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.

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.

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.

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.

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.