I was watching a video presentation in Circuit City this weekend when I realized that the announcer was Christian Slater. The weird thing was, he never appeared in the video, and he was never credited. There was no way to know it was him.
Why pay a well-known actor to hawk your product and then keep his identity a secret? The answer is both sordid and disturbing -- par for the course in advertising.
According to a new Rice University study, you'll respond to a celebrity voice-over even if you're not aware of it. In fact, you'll feel more positively about the brand, presumably because the voice triggers positive feelings about the celebrity.
That's the sordid part. Here's the disturbing part. If, like me, you happen to recognize the celebrity's voice anyway, the spell is broken. That's because you'll recognize it as irrelevant and dismiss it.
So advertisers have a strong interest in distracting you with visuals and hiring big-name talent -- Julia Roberts, Gary Sinise, Stockard Channing, Donald Sutherland, Gene Hackman -- to pour honey in your ears.
This is a win-win for advertisers -- a celebrity's voice-over costs less than a full-blown appearance, and it's more effective. Ad guru Leo Burnett said, "The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships." You just don't get into heaven, is all.
|W|P|110945628494178222|W|P|His Master's Voice|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJon C. Allen has been designing one-sheet movie posters for 10 years, and his One-Sheet Design portfolio explains the stories behind 24 of them, including Air Force One, Men in Black, and Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone.
|W|P|110959602636573933|W|P|Movie Poster Design|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIn 1900 the Ladies Home Journal made 29 predictions about the year 2000. Sample:
There will be air-ships, but they will not successfully compete with surface cars and water vessels for passenger or freight traffic. They will be maintained as deadly war-vessels by all military nations. Some will transport men and goods. Others will be used by scientists making observations at great heights above the earth.
These prophecies reveal as much about the nature of science fiction as about the nature of science. They're often utopian, or naive extrapolations of existing knowledge. And change is accelerating. I'm sure the world of 2100 is literally unimaginable to us today. It's not even worth trying.
|W|P|110959593319643270|W|P|Auguries|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
People criticize online journals for being banal and aimless, and they often are, but their quotidian nature isn't necessarily a strike against them. The unorganized personal essay has a distinguished history, rising even to art in some cultures. Read this:
"What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head."
One of the classic works of Japanese prose is the Tsurezuregusa, a series of 243 short writings composed by a 13th-century monk. These "Essays on Idleness" follow the zuihitsu style of writing -- literally, "follow the brush" -- in which the writer skips among topics, with no larger structure in mind.
The monk, Yoshida Kenko, wrote variously about nature, traditions, and friendship while in his hermitage, putting the sheets on the wall. They were collected only later, by a friend. By the 17th century they were considered a classic, and they're now part of the Japanese high-school and undergraduate curricula. Not all blog entries deserve that distinction, certainly, but they shouldn't be dismissed for being idle.
|W|P|110944040054374737|W|P|"Follow the Brush"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBrace yourself: Patrick Swayze's 1989 poet-bouncer movie Road House is being remade as a stage play.
"In any given sequence, up to ten actors in harnesses and bungee cords are ricocheting off trampolines or making athletic head kicks at each other while breakaway tables shatter and fake vomit flies," says Time Out New York. "It's like watching Jerry Bruckheimer go off-off Broadway."
|W|P|110942829013772838|W|P|Pain Don't Hurt|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comEpitaphs:
Joseph Palmer
Persecuted for
Wearing a Beard.
-- Leominster, Mass., 1873
The Family of Robert T. Hallenbeck
None of us ever voted for
Roosevelt or Truman
-- Elgin, Minn., c. 1950
HE CALLED
BILL SMITH
A LIAR.
-- Cripple Creek, Colo., c. 1875
DOROTHY CECIL
Unmarried as yet
-- Wimbledon, England, c. 1900
Anna Wallace
The children of Israel wanted bread,
And the Lord he sent them manna,
Old Clerk Wallace wanted a wife,
And the Devil he sent him Anna.
-- Ribbesford, England, c. 1770
Here lies my wife,
Here lies she,
Hallelujah!
Hallelujee!
-- Ulverston, England, c. 1750
Jared Bates
Sacred to the Memory of Mr.
Jared Bates who Died Aug. the 6th
1800. His Widow aged 24 who mourns
as one who can be comforted lives
at 7 Elm Street this village
and possesses every qualification
for a good wife.
-- Lincoln, Maine, 1800
Even the pristine hinterlands aren't pristine anymore. In the early 1990s, British zoologist Tim Benton took a walk along a mile of shoreline on Ducie Island, a speck of land 4,970 miles east of Australia. Here's what he found:
- 268 unidentifiable pieces of plastic
- 171 glass bottles
- 74 bottle tops
- 71 plastic bottles
- 67 small buoys
- 66 buoy fragments
- 46 large buoys
- 44 pieces of rope
- 29 segments of plastic pipe
- 25 shoes
- 18 jars
- 14 crates
- 8 pieces of copper sheeting
- 7 aerosol cans
- 7 food and drink cans
- 6 fluorescent tubes
- 6 light bulbs
- 4 jerry cans
- 3 cigarette lighters
- 2 pen tops
- 2 dolls' heads
- 2 gloves (a pair)
- 1 asthma inhaler
- 1 construction worker's hat
- 1 football (punctured)
- 1 glue syringe
- 1 truck tire
- 1 plastic coat hanger
- 1 plastic foot mat
- 1 plastic skittle
- 1 small gas cylinder
- 1 tea strainer
- 1 tinned meat pie
- 1 toy soldier
And "0.5 toy airplane." That's 953 items of debris altogether, on an island of 2.5 square miles, in the least populous country in the world.
|W|P|110892767518728424|W|P|Thank You for Not Littering|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWilliam Topaz McGonagall is renowned as the worst poet in the English language. Sample:
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.
He didn't even get the facts right here -- 75 died.
Stephen Pile, in The Book of Heroic Failures, calls McGonagall "so giftedly bad he backed unwittingly into genius"; his temperance speeches were wildly popular with "poet-baiters" in Dundee, who pelted him with eggs and vegetables, and he was allowed to play Macbeth only if he paid in advance.
When Tennyson died, McGonagall visited Balmoral to ask if he might become poet laureate. He was told the queen was not at home.
|W|P|110935453694411377|W|P|"A Chicken Is a Noble Beast"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"God is a Republican, and Santa Claus is a Democrat." -- H.L. Mencken
|W|P|110708999446377698|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Contact Sheet takes the drudgery out of ransom notes.
|W|P|110925101714721080|W|P|Ransom Is As Ransom Does|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Incompatible Food Triad is a culinary puzzle: Name three foods such that any two of them go together, but all three do not.
The puzzle originated with University of Pittsburgh philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, and some notable thinkers have taken a crack at it. Physicist Richard Feynman thought he'd stumbled onto a solution when he accidentally asked for milk and lemon in his tea (ick), but this doesn't quite work, as one of the "good" pairs (milk and lemon) is bad.
Best attempts so far: salted cucumbers, sugar, yogurt; orange juice, gin, tonic. Honorable mention: "Get pregnant, and you can eat anything."
|W|P|110919535920779900|W|P|Three of a Perfect Pair|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe longest word you can type with your left hand is STEWARDESSES.
With the right, it's a tie: LOLLIPOP and MONOPOLY.
|W|P|110924954214403558|W|P|QWERTYUIOP|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
"I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up -- they have no holidays." Henny Youngman was actually pretty broad-minded, by today's standards. In an article for Secular Humanism, Edward Tabash says the plight of the American atheist is now a question of civil rights.
Tabash, who lost a 2000 race for the California legislature, calls nonbelievers "the the most unjustly despised minority in the United States today," and he offers some scary data. In 1958, 53 percent of Americans said they'd vote against a black presidential candidate on grounds of race alone. By 1999, that had shrunk to 4 percent -- but 49 percent of Americans still said they'd vote against an atheist.
Even during the civil rights movement, in 1964, the House of Representatives explicitly excluded atheists from protection under a new law against employment discrimination.
Meanwhile, their secular opponents were entrenching. In 1914, 58 percent of American scientists expressed "disbelief or doubt in the existence of God." By 1996, 93 percent did. Those who expressed outright disbelief rose from 52 percent to 72 percent.
Historically, atheists in this country have pressed for the separation of church and state, saying that "freedom of religion also means freedom from religion." The courts, unpopularly, have supported them.
But Tabash says that two new justices on the Supreme Court would establish a five-vote majority "to abolish the present requirement of government neutrality between religion and nonbelief." He calls on atheists to elect like-minded candidates to office.
"I submit that bigotry against a person just because that individual rejects unproven supernatural claims is every bit as destructive of the quest for a just and enlightened society as is bigotry against someone on grounds of race or ethnicity." I think he's right, but he may be, um, preaching to the choir.
|W|P|110557118192689187|W|P|Devil's Advocate|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLatin palindromes:
Si bene te tua laus taxat sua laute tenebis
If you are considered praiseworthy, you, elegant man, will keep your own property.
Et necat eger amor non Roma rege tacente,
Roma reges una non anus eger amor
And sick love kills, not from Rome, while the king is silent,
Rome, you will rule together, an old woman is not your sick love.
Ablata at alba
Retired but pure.
A favorite among Roman lawyers was Si nummi immunis, which means "Give me my fee, and I'll warrant you free."
|W|P|110892881829999134|W|P|All'indietro|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity." -- Goethe
|W|P|110799568700040686|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
MythologyWeb has the full text of Sabine Baring-Gould's Book of Werewolves, one of the creepier reference works of the 1860s.
In America we think of lycanthropes as turning into wolves, but legends actually vary throughout the world. People tend to turn into the most important carnivore in the area: dogs in Greece, tigers in India, bears in Northern Europe, foxes in Japan, leopards in Africa, and jaguars in South America. In Polynesia there are even were-sharks.
Correspondingly, there's a psychiatric syndrome called clinical lycanthropy, in which people think they've turned into animals. Here, too, though, wolves are in the minority. Clinicians have reported patients who thought they'd become cats, horses, birds, tigers, frogs, even bees.
Baring-Gould's vision was quite a bit darker, but he was a weird guy himself. A Victorian hagiographer, antiquarian, novelist, and scholar, he used to teach with his pet bat on his shoulder. His book wanders from lycanthropy down into grave desecration and cannibalism -- kind of an odd area for the guy who wrote "Onward, Christian Soldiers." To each his own.
|W|P|110914739371300730|W|P|Loup-Garou|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat's brown and sticky?
A stick.
|W|P|110868161198062571|W|P|Thanks|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Animals are such agreeable friends," wrote George Eliot. "They ask no questions, they pass no criticisms." Maybe that's why so many explorers included cats among their ships' crews.
A cat named Nigeraurak accompanied Vilhjalmur Stefansson to the arctic in 1913; another, Mrs. Chippy, set out for Antarctica with Ernest Shackleton the next year. Matthew Flinders' cat Trim circled Australia with him in 1803, and the first cat to sail around the world was Khouli-Khan, with Adm. George Anson in 1744.
If you have neglected to buy a cat for your own ship, don't worry, you can buy a creepy fake one.
|W|P|110685491399804826|W|P|Ratsbane|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Doctor Macro has high-quality images of classic films and their stars, mostly from the 1940s and earlier. This one is a publicity still of Hedy Lamarr, the Austrian-born star of Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah.
Lamarr is an object lesson in the price of beauty. She had quite a good technical education, and actually patented a device that made radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect. But the world saw only her face: She had to drug her obsessive husband to escape to London, and then Hollywood saddled her with demeaning epithets like "the most beautiful girl in films" and "the Laurence Olivier of orgasm." When she tried to join the National Inventors Council, she was told she could better help the war effort by selling war bonds.
In the end she went through five more husbands before she passed away in 2000; if she was bitter at her fame, it was certainly understandable. "Any girl can be glamorous," she once said. "All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
|W|P|110895843979898813|W|P|Heady|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comPetals Around the Rose is a simple brain teaser with an impressive pedigree -- here's how Bill Gates responded to the puzzle when he first encountered it.
Newcomers are told that the name of the game is important. Someone rolls five dice and announces the "answer," which is always zero or an even number.
That's it. On each roll, the initiate has to give the correct answer before he's told. When he can do this consistently, he becomes a Potentate of the Rose, pledged "to be a cruel and heartless wretch who will never divulge the secret of the game to anyone else."
I'm told that the puzzle is a good index of intelligence -- smart people take longer to figure it out.
|W|P|110877398505198102|W|P|Stumper|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOne downside of open-source software is the amount of profanity in the programmers' comments. Vidar Holen tracks the number of swear words in the Linux kernel: At last count there were 139 craps, 101 shits, 61 fucks, 16 bastards ... and 110 penguins.
He also has a rather amazing Excel macro for generating Mandelbrot fractals.
|W|P|110410952869373512|W|P|Language!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The Depravity Scale is an attempt to reach a scientific definition of evil. What makes a crime "heinous"? If "horrible" or "atrocious" crimes get longer sentences, what counts? The Supreme Court says that sentences must reflect societal attitudes, but right now there's no legal definition of a "heinous, atrocious, or cruel" act; jurors have to rely on their emotions.
New York forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner put together a list of 26 things that might characterize an act as depraved. Does the criminal maximize the victim's fear or pain? Does he boast about his act? So far, Welner has found more than 90 percent consensus that 16 of the items indicate depravity. Interestingly, the results seem consistent across states, but not between countries.
"We need consistency, and in particular consistency that reflects the best that forensics has to offer," Welner says. "From my own vantage point of working within the cases, juries and judges don't see near as much as they should be seeing when it comes to forensic evidence about what a person's intent was, what a person actually did, and what a person's attitude was about what he did. Even from a mental health standpoint, there's far more effort devoted to the question of who a person is or why that person did something rather than just look at what the person did."
And Welner has no problem with the concept of evil. "I have no problem with the word being used," he says. "If you look in the literature, there's a startling lack of effort to try to flesh out what evil is, and I think it's our responsibility as behavioral scientists to try to understand it. This issue gets neglected because therapeutic professions like psychiatry inherently must focus on the good in order to be therapeutic. Another reason for this neglect is because to wade in and wrestle with it means to confront it in ourselves, and that's a painful prospect even for the most stable of us. When I first began exploring this, I never enjoyed it, and I appreciated walking away from it. The more I studied it, the more it affected even my dreams. It's an unpalatable exercise."
|W|P|110865113652608591|W|P|Of Vice and Men|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I hate women because they always know where things are." -- James Thurber
|W|P|110799591547783990|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comZombie Astronaut has old-time radio recordings of horror, science fiction, and suspense, including a pretty good dramatization of H.P. Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror", with Ronald Coleman.
|W|P|110865010676936169|W|P|Creepshow|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Anne Spragge
Sacred to posterity,
In a vault, near this place, lies the body of
ANNE, the only daughter of
EDWARD CHAMBERLAYNE, LL.D.
Born in London, January 20, 1667,
Who,
For a considerable time, declined the matrimonial state,
And scheming many things
Superior to her sex and age,
On the 30th of June, 1690,
And under the command of her brother,
With arms and in the dress of a man,
She approv'd herself a true Virago,
By fighting undaunted in a fire ship against the French,
Upwards of six hours,
She might have given us a race of heroes,
Had not premature fate interposed.
She returned safe fromthe naval engagement,
And was married, in some months after, to
JOHN SPRAGGE, Esq.
With whom she lived half a year extremely happy,
But being delivered of a daughter, she died
A few days after,
October 30, 1692.
This monument, to his most dear and affectionate
wife, was erected by her most disconsolate
husband.
-- Epitaph, London, 1692
|W|P|110891783920401911|W|P|R.I.P.|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFilms with the most prolific use of the word fuck:
- Tigerland (527)
- Nil By Mouth (470)
- Casino (422)
- South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut (399)
- Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat (347)
- Another Day in Paradise (327)
- Summer of Sam (326)
- Twin Town (320)
- Ken Loach's Sweet Sixteen (313)
- Narc (298)
The winner, Joel Schumacher's 2000 infantry-training drama Tigerland, packs 527 fucks into 100 minutes, for a fuck-per-minute ratio of 5.27, or one fuck every 12 seconds. ("Damn it, Cantwell! Shit, man. Shit! Fuck, I don't even know you, man! You sittin' there telling your fucking stories. You make me want to fuckin' cry! What's that about?") Schumacher got a lump of coal that Christmas.
|W|P|110668633266220727|W|P|Intercourse the Penguin!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Recognize this hotel room? Then you should call the Toronto police: A 9-year-old girl was sexually abused here two or three years ago.
Even though she's been airbrushed out of the photo, the room still has a haunted quality. The same girl was apparently photographed in an elevator, near a fountain, even in an arcade.
Stranger still are the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, dollhouse recreations of actual crime scenes. They were created in the 1930s by Frances Glessner Lee, a millionaire heiress who wanted to improve police skills in forensic pathology. Four puzzles are presented here, and the Baltimore medical examiner won't reveal the solutions -- he's still using them in training seminars.
|W|P|110757638299686406|W|P|Scene of the Crime|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhen Winston Churchill won a seat in Parliament at age 26, he grew a mustache to make himself look older.
"Winston," said a female opponent, "I approve of neither your politics nor your mustache."
"Madam," he replied, "you are not likely to come in contact with either."
|W|P|110698477022119694|W|P|Churchill Anecdote #1|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comA Buddhist walks up to a hot dog vendor and says, "Make me one with everything."
|W|P|110868163218646514|W|P|Thank You Very Much|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Steven Wright used to say, "I've been doing a lot of abstract painting lately, extremely abstract. No brush, no paint, no canvas. I just think about it."
With Mr. Picassohead you can make a Cubist portrait in about 60 seconds. I spent a little longer on this one, pretending to get the composition right, but it's hard to go wrong with drag-and-drop noses.
Even simpler is the Mondrian Machine—even a dead guy could produce a neoplasticist masterwork if you clicked the mouse for him.
I suppose the masters wouldn't approve of these pushbutton knockoffs; Picasso seemed to take a dim view of technology in general. "Computers are useless," he once said. "They can only give you answers."
Of course, if you have real talent, machines can be a useful tool, too. Art.com's artPad is a lot easier to use than real brushes and paints, and the gallery has some decent abstracts.
|W|P|110852513031230228|W|P|DIY|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comIf you work in a spirit-crushing cubicle farm and can't remember the innocent joys of childhood, here's a compromise: Get a cube farm playset, including office furniture, a meaningless job title generator ("Domestic Engineering Associate"), and downloadable decorations.
If that's not highbrow enough for you, theory.org has Lego versions of social theorists Judith Butler, Anthony Giddens, Angela McRobbie, and Michel Foucault. Post-structuralism sold separately.
|W|P|110412091246169061|W|P|Leggo My Soul-Corroding Ennui|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out."—Decca Recording Company executive, turning down the Beatles, 1962
|W|P|110823066190144120|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Last May, it was reported that more than 80 percent of all e-mails in the United States were spam. That's a rather amazing number, as many as 30 billion messages.
What's even more amazing is that 80 percent of this crap comes from just 200 operations. Two hundred soulless hucksters are costing us $10 billion a year in wasted time and computing resources. We even know who they are: They're listed in Spamhaus' ROKSO database, the Register of Known Spam Operations.
If they're so few, and we know who they are, why don't we prosecute them? Spammers are like electronic silverfish; they use the Internet's ubiquity to evade the legal system. Most anti-spam suits are filed in state courts, but spammers can slip geographic boundaries. Congress passed the CAN SPAM act in 2003, but it was so toothless that some activists now call it the "You Can Spam" act. The feds could request stronger snooping powers, but that makes civil libertarians (rightly) nervous.
For now, we all have to live with it, and celebrate small victories. This month the world's eighth most prolific spammer, Jeremy Jaynes, starts a nine-year prison sentence in Virginia. He'll be the first person ever imprisoned for spamming.
|W|P|110769480300053070|W|P|Make Money Fast!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comJohn Brignell is saving the world, one blockhead at a time. At Number Watch, the electronics engineer exposes numerical illiteracy in politics and the media.
Last month's number, for instance, was 0.00035. That's the percentage of customers who complained about smoking in an outdoor venue, and who nonetheless won a total ban, thanks to a campaign led by the local BBC station. This makes no sense, but most people didn't seem to notice.
I don't agree with everything Brignell says—he's a vocal critic of global warming concerns, for instance—but I applaud anyone who can knock some sense into 4,000 readers a month.
|W|P|110839571446460951|W|P|Innumeracy|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"The bow is a simple weapon, firearms are very complicated things which get out of order in many ways ... a very heavy weapon and tires out soldiers on the march. Whereas also a bowman can let off six aimed shots a minute, a musketeer can discharge but one in two minutes."
That's Colonel Sir John Smyth in 1591, advising the British Privy Council to skip muskets and stick with bows.
InfoToday collected a lot of similarly farsighted advice into an online feature, appropriately called OOPS!
|W|P|110823123341136438|W|P|The Experts Speak|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Design your own church sign.
|W|P|110808481842822559|W|P|"Forbidden Fruit Creates Many Jams"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Museum of Unworkable Devices debunks a whole fleet of perpetual-motion machines.
|W|P|110847711802799465|W|P|It'll Never Work|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comOn this date in A.D. 600, Pope Gregory the Great decreed that saying "God bless you" is the correct response to a sneeze.
How does that work, exactly? When you become pope, do they give you a special hotline phone? If so, I think there are more important questions he could have asked.
You can spare others the whole "gesundheit" question by tickling the roof of your mouth with the tip of your tongue—it stops the sneeze impulse.
|W|P|110696362093017852|W|P|Hayfever and Ever, Amen|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Ambigrams are word renderings that can be read both right-side up and upside down (or, sometimes, in a mirror). They're hard to do convincingly, though some designers are pretty good at it. The one above was actually generated by a computer: Word.Net's Ambigram.Matic. It's not as elegant as the others, but I'm surprised that a machine can do this at all.
|W|P|110808558371860720|W|P|Topsy-Turvy|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"When you are 8 years old, nothing is any of your business."—Lenny Bruce
|W|P|110792055018709203|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRon Bailey, famous for inserting "pants" into Star Wars dialogue, has branched out into Spanish translations:
- "I'd just as soon kiss a Wookiee." = "Preferiria besar a un Wookiee."
- "Artoo! You're playing the wrong message!" = "�Artu! �Pusiste el mensaje equivocado!"
- "I see you have constructed a new lightsaber." = "Veo que has construido una nueva espada laser."
Luke Skywalker is Lucas Trotacielos, and the Force is la Fuerza. Yeesh. I suppose some Spanish films must sound embarrassingly dorky in English, too.
|W|P|110667144166557556|W|P|"�Puedo Arreglarlo!"|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The exact layout of Air Force One has always been classified, but How Stuff Works has figured it out and rather recklessly published it online.
When they retire the plane in 2010, I'm hoping they put it up on eBay. At 4,000 square feet, it's twice the size of my house, and my house doesn't have a pharmacy, an operating table, 85 telephones, 19 televisions, radar jammers, hand-crafted wooden furniture, and flares to confuse heat-seeking missiles.
Also, Air Force One holds 2,000 meals and feeds 100 people at a time, and it can carry 70 passengers halfway around the world without refueling. I think that would be handy on vacations. I can probably fit 10 people in my dining room if we set up an extra card table, but it doesn't go anywhere.
|W|P|110773032184947536|W|P|Harrison Ford, Call Your Agent|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comLike hopscotch and jacks, string figures always struck me as stupid girl stuff when I was growing up. World-Wide Webs shows how wrong I was: A lot of traditional cultures have long histories in making string figures, and there's even an International String Figure Association, founded by a Japanese mathematician and an Anglican missionary.
Oh, and the site gives lots of examples, some of which are downright scary.
|W|P|110420615142889971|W|P|Cat's Cradle|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Language Museum has samples of more than 2,000 languages, rather amazingly compiled by one guy in Beijing. Showoff.
|W|P|110412062761380637|W|P|No Pig Latin, Though|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
If stars on Hollywood Boulevard actually recognized incendiary talent, this is what mine would look like. Unfortunately, the actual system is a lot more sordid than people think. Oscar Levant said, "Behind the phony tinsel of Hollywood lies the real tinsel."
It's the Chamber of Commerce that doles out the stars, choosing 20-24 each year from among 200-300 applicants. That's right, you have to apply. It's all just a big marketing project. Even if they pick you, they charge a $15,000 fee; usually that's paid by your studio, which uses the ceremony to promote a recent project.
Like the Grammys, the stars are no measure of real merit. Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Redford, and Mel Gibson don't have stars; Bob Barker, David Spade, Pee Wee Herman, and Big Bird do.
So save your money and design your own star like I did. You can blow the $15,000 on heroin and hookers.
|W|P|110813197902298838|W|P|Star Wars|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."—Thomas Watson, chairman of the board, IBM, 1943
|W|P|110823081508509259|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFeralChildren.com has harrowing stories of almost 100 resilient children—kids raised by ostriches, raised in henhouses, running with jackals, or simply living alone in a forest.
Tarzan and Mowgli were hugely romanticized fictions. Real feral kids walk on all fours, their growth is retarded, they have keen senses, and they're impervious to heat, cold, and rain. What an awful life. Linnaeus even classed them as a separate species.
|W|P|110514171684480372|W|P|L'Enfant Sauvage|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comArtist Kamiel Proost makes miniature paintings on dollar bills.
It's a good thing he lives in Amsterdam, or he could face six months in the slammer.
|W|P|110588933262472518|W|P|Curious George|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comGeorge Bush and Dan Quayle are famous for fractured oratory, but the godfather of political malaprops is Sir Boyle Roche, an Irish member of Parliament in the 18th century. Highlights:
- "Mr. Speaker, I smell a rat; I see him forming in the air and darkening the sky; but I'll nip him in the bud."
- "While I write this letter, I have a pistol in one hand and a sword in the other."
- "All along the untrodden paths of the future I can see the footprints of an unseen hand."
- "He is the kind of opponent who would stab you in front of your face and then stab you in the chest when your back is turned."
- "We should silence anyone who opposes the right to freedom of speech."
- "I answer in the affirmative with an emphatic no."
The best I've seen: "It would surely be better to give up, not only a part but, if necessary, the whole of our constitution, to preserve the remainder."
|W|P|110822756372034390|W|P|Down in Front|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Assign your own Bart Simpson chalk message.
|W|P|110808487886799701|W|P|Blackboard Jumble|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comRule 9 in the Cartoon Laws of Physics: "Everything falls faster than an anvil."
|W|P|110808712531465798|W|P|Blam!|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe New Madrid Compendium collects eyewitness descriptions of the worst earthquake in American history. The Richter scale hadn't been invented in 1811, but this quake would have measured 8.0:
The vibration of the earth shook down trees, thousands of willows were swept off like a pipe stem, about waist high, and the swamps became high ground, and the high land became low ground, and two islands in the river were so shaken, washed away and sunk, as not to be found.
The kicker: This happened in Missouri, rocking the state hard enough to ring bells in Boston. Seismologists say there's a 90 percent chance of a magnitude 6.0 to 7.0 quake in the same area before 2040, affecting as much as 20 times the area of a West Coast quake. I wonder if their insurance rates reflect this?
|W|P|110511251750652174|W|P|The Earth Moved|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Once thought to be a sign of witchcraft, extra digits are actually the most common developmental abnormality found at birth. About two children in a thousand have extra fingers or toes.
They're even more common among the Amish, probably due to the "founder effect"—because the original settlers were few, their genetic legacy is amplified among their descendants, and apparently one of them had an extra finger.
If it's so common, why does it creep people out? Fictional villains from Hannibal Lecter to Count Rugen have been given extra digits, to make them seem alien and somehow menacing.
They're actually in quite good company. Marilyn Monroe didn't have extra digits, urban legends notwithstanding, but Anne Boleyn and Winston Churchill both did. And Atlanta Braves pitcher Antonio "The Octopus" Alfonseca was born with six fingers and six toes. I'd like to hear him play the piano.
|W|P|110773025270040996|W|P|A Great Big Hand|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"No one can earn a million dollars honestly."—William Jennings Bryan
|W|P|110799602661906089|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
An optical illusion. Squares A and B are the same color.
|W|P|110757804052670476|W|P|Shades of Gray|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Dr. Phil Random Quote Generator has a simple-minded Texas platitude for every occasion:
- "You don't need stain-resistant pants to join the circus."
- "You don't need a rope to learn about proper dental hygiene."
- "You don't need help to throw up in Tijuana."
Truest observation: "You don't need tap dancing lessons to hate my guts."
|W|P|110789152861150290|W|P|Pushbutton Counseling|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Your Mom! Joke Directory now has a section for math geeks:
Your mom is so stupid she tried to use substitution to find the definite integral of f(x)=x2 over the interval 0<2.
You might want to bring a baseball bat, just in case.
|W|P|110790517111994718|W|P|Fractious|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Earth's city lights, seen by satellite. You can make out major transportation networks: the American interstate highway system, the trans-Siberian railroad, the Nile. 100 years after the invention of electric light, only Antarctica is entirely dark.
|W|P|110773026528616282|W|P|City Lights|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe 10 most commonly stolen vehicles in the United States in 2002, according to the National Insurance Crime Bureau:
- Toyota Camry (vintage most stolen: 1989)
- Honda Accord (1994)
- Honda Civic (2000)
- Chevrolet Full Size C/K Pickup (1992)
- Ford Full Size Pickup (150/250/350) (1997)
- Jeep Cherokee/Grand Cherokee (1993)
- Oldsmobile Cutlass /Supreme/Ciera (1986)
- Dodge Caravan/Grand Caravan (1994)
- Ford Taurus (1996)
- Toyota Corolla (2001)
Apparently most stolen vehicles are stripped for parts. My Sentra's actually number 12 on this list—I don't know whether that's good or bad.
|W|P|110764591116920983|W|P|Grand Theft Auto|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comFrom National and Regional Card Games: "Idioten is a game similar to Shithead, which seems to have quite a long tradition in Norway."
No comment.
|W|P|110412058069839619|W|P|National and Regional Card Games|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
This is the "From Hell" letter, sent by Jack the Ripper to the president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee that was pursuing him. He included a bloody fragment to prove his identity:
"I send you half the Kidne I took from one woman and prasarved it for you tother piece I fried and ate it was very nise. I may send you the bloody knif that took it out if you only wate a whil longer"
Whoever he was, Jack certainly had a flair for dramatic horror. But much of his fame is really due to newspapers, which were becoming popular at the time. His crimes, which combined sex, violence, mystery, class warfare and police ineptitude, were tailor-made for cheap sensation. (In fact, it was probably a journalist who invented the "Ripper" nickname.)
Casebook: Jack the Ripper has gathered examples of lurid accounts from as far away as Poland, Jamaica, and Mexico. "All London is ringing with the horror of the thing," writes one New Zealand editor. "The woman who reads, with hair standing on end, the details of some fresh outrage to-night cannot feel sure that on the morrow she may not be the next victim." The whole episode is a low point for responsible journalism.
BTW, today the Ripper's story has spawned a rather unwholesome fanbase, with concentration games, crossword puzzles, and fan fiction. Somehow time can make even serial murder seem quaint.
|W|P|110756559182300631|W|P|Jack the Ripper|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comTheseus and the Minotaur is a series of Java-based puzzles in which you have to escape a maze without getting mashed by a computerized monster that moves predictably. There are 14 levels, and I can't get past level 4.
The interesting thing is that the puzzles were designed by a computer, and they're now being used in AI experiments at the National University of Ireland. So computers are now solving puzzles designed by other computers.
|W|P|110757273130311726|W|P|Theseus and the Minotaur|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"No opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible."—W.H. Auden
|W|P|110773149107182654|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHumphrey Bogart was apparently a pretty good chessplayer. As a kid he hustled for quarters in New York, and even during his film career he served as director of the U.S. Chess Federation. Reportedly he could beat John Wayne easily, and he taught the game to Dean Martin.
Here's a game he played in 1951 against Lauren Bacall:
Chessgames.com also has games by Charlie Chaplin, Ray Charles, Woody Harrelson, David Letterman, Woody Allen, and Sting.
|W|P|110761481022511085|W|P|Bogie and Chess|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Library of Vanished Sounds includes steam engines and teletypes, telephone rings and LP records.
|W|P|110411917778281945|W|P|What?|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comBad news: Aristotle is dead.
Good news: He's been reincarnated.
Bad news: He's been reincarnated as a stuffed bear.
Good news: He's taking questions.
And some of them are pretty good:
Q: Is logic truly analytic?
A: Truly, but not purely. It is both deductive and inductive, and must first start with observation in order to obtain premises with which to start.
Now if they could just housebreak him ...
|W|P|110453216693387027|W|P|No Word on Plato|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Last night I watched Monty Python: Live at Aspen and was terribly disappointed. This was the first time in 18 years that all five surviving Pythons appeared together onstage, ostensibly for a group interview with host Robert Klein. It could have been great. But the producers seemed to feel that intelligent conversation with comedy writers can't keep people's attention.
So they mixed it up with long clips, live songs, and boring, unfunny shtick with Graham Chapman's "ashes," leaving time for only about 10 ignorant questions from Klein, which he apparently cribbed from a Web site. Ironically, Terry Gilliam's comment that they wrote only to please themselves drew applause, as if the audience agreed that too much pointless showbiz only weakens the product.
If I were in Klein's place I'd skip the introduction (obviously the audience knows who Monty Python is), bring on the guests and take all questions from the audience. It really could have been great.
Anyway, here's how to find the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.
|W|P|110761879532515393|W|P|Python|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comAnd here's a list of the origins of band names:
- Spandau Ballet was a Nazi guards' term for the contortions of Jewish prisoners being gassed to death. There was a large gas chamber in the city of Spandau.
- The Red Hot Chili Peppers were originally called Tony Flow and the Miraculously Majestic Masters of Mayhem.
- Pantera is Portuguese for "panther."
- Oingo Boingo is Swahili for "thinking while dancing."
- The Eagles were originally going to call themselves Teen King and the Emergencies.
- Def Leppard got its name from Joe Elliot's drawing of a leopard with no ears.
I always wondered about that last one. What a stupid name.
|W|P|110761193936843656|W|P|Origins of Band Names|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comApparently Ohio's official state rock song is "Hang On Sloopy."
I don't know if that's the best song that ever came out of Ohio, but the resolution that proposed it is priceless:
If fans of jazz, country-and-western, classical, Hawaiian and polka music think those styles also should be recognized by the state, then by golly, they can push their own resolution just like we're doing.
Washington has better taste—it chose "Louie Louie."
|W|P|110756451629352956|W|P|Hang On Sloopy|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
The full text of Philip Wiener's Dictionary of the History of Ideas, from abstraction to zeitgeist, is now available online.
It's a great book, but because the original came out in 1974, a lot of people will see it as dated. That's a shame. Even as it gives us access to the great treasures of Western culture, the Internet is teaching us that they're irrelevant fossils.
So here's an obscure plug: Around 1910, Harvard's faculty composed a series of lectures to introduce its "five-foot shelf" of great books. They're brilliant, they're free to anyone on the net, and probably no one is reading them, simply because they're old. Start with Thomas Nixon Carver's general introduction to political science, which gives a beautifully simple way to think about economics. See what you think.
|W|P|110619080529898130|W|P|Dictionary of the History of Ideas|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Billions of bilious blue blistering barbecued barnacles!"
Tintinologist has a complete list of Captain Haddock's curses.
He's pretty well educated for a sea captain: I don't think Long John Silver knew what an anacoluthon was.
|W|P|110668620534371603|W|P|Captain Haddock's Curses|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comHere's a little light reading before you go strolling downtown: "Self-Defence With a Walking-Stick: The Different Methods of Defending Oneself With a Walking-Stick or Umbrella When Attacked Under Unequal Conditions." It originally ran in Pearson's Magazine in January 1901.
Apparently those things were pretty deadly: If you use your wrists and swing from the hip, "it is possible to sever a man's jugular vein through the collar of his overcoat."
|W|P|110691819635839742|W|P|Self-Defense With a Cane|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
A memo to every parent who's ever lived: Giving your kid a special name does not make him special. It never has. It never will.
You know what I mean. It's one thing to give yourself a screwy moniker. Body-modification enthusiasts have changed their names to Swirly Wanx Sinatra, Grenade Bee of Death, and RooRaaah Mew Crumbs, among other things, and there's a U.S. Army Ohio National Guard firefighter who named himself Optimus Prime. That's fine, you're the one who has to live with it.
It's worse when you inflict a harebrained epithet on a newborn, who will have to drag it through life like a neon hairshirt. Celebrities are notorious experts at this. Sylvester Stallone named his kid named Sage Moonblood. Jason Lee's son is named Pilot Inspektor. Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin named their daughter Apple. And Welsh TV personality Paula Yates had daughters named Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom, Pixie, and Heavenly Hirrani Tiger Lily.
This does nothing but embarrass the kid, and it's not even original. In the late 17th century there was actually a member of the British parliament named Isaac Praise-God Barebone. And that's nothing—he had brothers and sons named Fear-God Barebone, Jesus-Christ-Came-Into-The-World-To-Save Barebone, and If-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned Barebone. The last changed his name—I just love this—to Nicholas.
Of course, the parents see it differently, and a few have even gone to court to defend these monstrosities. In 1996 a Danish woman decided to name her son Christophpher, and she paid more than $45,000 in court fines for not using a government-sanctioned name. In the same year a Swedish family named its child Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (pronounced "Albin"), claiming it's "a pregnant, expressionistic development that we see as an artistic creation." The court still charged them $680.
If you're going to do this, fine, but at least be practical. Comedian Louis C.K. recommends naming your kid Ladies and Gentlemen. ("Ladies and Gentlemen, please!") And Bill Cosby says, "Always end the name of your child with a vowel—so that when you yell, the name will carry."
|W|P|110668714050657290|W|P|Unusual Personal Names|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comThe Infinite Cat Project is like the ZoomQuilt, only furrier.
|W|P|110730709698168146|W|P|Infinite Regress|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"I told the doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to quit going to those places."—Henny Youngman
|W|P|110746352324817893|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
Upload any image and Stanford's Vischeck program will show you how a color-blind person would see it.
The program lets you choose among three flavors of color blindness. This macaw appears as a protanope would see it, someone who can't distinguish between colors in the green-yellow-red section of the spectrum.
About 10 percent of American men have some deficiency in color perception, but it's not always a handicap. In some situations it's actually an advantage: Color-blind hunters are unusually good at picking out prey against a confusing background, and the color-blind soldiers can sometimes "see through" camouflage that fools everyone else.
In fact, it's possible that in extreme situations we're all color-blind. Some people claim that in extreme emergencies, like a train or aircraft crash, the brain's visual system suspends color processing and switches to black and white. If that's true, then designers should pay even more attention to the color of emergency brake handles, phones, etc.
If you're interested, the Stanford page can also display your Web page as the color-blind would see it, and it even offers free PhotoShop plugins so you can experiment further.
|W|P|110412128829636943|W|P|Vischeck|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comI admire anyone who can fit Andrew Dice Clay and Dante Alighieri into the same Venn diagram. And it's all accurate!
|W|P|110730735015533871|W|P|Venn and Now|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comWhat's this?
It's the World's Smallest Pac-Man game.
|W|P|110730748288946608|W|P|Tiny Pac-Man|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com
With robots on Mars and Titan, it's easy to get excited at the prospect of finding life elsewhere. But we have to know what we're looking for, and that's a slippery topic. "In connection with the origin of life," Linus Pauling wrote, "I should like to say that it is sometimes easier to study a subject than to define it."
We all know life when we see it, right? Past definitions have called for structural features, growth, reproduction, metabolism, motion against force, response to stimuli, evolvability, information content and transfer, and control of energy flow. But there are always exceptions. Fire grows, moves, metabolizes, reproduces, and responds to stimuli, but it's "nonliving." I am nonreproducing but, I hope, still alive.
We can look at properties of Earth life in the aggregate, but Earth is still a tiny, tenuous environment—like a film of water on a basketball—and it's been a closed system for 3.8 billion years. We may be guilty of "carbon chauvinism," or any of a hundred other unfounded assumptions about how life might have evolved elsewhere.
So maybe we should focus on more abstract properties. We could note that life forms have a high information content, for instance (it takes a lot of steps to specify them), and that they're highly ordered (unlikely to occur by chance). Maybe life is distinguished by order and specified complexity.
But then you start getting some pretty odd aliens. Stars might harbor "plasma life," where interactions between charged particles and magnetic fields could create a self-sustaining, orderly system. On a very cold planet, "nuclear life" might arise, composed mainly of solid hydrogen and liquid helium, where the magnetic orientations of the hydrogen nuclei would be highly ordered. Would we recognize these today if we encountered them?
The bottom line is, if we don't define what we're looking for, we might sail right past it. But many astrobiologists—like many biology textbooks—never quite define what they're studying.
|W|P|110584266267171376|W|P|The Meaning of Life|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.comUnusual deaths:
- Sherwood Anderson swallowed a toothpick at a party and died of peritonitis.
- Francis Bacon died of pneumonia after stuffing a chicken with snow.
- Jack Daniel, the distillery founder, kicked his safe when he forgot its combination, injured his toe, and died of blood poisoning.
- Actress Isadora Duncan broke her neck when her scarf caught in a car's wheel.
- Tour de France winner Fran�ois Faber was in a trench in World War I when he learned his wife had given birth to a daughter. He cheered and a German sniper picked him off.
- Jockey Frank Hayes died of a heart attack during a race in 1923. The horse finished first, making Hayes the only dead jockey to win a race.
- Pope John XXI died when his scientific laboratory collapsed in 1277.
- Tennessee Williams choked to death on a plastic bottle cap.
The all-time winner is still the Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin, who survived being poisoned, shot multiple times in the head and torso, bludgeoned, mutilated, wrapped in a sheet and dropped in a frozen river. He was swimming to shore when he died of hypothermia.
|W|P|110668708100653354|W|P|Unusual Deaths|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com"Complete masculinity and stupidity are often indistinguishable."—H.L. Mencken
|W|P|110708996880823756|W|P|Unquote|W|P|greg.ross@gmail.com