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.