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currently both Todd James Pierce threads have the same number of comments in them. Let's not mess this up. Altogether I think TJP might eclipse Mary Sue at some future point.
I watched the Disney TV movie of _A Wrinkle in Time_ the other night, and while I wasn't entirely pleased with it, it did make me want to go back and reread the book, which I did. Which led me to a question:
Does anyone know if the idea of tessering and the tesseract pre-dated the book, or if M. L'Engle created it?
The idea of the tesseract (4-D cube) predates the book by a considerable amount, but I don't know its actual origin. "Tessering" was invented for the book.
No clue on the tesseract thing. I was marvelling (again) at the thread heading, which amused me as much as the "Tlak..." one ("Talk amongst yourselves", but jumbled). That one impressed me a lot.
This one appears to be bilingual, in English and... Japanese? (We've seen kabuki prints and other Japanese art often enough that Japanese is plausible. I guess it could be something else, but my gut says Japanese.) My computerized Japanese dictionary informs me that 所有 (read しょゆう, romaji shoyu except it'd have that long-vowel line overtop the u or you could write it shoyuu if you were into that system of romanizing Japanese) means 'one's possessions'... so this could well be seen (okay, free hand with it, but I'm allowed) as "Show me what you've got".
Er. If I am right, do I get a cookie? If I'm wrong, dead wrong, can someone else offer an explanation of how I was *supposed* to read it?
In reference to queries about what the dog may or may not have done in the backyard, we've come up with a shorthand designation at our house: "Number Three." This, of course, encodes success for both "Number One" and "Number Two," which are themselves bits.
A completely unproductive session is "Number Zero."
M. invented tessring, to the best of my knowledge.
I'm pretty sure the thread heading is a reference to the Kikkoman flash what-not linked to from the front page.
"Show you" is also a pun, as shoyu (show you) means soy sauce in japanese.
Gotcha. I didn't get the Kikkoman flash connection because I hadn't gone to look at it (I'm on dialup at home) yet. Thanks -- makes more sense now.
Perhaps if shoyu means "one's possessions," a non-literal translation could also be "Show me the money."
[/random pop culture reference]
A nice tesseract story is "And he built a crooked house" by (I think) Martin Gardner... No, no, Google reveals to me that it is by Heinlein. An architect designs a house which is an unfolded tesseract, and builds it in the desert near Los Angeles; while he is showing it to his clients there is a tremor, which causes the house to fold back up. Fun ensues as they try to get back into the third dimension. (This is my memory of the story from long ago and could be off; also I really think the story was by Gardner so it may well be that I have the wrong title.)
Besides A Wrinkle in Time, my favorite tale of the fourth dimension is William Sleater's The Boy Who Reversed Himself. Anyone else read that one?
So *that's* what editors do...
I've just read the expanded/unedited version of Heinlein's _The Puppet Masters_, a cheery tale of mind controlling slugs, eternal vigilance, and compulsory nudity. I hadn't read it for a decade or so, but since I'd read it about 50 bazillion times as a teenager, I had a good feel for deviations from the previously published text. Comments:
i) I'd seen people talking about the book as a thinly veiled attack on communism, and taken the comment with a grain of salt. I can only think of one or two mentions of the USSR in the previous version. In the expanded version, comparisons are brought up ad nauseum.
ii) The expanded version contained a bit more in the way of hard boiled private eye talk, and it didn't fly. The hero wakes up next to an anonymous blonde and occasionaly wonder what happened to 'the blonde'. Lukewarm Mickey Spillanism - doesn't add anything.
iii) Main point: The damned thing was *flabby*. The whole book needed to cut down on fatty deserts - maybe have fruit instead of cheesecake - and take a long walk after dinner every night. Most of the material I noticed as new I also noticed as being an unnecessary digression, an attention breaker, an irrelevance.
Interesting to read, but I'm left thinking the original editor knew exactly what s/he was doing. Rating: educational.
Jeremy, you've got the correct story title, and it is by Heinlein.
That restoration particle reminded me of this guy's Victorian house restoration project. Very graphics-heavy, but a fascinating read.
Both my father and my brother were cured of a lust for shoyu by being given a cup of it to drink, after nagging for more shoyu one too many times.
What the hell is the Swedish flash animation about? The one that starts with a voice cpeaking German, and then goes into a bouncing Thatcher/rabbit sequence. I can translate the Swedish, but it still doesn't make much sense at all. Is it, I wonder, related to the immortal Docktor Nårton's advice on defragging your hard disk with a brillo pad?
Thanks Elric, yep -- here is a link to the text. The house is built not in "the desert near L.A." but in Laurel Canyon.
With sf readers, writers, editors, etc. sitting around here, I've got a request-- to ID a novella I read many years ago, but whose author and title have hazed out in the mists of finite cerebral capacity...
-- Took place on Titan
-- Intelligent characters on Titan are prescientific, main Titan character is a female 'princess (?)'
-- Earth scientists sent a probe to Titan, problem is long time needed to send signals back and forth between Earth and Titan
-- Climax involved probe's 'self-defence' mechanism.
I suspect that this is a well-known story, and would very much like to find it and read it again.
Never mind 'behold the power of self-publishing', if you look at the Amazon page for the Elven Vampire you will witness an extremely well-Lit page:
Customers who shopped for this item also shopped for these items:
* The Stolen Election by Lloyd Robinson (Author) (Rate it)
* A Fine and Pleasant Misery by Patrick McManus, Jack Samson (Photographer) (Rate it)
* Making Book by Teresa Nielsen Hayden, et al (Rate it)
* Life As We Know It by Michael Berube (Author) (Rate it)
* The Paths of the Dead (The Viscount of Adrilankha, Book 1) by Steven Brust (Author) (Rate it)
Totally Self-serving Cross-ref:
For anybody who was waiting for the other (and final, -really-) two bits of "Harry of Five Points," they're hiding in the "It Came From Beneath the EETS" thread, afraid to stick their snouts out in daylight.
For anybody who wasn't, what did the Kikkoman kitty do to deserve -that?- And where was Bad-Badtz Maru when it happened?
Really final? Really? I shall cherish what you've graced us with so far, then, and try not to pine for more--at least, not publicly.
Besides A Wrinkle in Time, my favorite tale of the fourth dimension is William Sleater's The Boy Who Reversed Himself. Anyone else read that one?
Yup. Mucho fun, as are Sleator's marvelously creeptastic children's books House of Stairs and (less obviously) Interstellar Pig. I just got Into the Dream out of the library a few weeks ago, and I enjoyed it (I think the darkness of the ending escaped me when I was 9). Sleator's brother, Tycho (that Tycho), has a copy of Sleator's childhood memoir, Oddballs, up on the web.
Neither shoyu nor ukiyo-e: Tiger having eaten professor
---L.
He comes from the stars of the soybeans?!
Wow. That's ...really messed up. Also funny.
Dragonfly in progress...
probable finished product (I had to go to work so couldn't stay to watch how the one I was photographing came out, but this was what was emerging all over the place.)
No dragonflies were harmed in the production of these pictures. Pictures were taken with a Canon Powershot S400 using the built-in macro and the for-dummies autofocus. It is better at taking pictures than I am, so I let it do its thing.
Okay, how about I depress the lot of you here. Anyone here think that this could realistically happen? And if it did happen, how would you react?
If you find this type of discussion depressing, we can continue talking about soy sauce. I, personally, wish the discussion would turn towards reruns of the kid's television show called The Electric Company. But that's just me...
As a Mexican jumping being once said, "Yo soy."
I thought the Math Teacher thing was particularly good. I looked at the rest of the site, too. His "Save Us, Davis" game is pretty funny. I emailed him and told him so.
Also, he's cute as a bug.
... shoulda mentioned, i'm the guy on the left in the picture. We had 6 physics majors graduate in a class of 491.
Elisabeth,
There's a picture of a tesseract in Carl Sagan's _Cosmos_ (basically, a cube within a cube which might make a nice end table).
Pat, longtime lurker
Do remember that "pictures of tesseracts" are distorted representations of four-dimensional objects -- the six truncated pyramids (or, as Heinlein put it, "whatchamacallems -- prisms") are actually dead-on cubical in the thing itself. It's an approximate view, like the fact that you can stick your noggin inside a Klein-bottle hat and still, like, breathe and stuff.
Jill, wasn't the line
Heyyyyyyyyy Youuuuu Guyyyyyyyyyyys!!!!
? I've always wondered what Rita Moreno thinks about how, for all her long and varied career, there's a whole generation out there that still remembers her as holding that director's megaphone...
FWIW: My take on the giant bunny/Margaret Thatcher animation is that it may be intended as a PETA-like condemnation of meat eaters.
Randall:
I've always thought of The Electric Company as "that show after '3-2-1 Contact!' " Curiousity strikes (somewhat belatedly)--what was it about?
Andrew Willett is right about the Electric Company's opening -- Jill Smith is thinking of what lovable, furry old Grover says.
Not just Rita Moreno, Morgan Freeman. And a young David Letterman. (I'm lying about that one.) And songs from Tom Lehrer ("Silent E" and "L-Y"). Giants walked the public airwaves in those days.
There was a wonderful Electric Company archive I discovered recently with MP3s, but they appear to have received a C&D, forcing them offline. Ah... nostalgia. When I realize the number of people who probably looked at the recent "Spiderman" movies and thought of it first as the Electric Company program, not as the comic book.
You're right! And just Jill is fine, thanks Chris!
Somebody had some video clips up recently of old Electric Company skits. Unfortunately, they are no longer there, as the hosters have apparently been on the receiving end of a nastygram from CTS...
Ah, the joys of simultaneous posting.
Since the thread starts out with soy sauce, I thought I'd add this horrible story of Human Hair Shoyu. Oishii des, ne?
Since the thread starts out with soy sauce, I thought I'd add this horrible story of Human Hair Shoyu.
Selected further suggestions (from Wonkette):
We're taking your guns away.
I voted for one world government so that you don't have to.
Proud parent of a guy who's married to another guy.
I'm a citizen of the United Nations.
Redistributing wealth since 1913.
My other car is a black helicopter.
Terrorists are people too.
Free abortions for everyone.
Don't mess with taxes.
Ask me about the homosexual agenda.
In the event of the Rapture, this car will be doing a 150 down the center lane.
Soft on crime, soft on the causes of crime.
These colors run.
I posted this on my own blog after I cribbed it from metafilter, but here you go. Remember the "pinball" song from Electric Company. Someone remixed it...
The link to the remix video is here, and the link to the mp3 is here. Here's a letter from the guy who wrote it.
Andy Perrin: Besides A Wrinkle in Time, my favorite tale of the fourth dimension is William Sleater's The Boy Who Reversed Himself. Anyone else read that one?
Sleator, isn't it? But yes. I've been haunted by the thought of reversed ketchup (catsup? other? toe-may-toe-maw-toe-mayn't-toe?) ever since.
I remember trying to get my hands on an animated? short film? of slices of a hypersphere by Banchoff? to convince my Integrated 3 Math (~= Algebra II) kids that hyperwhatevers could too be conceptualized by mathy peoples. Alas, I had to settle for showing them two-dimensional renditions of three-dimensional slices of four-dimensional cubes from some Ivars Peterson book or other. I still want to see that film before I die.
Followers of the Spritualist movement were fascinated with notions about tesseracts and a fourth spatial dimension around the turn of the previous century.
They believed that the "other planes" that scientists and mathematicians speculated about were the dwelling places of passed-on souls.
It added a bit of scientific rigor to a belief system that . . . well, ultimately turned out to be based on teenage girls who learned how to snap their toes.
Maybe I'm stretching a bit here, but L'Engle's three spooky old ladies could be based on eccentric Spiritualists, and the time & space travel in the book a fanciful spin on these beliefs.
I adopted a dog last weekend. A big burly Belgian shepherd.
I've noticed a behavior I've never seen in a dog before:
After I've thoroughly wiped her out with a four mile evening walk, and satisfied her back-in-the-apartment yen to have her belly rubbed, she -- right before collapsing for the night -- vigorously bats and rubs at her muzzle with both front paws.
Any guesses?
Yoon Ha Lee:
It is indeed Sleator, not Sleater. A tip of the slyping fingers. The reversed ketchup was a brilliant touch. How many authors would think to themselves that (a) not all molecules are symmetric, so (b) if you flip them in 4d then drop them back into 3d, there might be some peculiar biological side effects?
As for visualizing hypercubes/spheres etc., one could probably write a quick OpenGL or Matlab code to project them into 3d, then view them. The students could "steer around" with the arrow keys to see various 3d cross-sections. Something like this may already be out on the web somewhere, or it might make a nice project for a student.
Andy Perrin: Alas, this was during my student-teaching (and I'm not currently teaching and probably will never again be doing so), at a high school where the computer lab was forever tied up either with morning C programming classes, or with keyboarding and basic word processing/computer literacy, and the only computers in the classroom were two functional but old Macs (not connected to internet) with nonfunctional mice (balls removed). I don't know any OpenGL and my Matlab is so rusty it ain't even funny, even had the computers had the latter installed. If I am ever again in a math-teachy way with computers, I will remember the suggestion, though. :-) Thanks!
Yoon Ha Lee: To satisfy your curiousity, here is a 4d viewing utility written in Java. It takes a while to load, so be patient. Unfortunately, hyperspheres aren't supported.
I wish I had 3d glasses! [Just to be clear-- this is not my work. I googled it.]
Andy,
The Electric Company was created by The Children's Television Workshop and was, basically, an attempt to cater to an older audience than Sesame Street. It focused on reading and numbers. It had some spectacular songs and some very memorable characters. It was also the introduction of Spider-Man for a number of kids ("Spider-man/Where are you comin' from?/Spider-man/Nobody knows who you ahhhhhhhhre!"). Morgan Freeman used to play a vampire on the show (and Rita Moreno was on it as well).
I have this grand idea (patent pending) of taking all of that old Electric Company music and making a Broadway show out of it. Basically, we'd just recreate sketches from the show on stage. No kidding, that would make me a million bucks. Anybody out there got the financing for it?
And remember, it was Randall P. Girdner's idea first! It's MY idea! Broadway show! Electric Company! Randall P.!
BTW, Julia...I downloaded all of the songs from that site. If anyone wants any of them, please let me know and I'll post some on my site for you all to download (not all of them, but some of them, like, "Spider-man/Where are you comin' from?/Spider-man/Nobody knows who you ahhhhhhhhre!").
Lots of love,
Randall P.
Morgan Freeman may have trafficked in the occasional vampire, but probably fifteen of us are tripping over our keyboards to assert that he is forever Easy Reader in our memories. But who played Fargo South, Decoder?
Oh, the joys of remembered juvie books. Sleator and L'Engle were two of my favorite authors in elementary school. Anyone read Caroline B. Cooney? The Fog, The Snow, and The Fire scared me out of a year's growth in 7th grade. I made my mother swear solemn oaths that she would always believe me if I told her someone was doing something evil, even if it seemed impossible.
Right now I can't get enough Diane Duane and Tamora Pierce, even if I am a little sheepish to be shopping in the 'tweener' section of the bookstore. I loved So You Want To Be A Wizard and the Song of The Lioness quartet when I was younger, so imagine my joy when I discovered that both authors are still turning out absolutely fantastic books.
Stefan: my parents' foxhound does that, too. I don't know why they do it, but I don't think it's a sign that the warhead is armed or anything. Considering dogs tend to sneeze when they get excited, maybe she's got that about-to-sneeze tickle in her nose?
rams: According to IMDb, Skip Hinnant was Fargo North, Decoder.
Randall: Thanks.
cyclopatra:
I read the Fog/Snow/Fire trilogy at summer camp (in Maine!) when I was thirteen. One rest period, as I was nearing the end of The Fire, I decided to hell with it, I am going to finish reading this before I do anything else. Including scheduled camp activities. After rest period we were supposed to play soccer, so I hid underneath my cabin. (The cabin was on stilts, and the ground was sandy, so this was not uncomfortable.) I caused a stir at the pre-game head count. After some searching, the camp director eventually saw my foot sticking out from under the cabin floor. By that point I was thoroughly enraptured and had become careless.
The camp officials were very understanding, particularly in light of the panic I caused. They let me sit out the rest of the game and finish the book.
cyclopatra: By the way, yesterday was apparently Diane Duane's birthday, so you might wish her a happy one over at Out of Ambit.
(http://outofambit.blogspot.com)
For a while, the Noggin channel was running Electric Company episodes, first in the afternoon and then in the middle of the night for old folks like us. They also ran some first season Sesame Street shows as "Sesame Street Unpaved." Lately though it's been mid-nineties Sesame's and Daria instead of EC.
Those sketches were just as funny as I remembered though. Bill Cosby too, though he wasn't unknown back then.
I was in my twenties before I got the Fargo North, Decoder joke. Almost drove off the road laughing.
Andy Perrin notes "How many authors would think to themselves that (a) not all molecules are symmetric, so (b) if you flip them in 4d then drop them back into 3d, there might be some peculiar biological side effects?"
I can recall two earlier uses of the idea. The first is Roger Zelazny's "Doorways in the Sand", written in (I believe) the mid-70's. The second is a Spider Robinson story (title of which is eluding me now) set at Callahan's saloon. I'm fairly certain that Robinson's story came after the Zelazny novel.
I'm very fond of the Zelazny work, in part because the hero is a perpetual student (ah, bliss!), and in part because Zelazny chops up the narrative in an interesting way.
Each chapter (after the first few) begins with the protagonist in a cliffhanger. The rest of that chapter is his recollection of how he got out of the cliffhanger at the start of the *previous* chapter and how he then got into the predicament that opened the chapter you are reading. Now that you know how he got into this mess, you turn the page and *viola*, it is the next chapter and he hanging from a new cilff.
Hummm - http://www.isfdb.org gives the Zelazny a publication date of 1975. Does anyone know of an earlier use of this "reversed foods" notion?
Best, Jim
Jim, thanks. I ought to have known that this bunch would actually know the answer to my rhetorical question. :-)
Stefan Jones writes that his new dog vigorously bats and rubs at her muzzle with both front paws. Both of my dogs, also very large, do this all the time. I don't know exactly why they do it, but it's normal. If I had to guess, I'd say that it was an attempt to scratch an itch or reset her whiskers. Also, sometimes my dogs do it before sneezing.
Congratulations on the new dog.
Cyclopatra, I buy most of my books from Amazon, and they seem to think I have children. (Currently reading Diana Wynne Jones' The Year of the Griffin.)
BTW, Skip Hinnant also portrayed Schroeder in the original off-Broadway production of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Bill Hinnant, who I assume is related, was Snoopy. And who played Charlie Brown?
Gary Burghoff.
Jim: Does anyone know of an earlier use of this "reversed foods" notion?
Technical Error (1946) by Arthur C. Clarke.
Randall P - Thank you! The pinball song rescued my day. Makes me pine for the 70's and my lost youth. OK, maybe my youth is merely misplaced, but I'm pinin' nonetheless.
This comment moved to Jonathan Vos Post.
That Flash animation is called "Ja Da," and it's been around for a few years. The song ("Ja Da," since you asked) comes from a Swedish kid's TV show.
David Stevenson did the original Flash animation -- here's the link to the animation from his own site.
Via Google I tracked down an article from The Register that provides explanatory links to not only to the song lyrics but also a short bio about the animation artist.
One thing I hadn't known till I read the Register article was that Stevenson said he was influenced by the work of Neil Cicierega, a 15-year-old homeschooled kid who does Flash "animutations" with found images. Neil won international acclaim with his animutation Hyakugojyuuichi (I'm giving this link rather than the link from Neil's site to help spread the bandwidth around). B3TA did an interview with Neil a while back. And here's Neil's own site. Start at the bottom and work your way up.
I hope y'all don't mind the core dump -- Ja Da and Hyakugojyuuichi!! are in my bookmark list as two things I can count on to cheer me up.
Stefan Jones, I have a 12-year-old medium-sized pointer who has been doing the muzzle thing all her life. I've concluded that as much as she hates cats, she shares some tendencies with them.
Whoops, I left out that first link, to David Stevenson's version of Ja Da.
Here it is: http://www.btinternet.com/~david.st/b3ta/.
matt:
Your novella is "Eyes of Amber", by Joan Vinge. You'll find it in the story collection of the same name, or as the cover story of a late-Seventies issue of "Analog" whose details I don't recall.
(Remember when Joan Vinge was the famous one?)
Andrew Brown, Vanessa:
I wrote a short explanation about the show the flash animation is from yesterday. It's buried in the last open thread, so I'll just copy it here.
'I clicked the link where you wrote "I have no idea what's going on here" in the Particles.
I'm happy to be of service!
The song, except maybe for the first parts in German, is from a Swedish TV program for children.
Lasse ลberg, a prominent artist and B actor with a Mickey Mouse fixation, was asked to do a winter holiday morning show 1976. It featured him as Trazan ("trasa" in Swedish means rag) and Klasse M๖llberg as Banarne, a monkey. It got immensely popular, and even had 100% coverage, something that has never happened before or again.
When the show was up for reruns, it was discovered that the tapes had been overwritten. New episodes were recorded, and the Electric Banana Band was added to the cast.
I'm a few years too young for the mass hysteria, but can still sing their song about how the Phantom should be very warm in his pyjama, and that he should do better in a skirt...'
On extradimensional stories: I always loved (and am still disturbed by) "Mimsy Were the Borogoves" by Lewis Padgett.
On The Electric Company, part I: some video clips found here (best to visit on Tuesday); lyrics to the songs can be found here. This was an excellent site, but apparently CTW didn't like the extensive archive of video they had up. (Glad I pulled it all down before they C&D'd.)
On The Electric Company, II: There is a spiritual descendant of the show, called Between the Lions, currently running on PBS, which I highly recommend. Oriented on teaching phonics, with all sorts of cool recurring sketches ("The Adventures of Cliff Hanger" and "Gawaine's Word", for example) and guests (Dr. Ruth "Wordheimer", Faith Prince), as well as a core story around which each show revolves. (Some of these have been really especially cool: Abiyoyo and Sylvester and the Magic Pebble are two that really stand out in my mind.)
See what lovely things you learn when you have young kids? :-)
Randall P:
The Avenue Q folks would probably be cross with you -- it was probably a joke, but the one who is an Alum from my current school mentioned that their next project (assuming that the recent Muppet-movements don't allow for Kermit, Prince of Denmark) is EC done up in the Avenue Q, CTW-with-bad-behaviorr, style.
"Faster than a rolling O, stronger than silent E, able to leap capital T with a single bound!
It's a word... it's a plan... it's Letterman!"
Those were good days.
Actually, "Ja Da" is an American song, copyright 1918. Dad probably still sings it around the house.
Speaking of songs, I've been trying to find some of the work of one of our great American songwriters, Jimmie Dodd. I expected to find a fan site, but all I can find are some pictures here and there (and most of those are from a UK photographer with that name). Where are the songs? There should be a book of them; a tribute album; a Broadway show. The man was a sincere genius, and we deserve to have his stuff available. Heck, never mind "we." I deserve it.
Bruce A:
Thanks so much for reminding me about "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". My aging mind kept thinking it was written by Sturgeon, but I can't ever forget the story. I've often thought of making an installation/maze of tissue paper, slimy rocks, etc.
I'm afraid I'm a hair too old for The Electric Company, but can identify with Beany and Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, Kukla,Fran and Ollie, and a show where you put a piece of filmy plastic on the 10" TV screen and used a crayon to follow along with the program. I'm forgetting the name of it, though.....
Hey, everybody, I got a strange piece of email in my Yahoo bulk folder this morning. The filter read it as spam, but it came from Jane Yolen's AOL address (janeyolen@aol.com). The subject line says "read it immediately" and there is a text file attached, but I'm reluctant to open it because there's no real reason for Jane Yolen to be sending me cryptic email. The only connection between us (that I know of) is this blog, in fact. So Jane, be warned you may have a virus, or somebody is piggybacking off your email address.
As an aged child, can I express my profound disappointment at the lack of really imaginative environments for first-person shooters? A decade-and-a-half ago, as a mature (graphic arts) student, I eagerly anticipated VR games set in free-fall, variable gravity, 4-D spaces and other, weirder environments I couldn't predict. But, no. All the games I see are stuck in the same old Aristotelian-physics-one-gee-flat-space model.
Admittedly, I'm a couple of years behind the curve, since I only buy bargain bin games, but the latest I'm playing (No-one Lives Forever) couldn't even get free fall right. I wonder if I'm too old to learn to program....
Does anybody who remembers the electric remember seeing a few years ago an ad. for some sneaker that was a direct parody of the standard Electric Company sketch in which two silhouetted faces would appear close to each other and each say part of a word?
In the commercial, the two silhouettes came together and said "Buh" -- "oing" -- (together) "Boing!". The background music was possibly a rip from the original - if not, they copied the style flawlessly.
Isn't it fun to be part of a target market?
Holly wrote: So Jane, be warned you may have a virus, or somebody is piggybacking off your email address.
Most likely scenario is that someone else who has both your addresses in their address book is infected - modern viruses typically forge the address to look as if they come from somewhere else. You'd need to check the headers and trace the IP address the virus came from.
I too've started to get spam e-mails with from headers of people who post on blog comments. My theory is that somebody built a robot for harvesting e-mail addresses from comment threads and putting the name of another poster on the thread in the From field, on the theory that people are more likely to read the spam if it comes from a name they recognize.
Diana Wynne Jones' Year of the Griffin...
Fans of Ms. Jones' work may be excited to know that Hayao Miyazaki (director of Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, and many others) is adapting Howl's Moving Castle to the screen. Last I heard, it was due out in Japan in late 2004.
As for tesseracts, I remember writing something that would show a wire-frame image of a tesseract cross-section at all sorts of strange angles back in high school. (no perspective, so it always looked a bit flat, and it was all in Turbo Pascal 5, the old dos-based version)
This was after having pulled a muscle in my brain working out what those cross-sections would look like if a hypercube were to pass through our universe corner-first. (Analogous to a cube looking like a triangle or a hexagon to residents of flatland if it intersected flatland corner-first)
It's odd that over a decade later I don't think any of the programs I'm writing professionally or for fun involve a tenth as much math as that one did, even though I have two big fancy pieces of paper on the wall that ought to mean I'm now much more acquainted with matters mathematical. (I assume a BA and an MA both in math aren't sufficiently unrelated to computer programming to win me any prizes in the "schooling that has nothing to do with job" thread)
Julai Jones: Most likely scenario is that someone else who has both your addresses in their address book is infected - modern viruses typically forge the address to look as if they come from somewhere else.
Yes modern viruses forge the address, but not necessarily out of the infected machine's address book. I doubt that getting sender&receiver addresses out of the same web page or newsgroup is not beyond the state of the art.
You'd need to check the headers and trace the IP address the virus came from.In particular, the "Received:" lines describe the trail that the message took from the last non-lying host. It's not beyond a virus to put in extra pebbles to lead you off the track. I've been tracing e-mail spam since 1994, and it just gets trickier.
I too've started to get spam e-mails with from headers of people who post on blog comments. My theory is that somebody built a robot for harvesting e-mail addresses from comment threads and putting the name of another poster on the thread in the From field, on the theory that people are more likely to read the spam if it comes from a name they recognize.
That is my theory as well - I've gotten spam similar to Holly's which ostensibly came from Patrick, Teresa, Beth Meacham, and Kate Nepveu, and the chances of anyone having all of them and me in their address book are lowish.
Refreshing Michael's memory:
Winky Dink . . . and you!
Winky Dink . . . and me!
Mumble mumble mumble together!
The show had a short revival in the early 70s, and a DVD / VHS version is available now.
* * *
There were parts of The Electric Company I liked as a kid, but it was kind of sparse compared to Sesame Street. Also, but the time TEC was on, I was already a pretty good reader.
I caught an episode or two of Between the Lions. A very neat show with appealing characters. I like the way the kid-lions beg mom for hunks of meat for snacks. Go carnivores!
Oh . . . if you have a big sturdy dog, get a "Gentle Leader."
The instruction copy for this head harness claims it calms them down by pressing on pack dominance related pressure points, but I think that's cover for something else, like nano-probes that sink into and paralyze the "pull master's arms off" lobe of the dog's brain.
Now I need something that will stimulate her "pee now rather than in the last five minutes of a four mile walk" lobe . . .
Dan Blum: indeed, my only address book is in Eudora Light 3.0.6 (very old version, that is [*]), and I don't have you or anyone else in that list in it.
[*] I haven't upgraded because it keeps my mail in plain-text mailboxes, with a separate file that puts them in order. I don't trust any program with important mail if I can't get to that mail in a text editor.
Stefan Jones: What a great picture! I wanted to say earlier congratulations on adopting an adult dog, but the comment previewing timed out. We adopted a ~1 year old dog nearly a year ago, and besides her general wonderfulness, it is so nice not to have to housetrain a puppy.
We thought about getting a Gentle Leader for our dog (she's about 50 pounds, so I think smaller than your dog), but after some training we managed to get her to (basically) understand the concept of loose-leash walking. It would've been our next step (though if our trainer had pulled out "pack dominance pressure points," we probably would've rolled our eyes and moved on).
(PSA: if generic-you are thinking of using pinch collars, please talk to a trainer first. Behaviorally, they may do more harm than good depending on your dog's issues, and it's important to get the right fit.)
According to our trainer, you can get dogs to pee on command (because service dogs have to). We didn't cover it in detail, but she recommended saying "Hurry up" just as the knees bend in that characteristic way.
Enjoy your dog--she sounds like a charmer.
Ahhh, Winky Dink! I have very fuzzy, toddler memories of getting in terrible trouble for coloring on our 19" B/W tv screen at Winky Dink's urging, early, early one morning.
I think you were supposed to put heavy plastic over the screen first, but that was just too much for my 2-ish brain to parse.
All my friends with sub-5-year-old kids treat crayons and markers as a controlled substance. Heaven forefend that there should be any coloring on unauthorized surfaces.
I agree that kid's programs have changed, and not for the better. My best friends' au pair, who's from Sweden, said that she didn't like any of the kid's programs here. They're either total junk, like Pokemon, or too dilligent about teaching and not enough fun, like Dora the Explorer. (My niece adores all things Dora. I think she said "Dora" before she said "Mama" or "Dada.")
NelC, if you haven't already, you should take a look at the original Unreal Tournament. It has a fantastic "low-G" effect, used brilliantly on a level featuring three skyscraper peaks jutting into the upper reaches of the Earth's atmosphere. Vertigo-inducing, and really, really beautiful.
There's also a space station in Martian orbit-- when you stand on one of the outside edges of the station and look up (or down, or across, as you see fit) at that huge, revolving red planet, you'll want to grab something so you don't fall into your monitor.
It's also one of the best first-person shooters I've ever played, to boot.
My favorite shows (in no particular order) were:
3-2-1 Contact!
Gobots
Mr. Wizard
Reading Rainbow
You Can't Do That On Television
All Goofy and Donald Duck cartoons
All Scooby-Doo cartoons; all Batman cartoons (and all Scooby-Doo and Batman cartoons)
Key childhood movies:
Back to the Future
Freaky Friday (endless reruns on Disney channel)
Escape to Witch Mountain (endless reruns on Disney channel)
Ghost Busters
Adventures in Babysitting
All Pippi Longstocking movies
Now calculate my age.
Having a two year old, I can say that Dora the Explorer is evil. The animation is crap and cheap. However, there are some excellent shows out there for kids. The Wiggles are good (before they got bought out by Disney), Bear in the Big Blue House is good (before they got bought out by Disney), and here in Canada, we have a show called Big Comfy Couch that my daughter just adores. So, I'd say there are some good shows out there. Unfortunately, Sesame Street is not one of them (and trust me, I've seen them all in my constant search for something worthwhile on television). I don't know when it happened, but Sesame Street became all about famous guest stars that have nothing to do with kids.
For instance, they had Edie Falco from The Sopranos on one morning. Why would they have Edie Falco? What good would that do for a kid? Kids watch The Sopranos? Have I missed something here? They have such a desperate desire to be "hip" that they've lost touch with a lot of what made them popular in the first place. Elmo? I'm sorry, but give me and my daughter Oscar the Grouch any day. They rarely use the original characters anymore. Bert is non-existent, yet Ernie has his own stupid, poorly animated segment with Big Bird (who is ineffective as a character anymore, as his "puppeteer" sounds tired and old).
IMHO, Sesame Street was never broken. They didn't need to fix it. Bert and Ernie were fine characters. Did they need to be updated? No. Did they need to tell fresh stories with those characters? No. Why? Because Sesame Street doesn't grow up with the kids. The kids grow out of Sesame Street. You could tell the same story a hundred times on Sesame Street, because your audience is constantly two to three years old and constantly changing. Marketing experts and idiot television executives have ruined wonderful shows because they're trying to hook us (meaning you and me) and not the kids. Shows like Sesame Street aren't for us and never were. They're for kids.
As a side note, thank God I live in Canada, because we have two children's networks without any commercials. I don't know how much longer that will last, but I was down in the States for Christmas and could not find one kid's channel without evil commercials directed at kids. I fear for the future generations in the States.
Finally, a subject in which I'm an expert! (I'm also an elementary school teacher). Any questions about children's tv? Please direct them to me.
Okay, I have to add to this. Favorite shows:
Electric Company
You Can't Do That on Television
Super Friends
The Flintstones (every day after school on TBS)
All of the Warner Bros. shorts
All of the original Disney animated shorts
Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends
Dungeons and Dragons (the terrible Saturday morning animated version)
I also had a favorite Saturday morning cartoon called "Galaxy High", which was only on for one season. I haven't seen it since then, but I remember loving it.
There was another show on at night called, "It's Your Move" with Jason Bateman. I worshipped that show and had all of the episodes on tape (Beta, no less). Anyone else ever watch that?
I will refrain from posting now, as I have embarassed myself.
I used to love the old cartoons, like Bullwinkle (esp. Fractured Fairy Tales), Underdog and all the Looney Tunes stuff. I also used to like (swallowing hard before admitting it) Josie and the Pussycats (esp. the In Outer Space variant) and (gulp) The Far Out Space Nuts. With Ruth Buzzi and Jim Nabors. Shudder.
I think I'm right on the borderline for Sesame Street, but The Electric Company hit me square between the eyes, as did Zoom. Like most Americans my age, I clearly remember Zoom's mailing address. I wonder if they got the same box and zip code for the new show.
I don't worry too much about my niece's Dora problem. Her TV access is tightly controlled and I'm sure that Dora will be rudely ousted from hear heart by something even worse. Thankfully, Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony only resonate in the irony-prone psyches of aging Gen-Xers.
Of course, there are the current cartoons designed to appeal to 30-something parents, written, no doubt by 30-something writers, like The Fairly Odd Parents, Rugrats, and the short lived and much missed (at least by me) Sheep in the Big City. I would pay far more than I can afford for a SitBC DVD. Now that's animation with the power of an ox!
Larry, my sister tortured me with Strawberry Shortcake and My Little Pony. Also Rainbow Brite. I had to sit through the Strawbery Shortcake and Rainbow Brite movies more times than I want to remember. My sisters room was all pink, with SS sheets, wallpaper, and a particularly dreadful lamp shaped like a giant strawberry. It was revolting.
Kip: Was the Jimmie Dodd you wanted to find this one?
http://www.facethemusic.org/fantasy/kids/jimmyd1.html
Andy - you're younger than I am, but not by a whole helluva lot: I would say 5-7 years younger (I'm 35).
Am I close?
I adore Rocky & Bullwinkle (went to a wonderful R&B film-festival in Minneapolis years ago - good thing the fire marshal didn't show up, becase a bunch of us ended up sitting on the stairs, it was that packed). Also love Looney Tunes.
Rocky: Bullwinkle, is that you?
Bullwinkle: I dunno - got any other friends with antlers?
Speaking of My Little Pony, everyone's seen the web page for My Little Justice League, right?
Andy -- I am going to guess you are about 30, or slightly younger, but not less than 28. (I am 34.)
My own childhood TV appreciation is complicated by the fact that my folks did not have one -- I only watched at friends houses or at my grandparents', and only after I was too old to really get Sesame Street. I watched Electric Co. and Mr. Rogers once in a while but they never really got me going either -- but I loved the experience of being in front of the box, being *entertained* -- despite that I did not really dig the show content. Go figure. The same was true in my teenage years of lacksadaisickally watching reruns of Three's Company, The Jeffersons, etc. -- they did not move me to laughter or emotional response but it was great just to be able to *watch*. I blame my parents of course.
Life of Chair!
My mom said the best thing about Electric Company was that it was super funny for her too - we all loved that show. Thanks for all the good memories of it, dang, I'm grinning.
Andy, you are maybe 30?
Wow -- I see Jill posted the same age estimate for Andy as mine, while I was typing.
As long as we're going on about tesseracts, etc., here's ample reason to wish you were in LA in a week:
Daina Taimina and David Henderson are mathematicians at Cornell University, and co-authors of Experiencing Geometry, a classic text on euclidean and non-euclidean space. In 1997 Daina worked out how "hyperbolic" space could be modeled in crochet. Since then, she and David have used her woolen models to further explore this peculiar topology. Here, David and Daina will talk about crocheting the hyperbolic plane, the geometry of lettuce, and the architecture of the universe.
Crocheting The Hyperbolic Plane
A lecture presented by The Institute for Figuring
Thursday, May 27, 7:30PM
The Foshay Masonic Lodge (truly a remarkable structure)
9635 Venice Blvd
Culver City, CA 90232
$10, $6 members & students
There's a link with photos and stuff. Well. A photo, anyway.
Wasn't it "Love Of Chair"? I remember 'cuz there was a soap around then called "Love of Life."
An educational show to look for, at least once: "Cyberchase."
Animation is icky, characters are cliched, but the subject matter is well conveyed and unusual: It teaches kids about math and logic and problem-solving.
I saw three episodes: One was about games and probability. (What is a fair game?) Another had to do with figuring out the volume of an irregular space. Another was about the game of Nim, played out with dragons.
They kept things moving along nicely.
What about Zoom? Did any one watch Zoom? Loved that show and used to sing the theme song all the time.
Loved the Electric Company too.
And no one has brought up School House Rock. God, I loved those. When I was an elementary school teacher, I used so many of those songs to teach concepts. The second graders loved them, while the fourth and fifth graders thought I was nuts! Conjunction Junction, Lolly Lolly Get Your Adverbs Here, Interplanet Janet... Heck, it's still the only way I can quote the preamble of the Constitution. (And according to some of my former students, it's the only way they know it too.)
I'm 25, therefore I was born in 1978. (I'll be 26 in November.) I caught some of the movies (labeled above) as reruns. The Scooby-Doo cartoons were also (I'm guessing) reruns, although some new ones may still have been coming out in the early 80s. (?)
I also loved the live-action Batman show. I don't know if that was a rerun or not-- at that age, it was all new to me.
So. Raise your hand if you have sweaters older than I am.
There was this great animated program called "Eureka!" that explained physics for the 6th to 8th grade crowd. I think it was Canadian. Wow! I was somewhat ahead of it when I saw it, but I was very impressed. Funny, with cogent explanations that were neither too technical nor too simplistic.
I *loved* Zoom and did many of the projects. Looking back, though, those stripey shirts with the ring-pull zippers that everyone wore belong in the "70's Fashions Not To Be Revived" file.
Yes, Zoom has the same address. (And they still read it the same way. Although they also encourage e-contact, these days.) Which must have been really embarrassing for TV Guide when they ran a little box on the show, specifically noting the famous address -- and getting the ZIP code incorrect. (They had it as 01234!)
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Come on, now -- how many here took tests on the Constitution and, to recall the Preamble, sang (quietly, or in one's head) the words? (And how many remembered to put BACK "of the United States of America"?) *raises hand*
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I'll bet Jay Leno has LOADS of fun playing The Crimson Chin on The Fairly Oddparents
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Mr. Wizard
Rocky and Bullwinkle
Underdog
Those were days.
I missed out on "Zoom", but I loved "Schoolhouse Rock", mostly the history bits. "I'm just a bill" is still a favorite, along with "Shot heard round the world". I do remember watching "1-2-3 Contact" and later Square One with Mathnet and Carmen Sandiego. I've seen bits of "Behind the Lions". I mostly remember the nutty knight skits.
Sara, Interplanet Janet is a criminally underappreciated work in the Schoolhouse Rock oeuvre. Plus: it has the added bonus of (just when you think it's going to drive you out of your mind because it's been looping around in your head for an hour and a half) suddenly turning into They Might Be Giants singing "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas / A giant nuclear furnace..." In many ways, I think TMBG is the spiritual inheritor of SR's legacy.
And Bruce, I vividly remember an eighth-grade Civics test in which you could people humming the Preamble Song to themselves all over the room. (Much to my shame, I always forget to re-insert "...of the United States of America...")
Oops. I misremembered the title of the live-action kids show I liked. It wasn't "Far Out Space Nuts" (which had Bob Denver of Gilligan fame) but rather "The Lost Saucer." My bad.
[raises hand] Andy, I have laugh lines older than you.
Zoom was a little too young for me, but bits of it I loved. As a budding linguist I loved Ubby-Dubby, which is phonologically fascinating -- you just turn on "ubbydubbiness" and away you go. It's almost like doing an accent.
I think I'm going to have to come down hard in defense of My Little Pony. That was a good show, if you put aside the fact that it was designed to sell me toys. (And Dear Lord did it succeed in that.)
My Little Pony actually managed to have some neat messages, fairly subtly delivered. Sure it seems cliched now, but I remember quality episodes about not bullying and one about not judging people based on their appearances. And yes, I have seen this show in the last few years, but somehow I still enjoyed it.
And the toys themselves weren't bad. My mother was incredibly happy that I wanted magical ponies and castles rather than anorexic, half-naked blondes.
I think a lot of my emotional involvement with this show and some other similar ones from the era is that they were fun shows for girls. If you watch Saturday morning cartoons lately you'll see nothing but boys' cartoons. There might be a girl sidekick, to get rescued and cry a lot, there might not. It makes me sort of sick.
Megan from my little ponies was just a really together girl who liked horses and taking care of people. You don't see anything like that on TV nowadays. There are three girls on modern children's programming: The Brainy Bookworm, the Popular Cheerleader, and the Bossy B*tch. If you go a few years older you might get villainous vixen.
I miss Rainbow Brite, Strawberry Shortcake, Megan and the Ponies, and yes, I even Miss She-ra. When I was a kid we were running over the playground on our pretend horses fighting evil with our magical unicorns to save the Dream Castle. Every once in a while our She-ra friend would start ranting about swords and armor, and we would concede that perhaps we could wear armor while riding our ponies and use them to defeat the sorceress. I mean, why wouldn't the evil sorceress from She-ra attack Dream Castle? It stood to reason.
I'm not saying girls don't do this anymore, but it seems to me that they change over to boys and makeup earlier and earlier these days, and I think that's partially the fact that they aren't provided with many socially acceptable default fantasies. "My Little Ponies" was our "Cowboys and Indians." Now what do six-year-olds with active imaginations have? Lizzie Maguire? Maybe "Disney Princesses" if they're lucky? Subservient boy-crazy BS.
Damn, I'm crying with nostalgia here. Sorry.
This started out as a song of praises for the Muppet Show and Square One. I can't believe no one has mentioned Square One yet. As soon as I'm back from the library I'll reopen that text file.
So yeah. Please don't think too harshly of the My Little Ponies.
Heinlein edited himself. He deliberately wrote long, then went through the manuscript with a red pen, just crossing out.A comparison of the two versions of Stranger in a Strange Land is instructive: from flabby sentences to terse ones. Illness kept him from doing so with I Will Fear No Evil, and it sold so well he decided not to bother anymore.
"The Sun" was originally from a LP of educational space songs:
http://www.acme.com/jef/science_songs/
There were other albums in the series. Dig the trippy cover art!
My 3rd Grade music teacher played this in class. It was old then.
Randall P.: ...As a side note, thank God I live in Canada, because we have two children's networks without any commercials. I don't know how much longer that will last, but I was down in the States for Christmas and could not find one kid's channel without evil commercials directed at kids. I fear for the future generations in the States.
Didn't they just figure out that TV is bad for kids? Maybe having ads so distasteful you won't let your kids at the automatic babysitter will save them from having it eat their brains.
Anyone with a better memory than mine can prove it by identifying the story about a scientist who figured out that VHF broadcast frequencies were causing cancer/making people stupid/[your disaster here] but couldn't convince anyone to ban it. He decided to fight it by subverting the network programming departments to pump out dreck so unwatchable that TV would be unprofitable. I forget why his plan failed--perhaps the stupidity effect worked too fast.
Finally, a subject in which I'm an expert! (I'm also an elementary school teacher). Any questions about children's tv? Please direct them to me.Yeah! So what about TV eating kids' brains? Is that bunk? Or is there a cutoff age at which they become immune? Or has it just all been eaten?
I hope this doesn't all come out twice. I tried to post once and it vanished.
In no particular order:
Rocky and Bullwinkle
The Muppet Show
Contact 1 2 3 (there was a pac-man-like math bit I think)
Sesame Street
Kidstreet
She-ra
Spiderman
The Edison Twins (someone else remember this please)
and others
Also a brief and horrible flirtation with the Samurai Pizza Cats. The theme song still haunts me at unexpected moments. Who do you call when you want some pepperoni?
Nine Naked Men, move over!
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=573&ncid=757&e=1&u=/nm/20040521/od_nm/life_rollercoaster_dc
81 or so college students on a rollercoaster, nekkid. Brings a new face to "swinging in the breeze..."
From today's Reuters "Oddly Enough" news.
This may work better
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=index&cid=757
The story should stay at the top (including photo-far enough off thank Ghu!) for a while,
Comments on Open thread 23: