Coati mundane

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It seems the very air I'm breathing

For Sunday we had plans to meet my sister and her husband. This would be another chance for bunny_hugger to meet more of my immediate family, and also a rare chance for me to see my sister, who's remarkably elusive. My parents think they saw more of me, when I was living in Singapore, then they did of my sister, who was living about an hour away.

( We spent the day with my sister, her husband, and many kinds of sea life, including elaborate mixed feelings about sharks. We spent the evening with Doctor Who, old model. )

In addition we tracked down, online, a Companion of the Doctor who'd appeared only in comic strip form, an alien shapeshifter with a preference for taking on the form of a penguin after a failed romance. This pleased us as well as it could be for our final night together this trip.

Trivia: Sir Stamford Fleming's paper on ``Terrestrial Time'' attempted to avoid the politically sensitive question of where to set a prime meridian by instead setting a worldwide clock for the center of the Earth, with 24 time zones given Roman numerals on a special dial on the outside of clock faces, and an inner dial of 24 letters --- omitting J and Z --- to represent the hours, so that a particular time might be, as example, ``M.22''. Source: Time Lord: Sir Stamford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time. Clark Blaise. (And no, I'm not clear on how this avoids the prime meridian issue --- or the International Date Line issue --- either. My sense is Fleming kind of hoped it would be confused out of existence.)

Currently Reading: When Computers Were Human, David Alan Grier.

'Cause the sun is gonna shine and keep shining all the time

Saturday was cold. I want to emphasize this because ``cold'' by itself doesn't really describe how cold it was. There would, later in January, be colder days yet, but as we didn't have hopes to go out and do interesting things in that (the most I did on those colder days was go to work, which required almost no involvement from me) they wouldn't affect me so much. For bunny_hugger and I, though, we planned in the cold to go to the zoo.

( We went to the zoo, the library, the shore, and the movies, in more or less that order, and watched some Doctor Who. )

And that's how we filled out a happy Saturday.

Trivia: Radio City Music Hall's initial manager and operator, S L ``Roxy'' Rothapfel, claimed the design was the product of ``experience gained from a study of 6,000,000 letters'' from the public. This would imply his studying 68 letters per hour for his typical twelve-hour workday for his twenty years in the theatrical business. Source: Great Fortune: The Epic Of Rockefeller Center, Daniel Okrent.

Currently Reading: When Computers Were Human, David Alan Grier. And it happens I went back to that Burger King which has caused me mild disconcernment, and as I read it, one of the kids who stopped in asked what I was reading. I tried describing it briefly, and he claimed to find it interesting and discussed something about early video games I didn't quite get, and thanked me for the chat when his order was ready and he left.

And all the mist will clear

For the first day of the new year bunny_hugger and I had a plan which was a little bit old --- go up to Manhattan and maybe take in Macy's and the Rockefeller Center tree --- and a little bit new --- meet her brother and his girlfriend. Although he lives in Brooklyn and she had visited him immediately after her first visit out to me, back in 2007, we hadn't had the chance to meet yet. This could be the time.

( The critical core of the day was meeting her brother and his girlfriend; along the way, we did some shopping at Macy's, and saw a Christmas tree, and did not get seriously lost on or around the subways of Manhattan much. )

We would have looser plans yet for Saturday.

Trivia: Peter Stuyvesant launched New Amsterdam's first municipal government in February 1653, in a second-floor room of the Stadt's Herbergh (City Tavern), soon renamed the Stadhuis (City Hall), on the East River with burgomasters and schepens appointed by Stuyvesant taking their oaths of office. Source: Gotham: A History Of New York City To 1898, Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace.

Currently Reading: When Computers Were Human, David Alan Grier. Talking about the days when people did numerical computation by hand, with mechanical adjuncts, and boy it's fascinating stuff. I assume it's a different David Alan Grier from the one who appears on television, but there's not actually a biographic sketch to make sure of it.

'Cause the world's gonna know when they see our good times grow

On waking up bunny_hugger spent some time talking with my parents, and we thought some about what we would need for the Thursday night, which was New Year's Eve. The overwhelming consensus: food.

( A surprising amount of the day was based on the challenge of finding food, so, it was a good day. )

And so, with a different set of relatives, bunny_hugger and I finished the year together as we had begun it, and began a second year in person together.

Trivia: For his 1802 volume of the Annuaires Météorologiqus, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck attempted to divide all the kinds of clouds into five initial categories: en forme de voile (hazy clouds), attroupés (massed clouds); pommelés (dappled clouds); en balayers (broomlike clouds); and groupés (grouped clouds). Source: The Invention of Clouds: How An Amateur Meteorologist Forged The Language Of The Skies, Richard Hamblyn.

Currently Reading: Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen K Garriott, Joseph P Kerwin.

Go on, take the money and run

It's usually difficult to predict whether a company will succeed, particularly in advance. It's easier to wait and see how it turns out, then file a backdated prediction with the Patent, Trademark, Servicemark, General Markness, and Predictions Office within the Department of Commerce (second hallway on the left; ask for Mark).

The Zeggers-Pense Bank optimistically opened on January 26, 1958, and again February 4th, clearing its throat this time to attract attention. It preceded the third opening, on the 11th, with long aggravated sighing, and decided on March 2nd to get to work regardless of who noticed, which it did March 19th, April 20th, and one last time on April 12th. While the company was initially under-capitalized it found a steady revenue stream from passers-by making deposits.

It would be years before the company realized the confusion caused by featuring cofounder Zegger Zegger Bank's name on the signs. ``In retrospect,'' said an accountant, ``we should have guessed. It explained all the people demanding their money back.'' Attorneys-General in seven states agreed and the company escaped prosecution by putting a giant set of Groucho eyeglasses over its headquarters when the sheriff came around.

The initial product line was a low-calorie fruit drink and one of those weird-shaped rubber gasket-ish things that auto parts stores seem to have a lot of. Stores were unhappy trying to stock rubber gaskets that could be drunk, and the high rate of spillage from shop owners who hung juicy gaskets from nails resulted in floors that were noisy and stickier than even auto parts stores of the 60s needed.

The Bank regrouped, splitting the product line into rubber fruit and low-calorie gaskets, and tried again three months later with rubber drinks and low-calorie gaskets. In 1971 they added chocolate to create high-calorie gaskets, letting the company cover its debts under torn-up Hershey wrappers. When the sheriff arrived they removed the Groucho glasses from headquarters, again avoiding prosecution, and pleaded down to second-degree aggravated impersonation of Jack Benny, with extenuating circumstances.

The company hoped to inaugurate its exciting line of Exciting Mark Services with advertisements in the 1975 Super Bowl costing an un-heard $29. ``We should have heard,'' explained a National Football League representative, ``but we were on the phone doing a crossword puzzle while negotiating.'' The NFL got revenge by cancelling that Super Bowl, citing ``bees'' and the ``giggles'' contracted by players for the New York Giants and the Atlanta Falcons.

Despite the stumble within a year providing the services people named Mark require grew to one-fifth of all corporate revenue, and one-fifth of net profits, although not the same fifth. But despite test-marketing experiences in Akron (Ohio), Akron (Colorado), and Akron (Taiwan) they expanded to Peter Services, Raoul Disservices, and a women's Markeanne Services line. Soon the cash-flow difficulties returned, aggravated by a stiff fine for repeated and malicious imitation of Theda Bara.

Seeking a new corporate identity in 1984 the company changed its name to the Zeggers-Pense Bank, which nobody noticed until they had to order new stationery. That year's shareholder report claimed the name change had been so successful nobody could even remember an earlier name, and that their no-contest plea to first-degree James Arness impersonations worked out great.

By 1986 the company pared its target down to Mark, and had the market saturated within two years. Marks all over North America and the Loire Valley for some reason pleaded for less attention, but their letters were almost illegible from being drenched in low-gasket fruit juice. By February 1994 the Marks' discovery they could hire attorneys not named ``Mark'' saw the collapse of Zeggers-Pense Bank. Even so, many thought it could have been saved had it stuck to celebrity impersonations rather than hiding behind a fortress of strategically placed umbrellas.

In 2007 the company was revived as a free text-based role-playing game in Staten Island and Brooklyn, and closed in 2008 and again in 2009 just to make sure. It left the world much as it had entered, except for getting fewer outraged mobs this time around.

Trivia: The Pan-Atlantic Steamship Company, which would become the company with which Malcom McLean inaugurated containerized cargo service in 1956, was incorporated in 1933 with a fleet of four cargo ships designed to the United States Shipping Board's specifications for World War I cargo vessels. Source: Box Boats: How Container Ships Changed The World, Brian J Cuday.

Currently Reading: Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen K Garriott, Joseph P Kerwin.

There'll never be another like it as far as I can see

Now on to a fresh trip report: bunny_hugger visited me over New Year's, and I do want to talk about that, now that the maybe excessively long report of a con and my visit to her are amply described.

( On Wednesday, we came together, although not without incident. )

Trivia: Before the first cruise of the US Navy's Monitor no one had investigated whether the ship's propeller turned to the left or the right; as a result, a faulty valve setting resulted in the main engine turning the wrong direction and cutting the ship's forward speed to about three and a half knots, compared to the contract specification of eight. Source: Monitor: The Story Of The Legendary Civil War Ironclad And The Man Whose Invention Changed The Course Of History, Jams Tertius deKay.

Currently Reading: Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen K Garriott, Joseph P Kerwin.

It could make a million for you overnight

And some good professional news! I mean in my profession of doing academic-style stuff. I must have mentioned in passing being frustrated with the publisher of my first textbook, which came out in late 2006, since they never got around to sending me royalty statements or checks. A couple of times I chatted with the editor my co-author and I worked with and pointed this out, but promised follow-up action on this never materialized (although I did get a copy of one year's statement e-mailed me, by my co-author).

In late December they mailed out requests for all their authors to update contact information. If I understand the contact information they had for me correct, they thought I was at my old department --- which was reorganized out of existence --- at my old university --- which I wasn't --- and so if they were making efforts to contact me it was going to a nonexistent mailbox on the wrong (albeit existent) continent. Whey they didn't talk to the person who was e-mailing them I don't know, but I did send the person requesting the updated information a fairly snippy note pointing out that not only was their information bad but I had made multiple efforts to get any kind of royalty statement or check out of them and no longer believed they issued such things. The person expressed shock and apologized, and I supposed that this would have to do until I could get around to having a lawyer send them a vaguely threatening letter.

Instead, however, I've got a neat envelope with royalty statements for 2006, 2007, and 2008, along with a check for the accumulated sum which is not going to be enough to retire on, but gets above the minimum price for a MacBook Pro, which makes a nice windfall.

According to the statement up through 2008 the book's sold a total of 339 copies, which is good enough to get above the two millionth spot in Amazon.com's rankings. 186 of them were in the US, 152 of them in the EU, and 1 in the mysteriously labelled BK. I can only assume that I have a stronger readership in Burger King than I would have anticipated.

Trivia: In both 2003 and 2004 the United States supported 3,377 book publishers. The number of greeting card publishers rose from 114 to 120, however. Source: Statistical Abstract Of The United States: 2008. United States Census Bureau.

Currently Reading: Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen K Garriott, Joseph P Kerwin.

A million ways to spend your time

Fresh month, fresh The Price Is Right report: the Showcase Showdowns got to being as uniformly distributed as it was possible to get for the new episodes airing in January 2010. The first contestant won 13 of the spins; the second, 14; and the third, 13 again. For the season in total this gets us to 55 times that the first contestant's gone on to the showcase; 63 times that the second contestant has; and 64 times that the third has. So I think I'm justified in saying the pitiful performance of the third constant early this season was a fluke. In the past two months the relative shortage of the third contestant has been wiped out, although most of that difference was eliminated in December 2009. In either case the second and third contestants are pulling comfortably ahead of the first.

In my showcase-revelation pity watch, they threw my long-murdered hypothesis a bone: the last week of January was the first week since early October that the second-revealed contestant won more often than the first-revealed did. Still, for January, the first-revealed contestant won 14 times; the second-revealed 6 times; and there were no double overbids. For ``free choice'' cases, the first contestant won 7 times over the month and hte second-revealed 4 times. For the season, in total, that's 68 wins for the first-revealed, 20 wins for the second-revealed, the 3 double overbids. In ``free choice'' cases, it's 44 wins for the first-revealed and 18 for the second-revealed.

There weren't any remarkable spinning events, although for another time a contestant won the Showcase Showdown with a mere 55 cents. 50 cents remains the lowest winning spin I've seen. And in the Showcase one contestant overbid by a mere $80. Another fainted on the revelation of a car in her showcase; it was a Dodge Challenger SE. She won.

No fresh coatis popped up on Let's Make A Deal, although an otter was one of the zonk prizes for a curtain teased as being ``wet and wild''. Despite that teasing, the otter didn't have any water nearby.

Trivia: 523 West Point graduates fought in the Mexican-American War. 452 of them won brevet promotions; 49 were killed, and 92 were wounded. Source: The Class Of 1846: From West Point To Appomattox: Stonewall Jackson, George McClellan And Their Brothers, John G Waugh.

Currently Reading: Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story, David Hitt, Owen K Garriott, Joseph P Kerwin.

You leave the Pennsylvania station 'bout a quarter to four

Saturday was a cold day, and I was getting used to the idea of quite that much cold by doing my daily exercises --- actually, I was doing short, yoga- and strength-building exercises on the WiiFit rather than the half-hour step aerobics I tend towards, so that I'd be able to help my father installing the washer and dryer if he needed it --- when my mother got a phone call. From her side of the conversation, full of talk about their being in the area in no less than an hour but possibly longer because they hadn't decided what they were going to do, I picked up the essentials before the plans were relayed to me: my brother, his wife, and my niece were going to be nearby and would we like dinner with them?

Well, sure, of course, and when they got down (after I'd finished a not very grueling exercise session and was programming) we had some debate about where to go to eat. My father suggested a strip mall nearby with a diner, a steakhouse, two pizza places, a sushi place, and some miscellaneous others and while my brother wasn't sure just where it was, he thought following would work just fine. In the parking lot my mother was in the midst of calling them when they rolled their window down to pick a spot. We picked the diner, on my father's talking about how he liked it, and my reassurance that I'd been there with bunny_hugger so I had good feelings about it, although I admitted the food may have been irrelevant to those feelings.

My niece took to what seems to be her first Lavishly Fifties Retro Style Diner with energy, although it's to be noted she's at the age where everything is the most amazing thing ever yet. And she delighted my mother by running directly into her arms. She also charmed the waitress, who had a slightly distracting habit of touching my shoulder if I said anything in her direction including thanking her for putting the basket of rolls on the table, and while she sat at the far end of the table from me I was able to get a bit of quality time in by making faces at her while she looked in my general direction. (My father said that I hadn't learned the most important rule of parenting: eat first, play later. True, but it's not like I'd have much time afterwards.) She also found as among the most interesting things ever the ceiling fan and the TV set which for some reason had a bull-riding contest going on.

So it made for a successful dinner visit all around, and I learned a bit about the complex web of other children's birthdays which my brother and his wife participate in now that they have a child (yesterday's was something featuring Dora the Explorer; in a couple weeks there's a joint birthday at one of those inflatable-bounce-house places and they don't know the right etiquette for giving a gift to one of the other birthday children that they don't know), and we left just as snow was seeing its way clear to falling.

Trivia: Russia's adoption of the Gregorian calendar in 1918 resulted in the omission of the 1st through 13th of February that year. Source: Mapping Time: The Calendar and its History, EG Richards.

Currently Reading: Triplanetary, E E ``Doc'' Smith.

Isn't this a lovely day to be caught in the rain?

We've got the washing machine going pretty heavily today, the result of a week without any laundry being done. This isn't because the washer or dryer were broken, for a change; instead it was the floor. The floor wasn't really broken either, it's just my parents had decided it was time to replace ... decade-old linoleum. You know how that goes. So my father had laid out a practice tile configuration, your standard small-square, large-square, rectangle pattern on a diagonal and after getting some other chore done and being stuck around the house for a couple days anyway while his Jeep Something was getting fixed (They had to special order a part that didn't want to come in), got to work chipping up the old floor.

Apparently, standard practice in linoleum floors for something our laundry room size is to lay down glue around the edges and roll out the mock tile, flat. Also it turns out the builders deviously didn't rely on standard practice and instead glued every square millimeter of floor down, turning the tear-up-the-old-floor process from one of a couple hours to one lasting roughly as long as the Palaiologan Dynasty did in Byzantium. So we'd be without laundry a little longer than expected.

I go through a lot of clothes, what with my wearing them every day. And my reserves aren't so deep, since I've been donating away older, fatter clothes and buying smaller ones slowly as I figure out what my new size will be. And there was another surprise change as the tile pattern changed from the diagonal to going parallel to the walls, although this would be a net saving of time since diagonal tiles are a real pain to do. (Also it saves on tile costs.) But ... there was still waiting for the cement to dry, and this had to be done in two stages because of how hard it would be moving the washing machine out, and there's more delay waiting for the grout to go in and dry and ...

I was ready Friday to give up and go to the laundromat, but thought the washer and dryer were ready to be hooked up again. They weren't; one tile needed re-setting. Saturday while I did my WiiFit exercises this was finished and we got everything hooked up again, which is good as I was down to my last sweatpants and only had clean shirts because I picked up a couple when the Dockers at the mall shut down. Clearly I need more depth in the clothing drawer.

So with a little pause while I learned the water wasn't actually turned on, I've got what had been a mountain of uncleaned laundry cleaning.

Trivia: During the tense wait between the launch of what became Explorer 1 and the detection of it in orbit Army Ballistic Missile Agency commander Major General John Medaris sent the Jet Propulsion Laboratories a message to take it easy a while. JPL answered back, ``BEING NONCHALANT AND LIGHTING UP A MARIJUANA''. Source: A Ball, A Dog, And A Monkey: 1957 --- The Space Race Begins,Michael D'Antonio.

Currently Reading: Triplanetary, E E ``Doc'' Smith.

Good advice costs nothing and it's worth the price

One of the people at work regularly does the crossword puzzle, and that's on the page with with Doctor Gott, Bridge, and Dear Abby columns, as well as Doonesbury and (why not?) F Minus (which by the way featured a panel this week either a tribute to Mystery Science Theater 3000 or an independent re-creation of a classic Invention Exchange invention). Sometimes, I'll take the chance to read the columns, which occasionally have bits of madness. One of them came up this week, I think. ``Joyce'' asked for help in dealing with a co-worker from another department, whom she has encounters with a couple of times each week, and who consistently calls her by ``Sue'', a name which is fine yet wrong, even as a Dear Abby pseudonym. Abby's advice for how to correct him without embarrassment to any party:

DEAR POLITE: Try this. Tell him you have changed your name to Joyce --- that others are using it now and you'd appreciate it if he would, too. If he asks you the reason for the name change, say it's because all your life you have felt more like a Joyce than Sue. (It's true.)

I understand the sort of shyness and desire to avoid embarrassing situations, even if it's someone else getting embarrassed, which would go looking for ways to avoid pointing out to someone that he hasn't got your name even vaguely correct. Yet Abby's advice still strikes me as insane. It's the starting point for a dopey romantic comedy, not something that any actual person should do. One person I discussed this with suggested that maybe Abby was being sarcastic, pointing out that it's really not going to crush a person if you privately mention the mistake, although I have trouble imagining Dear Abby being sarcastic.

Really, I think the quality of her advice has declined sharply since she died. (She did die, didn't she?)

Trivia: The Chicago Tribune published a European edition until 1934, when it was bought by the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune for $50,000. Source: The Paper: The Life And Death Of The New York Herald Tribune, Richard Kluger.

Currently Reading: Designing The Centennial: A History Of The 1876 International Exhibition In Philadelphia, Bruno Gilberti. I'm not sure I came out of this knowing the Centennial Exposition better --- it's more about how the philosophy of expositions developed with chronology of events given only in passing --- but it has taught me the useful word ``vitrine''.

I'm the snappiest dresser right down to my inch wide tie

Let Your Undies Power Your iPhone
--- Headline from cnet.com.

( The news item inspires me to another of those rambling-dialogues. Readers are warned of attempted ... actually, not so much whimsy this time. )

``They'll just start making solar-powered hats.''

Trivia: The American League on its organization in 1900 adopted the Spalding-made Reach baseball for its games. Source: The Rules of Baseball: An Anecdotal Look at the Rules of Baseball and How They Came To Be, David Nemec.

Currently Reading: Designing The Centennial: A History Of The 1876 International Exhibition In Philadelphia, Bruno Gilberti. You know how it is. Some folks just notice one day they don't really know much about the Centennial Exhibition.

You could be a victim of circumstance

Good news, everyone: I may have a new job soon. Not losing the old one, so far as I know, but a project I could do as independent contractor, or freelancer, or what-have-you. A new interdisciplinary program at my grad school needs a web site which explains such things as how to get to it, what their mission statement is, who's in the program, that sort of thing. My advisor suggested me to them and based on a phone call I think they like me and I can do most of what they want right this minute, given minutes.

They do want some password-protected areas where groups can share files and also set up shared calendars of events and news bulletins. I've actually written code that could be redirected for most of this, but they are hoping to use something called ``Drupal''. I never heard of that either, but as a comical fake word of two or three syllables it's a web thing and it looks like it should do all the boring work of coding very well.

The one thing they asked which I'm stumped on is: what do I charge? In light of my comments about artist commissions a few weeks back the answer might seem obvious. I'd like enough money to cover the cost of a new laptop, as I'm getting about to my projected replacement time. The more the better, of course, although I see this project more as first item in a portfolio for as a paid web making thingy. So all I really want is to make sure I get the job, but don't put a price so low they suspect there's something wrong with me.

Oddly, back in grad school, I did a little web page design job, coding a tiny special-purpose search page, which I'm pretty sure I got $3,000 for. And that was a much simpler project, although I did have to learn enough Perl and cgi-bin to open dangerous security holes nobody would ever care about to do it. However, I also suspect this was the department chair throwing me some funding because there weren't summer-instructor positions available for me, so I don't know how to use this very old project for much simpler goals from a different department as a guide. Plus I'd have to learn ``Drupal'', assuming that is a real thing.

I'm trying to get my advisor to prod the people involved and see what they were planning to pay; my attempts to fish that out in the phone call didn't work. I may try using the earlier experience as a starting point, since $3,000 would cover my new-computer desires with room to spare, and by talking about it as what's-guiding-my-thinking might let me feel out their price range without committing to too much. Still, it'd be easier to know.

Trivia: Morton Thiokol's data before the final launch of the space shuttle Challenger indicated that the worst Solid Rocket Booster O-ring damages, field joint blow-bys, had come with a ring at an estimated temperature of 53 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest launched to that date (STS-51C, January 1985), and at 75 degrees Fahrenheit, the warmest launched to that date (STS-61A, October 1985). Source: The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA, Diane Vaughan.

Currently Reading: How Markets fail: The Logic Of Economic Calamities, John Cassidy.

Although it may be a pile of debris

Let me outline my strategic problem in the current struggle, where the Allies are sitting peaceably waiting for a winner in the Axis/Comintern war and where Japan digests its conquest of all China.

( Three dooms! There are three obvious wars the Allies might get into, discounting the chance of being at war with more than one of the parties simultaneously, and I size up the most generalized war plans for each. Gathering the data to make explicit my strategic problems has helped me figure just what to do for the hardest problem. The relative strengths of the Allies, Axis, Comintern, and Co-Prosperity Sphere are also estimated. )

However it works out, I think I may want Henry J Kaiser to get into aircraft production.

Trivia: Franklin Roosevelt's ``Germany First'' strategy seems to have been first articulated by Chief of Naval operations Admiral Harold Stark in November 1940, adopted by the ABC-1 Conference of February-March 1941, reinforced with discussions with Winston Churchill in the Placentia Bay meeting of August 1941, but only made policy after the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. Source: The Second World War, John Keegan.

Currently Reading: How Markets Fail: The Logic Of Economic Calamities, John Cassidy.

And latch on to the affirmative

I had the chance this weekend to resume my odd World War II simulation, in Hearts of Iron II. Given some time I was able to get through 1941 and half of 1942, although the way it turned out it's hardly worth bothering. Up to 1 January 1941, Japan had conquered all China except the Communists, and had just gone to war with them; and the German demands for the Sudetenland were refuse by Czechoslovakia, provoking a German invasion which eventually spread to Poland and became a war between the Axis and the Comintern.

Japan --- which has not joined the Axis --- conquered Communist China as of the 14th of May 1941, and the rest of the year settled to my finding that funding partisan uprisings was expensive and not all that clearly effective, which seems to be the rule in such things. With Japan's total conquest of China various historical events, such as the economic sanctions against Japan, haven't happened; it should not be surprising then that Japan hasn't attacked Pearl Harbor et al. The Axis/Comintern war, meanwhile, stalled out along the Dnieper River with neither side able to get very far across it one way or another. This bothers me since it seems clear the Allies will have to fight whoever wins this war, if anyone does, and their armies are building experience that the Allies just are not.

For the Allies, the exciting news was on the 9th of April, when Belgium joined, which says pretty much what a year that was. And in the rest of the world the big excitement was the 19th of July, when Peru demanded territory from Ecuador and Ecuador courageously gave in to their demands, since who could hope to stand up to the military prowess of Peru?

With the United States safely in the Allies and the Allies at peace, other historical developments have not happened: there's not been a destroyers-for-bases deal, for example, nor a British or eventual United States occupation of Greenland and Iceland. There's also been no talk of Lend-Lease, but there hasn't needed to be either.

As the United States I've realized I've fallen behind in developing strategic doctrines, which are (three!) technology trees, much like industrial or naval developments. I need to shore those up --- they affect how well units function in combat --- but it does feel ahistoric to me to have doctrines advance much when a nation's steadily at peace.

The peace has given me time to consider grand strategy options for the three probable wars to eventually come, and realize I have a huge potential problem with no good solution.

Trivia: A mid-Atlantic hurricane in March 1943 forced the cessation of U-boat operations, with most returned to base for refitting and refueling. Source: Why The Allies Won, Richard Overy.

Currently Reading: The Wilson Plot: How The Spycatchers And Their American Allies Tried To Overthrow The British Government, David Leigh.

He's the strongest, he's the quickest, he's the best

One of the program blocks on my old-time radio station is ``Brunch with the Brits'', which offers miscellaneties from British radio, which is where I learned just how rushed the conclusion of the second series of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy really is. I'd never heard it before. But I usually miss the first half since the ``Brunch'' starts at noon and I'm normally at lunch that hour, but for a weird change I happened to not be eating in the lunch room most of the hour.

What was playing and what I heard most of, for a change, was a Sherlock Holmes meets Dracula story. I can't guess who wrote it and I suppose it's not a unique project, considering what will happen with popular characters originating in nearby decades who're out of copyright. The baffling thing about it was that the author decided, as best as I can tell, that it was meant to be a sort of secret history alongside the events of Dracula, so that Van Helsing still slays Dracula somewhere in Transylvania. (I assume that's how it ends; I've never actually read the book, but I have seen Nosferatu several times.)

I guess the idea's fine, if Dracula had reason to go to England, but it forces an impossible anticlimax into the story: Holmes can go chasing Dracula just fine but he can't do anything to him. So all Holmes does is learn the mystery of the vampire, which everyone in the audience already knew because we've seen 110 years of riffing on the Dracula idea already. A clever enough treatment could wallpaper over that self-sabotage, but this one didn't find a way, so the result at the end was ``why was this ninety minutes of radio drama, exactly?''. What's the point of having Holmes and Dracula in the same story if Holmes isn't going to catch Dracula?

They closed out the block with the audio from an episode of Yes, Minister, though, so the Brunch ended at 2 pm on an up beat.

Trivia: On visiting Egypt in 1895 Arthur Conan Doyle discovered the Sherlock Holmes stories had been translated into Arabic by the Khedive and were issued to the police as training textbooks. Also surprising but less amusing was an officer who examined Doyle's face with great care and concluded the writer showed ``criminal tendencies''. Source: Conan Doyle, Detective, Peter Costello.

Currently Reading: The Wilson Plot: How The Spycatchers And Their American Allies Tried To Overthrow The British Government, David Leigh.

It's really love, dear, I knew it from the start

So Conan O'Brien had his final Tonight Show last night, and as anyone who read my 86-part essay on attending his final Late Night knows, I'm a fan, going far back to his start in 1993. You'd probably be very nearly interested in the number of little obscure fannish references to his shows that I've slipped into my online persona. One result is that many people wonder what I make of his firing/leaving/walking away from The Tonight Show, and what I think he'll do next.

And I realize that, somehow, I feel strangely okay with everything that's happened. Granted, none of it really affects me personally and everyone involved is at least getting some compensation for the job not being as stable as might have been expected. But something about the way O'Brien came to the end of his run on The Tonight Show feels ... maybe not right, morally, but at least appropriately legendary. Maybe I'm showing my age.

I was just barely old enough to watch Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, although I didn't very often since by the late 80s/early 90s he was mostly running on fumes and David Letterman was more exciting and original. But I did grow up with that feeling of The Tonight Show being this legend, an institution that went back to the misty days before television discovered fire, a place with names I kind of knew like Steve Allen, Jack Paar, and Ernie Kovacs who'd run it before and Heeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny now. I knew things which happened to it should be bigger and more exciting than what happened to other talk shows, this place where Ed Ames and Carnac and they took the show to Cuba and then Berlin and Kermit was guest-host and the Slauson Cutoff and ... even if on the day-to-day basis I was less worried about actually watching it.

And I think that's why it feels so right that Conan O'Brien should take what had been, at heart, Jay Leno's show failing at 10 pm and his own ratings being too low to resist being bumped back a half-hour, and turn it into a moral stance. Being pushed behind a half-hour Jay Leno show would be a subtly degrading demotion for Conan, but more, for The Tonight Show, and ... maybe everyone has fantasies of quitting rather than putting up with the boss's subtle degradations. But it's the sort of thing that becomes television mythology, the way Jack Paar's walking off the show did, and I feel good that something with that mythological heft could still happen.

Maybe in five years nobody will remember what was ever so interesting about late night talk shows. Maybe not. But I usually like it when people assume that what they do does matter, and that they should do things that can be legendary. So maybe that's why I don't feel distraught by all this. I got to be there to witness something striving for nobility.

Trivia: The Hoover Dam swing shift crew of 24 January 1933 managed a record 1,841 truckloads scooped out from the canyon base --- roughly, four truckloads a minute for the eight-hour shift. Source: Hoover Dam, Joseph E Stevens.

Currently Reading: The New Hugo Winners, Editors Isaac Asimov, Martin H Greenberg.

In the world where only time's erased
( The close of my Thanksgiving visit included bookshelf-moving, and ... the weird side-effects of a little holiday e-mail I'd sent my relatives. )

In many ways, I don't understand my family.

Trivia: From 1500 to 1800 every schoolchild in Iceland was given half a stockfish (fish tied in pairs by the tail and hug over poles to dry) every day. Source: Cod: A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World, Mark Kurlansky.

Currently Reading: The New Hugo Winners, Editors Isaac Asimov, Martin H Greenberg. 1983-1985's winners in the non-novel-length categories.

Why don't we drive in the rain

Good evening, or otherwise, and I thank you for your bewildering choice to have me speak about distracted driving. I may not have traditional or any expertise but probably I can share something of enough value to keep your sergeants-at-arms from applying their pointy sticks. I realize, gazing over your stunned faces, I have never been confident in my ability to spell sergeant, but I'm fairly good in the ``at'' part.

Many people are kinds of drivers, and nearly as many are vice-versa. If you are, or you know someone who is you, perhaps both of you may choose who's to be vice and who's to be versa, noting always the vice party is entitled to the hyphen unless that's supposed to just be a dash. Ties go to the runner, which is why we don't dress up as much as we used to.

It is almost impossible to drive distractedly without a vehicle, although this was managed by Swamp Meadow's Corner resident Susan Barometer last October when she left the dashboard satellite mime system running. As penalty she was required to turn her vehicle over to the county sheriff for two days of mocking, and while her mime lost four pounds it was all water weight. The lesson is if the car you do not have is to be temporarily confiscated please make certain it is a boring enough model the sheriff's mocking team cannot concentrate on it long enough to think of any paint-scarring jokes.

Most distracted driving starts with not paying attention to the road. This is probably fair since the road pays so little attention to you. For an inattentive example, on which side of the road do you drive? The expected answer is the outside, unless you are driving through a tunnel, in which case you want the inside, or the outside of the inside, unless again you are driving somewhere the force of gravity has gone terribly wrong, when you need to cling to an outer edge for dear life. Also, while driving on the outside (inside) you will want to be inside your vehicle, unless you are borrowing a friend's car.

Any skilled topologist can tell us the inside and the outside of your vehicle are actually the same place, whether or not you ask or listen. And just when we've got stuck wondering how we can tell a skilled from an unskilled topologist, the topologist adds that so are the inside and outside of your road. To compensate for this most jurisdictions mandate that each topology course one takes adds two points to one's driver's license, and those who earn an advanced degree have their cars trussed up and placed atop the dean's building.

But, wait, I hear a sergeant-at-pointy-sticks wondering, are there never times when it is acceptable to be distracted from the road? There's when you're not the driver, that's a hot one, or when you are the road, as distraction then is seen as your not being too self-absorbed. If you --- please stop poking --- you are not the road, who is? It is Daniel Easement of Belated Pines (Boro, not Township). Further, if you both are and are not the road you are probably in trouble from the logicians and the topologists will be none too satisfied either.

Another acceptable distraction is wondering why the Orville Reddenbacher corporation is being difficult. I --- ow --- imagine everyone has noticed microwave popcorn nutrition labels say a serving is two tablespoons unpopped, as eaten by sparrows, but this makes five cups of popped corn. Also it says a serving is --- ow --- one cup, and there are 2.5 servings per bag. This leaves 2.5 cups of popped corn unaccounted for each bag. Sorting this out is a good chance to hit another car, and you could use the un-servable popcorn to absorb whatever leaks from the wrecks. This requires in-car microwave ovens.

So the leading cause of acceptable accidents must be the Orville Reddenbacher corporation's confusing nutrition labels and ow hope I have confused enough to satisfy your anticipations about my talking. Thank you and, I suppose, that will have to do.

Trivia: On its formation in July 1897 stock in Marconi's Wireless Telegraph and Signal Corporation was valued at £ 1 per share. Within six months it had tripled. Source: Thunderstruck, Erik Larson.

Currently Reading: The Fallen Colossus: The Great Crash Of The Penn Central, Robert Sobel.

Fun for all that children call their favorite time of year
( Saturday: Christmas lights at an historical village dominate things; also, we get food, and see a spectacular tree. Finally we end up on Craggy Island. )

Trivia: Although Abraham Lincoln had his cabinet vote on the gauge for the transcontinental railroad in January 1863, he immediately pocketed the ballots so no one would know the outcome. On the 21st Lincoln announced he had chosen the five-foot gauge. Source: Empire Express: Building The First Transcontinental Railroad, David Haward Bain.

Currently Reading: The Fallen Colossus: The Great Crash Of The Penn Central, Robert Sobel.