Harper’s images

The bookstore by me is selling issues of Harper’s from 1855–1880 for $4 apiece. They were quite illustration-laden for the time, and since they’re public domain now I’ve been picking them up to find images to add to Wikipedia. So far I’ve added images to the following articles:

• Edmond About
• Octave Feuillet
• Paul de Kock
• John Law
• HMS Royal Charles
• F.B. Sanborn
• Jules Sandeau
• Soda fountain
• U.S. Treasury
• University of Minnesota
• Louis Veuillot

Anyway, that’s been keeping me busy for a while. I still have several issues to go through.

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Straight Dope

From: TheStrDope@aol.com
Date: Sun, 3 Dec 2006 09:38:24 EST
Subject: Your question to THE STRAIGHT DOPE about apples as forbidden fruit
To: sluggo@unknown.nu

Recently, you wrote to Cecil Adams of THE STRAIGHT DOPE asking about apples
as forbidden fruit. I think I responded briefly, but Cecil decided to tackle
it himself. Count yourself one of the lucky ones!

Cecil has answered your question in his column on 24 Nov 2006, in the
Chicago READER and various other alternative newspapers around the country. You
can also find Cecil's answer on our website at _www.straightdope.com_
(http://www.straightdope.com/) in the section called "Archives." Here's a direct link:
_The Straight Dope: Was the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden an apple?_
(http://www.straightdope.com/columns/061124.html)

And, of course, it's illustrated by Slug in his own inimitable way.

Congratulations on being one of the lucky few! We hope you're pleased...
and don't let the fame go to your head.
CK Dexter Haven
Straight Dope Staff

PS - You can buy Cecil's books and other neat stuff on our website, in the
section called "Buy Stuff." Cecil can use the money.

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A Groucho story

From The Marx Brothers Scrapbook, 1973:

Groucho Marx: I’ve got to tell you something that just came to mind even though it has nothing to do with what we’re talking about.There used to be a guy by the name of David Geiger. He lived in the same building where I was brought up on 93rd Street in New York. He was Jewish and his father ran a butter and egg store over on Third Avenue. I don’t think they have those anymore. All they have today are supermarkets, but in those days it was little stores.

Richard Anobile: A dairy store?

Yes, you could get a pound of butter and some eggs and things like that. David used to play with us all the time. We’d play marbles or stoop ball or whatever. We all thought that David would grow up to be at least a Supreme Court Justice because he was so smart and well educated.

Now then, 15 or 20 years go by and my brothers and I are doing Cocoanuts [on Broadway]. I had a scene in there where I used to jump over chairs. David Geiger came to see the show one night and he sends his card back to me: David Geiger, Attorney-at-Law. So I invited him backstage and he came to see me in my dressing room while I was taking off my make-up. So, he’s standing there and I ask him how he liked the show. Now at the time we were the biggest laughing hit of Broadway but this schmuck says, “It was all right, I guess.”

Then he says, “Julius, I was out front watching you. You’re not a boy anymore and it looks ridiculous to see you jumping over chairs. Don’t you think it’s about time for you to quit this sort of thing and get a regular job?” So I asked him what he did and he told me he was an attorney. I said, “That’s pretty good. How much salary do you get a week?” “I’m getting $150.00 a week,” he answered. He didn’t know I was getting $1200.00 a week at the time.

“Julius,” he said, “you’ve got a good mind. I think I can get you a job as an apprentice in my law firm. You look ridiculous on that stage and besides you have no dignity jumping over chairs and cracking jokes. I think you ought to quit.” So I told him I’d think about it and he left.

A couple of years pass and now I’m doing Animal Crackers. One evening there’s a knock on my dressing room door and I’m handed a card: David Geiger, Attorney-at-Law. So I invite him backstage again. Now I was getting $1500.00 a week!

“How are you, David!” I greeted him. “You must be quite a success by now. Christ you must be making a fortune! How much are you making now?” He said, “I’m getting $250.00 a week.” “Well, Dave,” I said, “I’m beginning to think about what you told me. I’m getting pretty old to be in show business. Maybe someday you can get me a job and I can quit this.”

I never told him how much money I was making or what a success I was. Four or five years later I meet him again at the Easter Parade on Fifth Avenue. Here he is walking down the street with his two small kids. “Julius, how are you?” he says. I told him that I was still in show business and he said, “Well, you never took my advice. You could have been a lawyer now. I’m getting $350.00 a week.” Well, by that time we had a picture contract. I was still making $1500.00 a week. That’s all there is to the story. I could never convince the cocksucker that I was a big success!

It struck me as so funny that here was this schmuck, this half-assed lawyer for a crummy company, who obviously never read the papers. Here I am a big star with my name in lights over Broadway and he never knew it. And I have to go meet him again at the Easter Parade with these two gorillas walking by his side. I realized that he was such a stupid square that it would be impossible to tell him how successful I was. And at one time I thought he’d be a Supreme Court Justice!

But, Jesus, his father had great butter and eggs!

I wonder if he’s still alive. He might be. Just in case he is alive I wish you’d use this story just so that cocksucker can read it!

That’s a promise.

He was such a horse’s ass!

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Great router name

Kudos to network provider Illinois Century Network for this hostname I saw on a traceroute: “atm-1-0-10-liberace-fat-elvis.springfield.lincon.net”.

Traceroutes should always amuse me, dammit.

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Ask Google: When Was the Height of the Cold War?

We all know that the “Cold War” took place between 1946 and 1989. But when was its “height”? Let’s ask Google!

1947? 1948? 1949? 1950? 1951? 1952? 1953? 1954? 1955? 1956? 1957? 1958? 1959? 1960? 1961? 1962? 1963? 1964? 1965? 1966? 1967? 1968? 1969? 1970? 1971? 1972? 1973? 1974? 1975? 1976? 1977? 1978? 1979? 1980? 1981? 1982? 1983? 1984? 1985? 1986? The 1950s? The 1960? The 1970s? The 1980s?

Glad we got that cleared up. (thanks to David Connell)

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Typographers Take Note

I was not aware that somebody has unofficially allocated Unicode mappings for the extra letters in Dr. Seuss’s On Beyond Zebra.

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Gettysburg Address

I had forgotten that the Gettysburg Address included this:

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

It’s ironic because it’s the opposite of what happened; the Battle of Gettysburg is now remembered, if at all, as what prompted Lincoln’s speech.

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Pictures

I get a fair amount of e-mail and IM messages from strangers, taking on a flirtatious tone. At least some of these can be attributed to a Google image search for “Kim Scarborough” bringing up a photo of this hot chick as its first result.

Once the Google image database is re-generated, probably the image from this page will be the first result, which should cut down the traffic a fair amount.

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Davy Rothbart

I don’t know who did this, but I am very amused. I’m glad I’m not the only one whom Davy rubs the wrong way.

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Net Neutrality

I don’t often disagree with the Lessig/Slashdot/BoingBoing crowd on domestic issues, but I have to say I think almost everyone’s off-base with this net neutrality business. I thought we all agreed that we didn’t want the goverment policing how the Internet works, but now everyone suddenly thinks that we need FCC bureaucrats constantly inspecting bandwidth providers’ pipes to ensure they’re neutral enough. It sounds to me like a nightmare–every time there’s some random backhoe outage somewhere, there’ll have to be a goverment investigation to make sure it wasn’t intentional.

What on earth is everyone so worried about? No upstream provider is just going to cut off access to Operation Rescue or Democratic Underground, despite what the more hysterical folks are saying. The outrage would be too great, and why would they care anyway? What will really happen in absence of this new goverment interference is that you might get an extra 10KBps when downloading the trailer for the latest dumb Warner Brothers movie. This is the great evil we need to avoid at all costs?

The other part I can’t understand is why does this have to be done right this minute? We can always pass net neutrality legislation later if it turns out that really bad things are happening–this isn’t irrevocable. Why don’t we err on the side of less goverment regulation, at least until we have a chance to see what happens without it?

Of course this whole discussion avoids the moral questions. Why can’t upstream providers do what they want with their property? But arguments like that never seem to get anywhere–witness restaurant smoking bans.

I still can’t shake the feeling I’m missing something here. I definitely don’t like siding with Ted Stevens against Cory Doctorow. But this sure seems like a mass hysteria on the part of the tech community.

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Stupid program of the month

Wikipediafs “is a mountable Linux virtual file system that enables you to deal with Wikipedia… articles as if they were real files.”

Dear god. How depraved do you have to be to come up with something like this?

Via Sabrina, discovered by grumpy_sysadmin, who wonders what the fsck would be like.

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Stereo photography

Finally got some stereo pictures up on Flickr… check them out.

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Through the Looking Glass PGN

Here’s something I’ve been looking for for awhile: a PGN of Through the Looking Glass. This guy did a pretty good job, considering the game as written violates chess rules pretty seriously.

Explanation thread here.

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Latest Project

Here’s my latest project—a multimedia archive blog that I started with a couple friends. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed—there should be a lot of cool stuff coming down the wire in the coming months.

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Buy My Stamp!

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The Velvet Underground and Lawrence Welk

Looking through my logs, I see that my computer song playlist archive has gotten several hits from people searching for “lawrence welk velvet underground”. I think it’s funny that my playlists combine both, but what’s extra funny is that I actually know what these people are looking for.

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Muhammad Cartoons

The whole Muhammad cartoons thing has really depressed me. It’s not really the reaction of the Muslim extremists—after all, we already knew they’re fanatics, or at least those of us paying attention knew—it’s the reaction of people here in the west.

I thought we were all agreed that people should be able to write and publish what they want, free from initimidation. Even if some people are really offended by it. Isn’t this pretty basic? I would have thought this was a core belief of our culture.

Apparently not. I’ve had friends and relatives basically weigh in against people drawing cartoons on the side of people threatening to kill people drawing cartoons, or at least drawing some sort of moral equivalence between the two. This chilling article from a professor at Seton Hall calls for criminal punishment of the cartoonist. I thought it was scary enough that a man who thinks the ideals behind the first amendment are in error is teaching law—but then I look at his bio and see he’s on the board of directors of the New Jersey ACLU!

Something is seriously wrong here. I guess that explains why they’re against a war against theocratic fascism—they’re not all that convinced that tolerant liberal secularism is a better choice. Maybe I’m reading too much into it—but it seems that freedom of speech is as basic of as you can get to our system. One of our pillars, so to speak. It’s very disheartening.

This Iraqi blogger’s reaction is also too even-handed, but I had to laugh at this:

I wake up, go to the fridge, do a sleepy-eye makeshift inspection, and voila, there in the treacherous corner of the first drawer….what the? An almost depelted package of Danish butter Lurpak… Blood and sugar pressures went to the devil immediately…this is outrage! This is blasphemous, how can a Danish product survive in our god-abiding, muslim household…La, and a thousand La…I took out the cursed vile from the refrigerator and recalimed the appliance in the name of Islam. I whipped out a knife, and with a ear-piercing ‘Allahu Akbar’ that startled my half-deaf gradnma I charged, cutting up the cursed butter into slices, frantically, I spread that on bread and added the nice aftertouch of strawberry blood – munching up the dreaded work of Satan quickly into oblivion, my mission to eradicate the evil conspiracy off the face of the planet was a resounding success!

Burp.

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Weird Phone Call

So I’m sitting at my desk at work, and I get a phone call:

“Hello, may I speak to Hugh Hefner?”

“Uh… is this a joke? Why are you dialing my direct line to talk to Hugh Hefner?”

“This number came up in our system as belonging to Mr. Hugh Hefner, and we need to speak to him.”

“Well, uh… this is a Playboy line, but I’m pretty low on the totem pole here. I have no idea how you would get ahold of… who is this, anyway?”

“I’m with ‘Nordac’.”

“Okay, and what’s your name?”

“Chris Duffy.”

“What is this regarding?”

He hangs up.

Just wanted to copy that down before I forgot it. The guy seemed dead serious—I would have thought it was a joke otherwise. Apparently he either has no idea who Hefner is, or he’s just stupid. A Google search for “Nordac” brings up a lot of stuff which seems completely unrelated. I didn’t copy the number down, unfortunately, but I remember it started with 888-404.

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The Butterfly Effect

I just watched The Buttefly Effect on cable; I vaguely remembered it had gotten bad reviews, but I’m a sucker for gimmicky time travel–paradox stories, so I checked it out. Not bad, I thought. It could have been a lot better, but the story was just missing something indescribable—it wasn’t quite ambitious enough. Kutchner couldn’t really pull off the acting, either, although he wasn’t awful. All in all, a decent, mean little movie that was just frustrating because you could imagine it being much better.

Then I read the reviews. It was stunning how venomous they were. Critics hated this film, to an extent that I find completely mysterious. It’s a cliche, but I honestly found myself wondering if I had seen the same film. Typical is this writeup from Salon, which doesn’t even really explain why the movie is bad; the review boils down to “this movie feature child molestation and a puppy being burned, therefore it’s the worst movie I’ve ever seen”. For this we need reviewers? My grandmother thought that accused child molesters shouldn’t even get trials. This is the film critic’s equivalent—any movie that burns up a puppy doesn’t get a discussion on the merits.

I was amused to find that one of the few reviewers who gave it the review it deserved—an interesting but flawed experiment—was Jeffrey M. Anderson, writing for Combustible Celluloid. I discovered Anderson almost three years ago when doing a survey of movie critics; I immediately became a huge fan of his when I saw that he was the only reviewer that hated the two most pretentious films I ever saw: The Truth About Tully and Laurel Canyon. I need to make a point to never miss his reviews.

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Declaration of Independence links

In case you were wondering about the history of some of the more obscure complaints in the Declaration of Independence, here’s an annotated copy explaining them. I always wondered about some of the things in there, like the bit about “abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province”; turns out that’s a complaint about the Crown’s recent decision to revert Quebec to a French legal system.

Somewhat less useful is this page I put up a while ago, but fun on a nerdy level. I tried to mirror as closely as possible with HTML and CSS the earliest printed copy of the Declaration, known as the “Dunlap Broadside”. I even included the long “S”’s.

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