L'Hopital's rule

I was talking to one of my not-girlfriends the other day, so called because she's a girl and a friend but not a girlfriend, and she was asking me why people are always asking her “why are you still single”. You know, because she’s smart and funny and cute and interesting and has a good job and so on and so forth. After I suppressed my first reaction of immediately offering marriage, which I knew she would decline but that’s another story, I got to thinking about the issue, and I realized I have just the opposite problem.
Namely, nobody ever asks me why *I’m* still single, which presumably means I’m either dimwitted, humorless, fat, boring or unemployed. But I think I have a solution, which I got part from an old Monty Python episode (which is a bit redundant, isn’t it, since there aren’t any new Monty Python episodes) about a scheme to sell boring people bits of the lives of interesting people, which reminds me of the story of L’Hopital’s rule, something you learn about in calculus, and it doesn’t really matter what the rule is, the point is, L’Hopital’s rule wasn’t actually invented by L’Hopital, but by Johann Bernoulli, who (are you ready for this?) sold the rights to the discovery to L’Hopital. So you see the Monty Python skit had more truth to it that you might suspect.
But L’Hopital was a French nobleman who could afford to buy stuff and I’m not (unless maybe I have a long lost great uncle in France I’ve never heard about, which is not completely impossible) so I had to come up with a different idea, which I think will be the next eBay. I’ll set up an on-line computer system to trade the parts of my life I’ve got too much of, like brains, to someone else for something they’ve got too much of, like money or girlfriends, cause I’m sure that lots of people think they could do with a little less money or fewer friends...
Well, I still have to get some of the bugs worked out of the idea, but it’s viable, Monty Python and L’Hopital prove that.
I just now thought of a much easier way to solve the problem. I’ll just get a t-shirt made that says, “ask me why I’m still single”, and that’ll solve that problem, although I don’t know if people will really want to hold still while I explain about how I don’t have any long-long great uncles who are French nobles, let alone about L’Hopital’s rule, because people’s eyes tend to glaze over the minute they hear the word calculus, or even math. So I’ll have to find a similar story about some other topic, like maybe statistics, or economics.
Alternatively, I can get my not-girlfriend a t-shirt that says, “don’t ask me why I’m still single”. I guess I might have to get her several in case she wants to change clothes every now and then, and that’ll solve her problem.
I’m just a natural problem solver, I guess. Maybe I can go into business, telling people how to solve these problems like how to get rid of excess money.
Or t-shirt design, I have several ideas for t-shirts, and I hear there’s incredible profits to be made in t-shirt sales. Or was it that there are incredibly small profits? These distinctions are important: as Mark Twain observed, you don’t want to confuse the lightning with the lightning bug, and what a story Twain would have made of the case of L’Hopital’s rule. He had something of a sad life, although I don’t think he had people asking him why are you still single, or for that matter, people not-asking him the same thing, which just goes to show that you really can find a silver lining in most clouds, although if it’s a thunderstorm the lining might just make things even worse, since silver conducts electricity. On the other hand, maybe it will ground out the lightning, and there’s an application: figure out where the silver lining is in the cloud and reduce your risk of getting struck by lightning, but possibly increasing the risk of being swarmed by lightning bugs, depending on how they react to electricity, which I think would pretty thoroughly explain the issue of still being single. I’ll have to run that one by my not-girlfriend, see what she thinks.

Well, I haven't got anything better to do at the moment than blog...

Blog blog blog. Blog Bloggerson of Blogistan. I feel like Hobbes (of Calvin and Hobbes) saying 'smock smock smock' until Calvin was moved to scream 'what in the world is wrong with you?' Blog.
The Blog. The Return of the Blog. It can only be destroyed by, by, I don't know. Mint-flavored toothpicks. Which reminds me of one of my other pet peeves, about movies. Typically the movie sets up some problem, heroes try some solution, which almost works. Most people at that point would say, well, that almost worked, let's try again but with more explosives. But movies characters almost never do this. Which no doubt has more to do with narrative structure than common sense, and there are lots of movie traditions like that which don't bother me at all so I guess I don't have to complain.
I don't think I have any real point here, I just wanted to natter. I can't brag about writing 555 words a day since I haven't in 3 days and I'm not going to tonight either because as usually happens in NaNoWriMo I'm getting bored with my own story so maybe I should switch stories.
Or something.

Blogging, not to be confused with logging, is the removal of b-trees for the manufacture of blunder (instead of lumber), which is a natural consequence, since b-trees are a means of storing and retrieving data and if your data disappears you'll have to guess what to do. Unlike logging, blogging is a hostile act performed on an enemy.

...eh.

Pet peeve

"No one is saying X".

Hello? This is the Internet, people. I guarantee you, someone is saying X, and give me five minutes with Google and I'll prove it.

That is all.

Today's random word: Montage

...which reminds me of the (in)famous 'training montage', that scene, or series of scenes, in an action flick demonstrating how the hero learns the new skill he or she will need to kick the bad guy's, ah, backside. You know the one: to the sound of inspiring music we see the hero practicing, practicing, practicing, and in only a minute or two: Kung Fu! The Violin! Math! I want to have a training montage or two to learn, oh, I don't know. Japanese, maybe. Glider piloting. Heck, why not King Fu! Although I gather the martial arts guys generally teach you not to get into fights, which would seem to rather defeat the point of learning Kung Fu: you can't kick anyone's backside if you don't ever get into a fight. The only winning move is not to play, as the movie War Games taught us, although I don't recall that that one had any training montages in it. Unless you count the scene where the computer (named after a fast food, if I recall: the Big Mac or the whopper or something) plays the nuclear war game with itself a zillion times. But I definitely don't count that. What Whoppers have to do with it is beyond me, but not doubt the Illuminati know what they're doing. And I have 2 minutes left with no particular idea of where I'm going. The opposite of Illuminati is what? The Dark-ati? Freedom fighters against the Man, the Dark-ati have opposed the Illuminati since even before they existed!

Scoundrels

So I decided to upgrade my ancient Nokia cell phone. AT&T's web site has several low-end (but still better than my Nokia) phones advertised as 'FREE', if you sign up for a 2-year contract.

'FREE' turns out to mean 'except for the $18.99 "upgrade" fee'.

What baloney.

Dear AT&T: "FREE" means $0.00, not $18.99. Sincerely, ex-customer.

The (relatively insignificant) money doesn't bother me 1/10th as much as the blatant dishonesty. If the new phone costs $18.99 then call it $18.99, don't lie and say it's 'FREE' when it isn't.

razzzle fraztzn bumble brack.

Today's post is brought to you by the letter 'p' and the number '4'

P: perodactyl, not to be confused with the more common pterodactyl: a little known prehistoric creature which carried a jar of coffee substitute in its fingers at all times hence the name Pero (a brand of coffee substitute) and -dactyl (from the Greek for 'finger'.) How it was determined that it carried Pero, or how Pero could possibly have existed in the Jurassic, are not known, although some commentators have speculated that it may be related to the appearance of Mark Twain before Congress in 2006, as documented in a blog post I've now lost track of. Skeptics who say I didn't read it correctly or that the post had a typographical error are invited to read the post themselves.

Six days later?

It sounds like the title of some cheesy horror movie. "Six days after they accidentally killed a fellow student, a group of high-school friends discover they student might not be quite dead..."

No.

"The asteroid struck the earth, appropriately enough, on December 31st. Six days later..."

...umm. No.

"The killer plague was released on a Friday. Six days later..."

...it's been done.

Six days after his previous blog post?

No, no, no.

But who is this who insists "no, no, no?" Who asked you your opinion? If I want to write horror stories about revenants or asteroids or plagues or blog posts, who are you to stop me, wise guy?

6 Days later

Seven days is the wrong length for a week, because you can't divide it evenly. Six days would make a better week, but if the week were six days long, this post would be a week after the last one, so I'd better stick with seven days for now. And, since this post should be about something other than how long it's been since my last one, how about this:

Six day weeks don't divide evenly into 365 days, which is 60 time 6, plus 5. So why not just have 360 day years? It would mean the months wouldn't stay synchronized with the seasons, but so what? The Muslims have a 354-day year and they manage all right.

So, we have 12 months of 30 days each, 5 six-day weeks. Two days off on the weekends, four days on. That's about 10 extra days off a year, another bonus.

Six-day weeks for the win! And the post is a week late after all.

Random word: Spool

Spool is the name of a program on unix systems that has something to do with printers; the 'spool' has all the files that people want to print out. There's probably some explanation about where the name came from (maybe the programmer picked a word at random out of a dictionary?) but I don't know what it is. Spools (I keep typing sppols by mistake) hold thread, or sometimes heavier things like twine or cord or rope or cable or chain. I don't know what sppols are. Probably something to do with the Conspiracy. The 2nd lowest rank. "I was promoted to sppol last week. Another couple of years and perhaps I'll make workd." Which is another word I type by mistake a lot, workd instead of world. Also mistke, which is obviously the 4th rank in the Conspiracy.
Hopefully someday I'll figure out what the Conspiracy is conspiring about. Must have something to do with aardvarks, I'm sure, and spools, and unix.

Prompt

This comment says:

in 1990, Robert Alan Haag, one of the biggest traders^* of meteorites of the world, tried to steal the second largest meteorite of the world from Chaco, Argentina. He mounted a huge operation to lift and move this 37 ton piece and take it to the U.S.

*:The original word here was "trades", which I assume was a typo. -de

Transcription 003

Oct 5 '09
F Friends of the Library would apparently be a fairly innocuous or even beneficial group.^However My researches have ascertained that many branches are merely front groups for the Ensoniati, that ancient secret society of which the Bavarian Illuminati are merely the palest imitation. FotL members regularly interfere in the course of history, affecting the results of Fish-fancier club elections, grocer store layouts, the distance between sidewalk cracks, and even karaoke night music selections. Doubters may scoff at the significance of these details but how do they respond to the experience of Nicanor the Younger of when his gold-fish were declared 3^rd place finishers for the 3^rd time in a row on March 3^rd? I've never met a single skeptic with a coherent reply to that one!

E Elephant in the Room, The: Usually ignored by all present, except by small children, many of whom are quite pleased to discover an elephant right there in the house. One odious child of my acquaintance threw a mouse under the Elephant's trunk but fortunately the elephant had been taking musophobi ^cognitive therapy treatments for musophobia and merely grabbed the mouse and threw it back in the child's face, much to the amusement - unacknowledged, of course - of all.

S Strange, Dr: Legendary neurosurgeon and Master of The Mystic Arts, not to be confused with Dr. Doom, Dr. Fate, Dr. Destiny, Adam Strange, Dr. Midnight, or The Doctor. Gandalf, Merlin, and Professor Dumbledore are perhaps his only peers. On the other hand, perhaps not, since I've never heard that any of those were any good at neurosurgery.

Internet pet peeve

The past tense of "mislead" is "misled".
That is all.

Transcription 002

June 1st, 09, 10:00 PM 10:30 PM
We are told
The Norse goddess of the dead, named Hel (with one ell), supposedly has half her body that of a beautiful woman and half that of a worm-eaten corpse, although ^^{sources differ on} which half is which - top or bottom of left or right. There's likely some mythological reason for this curious hybrid state - but present deponent knoweth not. Which last phrase is a quote from somewhere that I must look up sometime. When I get a round tooit.
Funny how those never seem to show up. Triangular and square tooits are as common as dirt and six-sided tooits are rare though not unknown--but round ones never show up. although I did one see a 17-sided tooit in the collection of Hugo Bracetrouser III which looked quite round until examined carefully under a magnifying glass. It was supposed to have been collected by Bracetrouser's great-uncle Palagrin while exploring the bottom of isolated a 500-foot deep 500-foot wide hold at the top of a 5000-foot plateau in the middle of a South American jungle, although for a fact Palagrin had always maintained the jungle was actually found on a lost island int he middle of the South Atlantic that had arisen from the deep after a sea quake and unfortunately sunken again shortly after he'd retrieved the tooit.
Doubters sometimes accused Bracetrouser of filing off the edges of a 7-sided tooit to get his trophy, as Normax van Lijn had done, selling his forgery to a gullible museum for nearly 100,000 guilders before disappearing in India on what he said was a quest to descover the secret of the famous rope trick.

March 22 to April 8 is weeks

Oh, well. Too bad. No reason I can't blame that on society, is there? That Society, he's always up to something, and generally something disreputable, to say the least. Why, I've heard that Society was single-handedly responsible for the crime wave of the last 50 years, although since it appears to be dying down (if one trusts the statisticians, and who wouldn't?) he's apparently getting a bit tired in his old age. It's really a kind of shame to see the old fellow in that state of decline. Back in the day he was setting fashions, starting fads, even touching off wars, and nowadays, he barely gets a mention in the Society pages (the similarity of names, is, I am told, merely a coincidence.)
But who knows? The grand old man may be given a new lease on life and go on to even bigger and more disreputable things. One can always hope.

Transcription 001

I suppose 001 will leave me enough numbers. I can go from 001 to 999 (and even use 000 if necessary) and surely I have less than 999 pages of writing to transcribe.

If not, I can always go to hexadecimal and use 0123456789abcdef, or even go all the way to z, which is pronounced "zed" by the British for some reason, and how in the world do they expect to be able to sing the alphabet to the tune of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" if they pronounce z as "zed"? It's a mixed-up country and no mistake.

Probably it's something to do with those Ancient Atlantean Aardvarks.

In any case, here is transcription 001: and I just knocked my hot chocolate cup off my side table but fortunately there was no chocolate left in it.

May 5, '09, Afternoon 6:00 PM

D:
De le ware: French, of the 'ware, 'ware meaning software. The 1st Delaware, so called because he acted, so it was said, as automatically as the 'ware that controlled the automatic mills nea _{ing machines} ⁱⁿ his home town.
The mills, invented by Roger Bacon in the 13th century were controlled by 'warez in the form of ribbons^stacks of punched parchment cards.

Bacon, better known for ^co-inventing the Bacon, Lettuce, & Tomato Sandwich (along with Lord Sandwich, Charles Lettuce, and of course the infamous Thomas Tomato) is supposed to have gotten the idea for the mills while watching from his wife darning a sock. playing whack-a-mole at a county fair. But However, since the only point of commonality is that both entities have holes, I this am at a loss as to how the one is supposed to have led to the other.

For Bacon's original work on the moon, see that entry.

One week is less than 'weeks'

Spring is Here! Which reminds me of Tom Lehrer's comedy song "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park", whose title unfortunately gives away the joke, and I wonder why Lehrer let that get by him. Perhaps the title was imposed on him by his producers, who are notorious for messing up artistic visions in misguided attempts to pander to the popular will. That is, not Lehrer's producers in particular, but producers in general. For all I know Lehrer's producers are or were gems in human form and the title is merely an ironic joke that's too subtle for my poor brain to grasp. My guess would be that that's not the case but I've been wrong before. More than once, even. Like Fred Saberhagen's time-traveling hero, Pilgrim, I can remember three times in the past century that I've been wrong. (Pilgrim is quite a character.) But he doesn't really have much to do with Spring, or with Tom Lehrer, as far as I know, although, again, it could be that the whole story Saberhagen tells is a coded message, understandable to those in the know, explicating Lehrer's song and it's relation to the season, and how it all traces back to trained aardvarks from Ancient Atlantis.
But probably not.

I hate bloggers who don't blog for weeks at a time.

It's really inconsiderate! Here I am, all eager to see what new amusement they're going to provide me for free, and they haven't done anything! Therottabealaw! Although, we have a lot of laws already, come to think of it, and I hear somebody in New York wants to ban restaurants from cooking with salt, which doesn't sound very practical to me, although I would certainly appreciate the option of at least one truly low-sodium dish on a restaurant menu. But that's a case where I'd say there didn't ottabealaw and so far there isn't, so I guess it's all to the good, except for seekers of low-sodium meals, who are mostly forced to cook their own meals, but that's cheaper and healthier anyway, so what's the big deal? (Funny/gruesome typo: I first wrote: 'mostly forced to cook themselves', which evokes some rather disturbing images, no?) It reminds one of the fabled auto-cannibals of Lemuria, the car-eating cars that are said to have evolved 500 million years ago on that lost continent from a colony of defective self-reproducing robots left here as junk by visiting aliens from outer space. The eventual extermination of the auto-cannibals was indirectly triggered by the time-travelling antics of the well known Young Man (well, little-known, really), in a brief episode regrettably left out of Wells's account in The Time Machine. How Wells came to know of it at all is an amusing story which may one day come to light if we're all lucky.

It's still morning in Honolulu

...but it's tomorrow in Tokyo.

I don't think it's yesterday anywhere, although as of 1 AM this morning it was yesterday in Honolulu, if I am not mistaken. Which reminds me of the 'how to prove Santa Claus exists' theory, dramatized by Raymond Smullyan approximately as follows:

Logician 1: Santa Claus exists, if I am not mistaken.
Logician 2: Well of course he exists if you are not mistaken.
Logician 1: So you agree I am correct.
Logician 2: Yes of course, I just said so.
Logician 1: Or in other words, I am not mistaken.
Logician 2: Yes. Um, wait...
Logician 1: And we agreed that if I am not mistaken then Santa exists.
Logician 2: Just a minute...
Logician 1: Therefore, Santa exists!

Invalid

Invalid reminds me of Dorothy L. Sayers's (whose name I keep confusing with Dorothy Salisbury Davis for some reason) mystery Strong Poison in which an invalid, and imbecile, old lady named Cremorna Garden (which one character in the book mis-remembers as Hyde Park, go figure) leaves all her money to one nephew but not the other, which fact (not revealed till near the end of the book, if I recall correctly) had started the sequence of events leading to the murder. Strong Poison also features my favorite Sayers character, Miss Katharine Alexandra (or possibly Alexandra Katherine, Sayers doesn't seem to know for sure herself) Climpson, an elderly spinster who (in this book) masquerades as an amateur spiritualist medium, thereby persuading "Cremorna Garden's" nurse to send her (i.e. Garden's (English needs more pronouns)) will to her (Garden's) lawyer. The reader gets a good look at how spiritualist fakers do 'cold readings' when Miss Climpson takes a quick look around the nurse's sitting room while she (the nurse, that is (English needs more kinds of pronouns)) is outside making tea. Miss Climpson looks at furniture, old photographs, quickly glances through letters, and does all kinds of shocking intrusions into the nurse's privacy that you would never expect an elderly spinster to perpetrate, all in aid of tricking the nurse into believing that Miss Climpson has psychically discovered personal information about the nurse.

It's great fun.

I don't know what kind of a point I had here, but another thing English needs is a better way of handling parenthetical remarks, or else maybe I need to not use so many.

It's technically still morning!

Today's random word is 'automatic' (courtesy of this site.)

Automatic MacHinery (1742-1919), one of the Virginia MacHinery's, was an inventory of automatic machinery which he modestly named after himself. His mother's family, the Pluperfects, originated in New Hampshire from a colony of mutant mold spores whose DNA was blended with human DNA by radiation from a fallen meteorite. This unusual ancestry no doubt accounts for MacHinery's long life, although he himself claimed it came from his father's side, on which he was allegedly descended from Ancient Atlanteans. The family tradition of vegetarian aardvark breeding adds some verisimilitude to the claim, although the tradition can be traced back with certitude to no earlier than the early fifteenth century. MacHinery's first invention was inspired by this tradition: a peanut shelling machine which made it much easier to feed the aardvarks. In his old age, MacHinery was heard to remark that it was a wonder the Atlanteans hadn't invented such a machine themselves, and if they had, the continent might well have survived to this day. Based on this comment, some researchers have speculated that the peanut-shelling machine must have been suppressed by enemies of the Atlanteans such as the Muvians, who bought up all the patents before the machines could go on the market. Others, however, have argued that even if MacHinery was descended from Atlantis, he had no better idea of what sank the continent that Plato did, and stories of patent-suppression were no more than propaganda by anti-Muvian partisans. The truth may never be known.

Why I didn't blog this morning

...because I had some very important loafing to do. Those Futurama re-runs won't watch themselves, now, will they? Besides, the keyboard was covered with all these little pieces of black plastic with white letter on them; it was entirely too confusing. Which reminds of one of my pet peeves: the weird habit of electronic appliance manufactures of marking the controls in black-on-black. Who can read such controls? I suppose I should be grateful my keyboard isn't marked like that. Frankly, I suspect the Bavarian Illuminati; it's part of their subtle plot to destabilize the world to make it easier for their takeover. But I'm ready for them! I have a white-paint pen to mark the black controls with! That'll fix them. Fortune favors the prepared and I'm prepared for black-on-black controls. But I digress, as Tom Lehrer would say. Since the Illuminati have been interefering with my blogging I'll just have to do twice as much for the next few days to make up for it.

...starting tomorrow. TheThis afternoon I have to watch Robin Hood.

How I got this way

I was searching the Web for entertaining items for sale cheap (xkcd's idea of a script to buy random stuff is cute but I bet you'd just get boring things most of the time) when I came across the juiciest, raciest, funniest, most outrageous gadget I ever saw, which I'll name as soon as I can think what it should be. Alma Werfel's autobiography, perhaps, or a ridiculous automatic gadget that throws naughty items up in the air to land at the feet of unsuspecting passers-by. Anyway, whatever it was, I decided at once that "it must be mine", to quote John Kovalic's Dork Tower comic, which shows that it must actually have been a gamer's item: the D&D Book of Naughtiness, that must be it (and there actually is a book like that, although I forget its actual name.) And I just almost mispelled its: Why is the possessive of it not spelled it's? Frankly, I firmly believe that English could get along just fine without apostrophe's. In fact, it'd be noticeably improved. Join the Coalition to Stamp Out the Apostrophe! It's bad enough in its (ha! check out those its's!) place--the apostrophe, that is--but when it's misused, as it frequently is, either by those who know no better or those who experience an unfortunate lapse of mental acuity, it can drive one nearly to distraction. Evidence is left as an exercise for the Google-fu of the reader. So in summary, naughty apostrophes have destroyed the racy automatic gadgets that throw Alma Werfel's non-existent (as far as I know) autobiography at innocent bystanders. What else could explain it?

Update: check it out, I spelled the plural of apostrophe as apostrophe's, instead of apostrophes! Once again proving that it's impossible to write a post about bad spelling without making a spelling error.

I spy with my little eye

Frankenstein, Victor: late 18th century biologist and physiologist who discovered the reanimation technique later improved, if not quite perfected, by Dr. Herbert West. Frankenstein's research was described by Mary Shelley in a lengthy report that was edited and heavily sensationalized by her husband Percy Shelley. Soberer researchers recognize that the so-called 'monster' was merely a somewhat less that averagely attractive construct, and, rather than being chased to the North Pole by Frankenstein, he merely took a job serving beer at a local inn under the name Bergdorf. Bergdorf's later development of the famous beer called Heart of the West has been erroneously attributed to everyone from Finn MacCool to Merlin Ambrosius Aurelianus. Drinkers supposing that such an amazing beverage must have been the product of magic, and therefore ancient. The present brewers of the beer have not troubled themselves to contradict the legend, and in fact have gone so far as to argue that Bergdorf's discovery was, in fact, the result of his own researches into the beer-making techniques of the ancient Gauls. Less impressionable writers suggest he was inspired by his creators methods, and claim that powerful electric currents passed through the brew are the source of the distinctive flavor of the Heart of the West.

Today's post is brought to you by the letter 'C'

Calendula is a flower of some kind, no doubt related to the calendar, judging by the name. I suppose the blooms change color with the months, and the number of petals left tells you how many days have passed. Presumably a product of genetic engineering by the Atlanteans, who got up to a lot of mischief, considering that they were (almost certainly) imaginary. Their ability to adapt to changes in the popular calendars in use is the most amazing aspect of the plant, leading one to suspect that the Atlanteans programmed some kind of simple thought processes into their flowering plant. This, no doubt, is the source of the theory that plants can feel and think. It's not true of plants in general, but Atlantean calendulas can, in fact. Rumor has it that one of Dr. Frankenstein's lesser-know experiments selectively bred Atlantean calendulas for increased intelligence and the descendants of this plant, cross-bred with Venus' fly-traps, tried out for the role of Audrey II the carnivorous plant in Little Shop of Horrors. Unfortunately, her insistence on changing colors to match the months made her a difficult plant to direct, and the producers ultimately decided to use a fake plant and special effects instead.

Fun and games with scale

This covers a (much) wider range of scales, but this is better designed and has better art.

Time to blog

Blog's a funny contraction, isn't it? We don't contract many words by removing letters at the front. 'tis, for it is, and (I am informed) zounds for God's wounds, which is a pretty strange expression, but was very naughty a few centuries ago. I suppose in a few more centuries our own curse words will seem pretty tame to the people of the time, and if Gregory Benford really can invent the cure for old age in the next twenty years, maybe I'll be around to find out. Although since Benford's plan is to breed flies for long lives and then look at their genes to see how they live so long, I'm not holding out too much hope. Really, Benford: flies? But who knows? Unfortunately, since the act of observing affects that which is observed, even if he does do it we won't be able to tell what would have happened to curse words in a few centuries if we hadn't been around to watch. So the whole question is apparently pointless. Which makes it all the more fun to argue about.

One-a-Day

...plus Iron! Which always puzzled me: why would they put iron in your vitamins? I always figured the iron they advertise in your vitamins and breakfast cereal must be something different from regular old iron metal but seemingly it's the same. And they put silicon dioxide, aka sand, in my instant soup! Or at least they used to. I haven't had instant soup in many years so I don't know if they still put sand in it. My feeling is that if I wanted sand in my instant soup, I can always go to the beach to eat it and the sand will get into it whether I want it or not, but otherwise, I'd just as soon they leave the sand, and the iron filings or whatever, out of the food. I guess they must do it for the sake of people who don't live just a few blocks from the beach, but even so, the people who strongly desire sand in their instant soup are surely few and far between. But maybe I'm the strange one, and sand-eating is wildly popular amongst the general public, although if it is I've never heard about it; just one more way in which I'm badly out of touch with popular culture, I guess. I really have to start paying better attention to the world.

So what's it all about?

Ten years behind the cutting edge of technology, Dave starts blogging. This will (probably) be a collection of fiction snippets, with (possibly) occasional comments about the actual world. Goal: at least one post a day, of at least two hundred words. So, here I go, free associating for ten minutes on a random word:

The random word generator gave me: "peanut". Which turns to be neither a pea nor a nut, but is apparently actually a bean, or so I hear, which is a little odd since most other beans aren't roasted, dried and salted and sold in big jars in the supermarket, as least as far as I know. I don't know what the Ancient Atlanteans, or the aardvarks, thought about peanuts, although since aardvarks eat insects and Atlanteans never existed the answer is probably "nothing." But you never know; perhaps the Atlanteans bred a special breed of vegetarian aardvark that satisfied its protein requirement with peanuts, for the sole purpose of eliminating the dreaded bean from their continent. Unfortunately, it must have been a failure because Atlantis still sank beneath the waves, which clearly would never have happened had peanuts been successfully eliminated. The intervention of the Dark Lord into Atlantis was essentially pointless, despite what the pseudo-history books say, which tells us something about the relative significance of wizards and lowly beans. Of course, the story got all confused in the post-Cataclysmic age, and peanut-eating barbarians from the North were credited in popular lore with the downfall of Atlantis, when really their eating habits probably delayed its fall by several decades. Man this autosave feature is really annoying.