was in attendance.

Some Of Our Blood And Sweat: Input Form For Our Huey Specific Motion
Control SoftwareSome of our blood and sweat: input form for our
Huey-specific motion control software Now being perfectly aware of
how much blood and sweat go into making a movie -- whether it turns
out good, bad, or indifferent -- I always try to find something to
like and appreciate when I watch one. Howard the Duck certainly did
have its moments, and I think so even more to this day. But you could
hear a pin drop in there at times when it was obvious we were all
supposed to be laughing. As we filed out at the end there was a lot
of polite murmuring.

The next day at work we were saying things like, "That's OK, the
kids'll like it!" and "Boy, there was a lot happening in that movie,
wasn't there?" As everyone knows, the film went down in history as a
spectacular failure. The trade magazines tried to outdo each other by
brandishing headlines like "HOWARD THE DUCK, A NEW BREED OF TURKEY,"
"THE DUCK LAYS AN EGG," and so forth. Rumors even flew that Universal
production heads Sid Sheinberg and Frank Price literally got into
fisticuffs over who had been more to blame for greenlighting Howard
in the first place.

One of the more amusing aspects of this was something Michelle
Pfeiffer said in a 1990 issue of People magazine: "You know, I look
like a duck. I just do. And I'm not the only person who thinks that.
It's the way my mouth sort of curls up or my nose tilts up. I should
have played Howard the Duck."

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Buckminsterfullerene, lab rats, and you


5/1/2012

Rats Plus Buckyball_a Feeding laboratory rats purplish
buckminsterfullerene-infused olive oil makes them live twice as long.

At least that's the observation published by researchers recently at
the University of Paris-Sud. In their experiment one set of Wistar
rats went olive oil-free, the second set got the oil alone, while the
third had their olive oil enriched with buckminsterfullerene.

Rats Plus Buckyball_b Median lifespans came out to 22 months, 26
months, and 42 months respectively. One lucky participant in the
third group lived 66 months -- pretty much a Jeanne Calment-like
record for any rat. For further details you can go here, here, here, 
here, and for the complete technical account by the authors,  here.

Rats Plus Buckyball_c Buckminsterfullerene, named after futurist and
geodesic dome pioneer Buckminster Fuller, is a form of carbon
consisting of a spherical shell of 60 atoms. They're arranged into 20
hexagons and 12 pentagons identical to the pattern on a regulation
soccer ball. C [60] was first prepared in a laboratory at Rice
University in 1985 but since then it's been found to occur naturally
in small traces in soot and meteorites. It's odorless and flavorless.

Over the intervening 25-plus years an entire technology has
flourished around fullerenes in general (buckyballs in sizes aside
from just 60), graphene (individual chicken wire sheets of carbon
atoms) nanotubes (that same chicken wire wrapped into cylinders), and
other novel carbon-based geometries. These substances are exhibiting
some pretty unusual properties, to put it mildly, and they've been
creeping into virtually every branch of science and engineering.

Now that these lab-generated fullerenes and their kin threaten to
take over the world, the experimenters at Paris-Sud and others have
rightly wondered if some or all might be toxic in some way. Remember
asbestos? Dioxins?

At least in terms of C [60] and as far as their rats are concerned,
the answer seems to be the exact opposite. Of course it's possible
that what's beneficial during the lifespan of a rat might be
deleterious -- or for all we know at the moment, even fatal -- over
longer periods of time in humans.

So, where would you (hypothetically, of course -- for your, uh,
"rats") get this stuff? What does it cost? What different varieties
are there, and what do they look and act like?

All about buckyballs

Philosophers Stone Fullerenes appear whenever you vaporize carbon in
an inert atmosphere. The team of Sir Harry Kroto, Robert Curl, and
Richard Smalley at Rice produced the first samples of C [60] in 1985
by firing a pulsed laser at a spinning graphite disc under
pressurized helium. They shared the Nobel prize for chemistry for
this work in 1996.

But the method of choice nowadays involves zapping an electrical arc
between the tips of two graphite rods, also surrounded by helium but
under a partial vacuum. A fullrene-rich soot builds up on the walls
of the chamber which technicians then mix with toluene, filter, and
then process through a device called a chromatograph that sorts the
components according to their differing flow rates and colors (deep
purple for C [60], then gradations through red for C [70] and orange
and gold beyond that).

Most of the output emerges as buckminsterfullerene, C [60], followed
a distant second by C [70]. A tiny remainder yields other sizes in
the 60s, 70s, 80s, and beyond. Both C [60] and C [70] form dark brown
crystalline solids. They don't dissolve in water, but rather in oils
and in organic solvents like the toluene mentioned above and benzene
and ethanol. A liter of either olive oil or ethanol will dissolve
about 8/10 of a gram.

Wistar Rat In principle any pioneering chemicals like fullerenes are
assumed toxic until proven otherwise and so handled under strict
protocols. As all these years have worn on, though, technicians
blessed with anything less than superhuman diligence have undoubtedly
ingested them. Had any dropped dead or even sickened noticeably it's
certainly been kept a secret.

The cosmetics industry has been hawking products containing
fullerenes for some years now, though independent analyses have
revealed the actual content of some representative samples to be
stingy if not downright homeopathic -- on the order of a microgram or
less per gram of lotion.

Safety testing with fullerenes for internal use has more work ahead
of it, but at least one early observation is encouraging. The
buckminsterfullerene in the rats at Paris-Sud passed completely
through their systems and out within a couple of days. Whatever free
radical-scavenging and/or other effects it had, it did its thing and
then politely excused itself.

Choose your color

Rat Enhancement Chart2a In an ideal world in which fullerenes of all
sizes were available at reasonable cost, you'd want to run a similar
but far more exhaustive set of lab rat experiments trying out each
C-something separately to find the holiest grail.

Smaller than C [60] they get increasingly unstable, though some
parties claim they can produce and store (how cold and for how long,
I don't know) fullerenes down to C [36]. In the other direction they
grow in size by even numbers, well into the hundreds and
theoretically into the thousands.

Right now our world is less than ideal and realistically speaking you
can get C [60], C [70], C [76], C [78], and C [84] and little else
unless you have influential friends in the nano business. Prices vary
according to your bulk discount and the degree of refinement you'd
like, so for comparison purposes let's stick to 1-gram lots at 99% or
so purity.

Fullerene Prices So C [60] isn't bad right now*, but C [70] costs ten
times as much and the last three belong in a vault someplace. This
appears to reflect the proportions of each you get through that
catch-as-catch-can carbon arc technique. But fortunately there are,
or presently will be, a couple of loopholes around this.

A less refined product called fullerene extract, consisting of a lot
of C [60], a little C [70], and traces of the others goes for bargain
rates of around $13 per gram. This is what comes out of the chamber
after it has had all its non-fullerene riffraff filtered out but
before it undergoes its final separations.

If at some point this extract could be left with its C-number
imperfections but otherwise cleaned up to pharmaceutical standards,
it should still come in at a very reasonable price. (At worst the C 
[70]-plus still in there would just be deadwood. Or better, maybe it
will turn out those varieties are just as effective as C [60] or even
more so.)

The second thing to consider is that the buckyball industry is
getting more crowded and competitive by the week. Other production
methods waiting in the wings should prove vastly more economical and
it's just a matter of time before market pressures force one or more
of those to come on line.

One stellar candidate involves firing a near-ultraviolet laser at C 
[60]H [30] against a platinum plate. The chemical C [60]H [30] is
basically an unwrapped buckyball with hydrogens lining the edges,
called a polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon or PAH, and relatively easy
to prepare. The combination of the laser and the platinum catalyst
makes the hydrogens pop off and the remaining carbon cage snap itself
closed into a C [60] molecule.

Moreover it's expected different varieties of these PAHs will sire
different-sized, made-to-order fullerenes. Then we could get going on
that multicolored olive oil trial described above.

* Averaged over the 17-month experimental treatment period, the
Paris-Sud lab rats effectively partook of 1.3 milligrams of C [60]
per kilogram of body weight per month. Assuming a typical adult human
weighs about 75 kilograms, an equivalent monthly dose at this unit
price would come out to around $3.10.

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Please note that CuriousNotions.com does NOT make any medical claims
for fullerenes, does NOT recommend their consumption in any form by
humans, and assumes no responsibility arising from any adverse
effects that may occurr from such exposure or consumption. Always
consult a medical profesional before using any supplements and
proceed under competent medical supervision.


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Oh no, not another ivory-billed woodpecker


5/28/2011

The other day while I was driving I saw something flutter through the
air that I thought was so important I immediately pulled over, got
out, and backtracked half a block.

Ivory Billed Woodpecker By Theodore Jasper (1888)Ivory-billed
woodpecker by Theodore Jasper (1888) It was an enormous woodpecker,
mostly black but with small white markings and a head with a
scarlet crest.

Now the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis) has been
presumed extinct for decades and was officially declared as such in
1994. About every couple of years the papers will carry a story about
an alleged sighting of them. The ornithological community will then
furrow its collective brow and examine all the evidence, but so far
its skepticism has prevailed.

As in the case of Bigfoot and the Tasmanian tiger, there are also
some infuriatingly ambiguous photographs and sound recordings making
the rounds. Cornell University has an outstanding offer of $50,000 to
anyone who can lead their researchers to an indisputably living,
breathing ivory-billed.

The bird alit on the trunk of a honey locust next to the road and
started its rapid thonk-thonk-thonk, but it was cagey enough to stay
on the side I couldn't see. As I rounded the tree it scooched in the
same direction to stay ahead of me but eventually decided to hell
with it and flew off. As it did so, I could see large white areas on
the trailing undersides of its wings.

This was in Michigan. Since ivory-billed woodpeckers live (or lived)
primarily in the southeastern US and the Caribbean I wasn't expecting
any big miracle here. It turned out that, yes, what I had spotted was
actually a ringer for it, the perfectly common pileated woodpecker
(Dryocopus pileatus). A true ivory-billed would have been even larger
-- about 20 inches long with a 30-inch wingspan -- and would have had
more white on the top near its tail. In addition it had a doubled
pecking rhythm whereas the bird I saw and heard kept things
perfectly even.

"Screw The Gold. Let's Just Go Find Us Some O' Them Gaudy
Woodpeckers.""Screw the gold. Let's just go find us some o' them
gaudy woodpeckers." There's an ivory-billed lookalike that's larger
yet, and again rare if not extinct: the imperial woodpecker (C.
imperialis). Their traffic-stopping appearance sped their final
demise as it encouraged people to shoot them simply out of curiosity.
The last confirmed live specimen was dispatched in this manner in
Mexico in 1956 (specifically Durango, where The Treasure of Sierra
Madre had been filmed a decade earlier), so you might keep a
semi-jaundiced eye out for this bird, too.

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Three unusual afflictions you don't usually hear about


1/1/2011

Empty nose syndrome

Inside our nasal passages on each side there's a set of three roughly
parallel horizontal folds called turbinates. Since the early 1900s
people suffering from serious nasal blockages have undergone surgery
to cut away some of this tissue.

It turns out the turbinates induce a necessary turbulence into the
airflow through the nose and help slow evaporation, and that overly
zealous excision of these structures can paradoxically make the
patient's nose feel even more stuffed up than before. This can be
fiendishly distressing and has been referred to as empty nose
syndrome. Treatment typically involves restoring the moisture inside
with a saline mist.

Zero stroke (or cipher stroke)

Hyperinflation This was first identified in patients by their doctors
during the German Weimar Republic hyperinflation of the early 1920s.
The constant stress of having prices rise so feverishly -- at the peak
of the crisis they doubled every 90 hours -- caused some people to
pass into a sort of trance and obsessively write down row upon row of
zeros on sheets of paper.

The Weimar hyperinflation hasn't been the worst, though. That honor
belongs to the Hungarian version which maxed out in July 1946 when
prices were doubling about every 15 hours.

Situs inversus

It's exceedingly rare, but some people are born with all their major
internal organs flipped horizontally so that their heart is on the
right, their liver is on the left, and so on. Normally this doesn't
produce any symptoms and the patient only learns of this state of
affairs through a routine x-ray or while being prepped for an organ
transplant. Humorist Catherine O'Hara is switched around like this.

But there are partial versions of situs inversus in which, say, the
heart is on the left side as normal (levocardia) with everything else
flipped or the heart alone is on the right (dextrocardia) with
everything else in the normal location. Either of these invariably
give rise to serious circulatory problems.

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Castle or Corman?


11/12/2008

Homicidal William Castle (1914-1977) and Roger Corman (b. 1926) are
known for their [usually] low-budget, [usually] high-concept movies.

Castle typically incorporated some kind of gimmick into his pictures
-- joy buzzers installed into selected seats, nurses stationed in the
lobby, a magic coin, a 45-second "fright break" timer overlaid onto
the screen, burial insurance for patrons who might die of shock, and
so forth.

Corman is probably best known for 1960's Little Shop of Horrors which
featured a human-eating plant and Jack Nicholson as a masochistic
dental patient. It went on to spawn a stage musical -- which itself
then ricocheted back into yet another movie, directed by John Waters
(who himself grew up as a Castle zealot).

Naturally Vincent Price saw plenty of action with both Castle and
Corman. He plays child-killing Richard III in Tower of London, and in
The Tingler he exhorts us to "Scream! Scream for your lives!!"

In The Thing With Two Heads, Ray Milland is a cantankerous and openly
racist physician who, as a consequence of multiple organ failure, has
to have his head grafted onto the body of a black death row inmate
played by Rosey Greer. Much of the film consists of this bizarre
Milland-Greer "Thing" racing around the countryside on a minibike.

The one A-list picture in this glorious morass was Rosemary's Baby,
produced by William Castle and directed by a new Polish kid hardly
anybody had then heard of named Roman Polanski. Castle himself
appears in a cameo as the man waiting for Mia Farrow to get off a
pay phone.

Let's see if you can tell some of the pictures of William Castle and
Roger Corman apart. Click below for the answers:

1. 13 Frightened Girls (banned in Finland)
2. Attack of the Crab Monsters
3. House on Haunted Hill
4. Let's Kill Uncle
5. Not of This Earth
6. The Thing With Two Heads
7. The Tingler
8. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
9. Tower of London
10. Zotz!

Answers1. Castle
2. Corman (starring Russell Johnson)
3. Castle (starring Vincent Price)
4. Castle (starring Nigel Bruce)
5. Corman (starring Beverly Garland)
6. Corman as producer (starring Ray Milland and Rosey Grier)
7. Castle (starring Vincent Price)
8. Corman (starring Ray Milland)
9. Corman (starring Vincent Price)
10. Castle (starring Tom Poston)


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Odd, entirely unrelated facts #1


10/15/2008

Neither birds nor naked mole rats are sensitive to the heat
(capsaicin) in chili peppers.

Kjb Few people have ever read a real King James bible (1611). The one
you normally see is a 1769 modernization of it. The original featured
a lengthy foreword by the translators along with an almanac. The
foreword reflected more modernistic language than the main content.

Icelanders like to eat shark meat that's been fermented for six
months. They call it hakarl. In this sense they have something in
common with the Japanese, who before the era of modern refrigeration
made their sushi this way.

From her roles most people inferred that character actress Nancy
Walker was Jewish, but she wasn't. Also, she was very small at 4'10''
(1.5m) -- a fact to which I can attest because she walked past me once
on a sidewalk.

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has detected
a mysterous underwater noise called "the bloop" on several occasions.
Researchers say it appears to be biological, but any animal producing
it must be many times larger than a blue whale.

Jerome "Curly" Howard of the Three Stooges hated having a shaved
head, so each year during the summer hiatus he would let his hair
grow out.

Napoleon Bonaparte's native language wasn't French. He learned it in
school beginning at the age of nine.

A tossed penny isn't perfectly fair. The obverse ("heads") is
slightly heavier so the coin lands with "tails" up about 50.5% of
the time.

Ken Actor Khigh Dheigh, best remembered as the North Korean
brainwasher in The Manchurian Canidate and recurring arch-criminal Wo
Fat in the TV series Hawaii Five-O, wasn't even Asian. His real name
was Kenneth Dickerson, he was born in New Jersey of north African
ancestry, and he lived out his retirement years in Arizona.


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Today in 1977: Martin Luther King, Jr. is posthumously awarded the
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Curious NotionsHome

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Entries


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  * 6/16/2012Little Hollywood story No. 1
  * 5/1/2012Buckminsterfullerene, lab rats, and you
  * 5/28/2011Oh no, not another ivory-billed woodpecker
  * 1/1/2011Three unusual afflictions you don't usually hear about
  * 11/12/2008Castle or Corman?
  * 10/15/2008Odd, entirely unrelated facts #1

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