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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.