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I know a beach where, baby, it never ends

A Pint Of Life gives us, at last, the team-up between the Wonder Twins and Aquaman that we've all been waiting for.

( While it's nominally about the search for compatible blood donors actually it's just poking around in leftover Jungle Land background cels they had. )

Ultimately, then, it's kind of a disappointment, even with spectacle like Zan's rocket fantasy to stumble across.

Trivia: The United States Congress never determined who was the rightful discoverer of anaesthetic convincingly enough to award a $100,000 prize meant for it --- dentist Horace Wells, doctor William Morton, and professor Charles Jackson let matters too confused between them. Source: Radar, Hula Hoops, and Playful Pigs, Joe Schwarcz.

Currently Reading: Galahad at Blandings, P G Wodehouse.

We stood on the beach at sunset

Enough Aquaman for the moment. Let's get back to real proper Superfriends antics with The Revenge Of Doom:

( As you might expect, the Legion of Doom tries to conquer the world, and it involves ray guns, man-sized test tubes, and hugging Robin. )

So it's got a lot of what was cool about Challenge of the Superfriends but condensed almost to the point the audience barely knows what hit them. There are things to be said either way for this.

Trivia: Coal was taxed in 1667 by the City of London at one shilling per ton. This was tripled in 1670. Source: London: A History, A N Wilson.

Currently Reading: Galahad at Blandings, P G Wodehouse.

What is the answer where there's no question

So you've got an exam to prepare for? How you prepare is depends on many things, mostly whether you're giving or taking it. If you are taking the exam be courteous and don't take two or more, unless there are enough to go around. If you're giving the exam then have a couple of extras so the photocopier can produce a few blurry copies with page three missing and page five stapled to something completely inappropriate, such as an early map of the gold fields of California or a teaching assistant, which makes it (not the teaching assistant) happy. If you lack a teaching assistant try stapling them to a field guide to steam locomotives, an attractive but uninformative copy of which may be found in the Attractive But Uninformative Books To Give As Gifts table in the bookstore.

Let's get back to thinking what you'd do if you're giving the exam, and you should really look this up before you get your preparations under way, since the next thing you have to do after deciding you really want to give one is learn what your subject is. There are some subjects that are much better as exam material than others. For example, Contemporary South Asian Art is a great subject to give an exam in.

You can ask all kinds of questions about what the art is, or who committed the feat of art, or how it was received, and whether it was received with an appreciative comment or if it was clearly just a quick acknowledgement and attempt to change the subject, and whether it meets the important qualifications of art like can it be used as the decorative pattern on the backs of mass transit system fare cards and so on. You can fill an exam's worth of questions before you even get into the big things like ``What is Asia?'' and ``Are we sure we know what we mean by South just yet?''. (No.)

Now compare that to when you have a tough subject, like Coffee Cups. There's almost nothing you can ask there. You can show a student an object and put out the question: Is This A Coffee Cup? (A) Yes, (B) No, (C) All of the above, (D) There is insufficient information to answer this question, (E) I'm thirsty. There's nowhere to go from there, and even when you're there you aren't much of anywhere. If you're giving the exam to upper-level undergraduates or maybe Masters' students you can try essay questions about whether something is a coffee cup if it's only ever used for tea, and how things change if you brew the tea in coffee rather than water, but what are the odds you're teaching an advanced course in Coffee Cups? Exactly. The notion is silly and I'm sorry to waste your time with it.

Much more probable is that you're preparing an exam in Socks, since you can there ask questions like: Is This A Pair Of Socks? using the same set of answers as above for the multiple-choice portion. It also leads to a natural essay question in that you can ask people who've chosen ``I'm thirsty'' as a response to the sock identification question just why they're thirsty. Is it the result of some sock-related incident? Have they possibly got a sock stuffed in their mouths right now? I mean each of them has one sock and one mouth per person, though advanced students might have multiple socks stuffed in there. Why are the socks there? Is it an attempt to keep them silent during their kidnapping? If it is should we contact responsible authorities, and maybe campus security too?

Now you see how fortunate you are? By having the exam in the correct subject area (Socks, not Coffee Cups) you've managed to detect and maybe even foil a serious crime. So you've earned the gratitude of the would-be victim, the family, and maybe even got a write-up in the student newspaper where they'll spell your name in an innovative new way.

The only downside to giving the exams is you'll also have to get them graded. Try a rock tumbler.

Trivia: Daniel Defoe asserted that the great storm of 27 November 1703 was the same one which had been felt in America several days earlier. Source: A History of the United States Weather Bureau, Donald R Whitnah.

Currently Reading: McKinley, Bryan, and the People, Paul W Glad.

Could've tripped out easy but I've changed my ways

Good news, everyone: it's an Aquaman episode! On to Terror On The Titanic:

( It's important to remember these were the days before the Titanic's remains had been found by Michel and Ballard through the ingenious process of going to where it had sunk and looking. )

Still, I like it a good deal. It feels like there's a decent monster movie struggling to get out of here, and that all the important things can be wrapped up in seven minutes shows the dramatic economy that the Superfriends feature at their best.

Trivia: The blizzard of 26 November 1898 forced the Baltimore Country Club to cancel a tornament which had invited golfers from 125 clubs across the nation. Source: 1898: The Birth Of The American Century, David Traxel.

Currently Reading: McKinley, Bryan, and the People, Paul W Glad.

Any trick in the book, now, baby

Well, enough of the deep and righteous moral outrage, which had not been one of the features of the first couple Superfriends: The Lost Episodes cartoons I'd watched for the weekend and which might have been improperly buried in your Friends lists. Instead we get to ... a Wonder Twins adventure.

( What gets advented is naturally one of the least practical schemes to take over the world which the Superfriends have faced, and as you can imagine, they've faced some doozies in their time, even if you discount the one where the idiot with the time machine sent back a Stupidity Monolith to One Million Years Ago but failed to imagine Skylab coming to the rescue. )

But for a Zan and Jayna Save The Day story, it plays all right, and they don't even have to rescue stupid teens to do it. And, of course, there's no deeply offensive moral outrages, which is another bonus.

Trivia: While Hirohito took office as Emperor of Japan immediately on his father's death in 1926 (and had been regent since 1921), his grand enthronement ceremony was not held until 1928. Source: A Modern History of Japan, Andrew Gordon.

Currently Reading: McKinley, Bryan, and the People, Paul W Glad.

You're gonna be mine, I know it, we'll do it in style

Next is the fourth lost Superfriends adventure, the surprisingly disturbing and deeply immoral The Krypton Syndrome.

( How could the time-travelling antics of the Supermobile go horribly wrong? )

So in short: it's a fairly cool setup, but manages to somehow be a greater outrage than the plainly evil Star Trek: Enterprise episode ``The Communicator''.

Trivia: United Fruit bought all its machetes from the Collins Company of Collinsville, Connecticut, the ``world's greatest machete maker''. Source: Bananas: How The United Fruit Company Shaped The World, Peter Chapman.

Currently Reading: McKinley, Bryan, and the People, Paul W Glad.

It'll take time, I know it, but in a while

Our third Lost Superfriends adventure: Once Upon A Poltergeist.

( Warning! The plot involves those magical people, the American Indians. )

Trivia: On investigating the Royal Navy's marine compasses Dr Gowin Knight (1713 - 1772) discovered that of a sample of twenty of them, no two agreeed on the direction of north. Source: Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation, Alan Gurney.

Currently Reading: Hershey: Milton S Hershey's Extraordinary Life Of Wealth, Empire, And Utopian Dreams, Michael D'Antonio.

Could've tripped out easy but I've changed my ways

The second Lost Superfriends adventure: Roller Coaster, with guest commentary from bunny_hugger.

( This title suggests the presence of a plot-relevant roller coaster and in that regard it does not disappoint. )

Trivia: The patent diagram for the QWERTY keyboard was patent number 207,559. Source: The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting, Darren Wershler-Henry.

Currently Reading: Hershey: Milton S Hershey's Extraordinary Life Of Wealth, Empire, And Utopian Dreams, Michael D'Antonio.

Sunshine came softly through my window today

I'm taking a week away from my normal routines and activities and so I've pre-written several entries well ahead of time in order that I don't have to think about that while I'm thinking about much bigger things that I think I'll write about afterward. So for the interim I'm going to the fundamental unit of blogging, namely, making fun of the Superfriends. Specifically this is reviewing one at a time the stories which made up the recent Superfriends: The Lost Episodes DVD release. There are understandably spoilers about the plots, although if you read them probably you don't mind being spoiled about them. I'll try to be sympathetic.

First up: Mxyzptlk's Revenge.

( You would expect a lot of mischief and some revenge this episode and might be surprised by its contents. )

Trivia: Ernestine Wade, who portrayed the Kingfish's wife Sapphire, was the first black actor hired to perform regularly on Amos 'n' Andy, in 1939. Source: The Adventures Of Amos 'N' Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon, Melvin Patrick Ely.

Currently Reading: Hershey: Milton S Hershey's Extraordinary Life Of Wealth, Empire, And Utopian Dreams, Michael D'Antonio.

You gotta be a football hero

[ Sorry to post early; flight to catch tomorrow. Will explain later. ]

With this year marking another anniversary for Upper Pompous Lakes Stadium we thought it fitting to review historic events we claim are from here, provided we have claims based on actual facts. Claims based on non-actual facts were disallowed by the Rules Committee on January 22, 2038.

June 30, 1934: Following a record 215 days of construction the Stadium opens to admit its first paying customers, who turn up three weeks later. An embarrassed stadium owner who asked not to be identified (he was Omero Catan, who hoped to use the low cost of labor to establish a chain of rapidly built stadiums which he could be the first to patronize) admitted they should have looked into booking some teams or events or something.

September 12, 1936: the first football game pits the Bear Swamp Rockies and the Occluded Brook Rockies against the baseball game being played by the Stammer Elk Angels and Jumping Puddle Eagles at the same time. The Angels win by two runs and a field goal.

1942: the Stadium is donated to the Army to support the War Effort, and is disassembled and transported brick-by-brick to be communications headquarters for liberated France. It is sheepishly returned in October when the Army admits they're not liberating France this year. The process is repeated in 1943, with the same results, and in 1944 they finally left the Stadium where it was and boy did everybody feel soooo foolish. The Army appreciated the thoughtfullness and sent the Pompous Lakes community a gift basket every year through 1958, when they probably moved away or something. The last bricks were finally found in 1966, where they had fallen behind a heavy dresser.

February 20, 1950: The Stadium Authority answers a big fan gripe by buying new parking lot acreage, bringing parking capacity from 28 cars to 35,800. When still-unsatisfied critics complain the new lots are in the outskirts of Inchon, South Korea, approximately 6,872 miles away from the entrance, and in a city 68 percent of those surveyed thought was a name the surveyors made up on the spot, the unidentified owner (Michael Catan; don't ask) said they would grow into it, and, just wait.

November 13, 1976: The infamous ``Snow Bowl'' game shows a nationwide audience comical attempts at football while snowdrifts over seven feet tall bury benches and seats and unsuccessfully attempt to hold ABC Wide World Of Sports anchor Jim McKay for ransom. Four snowmen and a team of rescue dogs win 17-14, with two abstentions. Questions persist about the quality of the stadium's domed roof. An investigating panel concludes by January that ``nobody has any idea who Major Deegan was or why he has an Expressway in the Bronx''. This was not under question but everybody felt better knowing it wasn't just them that wondered about the Major Deegan.

May 28, 1986: A record crowd of over 78,600 gathers for the final rounds of the Scripps-Howard National Spelling Bee. The Spelling Bee is held in Washington, DC, instead, but you tell 75,300 people excited by spelling ``odontalgia'' that (the rest were interested in spelling any word). Facing the restless crowd Pope Boniface III developed a system for sales of indulgences to misspell even the commonest words. The scheme raises money for the Stadium but gets attacked for producing laxity in the use of ``loose'' and making people vaguely nervous about all words ending in 's.

June 7, 1994: the Stadium reopens following a major renovation which saw the original main entrance turned into a wall with dramatic windows, while the wall with dramatic windows was replaced with the new main entrance. Contractors weren't sure just why, but you know how it is, you start renovating and can't stop and new window fixtures looked so attractive in the store and how could they resist? It would be two years before anyone noticed the dome was taken off and left behind the parking lot, where it was thought to be an artistic sun shade or maybe a tribute to aviation.

November 22, 2009: Save the date. Contributions are accepted through the Will Call booth; ask for Will.

Trivia: In 1939 the United States defense program made up about 11.7 percent of total federal expenses and only 1.6 percent of the Gross National Product. Source: The Rise And Fall Of The Great Powers, Paul Kennedy.

Currently Reading: Hershey: Milton S Hershey's Extraordinary Life Of Wealth, Empire, And Utopian Dreams, Michael D'Antonio. Not to mention being the guy people named ``Snavely'' have to look up to for an example that isn't the despicable villain in a slightly overwritten melodrama.

And some wise men and some fools, and I believed it too

Let me return to the action in my Hearts of Iron II game. When last left, in 1939, war had broken out over the Sudetenland and, after Germany annexed Czechoslovakia and Poland, turned into a battle between the Axis powers (Germany, Rumania, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, and Bulgaria) and the Comintern (Soviet Union, Mongolia, and Tannu Tuva), which turned into a stalemate on a line running roughly from Odessa to Minsk. Meanwhile in the far east Japan has overrun all of China except for Sinkiang, in the northwest of mainland China, and the Communist Chinese. My United States have joined the Allies, but as of 31 December 1939, we are not at war.

( The short version: things stay remarkably stable in Europe, while Japan continues its march through Chinese territories. The United States's rearmament program swings into higher gear, but for now, nothing's being used. )

Trivia: Pete Conrad made his bet, regarding whether he would be allowed to pick his own First Words on landing on the Moon, with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, whom he had known since 1964. She had bet $500 that he would not say what he did. Source: A Man On The Moon, Andrew Chaikin.

Currently Reading: The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale Of Genius, Deceit, And The Birth Of Television, Evan I Schwartz. Huh. So Farnsworth really was working on fusion power.

Plastic god, listen to the drone

My (US) bank's decided to change my checking account. I suppose I was asking for it what with having no really interesting events happening in my financial life, other than my belated discovery that it's possible to get direct deposit from work after all. Well, nobody had ever mentioned it. I was planning to get direct deposit set up, and accepting that I was just going to have to eat the cost of the remainder of the 45 ``Security Envelopes'' which I otherwise mail my paycheck to the nearest branch with. I'll also have to find something to do with the remainder of my Freedom Stamps, guaranteed to maintain their value against postal rate increases, which turns them (given my rate of mailing envelopes) into a profoundly lousy long-term investment considering the increase in the cost of a first-class stamp is required by law to not exceed the rate of inflation.

Anyway, they're discontinuing the Student Checking type of account which has been my checking type ever since I opened my account, back in 1994 when I was a student, and back when my bank used its local name rather than that of its globe-spanning corporate overlords, which I think they stopped doing in 1998. I suppose it's fair of them since I haven't been a Student since 2002, and just wait till they find out how much Checking I don't do.

It doesn't seem to be personal. They're discontinuing the whole Student Checking class of accounts, and you can understand that, what with how the type doesn't even charge monthly fees if the total of your accounts with them exceeds a tiny sum. They're changing it over to one of the Standard Model Checking Accounts, wherein you have to have $1,500 in your various accounts to not get charged monthly fees. However, since my account was a Student Checking account, they're grandfathering me in and I won't be charged a monthly fee as long as my balance across my accounts exceeds the old Student Checking threshold, so there's no change needed on my part. But I am watching to see if they change my account number on me.

My bank suffered over a billion dollars in credit losses over the third quarter of this year, and saw a net income loss of about $1.5 billion last year.

Trivia: The £200,000 in bonds backed by the government of Poyais floated in 1822 in the City of London were underwritten by the the banking firm of Sir John Perring, Shaw, Barber, & Co. Source: Sir Gregor MacGregor And The Land That Never Was: The Extraordinary Story Of The Most Audacious Land Fraud In History, David Sinclair.

Currently Reading: The Last Lone Inventor: A Tale Of Genius, Deceit, And The Birth Of Television, Evan I Schwartz. And suddenly I know who Aaron Sorkin was cribbing off in writing the play The Farnsworth Invention. (Admittedly the facts of the Philo Farnsworth/David Sarnoff conflict will force certain commonalities of any roughly chronological yet paired telling of the story.)

At the party she was kindness in the hard crowd

It was as I was going into work in the morning, after finishing my commute and putting my shoes back on and finding that I wouldn't have to fumble with the security-code locked door since one of the first-floor guys was standing there by the open door, taking in the fresh air and smoking. There's an impedence mismatch between him and the rest of the employees, as he's very energetic and driven and gives off many hints of being a morning person. He actually interact with clients, too, and in that line introduced the wireless telephone headset to operations, his operations anyway, so that he can speak clearly, sharply, and swiftly, from anywhere he happens to be. It's a good thing he's likeable or he'd be way too much to take at 7:58 am.

But he did break out of the routine mumbled-hi/sharply-stated-hello, how-are-you/mumbled-well-and-you/good-thank-you interchange that usually marks the morning interaction. He was curious where I live, which seemed like normal enough curiosity and I answered while the very slow, very stupid part of me that handles small talk began the process which would have otherwise inspired it, five minutes later, to think of asking where he lives. As it happens I live near one of the technical support guys, also dwelling on the first floor (although his job's off-site requirements make carpooling impractical, alas). And then he asked whether I believe in God, which was about the 2,038th subject I was expecting to come up.

``Er ... ah ... not particularly,'' I said, in what has got to be the weakest declaration of atheism on record.

Well, it's also the first time I've made an explicit declaration to anyone, either, although it's probably not a particularly interesting surprise to the folks I think likely to read this rather than skim vaguely over it. Mostly it doesn't come up. I had absolutely no idea what might follow from this exchange.

What followed was just a faint sort of disappointment, because, he said, he's part of a group which likes to get together but if I don't believe in God there's not much reason for me to join it. And I agreed, yes, given that it does sound like there wouldn't be a lot to chat about, really. But the dim small-talk sector of my brain did think to thank him for thinking of me. And we've gone on to the normal sorts of interaction, so far as that's possible between a morning person and a non-morning person.

Trivia: Britons collected £100,00 sterling to send to Portugal for the relief of victims of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Source: The Age Of Voltaire, Will and Ariel Durant.

Currently Reading: Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda, Lawrence C Soley. Operation Muzak?! Well, it was named that because it was recording music meant to subvert German morale at the Muzak Publishing Company, and not they named the company from a program to sap people's will to carry on. Still, you know, ``Words You Don't Expect To Come Across In A Book About The Allied War Effort for $400, please, Alex.''

To find that I was by the sea gazing with tranquility

Saturday morning (well, early afternoon) my mother asked why I had gone to a laundromat; I explained, my father had said the new washer wouldn't be delivered until next week. Given that, it didn't make sense to wait in the hope that maybe I wouldn't run out of clothes (or have to buy new ones) before it came in. That the washer wasn't expected until next week was news to her. She'd gone to buy one Friday and admitted that had she insisted on a new white washer she would have had to wait until next week. Perhaps that's what my father had thought was meant? No, because she bought it on her own, and she hadn't reported anything about this until she got back home.

She had bought a black unit instead, and it was installed early Saturday before I got up. My father did not grumble that he could have used my help from this, possibly because there were delivery people from whatever store sold this to work on delivering the new and carting away the old. Well, the new washer was in the laundry room, which I finally saw mid-exercise session; I didn't have reason to go past it before then. It's monstrously huge. My mother says it isn't really bigger than the old, it just looks like it because of the raiser underneath. Well, it's unmistakably taller, no matter what. The elevation removes the need to bend down so much for the washer, a good thing for ageing parents, although since the dryer has to be on the floor now --- there's not the space underneath the cabinets for it to rest atop the washer --- this means they'll now have to bend down for the dryer instead.

It's also much more digital, of course, so that there'll be less hope of fixing it whenever it does get around to breaking. My father's warned me that come 2019 I'm not to let him try repairing it. I wouldn't mind having the problem of talking him out of that ten years from now.

Trivia: Edward Gibson, science pilot for Skylab 4/3, grumbled of spacesuit wear, ``I'd like to have a couple of garments around here which don't have these blooming pockets, just for comfortable, casual wear.'' Source: A House In Space, Henry S F Cooper Jr.

Currently Reading: Radio Warfare: OSS and CIA Subversive Propaganda, Lawrence C Soley. I have the vague sense of reading a repurposed thesis, particularly in how the contextual historic detail is not really quite there and there are some curious stylistic fluctuations.

Believe I better roll with it

Friday afternoon I bundled up all my laundry, which was a pretty big pile and didn't quite fit in my aged laundry bag (purchased when I was first going off to college, back before the Battle of Manzikert), and drove out to find a laundromat. Actually, I had a vague idea of where one was, from the problem with the dryer last year or so, and my father helpfully pointed out one was located quite nearby on a road meeting the road where the laundromat I did find was. As I looked around uncertainly with a bundle of laundry and some detergent in my hands, the woman listlessly watching the front desk explained there were washers and dryers of different sizes, and I thanked her.

I would like to report a sequence of hilarious not-quite misunderstandings and confusion, but it didn't happen. The only real surprise I had is that laundromats today are a lot more expensive than dorm room laundry was a decade-plus ago. ($2.50 for the wash, $0.25 for five minutes of dryer time!) I had to use the change machines several times over, which allowed me to collect several State Quarters which I hadn't had before, mostly Denver mint issues, and my first Washington, DC, coin. Oddly, one washer wanted ten more minutes for its load than the other two.

When concerned that I might run out of quarters I stepped to the convenience store next door to break a twenty, and realized they must get a lot of break-a-twenty purchases. So for my purchase (a Diet Coke and a Nutter Butter pack) I paid exact change, using two of my three remaining quarters and getting back $18, which probably would have confused the cashier if he cared to think about it, which I realize, he probably didn't. I didn't get any new State Quarters I didn't have from the change I got from this, either, but you know, the time spent sitting in an uncomfortable metal chair while a Nor'Easter stormed outside was oddly tranquil. I doubt I'll do it again anytime soon, but it wasn't bad to do once.

Trivia: Jay Ward's pilot reel, completed 1948, for what would become the Crusader Rabbit series, included the cartoon ``Dudley Doright of the Mounties'', with Dudley chasing villain Sidney ``The Snake'' Snodgrass of Deepfreeze Landing to save heroine Bess Blushmore. Source: The Moose That Roared: The Story Of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, A Flying Squirrel, And A Talking Moose, Keith Scott.

Currently Reading: Solar Lottery, Philip K Dick.

The best things turn out better if they were never planned

We got the shock absorbers as ordered online for the washing machine, or more exactly my father got them since they arrived while I was at work and discovering that I had a tracking number for it, although I forgot to obsessively check delivery status over the two days it took to install. My father put the absorbers in, by himself, and by the time I got home he was running a test load on it. It wasn't going well. The drum was rattling around and bouncing as it would for an overload, which, of course, shouldn't be happening. My father suspected that the axle for the main barrel was the problem and sent me back to the web site to see what it would take to get a replacement axle. It turns out you can't get a replacement axle without getting a replacement barrel for the whole washer, and that runs on the order of $200.

So when I woke up this morning and heard a quiet tumbling noise from the laundry room and saw the wheeled table which we'd left the dryer on I initially supposed that the problem had been that the washer didn't have the dryer stacked on it, which would naturally provide a certain stability to both operations. I was surprised to learn that no, my father had just set the dryer on the floor and taken the washing machine out to the garage for disposition. (The test load had to be dried, after all.) My mother was off buying a replacement, which he expected to arrive sometime next week. This would imply my finding a laundry in the area for my week's worth of laundry.

My father meanwhile was surprised that I was home on a Friday, because he thought I should be at, you know, work. I reminded him that I'd gone to a four-day week. ``You have? Since when?'' And I pointed out it'd been about a month now. He was still surprised by the news, since my mother hadn't told him. I asked if he hadn't noticed my being around the last several Fridays; he insisted that he wasn't around since he was working then. Still, he likes my deal of trading a raise for time off, which makes this decision --- which, don't doubt it, I had worried about excessively --- the most universally popular thing I've done in years.

Trivia: ``Granny'' was the name of the talking piano on The Buster Brown Show radio series. Source: The Trivia Encyclopedia, Fred L Worth.

Currently Reading: Solar Lottery, Philip K Dick.

Hello, I love you, let me jump in your game

How do you solve a problem with not being able to remember other people's names? This assumes you have a problem, of course. It's possible you're fine not remembering, which could be. There are over 28 problems more exciting, including ``someone keeps painting my door unattractive colors'' and the most popular problem in the world, ``don't know what to do with all these capybaras''. You should keep them in the capybara drawer.

How to handle forgetting people's names keeps occupied the minds of 16 of the world's greatest thinkers, giving some idea how the world got into its current shape. It is a stellated icosahedron, and don't think there aren't eight people worried about this. There is the approac René Descartes used, of course, to move to Stockholm and instruct the Queen of Sweden in geometry until dying of an acute triangle, but this is impractical since Sweden abolished the monarchy in 1919. People have been coming to Queen Silvia for decades, trying to explain geometry, but she keeps insisting she doesn't exist. ``What are you doing in Drottningholm Palace, then,'' they ask, and she tosses crumpled-up balls of aluminum foil as distraction and running away. Somebody should look into that, but won't like the answer.

With Sweden so difficult the next approach is simplifying the problem: if you can't remember so many names then maybe you could remember fewer names. Therefore under no circumstances continue living during the Roman Empire, when someone like Augustus Caesar could have several dozen names and pick up new ones the moment he suspect historians have started following him. And even then they'd use a fake name like ``Thurinus'' when talking with people who actually saw them face-to-face, so they'd be better able to deny everything later.

A greater simplification is to move somewhere everybody has the same name, which I find the Statistical Abstract of the United States says will be ``ISBN-13''. I may be looking at the wrong page. Unfortunately that's no long-term solution because you'll probably find is people there gather in private moments in secluded rooms to call each other by different names, and you're back where you started but surrounded by people passing themselves off as ``ISBN-13''. And you still won't be able to shake the feeling ``ISBN-13'' is the name of the 31st-century clone-android of the A Doll's House author, and you never read all the way through that in 11th Grade English, despite getting a B on the exam. You could have got an A but you wrote an answer for the public bath play instead by accident.

Some extremists suggest reinforcing the memory of someone's name by repeating it back as soon as you've heard it. This has the side benefit of making the other person feel special with how you successfully sort of remembered the name. This would work if it were possible to remember a person's name all the way to the end of a sentence like ``Pleased to meet you, whoever you are'', such as, ``Pleased to meet you, person whose name is on the tip of my tongue''. It also doesn't work when it's someone you met before whose name you should know, such as your father or Santa Claus.

You can ask for a business card, which allows the other person to ask you for a business card, and you'll end up trading the only business cards you have. These were given to you by a strange fellow hanging around the tour group when you visited Indonesia five years ago which you've never got around to cleaning out or throwing out. The other person went on the same tour. While you'll be able to bond over your memories of that strange fellow and not knowing just what he was doing, neither of you risks learning the other's name, but you'll be better on the name of that strange fellow. He was King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, raising further questions.

Most men whose name you can't remember are ``Rob''. Most women are ``Carol''. If you use these names you'll be wrong less than one-quarter the time.

Trivia: In 2006 the Unitd states recorded 509,700 total copyright claims. (Only the first four digits are significant.) Source: Statistical Abstract of the united States: 2008, United States Census Bureau. I love library book sales.

Currently Reading: Divided Highways: Building The Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis.

Just read the magazine my friend, your name is printed there

More progress progressing in my storage locker! Surprisingly it's been going really quite well. I think it was giving away the mattress and a couple pieces of bulky furniture to my brother that's made the difference, since that left it possible to gain access to more than the front of the locker space and to get into the midst of it without having to spend a half an hour taking things out. The rate at which I've been just throwing things out has slowed, but that's because I've got into things like my textbooks or other books well worth saving. It's also resulted in my recovering my copies of such treasures as Ian Shoales's Not Wet Yet, which I thought was lost for good, or a copy of Arthur C Clarke's Greetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds which I had completely forgot I owned. (I believe I bought it for airplane reading in December 2001 and then didn't read it on the airplane.) Also a copy of the Baseball Encyclopedia, in case I need a baseball statistic of questionable reliability and can't get online.

All the more impressively things are shaping up to where I have actual organization: a section for plastic models, a section for paperback books, a section for my old computers (going back to the TRS-80 Color Computer, original version, thank you) ... I need to better organize things like textbooks and trade paperbacks (particularly comic strip collection books), but it's getting manageable. And I've cleaned out all the drawers of everything, which is also a strange feeling.

Trivia: A roughly one-square-mile bit of land around a zinc mine in Moresnet, about four miles south of Aix-la-Chapellle, was granted by the Congress of Vienna to neither claimants the Netherlands nor Prussia (although surrounding territory was assigned one or the other), and remained as nation-less ``Neutral Moresnet'' until seized in World War I by Germany and awarded to Belgium in 1919. Source: Vienna 1814: How The Conquerers Of Napoleon Made Love, War, And Peace At The Congress Of Vienna, David King.

Currently Reading: Divided Highways: Building The Interstate Highways, Transforming American life, Tom Lewis. Hey, i didn't know RPI had so much to do with building the Interstate, although that's not a surprise since RPI has no self-esteem and couldn't bring itself to mentioning such a thing. But I am glad to have a primary contemporary source citation for the urban legend that RPI didn't, in those pre-1972 days, have a policy banning women from applying, it was just that women didn't. (Although they explicitly didn't tell women that, oh, yes, they could get an engineering degree from a top university if they wanted.)

It doesn't really hurt you, so that can't be bad

And now on to another thrilling installment of Tales of Washing Machine Repair. This is probably actually the first, since the last clothing machinery-related tale I think I told was about the dryer, which had a thing last year where it was broken and we fixed it. Here, now, we've had a thing where a thing in the washing machine broke, and we're working on fixing it. Things started over the weekend when the washing machine started making this hideous, rattling, thundering noise while in the spin cycle. My father complained I was overloading the machine, although since it was just a couple of shirts, a pair of slacks, and a couple sweatpants, the machine was not anything like overloaded. In fact, the machine would be more overloaded if it were empty. Switching to the lower-speed spin made the rattling less severe, and less long-lasting, but it still left my clothes damp enough it needed more than one run through the dryer, which was working still.

My mother reminded me Sunday about not overloading the washing machine, and I pointed out to her that I was not, and I haven't overloaded a washing machine in years. So she asked what the problem was, then. ``It's broken'', was the best I could do, but I could say the barrel (it's a front-loaded machine) was moving around far more than seemed appropriate. When the washing machine got into the rattling and shaking and walking about phase with her slight load of laundry she agreed, it's broken.

So Monday night my father and I took to fixing it, first by getting the dryer off the top of it (they stack) in a process that took much longer than it had any right to and required breaking these things that hide the hole where the screws connect the dryer to the top of the washer. The springs holding the top of the barrel were in fine order, of course, and we had to look underneath where ... we had to drill out the screw holding part of the front cover in place because it had rusted into unmovable metal. It turns out one of the shock absorbers had broken, but fortunately it was just the farther one, harder to access or manipulate without working the washing machine completely out of the tiny laundry room.

So we have the replacement part on order, two-day Federal Express. I hope that it hurries along since I've got a big laundry load these days --- grown-up clothes for work, and then something to wear for exercise, and then clothes to wear after exercise because I work out until I'm horribly sweaty, not to mention towels. If we have to go too long the laundry pile will be large enough to affect tides. Meanwhile all the time my father and I were banging around the laundry room the two semi-sister cats were staring at us, clearly unsure what we were doing but certain that as soon as Mom found out about it we were going to be in sooooo much trouble.

Trivia: The Armistice of November 1918 required monthly renewals, until 12 February 1919 when it was extended indefinitely. Source: Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed The World, Margaret Macmillan.

Currently Reading: Divided Highways: Building The Interstate Highways, Transforming American life, Tom Lewis.

If I could find a souvenir, just to prove the world was here

I'm fairly sure I know where I was when I heard the Berlin Wall had fallen, at least in the metaphorical sense that East Germany was giving up on this whole ``keep people inside'' concept. If I sound unsure it's because I think I'm getting my memories of it mixed up with memories of hearing about Nelson Mandela was freed and South Africa was liberated without the revolution or terror I had feared was unavoidable, just a couple months later, in that strange season of the fall and winter of 1989-90. I'm really sure that either way I was in bed, getting the news as I woke up, because back in those days I left the news radio on all the time, reflecting some primordial fear that if I left the news off for a minute I might miss something important. This was one of the few times I actually did catch something important. The news radio hadn't tumbled onto the idea of declaring every slight variation in anything as Breaking News, with a prerecorded tune heavy on brass for the introduction and strings for the continuation, and I listened to it a lot more.

The time feels odd since it would have to have been at least early afternoon on a Friday when the news came through, and you'd think I would have been in school. But looking at the calendar I think it's plausible I would have been home, and so sleeping well into the afternoon, since it was that sweetest, shortest week of the school year --- the one with classes on Monday, then a day off for Election Day, then back to school Wednesday, then two days off for the state teachers' convention, and the only disappointing part of this is that we wouldn't get Veteran's Day off separately. Between all those days off November was the shortest month. I'd have been close to the floor, since I was a teenaged male and going through that ``putting the mattress directly on the floor'' thing that we seem to go through for no reason that can be articulated once one isn't a teenaged male any longer.

I remember the strange feeling of how one of the things I had always known and had always counted on existing was suddenly changed; finding out the news as I was going from sleep to wake was probably more fitting than could have been planned. The Cold War had been receding, certainly, and changing for years and it wasn't as scary as it had felt when I was younger still, but there were still some things that I couldn't imagine changing, and the division of Germany was one of them. It might change, particularly with the numbers of people who were rushing out over the season leading up to that, but that there might no longer be a separate East and West Germany was unimaginable. I didn't even have the real idea that nations could dissolve, not outside the aftermath of wars. I remember that feeling of nobody knowing just what it meant, or just how the world was changing, and in unpredictable but good ways. I'd been through big good changes before, but they were slow to develop and not obvious as they were happening, as with Gorbachev's Glastnost; or sudden things that were clearly historic but bad, as with the Chernobyl explosion or the Challenger accident, but ... big, shocking, certainly good? This was new. Maybe there's always an odd little selfish thought accompanying historic events: it happened that I was planning to visit West Germany the next summer, and I realized I'd be there in the last days of its existence as a separate nation, something that not long after I was there nobody could do again.

I wonder how it is someone could have lived through that winter of 1989/90 and not realize how sometimes the world does suddenly get a lot better.

Trivia: The legal status of postwar Germany remained unsettled between the four occupying powers and the German Federal Republic until the signature of a treaty in Versailles in October 1990; the Paris Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe in November 1990 formed the legal end of the Second World War. Source: 1945: The War That Never Ended, Gregor Dallas.

Currently Reading: Victorian Sensation: Or, the Spectacular, the Shocking, and the Scandalous in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Michael Diamond. On a more frivolous note all the descriptions of things which shocked Victorian sensibilities leaves me with a faint urge to create a story that combines all the elements possible, you know, murderous servants, adultery, gambling debts, Irish home rule fanatics, arsenic, railroad coach crimes, nuns trying to leave an oppressive convent, the Prince of Wales, bigamy, Chartists, German child-brides, Middle Eastern royalty, public hangings and letters of confession, a leering gorilla in a purple cape asking why he must kill Superman, the works. But then I realize that it's probably already been written, and it's so thoroughly unreadable and forgotten that even ratmmjess couldn't find it interesting enough to categorize.