Thane Plambeck

HA HA HA HA

"Which subject do you like the best in school?"

"I like Mathematics the best."

"Why do you like Mathematics the best?"

"Because my teacher is always absent."

HA HA HA HA HA (YouTube)

Easy crossword with truncated clues

I took the first puzzle from this book of "Easy" crosswords and copied it, deleting the last word from each clue. If a clue had only one word, I left it unchanged; if the last word was a blank (ie, _____), then I deleted the blank.

Give it a try (PDF)

The Missing Painting

themissingpainting0009
Originally uploaded by thane.

Dan asked for the text of The Missing Painting.

here it is (all slides on a page); or view the slideshow

Word puzzle

Fill in the four blanks to spell two words with the indicated meanings.

R E _ _ I T E S, meaning breaks
R E _ _ I T E S, meaning comes together again

Brain freeze

I had one devil of a time thinking of the right letter to complete the "droll observation" in today's (Wednesday) NYT crossword. I'd completed the whole puzzle, except for one letter of the droll observation, the second letter:

A_ALONEEDS TOFALLONLY AFEWINCHES TOBEANOOSE

So, what letter should go in the blank? Should be simple, right? I'll be damned if I could think of it. The crossing clue was

_______ Rios, Jamaica (4)

which I had all the letters (but one) for:

OC_O

It took me a good 10 minutes to realize the answer.

Yet another reason why I'll never be a strong solver.

Sternest Meanings

Amusing web front-end to Anagram Genius.

Free access to all information

From The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos, by Peggy Pond Church, University of New Mexico Press, 1959 [I have a signed first edition that I think the (now departed) Irv gave to me [AG can comment, perhaps]:

In 1950 Niels Bohr addressed an open letter to the United Nations in which he said in part

An open world where each nation can assert itself solely to the extent to which it can contribute to the common culture and is able to help others with experience and resources must be the goal to put before anything else [...] The development of technology has now reached a stage where the facilities for communication have provided the means for making all mankind a cooperating unity [...] at the same time fatal consequences to civilization may ensue unless international divergences are considered as issues to be settled by consultation based on free access to all information.

Hell, maybe I ripped it off from Irv's house. I don't think so. I'm not much of a book thief, although I am a very weak book returner. Should I die an untimely death, Joshua has said he will loudly proclaim at the estate sale "THAT BOOK, THOSE BOOKS! ALL MINE, I TELL YOU, MINE!"

Brain Power!

[ Owen and I went to Target to buy a Dyson vacuum. We went by the books, and grabbed this one. He started flipping through it in the back seat as I drove home. ]

[ On the drive home ]

OWEN: There are different kinds of puzzles. Oh look—a crossword. I know one. "10 Across: Spaceman." Astronaut, right?

THANE: How many letters is it?

OWEN: Nine.

THANE: OK, that sounds good. A-S-T-R-O-N-A-U-T.

OWEN: OK, the next one. Number 13. "Obstacle." Barrier?

THANE: [ Glances backward to see if he is cheating and looking at the answers. He isn't. ] How many letters?

OWEN: Six.

THANE: No, "barrier" has seven letters. But good guess. Very good. Thought of it myself, in fact.

OWEN: "17 Across. Assignment." Four letters. I wrote in WHEAT already for one that said "Flour grain."

THANE: What? You wrote in what?

OWEN: WHEAT.

THANE: For what?

OWEN: It says, Flour grain.

THANE: OK, yes, good, right-o. Let's have another one.

OWEN: "Assignment." So it starts with a T.

THANE: How many letters?

OWEN: Four.

THANE: Let's see, "TEST," maybe, but that's not quite right, let's not put anything in there yet...

OWEN: I'm going to write in TASK.

THANE: Ah—yes...

Stuck on Green Earth

stuck-on-green-earth0001
Originally uploaded by thane.

Full text (slideshow)

DPRK & Arnold

1) Emailed a friend to say that I won't be able to join him on his planned trip to the DPRK. It's too easy for me to imagine us detained as spies, then held as low-value bargaining chips in a less-than-healthful Pyeongyang prison. Not that we wouldn't be treated humanely, of course. He's going for 6 days or so, in September, and I wish him the very best.

2) Hatching a plan to make a documentary film about an 8-man high school football game to be held Friday, 22 September 2006 in Arnold, Nebraska. Arnold will be playing Thedford, and my dad and his crew are the referees. Thedford is just at the southern tip of the Sand Hills [click that link—the flickr photos are cool]. Drive far enough north, and you'll get to Valentine, where my mother grew up.

Practicing violin

THANE: It's still scratchy. You need to use more bow. Look—you're using about 1/6 of your bow. I could change the rest of your bow to concrete—you wouldn't know it. The staccato, it's OK. But the slurs, the crescendos. You've got to use more bow. Listen to the CD, it doesn't sound like that.

COLE: It's not easy!

THANE: [Sincerely] I know. What were the four things Denise said?

COLE: Vibrato, bow speed, crescendo/decrescendo, and flexing.

THANE: You're doing vibrato, and the flexing.

COLE: Yes.

THANE: But you're supposed to do all four!

COLE: OK

[tries it again]

THANE: Yes!

At the pool

THANE: You're swimming OK. Do you want to go to the deep end? You're not clinging to me like a barnacle—and besides, you can't touch the bottom here, anyway, right? Let's go to the deep end.

OWEN: Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Can we swim after the tennis lessons?

THANE: Maybe. Why not now? We could do it now.

OWEN: I don't have the courage.

THANE: Well, I could go with you.

OWEN: OK, let's go.

THANE: Oh—here comes Cole, and now it's Adult Swim. So we can do it tomorrow.

OWEN: OK—Let's do it tomorrow.

Wholphin

link

Time to add another McSweeney's subscription.

The world turns about 849 Valencia St.

30 St Mary Axe

swissre
Originally uploaded by thane.

30 St Mary Axe, London

El rey de la magia

Magic Shop
Originally uploaded by jovike.

0.414

414
Originally uploaded by thane.

Spent the day staring at screens full of pretending functions.

Must...finish...math....paper.

Oddi Printing

In Iceland.
[ They printed the Conjuring Arts publication "on Munken Pure Paper." ]

Conjuring Arts Research Center

Delicious mail today from the Conjuring Arts Research Center

And within?

The Table of Contents, you ask?

***
The Yawning Mouth (Volker Huber)

On the Prearrangement and Mnemonic Use of a Deck of Cards (Vanni Bossi)

Sharpers and their Tricks in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Robert Juette)

Davenport Brothers & Fay (Ricky Jay)

***

Admit it—you're so jealous.

"We call it life"

Joshua points out videos produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute that are meant to answer the (surprisingly excellent and informative) Al Gore politico-documentary (and world's most fantabulous Powerpoint presentation) An Inconvenient Truth. [ I attended a late night showing of Gore's movie on Tuesday at the Palo Alto Square, and people loudly applauded at the end of it. ]

Click on the video called "Energy" at the CEI site, and enjoy its punchline:

"Carbon Dioxide: they call it a pollutant—we call it life."

I like the dark, Marshall Josip Broz Tito totalitarian music that comes in at the end of the CEI video. It made me think of Gulags, show-trials, and summary executions. How dare they, those politicians—carbon dioxide is meant to save us from all that bad stuff! Arbeit macht frei!

As highbrow reading on Global Warming, I like the ICESat project, which is closely monitoring land-based ice in Antarctica and Greenland. Is that ice going to melt like the ice shelfs and glaciers and raise sea levels 20 feet (or more)?

Dunno.

In the Gore movie, he suffers the indignities of security checks as he bears his cross, the schlepping of his luggage and hi-fi powerpoint through airports ("I've given this presentation in thousands of places," he says). But he comes off quite well in the movie, and the scientific parts of it were well done and well illustrated. I liked the "last 640,000 years of CO₂ and temperature" graph, which Gore says "Very few outside of the scientific community have ever seen." (I saw it in Nature magazine, and tore out the page for future reference, but I don't consider myself part of the scientific community, just a scientific sympathizer. When it comes to shooting the scientists, I want to be able to say, "Hey, not me!").

More secret decoder ring

Bruce's photos of the Secret Decoder Ring looked strangely familiar

I blogged it myself, already