Thane Plambeck

Biggest fifth-grader spotted this season

Biggest fifth-grader spotted this season, originally uploaded by thane.

A photo of a photo taken by Rob H.

From Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

Parkins was an obvious contrast to this modest youth.  Pent up in the accidental intimacy of army life, men were usually anxious to exhibit themselves to the best advantage, particularly as regards their civilian antecedents. 'I'll bet he was jolly well-dressed before the war,' was a type of remark frequently made by young platoon commanders.  Parkins was about thirty, and often reminded us that he had been to Cambridge; in private life he had been a schoolmaster.  Plausible at first, he soon revealed his defects, for the slovenly tedium of that tent brought greed and selfishness to the surface.  With his muddy eyes and small dark moustache, he wasn't a man one took to.  But he was self-satisfied, and did his best to amuse us with indecent rhymes and anecdotes.  He was also fond of using certain stilted expressions, such as 'for the nonce,' and 'anent.'  "I've no complaints to make anent this hand," he would say when playing cards.  He posed as a gay dog, chaffing the nurses when they brought in the food, and quoting Omar Khayyam at them --- 'a jug of wine, a loaf of bread, and thou beside me, singing in the Wilderness' ---- and referring to the tent as 'this battered Caravanserai whose portals are alternate Night and Day.'   Parkins did not conceal his dislike of the Front Line, and was now in hopes of getting a job as Railway Transport Officer.  But he was the sort of man who would get killed in some unutterably wretched attack after doing his best to avoid it.

Vicodin double-strength: not good for Saturday crossword

One downside of doing crosswords in pen is that occasionally things go badly.

Sometimes they go very badly:



I did this puzzle as a delightful middle ear infection systematically took over most of my rational capabilities. After I'd finished maybe half of it, I took two Vicodin, prescribed earlier that day but not needed, somehow, until this puzzle started to go bad in the lower left corner.

Eventually I had to lay down my sword and admit my defeat by the southwest corner.

I had something ridiculous that I can't remember for Noted Venetian army general, eventually arriving at the correct OTHELLO after a couple of reinkings. But Ingredient in some chips went from SILICON to OREGANO (and perhaps something else), and I never came up with the correct answer, OLESTRA (I think; guess I should check the answers?). Also wrong was my answer to Something great, informally (AWESOME); I think the answer might be ALLTHAT, but I'm not sure. More toward the center, I wrote in the pretty-darn-dumb answer QUEXATL, a truly Thanospecific word as far as I can tell, via Google (I was trying to think of QUETZAL, which is a bird, not a Language of central Mexico. What is that one, anyway?).

Also couldn't get 51 Across, Magellan visited it (VENUS), even with three crossings.

Pass the Kleenex.

Finally got around to sending off 24 tapes for conversion to DVD

originally uploaded by thane.

The people behind me in line at the Hamilton Ave post office were not pleased.

Included: "Remembering the Swede," a documentary film I made in college with Jim Sanks.

Not included: My appearance in a Southwest Airlines TV commercial:

SOUTHWEST VIDEO GUY:  What do you like about Southwest Airlines?

THANE:  It's cheap.

SOUTHWEST VIDEO GUY'S HELPER:  Do you mean, "Low prices?"

THANE:  OK, have it your way -- Low prices!

[ They used the "Low Prices!" part, in which I smiled falsely, in the manner of a southern preacher.  But I was paid $2,250 in royalities, and got to see myself on TV quite a bit in bars. ]

Found in the "Contributors" section of the Hudson Review

Emily Grosholz's mathematical poems have just been published in two new anthologies published by AK Peters, The Shape of Content and Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics.

Looks interesting

Thursday NYT puzzle

Alan Arbesfeld's Thursday NYT gave me some trouble.

None of the thematic 15-letter across answers came quickly:

RUNAROUNDSUEZ ("Do a marathon in Egypt?")
PLAYSHARDTOGETZ ("Goes all out at an audition for a sax great?")
CLASSIFIEDADZ ("Top-secret carpentry tool?")

It's a nice trick throwing in the Z's at the end, and it worked against me big time because I usually fill the grid from upperleft to lower-right, finishing the right edges last.

It didn't help that with for an nine-letter answer for which I already had BALTI filled in, I completed it to BALTIMORE without reading the clue ("Part of Poland's border.")

The Larry David experiment

Time needed to read Gladwell's Outliers (reasonably carefully, including the end notes): 2 hours.   Favorite passage:

"We sat down and tried to figure out what is an insult that would go to the heart of an eighteen to twenty year-old's brain," Cohen says.  "It didn't take too long to come up with 'asshole.' "

The experiment went like this.  The social sciences building at the University of Michigan has a long, narrow hallway in the basement lined with filing cabinets.  The young men were called into a classroom, one by one, and asked to fill out a questionnaire.  Then they were told to drop off the questionnaire at the end of the hallway and return to the classroom --- a simple, seemingly innocent academic exercise.

For half the young men, that was it.  They were the control group.  For the other half, there was a catch.  As they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire, a man --- a confederate of the experimenters --- walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets.  The already narrow hallway now became even narrower.  As the young men tried to squeeze by, the confederate looked up, annoyed.  He slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut, jostled the young men with his shoulder, and in a low, but audible voice, said the trigger word, "Asshole."

Somehow this seemed like a scene out of Curb Your Enthusiasm --- the experiment is meant to measure whether "southerners" (ie people from the south of the US) are more likely to get pissed off in this situation than "northerners."  Later this study's conclusion is summarized

Call an southerner an asshole and he's itching for a fight.

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