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.