I’m organizing my Jaycees chapter’s participation in a local High School’s After Prom party. Our role basically boils down to supplying snack food and beverages for approximately 3-400 students. We do this by soliciting donations of food and money from area businesses.
So suppose I’ve just finished printing 286 donation letters. Assuming I’ve done that, and afterwards I’m looking them over one more time.
Now suppose I then – purely hypothetically – somewhat belatedly discovered that I’d accidentally used the wrong version of my signature (I scanned it for use on letters) and I now have 286 donation letters where my signature was backwards.
I recently found myself about to use the word “TANJ” in a conversation about things unexpectedly going wrong. I caught myself though with the realization that the other person would have no idea what I meant. On a whim, I looked up some references.
Niven uses TANJ the way I was planning, to mean “There Ain’t No Justice.” It’s a good generic curse for when things unexpectedly go wrong in a way that should never have happened. (It’s no wonder that we use it the same way, I picked it up from one of his books.)
So if TANJ means “There Ain’t No Justice,” just how ironic is it then that TANJ.org is the web site for the “Trial Attorneys of New Jersey”?
(And for that matter, how predictable was that joke?)
Some years ago I read a Peanuts strip in which Charlie Brown and Linus were talking about a list of family contact information they had to fill out at school. In the final panel, Linus admits that he wasn’t sure what to write in the space for “Doctor”, so he’d written the name “Seuss.” Years later, I still remember that strip and I keep waiting for someone to ask me who my family doctor is. Doctor Seuss – or, as his mother called him, Theodor Giesel (and no, I didn’t misspell either half of his name) – was born on March 2, 1904. And in 1957 he wrote The Cat in the Hat. So not only would this Friday have been Dr’s Seuss’ 103rd birthday, it can also be viewed as the Cat’s 50th.
I don’t know how long it’s been going on, but a few years ago I learned that March 2nd is celebrated as “Cat in the Hat Day.” This weekend, on March 3rd, my Jaycees chapter is going to participate in a Dr Seuss-inspired event called “Read Across America” (we’d have gone for the 2nd except that’s a Friday and everyone has jobs).
The big project for Tuesday evening was preparing a bunch of books that Nicole had convinced the Germantown Kohl’s to donate to the event, and then putting together a collection of “Cat in the Hat” hats that will be used as decorations for Saturday’s event. On the spur of the moment, I got out my cell phone and took a few photos of the result. In real life, the hats are red and white. But the cell phone camera, when combined with the fluorescent lights, results in photos that have the hats looking like we’re in a construction zone. 🙂
The Gaithersburg edition of “Read Across America” is Saturday, March 3rd at the Gaithersburg Library on Montgomery Village Avenue. The event starts at 9:30 and continues until 11:00. Approximately 200 kids will receive books donated by the Germantown Kohl’s, approximately 90 will receive the kit and instructions for making their own Cat in the Hat hats.
Bill Holbrook, the artist behind the Kevin and Kell cartoon, has come up with a new twist on Sudoku. As he points out in today’s strip, there’s really no significance to the numbers on a Sudoku grid.
The world of Kevin and Kell is populated with anthropomorphic animals, with a society loosely organized along the lines of what different species eat: Herbivores, Carnivores, Insectivores, etc. Today’s strip is the herbivore version of sudoku, using produce instead of numbers.
It takes a little while to get used to looking at vegetables instead of numbers, but the puzzle is solvable. It took me about 30 minutes.
I’ve been getting a lot of spam lately where the subject line contains a bunch of random words that have nothing to do with the actual message. The idea, of course, is to get past everyone’s spam filters by not using the words (and misspellings) that most folks associate with spam.
A lot of the resulting subject lines don’t make a lot of sense. Gibberish such as “Not prairie as draftsmen” or “Are go cyclotomic.” Every so often though, they come up with something that makes you do a double take.
Cleaning out the spam trap a few minutes ago, I spotted the subject line, “Eat Ilsa Osborn.”
I’m quite disappointed the spammer didn’t identify himself as Hannibal Lechter.
“You talk about insanity as though it were something bad.”
I’m certain that somewhere out there, a situation exists where that’s exactly the right thing to say. I’m also equally certain of two other things: A) I have no idea what that situation is, and B) If I should happen to encounter it, I won’t remember what to say.
It’s been a week since my 41st birthday and it seems like there may be an advantage to getting older.
It turns out that a midlife crisis is the perfect excuse for pretty much anything that might otherwise be frowned on. Decide to buy a motorcycle? Why it must be a midlife crisis! Buy a sports car and speed down the interstate at 150 MPH? It must be a midlife crisis! It works for anything!
I refuse to suffer from any sort of midlife crisis, but I may choose to have one in order to enjoy every moment of it.
Frequent visitors to Known Space are aware of the General Products Corporation. The company is entirely owned by the Pierson’s Puppeteers, arguably the most cautious species in the universe.
The company is perhaps best-known for building spaceship hulls. General Products hulls are built in four standard sizes, are transparent to light ranging from infra-red up into the ultra-violet range, but are otherwise impermeable and absolutely guaranteed to never fail.
The Puppeteer presence on Earth isn’t well known as of yet, but there have been rumors of a puppeteer sighting in Indiana. I’ve also found proof that they’ve set up shop in the eastern United States.
My house (photo below) seems ordinary enough…
but check out the name of one of the companies involved in its construction…
This is great news! My house can stand up to anything the universe dishes out!* That’s a great feeling of security.
*Well, almost anything. General Products hulls have been demonstrated to be vulnerable to anti-matter. Happily, there isn’t very much of that stuff available in all of Known Space and even less in Maryland.
Did you know that wombats are polygamous? I had no idea one way or the other but for some reason that phrase popped into my mind today. A quick Google search for polygamous wombats however reveals an extract from the Australian Journal of Zoology which says that yes, wombats are polygamous.
Who knew?
So that’s the useless fact of the day, but it really has nothing to do with anything. Today’s goal is best summed up as, “I’m just messing with Google.”
Back before she fell off the planet, Z. would send the occasional email to bring me up to date on what sort of ads Google was currently displaying on my site. (Everyone needs a hobby.) For example, when I wrote about the evil Ice Cream store, Google reacted by displaying an ad for the very same chain. (Currently, reading about my war against the Red Cross reveals ads for various donor banks, histories of the American Revolution, and companies offering to trace any phone number.)
So I’m curious what Google do when confronted with the wombat situation. My guess is they’ll do what they usually do in these situations. But is there really a market for Wombat Ringtones?
It’s been obvious for a while that I need to disguise my true identity when I’m out protecting the planet. One of the more obvious reasons is the need to protect my loved ones. How can I be an effective guardian if the bad guys take my family as hostages? There are some practical concerns too. How do you keep your day job when every little kid in the city is calling you for help when their cat goes up a tree? (And believe me, you’re going to need that day job. Adamantium armor is expensive, and there aren’t very many grants available.)
So you’ve got to keep your identity to yourself. But how? Continue reading My Secret Identity→
