At least it isn't aleph-null open threads - yet!

(I introduced a co-worker to 'Hot Gingered Pygmy Mammoth and Jumbo Shrimp Salad' this afternoon. Cue the giggling hordes!)

Posted January 10, 2008 9:39 PM by P J Evans

"99 Red balloons go by"

Posted January 10, 2008 9:49 PM by Maggie Brinkley

Tonight were gonna party like it's Open Thread 99.

Posted January 10, 2008 9:59 PM by Tania

"Don't tell me it's Open Thread, 99!"

"It's Open Thread 99."

"I asked you not to tell me that!"

Posted January 10, 2008 10:22 PM by Xopher

Just been turned on to http://deputy-dog.com/ which features stuff that looks cool. 5 unbelievably cool research facilites and
another 5 extremely cool research facilities and other posts will see me wasting some time there.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:30 PM by Soon Lee

Xopher, @#4: very Smart :-)

Posted January 10, 2008 10:33 PM by J MacQueen

99
I've been waiting so long
Oh 99
Where did we go wrong
Oh 99
Now you have this earworm too...

Posted January 10, 2008 10:36 PM by John Mark Ockerbloom

How long ago was Open Thread 1?

Posted January 10, 2008 10:37 PM by Steve C.

Reality query here--

Every time I've sung the song, the third and fourth lines were "Take one down, pass it around, [n-1] bottles of beer on the wall." The few times I've seen it written in the comics pages, the lines have been "If one of those bottles should happen to fall, there'd be [n-1] bottles of beer on the wall." At first I thought this was a regional variation and I had the Southern version. Then I decided that Management thought they might get sued for encouraging underage drinking, so they created a version in which the action happens accidentally.

Does anybody sing the "happen to fall" version?

Posted January 10, 2008 10:38 PM by Brenda Kalt

This has been bothering me for a while.

At the top left of the ML front page, there is a section titled "TNH's Particles". At the bottom of this box there is a link to take you to older posts from this box. This link is titled "More...".

Shouldn't it be titled "Past Particles"?

Posted January 10, 2008 10:41 PM by Doug Burbidge

Brenda Kalt #9:
In my youth we'd sing "And if one green bottle should accidentally fall, there'd be..."

So there's another variant for you.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:44 PM by Soon Lee

99 hydrogen bombs on the wall,
99 hydrogen bombs!
Take one dow

Posted January 10, 2008 10:46 PM by Xopher

Brenda @9

I grew up with the "if one of those bottles should happen to fall" version also. I'm from Morton Grove, IL, one of the suburbs north of Chicago.

I also grew up with the "eensy-beensy spider," not the "itsy-bitsy spider" or some other variation. (Long ago, Parade Magazine did a "What did you call the spider?" poll, and there were dozens of versions, IIRC.)

Posted January 10, 2008 10:47 PM by Beth Friedman

Brenda: I, a native New Yorker, grew up with the "happen to fall" version.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:50 PM by Chris Quinones

If I may, rather timidly, ask a question... what are the one or five or eight books you most wish everyone else would read? And is there an older thread on book recommendations toward making one a well-rounded individual?

Posted January 10, 2008 10:52 PM by Andrhia

Sir Edmund Hillary died.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:53 PM by Aaron

And then there's the Arthur C. Clarke Version:

"Nine billion names of God on the scroll, nine billion names of god.
Take one down, pass it around,
Eight billion, nine hundred ninety nine million, nine hundred ninety nine thousand, nine hundred ninety nine names of God on the scroll."

Very useful for filling time on those long multi-generational interstellar journeys.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:53 PM by Amy Thomson

I grew up in Milwaukee, WI and remember singing both the "happen to fall" and the "take one down and pass it around" versions. Also, when we sang it at home we always started with 100 bottles.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:58 PM by Kayjayoh

No beer here, the 'full' version goes:

(n) green bottles, hanging on the wall
(n) green bottles, hanging on the wall
And if one green bottle, should accidentally fall,
There'd be (n-1) green bottles, hanging on the wall

The tune is different to the beer version. I suspect that the beer tune is American, the green bottles tune is British.

Posted January 10, 2008 10:59 PM by Soon Lee

J 6: Yes, I have good Control of my material.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:02 PM by Xopher

The British version (different tune):

"Ten green bottles hanging on a wall,
Ten green bottles hanging on a wall,
and if one green bottle should accidentally fall,
There'll be nine green bottles hanging on the wall.
Nine green bottles, etc"

Traditionally it starts at ten, though of course it could start anywhere, and sometimes does on long car journeys. Or did before car stereos became ubiquitous.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:05 PM by NelC

Andrhia @15, because I'm feeling even more didactic than usual:

The Control of Nature by John McPhee, if just one.

And then these:

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

The Dispossessed, Ursula K. LeGuin

Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

Gods and Generals and The Killer Angels, Jeffery Shaara, Michael Shaara

At least tonight, I think those are the ones (although the top one is permanent).

Posted January 10, 2008 11:07 PM by JESR

Re: Xopher

Do you really think

...excuse me, my shoe is ringing.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:15 PM by Carol Kimball

Andrhia @15: The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollans, is the first book the reading of which has caused me to excitedly press it on friends and relatives. Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig, might have been another, had I been living near people who would have appreciated it at the time. (Well, I listened to it as a Creative Commons-licensed, community-produced MP3 audiobook, but it's the same idea.)

Posted January 10, 2008 11:23 PM by Kevin Riggle

Brenda@9
I grew up in Oregon and we always sang "take one down, pass it around".

On another subject: My bank had a trivia question posted today "How many raindrops reside in the average cloud?" My answer was none, clouds are water vapor and raindrops precipitate out of that and fall. Their answer was 6 trillion. Anyone have a "real" answer to a dumb question?

Posted January 10, 2008 11:33 PM by Rainflame

A new thread already? But I'd just gotten going on the old one.

I would like to repeat-point to my question requesting fluo'knowledge on Munich and Bavaria in January... experiences and advice? Countryside walking around conditions in winter: more like New York or Maine? Fasching-- what to try to see beyond the donuts?

And in gossip news, I am deeply disappointed that Mars and 2007 WD5 won't be getting together. They'd have been a smash hit, and all for the crater good.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:35 PM by Kathryn from Sunnyvale

10 REM BASIC Version of 99 Bottles of beer
20 FOR X=100 TO 1 STEP -1
30 PRINT X;"Bottle(s) of beer on the wall,";X;"bottle(s) of beer"
40 PRINT "Take one down and pass it around,"
50 PRINT X-1;"bottle(s) of beer on the wall"
60 NEXT

The internet is marvelous.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:40 PM by JKRichard

Andrhia: I'll take "one or five or eight" to mean eight. Mine are:
1. The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I'm counting as one book even though it's ten trillion pages long all together.
2. The Comforters by Muriel Spark.
3. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood.
4. Tales of the Rue Broca by Pierre Gripari.
5. The Chain of Chance by Stanislaw Lem.
6. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders.
7. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester.
8. The Douglas Adams Dirk Gently books (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, which I'm also counting as one book).

Posted January 10, 2008 11:41 PM by ethan

Brenda @ #9: I grew up singing the version you use. When we'd reach 0, we'd start up with

No bottles of beer on the wall, no bottles of beer
Burp one up, slurp it up.
One bottle of beer on the wall...

Very appealing to juveniles.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:46 PM by Tania

Aaron #16:
The NZ Herald's put up a piece on Hillary's life. I found it quite telling that of all the famous kiwis featured on NZ currency, he was the only one accorded that honour while still alive.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:47 PM by Soon Lee

Aaron #16:
The NZ Herald's put up a piece on Hillary's life. I found it quite telling that of all the famous kiwis featured on NZ currency, he was the only one accorded that honour while still alive.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:48 PM by Soon Lee

Apologies for the double post. Thought it failed the first time.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:50 PM by Soon Lee

Kathryn, armageddon what you're saying.

Posted January 10, 2008 11:54 PM by Tania

Oh, and in Rhode Island I always heard "take one down, pass it around."

Posted January 11, 2008 12:00 AM by ethan

Andrhia @15:

Konrad Lorenz On Aggression because it is wise beyond measure

Buwei Yang Chao How to Cook and Eat in Chinese (not for the recipes - for the delightful commentary)

John Scalzi's thread on Being Poor - because that thread and its subsidiary, a total of 650 comments, is big and important and well-written enough to be a book and we don't have to be pagists.

Neal Stepehnson's Mother Earth, Mother Board - preferably, read it in 1996.

Ray Brabury's Dandelion Wine for the virtuosity of its American-English usage. Some people play violin or piano or come up with elegant proofs or break your heart with beauty so joyous as to cause pain. Bradbury, in this book, took a slegehammer to my heart. And I wasn't even born when he wrote it.

Plutarch's Lives. Because people haven't changed a bit. And Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People for the same reason.

Karen Armstrong's The Battle for God, about the history of Fundamentalism. It explains so much. (Her history of Jerusalem is pretty awesome, too).

Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Women's Work, the first 20,000 years and hers with Paul Barber When They Severed Earth from Sky: How human mind shapes myth about oral traditions and how they were used. Even if their theories aren't for real, they make a mindblowing read. (And if you liked those, Paul Barber's book about vampires in folklore as contrasted to those in fiction is a cheerful read).

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is a very concise way to blow some gaskets. It may be the most important political book of 2007 - but I think it will last well beyond that.

I'll stop procrastinating now...

Posted January 11, 2008 12:04 AM by Dena Shunra

Andrhia at 15, I will name six books which I would recommend to any thoughtful person.

1) The Screwtape Letters, by C. S. Lewis
2) King Hereafter, by Dorothy Dunnett
3) The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula LeGuin
4) Another Country, by James Baldwin
5) Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell
6) The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

And a seventh, which is not exactly a "book," but can be found in bookstores: a good translation of Dante Alighieri's La Divina Commedia. I am fond of the Ciardi translation, but there are other good ones.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:05 AM by Lizzy L

99 tiny bugs in the code
99 tiny bugs
Fix a bug, compile it again
100 tiny bugs in the code

And:

I've got 96 tears in 99 eyes

Posted January 11, 2008 12:06 AM by Tim Walters

Kevin Riggle @24 mentioned Michael Pollan's Omnivore's Dilemma; I'll add Pollan's Botany of Desire to the list, and also say yay to 3,7, and 8 of ethan's list.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:07 AM by JESR

Kathryn # 26: Alas, the year I lived in München, Fasching was cancelled due to the First Gulf War. :P I'm afraid I can't give you any advice on that. Though as far as weather goes, my recollection was that it was more often closer to New York City than Maine (both of which I have ample experience with, having grown up in the latter and now practically living in the former).

However, having said that, the weekend of Karnivale I did go to Venice ... Karnivale had also been cancelled, but that didn't stop some people from wandering about in the fog wearing masks. It had snowed a couple days previous, so I have some gorgeous photos of snow-filled gondolas that I really *must* turn into holiday cards someday.

And while in München, I experienced thundersnow for the first (and so far, last) time. Very, very cool.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:18 AM by meredith

So I bought myself a birthday present two days ahead of the date, I now have a new laptop, with not only a touchscreen, but a built-in webcam, too--and a clip of me cursing at Microsoft, Vista, and Steven Jobs and his ancestry... unexpurgated live reaction commentary on doing -some- of the system reconfiguration to something less annoying that the stock user interface.... NOT for G-rated audience--no sex, no violence, but it is full of foul language! (It also included me trying to divide by 1280 by 800, out loud, for the purpose of trying to figure out if the ratio is closer to 4:3 or 16:9 [it's 16:10, but it would be way too easy for the stupid software to actually show typical resolutions and let the operator pick amongst them... and I forgot anyway was the resolution is, and then tried to go look it up on the machine... but Vista doesn't have the display control information in the same place that previous versions of Microsoft environments have them....])

I was testing the webcam.... the location it's at of course is designed for someone whose torso is much longer than mine is, so it shows lots of space above my head with the laptop on my lap....

Posted January 11, 2008 12:22 AM by Paula Lieberman

Dena Shunra #35:
Thanks for the John Scalzi link. I was gobsmacked.

BTW, the Neal Stephenson piece is available online at Wired. It's a hugely fascinating & insightful piece that has very much informed his subsequent books, "Cryptonomicon" & The Baroque Cycle and clearly shows his interest in the (infra)structures underlying our civilisation, and their origins.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:37 AM by Soon Lee

Andrhia - I'm going to go for generalities while I try to think of specific titles.

1) A work of religious significance. The Bhagavad Gita, The Bible, The Quran, etc.

2) A work of 'early literature' that is referenced by later literature. Greeks, Romans, Chinese, Japanese, etc.

3) A work on science that is referenced, but no one seems to have actually read. Origin of Species, Chaos, A Brief History of Time, etc.

4) A work considered significant or influential in a field/genre you enjoy. That way you catch the references/homages that are made to it in other works.

5) A biography of an influential or interesting person. Artists, politicians, deal makers, captains of industry, whoever catches your fancy.

The good thing is that a good book will lead you to other good books. And that's a good thing. Or a good start...

Posted January 11, 2008 12:40 AM by Tania

#9 Brenda Kalt: I grew up in Colorado singing the "take one down, pass it around" version; then sometime in the 90s, still in Colorado, I heard the "should happen to fall" version and immediately switched over. The patter/meter is way better, and the sly passive voice amuses me. Suuure, the bottle just happened to fall. I just happened to have my hand out in a cupped position, eh? It's a world of wonders and miracles.

#15 Andrhia: I don't have a list everyone should read, because people are different and I'm too lazy. I do have books I push on everyone I think might be even slightly receptive... These are:

1. Steven Brust's _The Phoenix Guard_, and
2. Eccelesiastes. (From the Bible. I enormously prefer the Revised Standard Version.)

There's not really a connecting bit. Those are just the ones that worked really well for me. (There are lots and lots of other awesome books, but those seem to be the ones I thump again and again.)

Posted January 11, 2008 12:45 AM by Madeline F

Dena @ 35, yep. If you read Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine and don't nearly burst an aneurysm you didn't even know you had, your capacity for rage is desperately lacking.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:01 AM by Linkmeister

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 26

Would it be crash of me to want to get a bang out of it?

and too bad it wasn't 2007 WD-40; it'd just slide right on through.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:03 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Mmm, wait. The question wasn't about books you'd recommend. It was about books you most wish other people would read. In other words, this time we're not supposed to be out to share our pleasures with other people. The assignment is to improve them -- or the world.

Here's a couple, off the top of my head. I need to go to bed, like, two hours ago, so maybe I'll dream some others overnight.

1. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, for obvious reasons.
2. Sun Tzu's Art of War, to nudge people in the direction of noticing that war is not even a little bit the same as reality TV.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:09 AM by Sylvia Li

Yes, indeed there was a tornado in Vancouver, WA. It actually did some damage, but the TV news crews have managed to blow it out of proportion even so. I'm watching Sh*tStorm Team Alert, or whatever they call their weather overreaction program; you can hear the exclamation marks in each report. Eva tells me this afternoon they even called up someone in Oklahoma so they could talk to an "expert" on the air.

Oh, the real news: no serious injuries, a couple of buildings destroyed, a bunch of trees and power poles down. And a bunch of fish picked up out of the lake and strewn around the landscape.

"Three funnel clouds,
two smashed homes,
and some fish up in the tree."

Posted January 11, 2008 1:20 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

99 open threads? It's KAOS I tell you, simply KAOS!

:D

Oh, and I heard both the "take one down..." and "happen to fall..." variants when I was growing up. But the spider was always "itsy-bitsy".

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Daniel C. Dennett
The Alphabet Versus the Goddess and Sex, Time and Power, Leonard Shlain--whether others find his theories worthwhile or not, these might expand their thought processes a bit...

Posted January 11, 2008 1:34 AM by Syd

I'm a "take one down pass it around" person (I grew up in far Alaska in the 1980's).

5-8 Books that Changed My Life

1) Antigone

2) Iliad

3) Anything by Joan Aiken, esp. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase/ James III Chronicles (What you thought I called myself after the Queen of Carthage? Um. No. She should really be # 1, especially for "The Cat Flap and the Apple Pie.")

3) Beauty (Robin McKinley) (This is the one that got me to learn Greek...the others just changed my entire self/world view.)
The Hero and the Crown (R. McKinley)
The Blue Sword (R. McKinley)

4) The Good Master (K. Seredey)

5) Medea (Euripides)

6) Roller Skates (R. Sawyer)

7 How I Live Now (M. Rosoff)

8) The Attolia Books (M. Whalen Turner)

Hmm. How do I get all of Crutcher (but especially "Whale Talk"), Eager & Nesbit and Ibbotson (but especially "Journey to the River Sea") in there? (Hi there! I've read (almost) all the archives; as you might guess I'm a Classics professor and I worked in a kids' bookstore for (off and on) 10 years.)

Posted January 11, 2008 1:39 AM by dido

Bruce @47,

I remember when there was a tornado here in Sunnyvale, California, a few years back. While central Cal gets plenty of small tornadoes--few people see them, and they take out fruit sheds at worst--they're much more rare near the coast.

It--our tornado--took out a few roofs and trees. The local news was breathless.

The weather channel also covered it. As I recall it went like this:
"Sunnyvale, California, experienced a... 'tornado' today. It was a class... half ... 'tornado'."

i.e. the disdain rained as he deigned to mention our 'tornado.'

Posted January 11, 2008 1:51 AM by Kathryn from Sunnyvale

dido - which part of AK? I grew up between Anchor Point and Fairbanks. And desperately wanted to be a classics scholar when I was kid.

Posted January 11, 2008 2:07 AM by Tania

Andrhia, I may be only 20 but these have shaped my life so far:

1. Arcadia (Tom Stoppard)
2. "Slow Sculpture" (Theodore Sturgeon)
3. Lest Darkness Fall (L. Sprauge de Camp)
4. Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey)
5. A Perfect Analysis Given By a Parrot (Tennessee Williams)
6. The Hero With A Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell)
7. The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka)

and one of the most original and complex YA fantasy novels,
8. The Spellcoats (Diana Wynne Jones)

also, for a really fun read chock-full of wit and puns,
9. The Case of the Toxic Spelldump (Harry Turtledove)

Posted January 11, 2008 2:25 AM by Lucy S.

Tania, my address is still (in my mind) SR ****, Anchor Pt., AK 99556, but I think of myself as being from Homer. As for being a classics scholar--it was rough getting here: it's totally worth it--and it totally isn't. Professor? Pfbbbt. But even though I finally can, I'd still totally cut off my right arm for the ability to read Homer. Elbow, shoulder, ya' know, . . .where ever.

(I was in Mr. B's 4-6th grade at Nikolaevsk, and HH for 9-12; quit [didn't graduate] in 1994; let me know if there's any overlap.)

Posted January 11, 2008 2:25 AM by dido

Books for the improvement of people:

Hamlet's Mill - Giorgio De Santillana and Hertha Von Dechend, for its sense of the time of the human species and its view of myth as real and useful wisdom.

The Immense Journey - Loren Eisley, for its sense of still deeper time, and our connection to all of life and the world.

Starmaker - Olaf Stapledon, for a glimpse of the deepest time of all, and some still quite interesting speculation on the nature of life and godhead.

Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter, for a chance to stretch your mind and your notion of mind.

The Stars My Destination - Alfred Bester. It may not be the best sf novel ever, but it's certainly breathing down the neck of whatever is. As a bonus, read The Count of Monte Christo - Alexandre Dumas, père to see how the story began (as a story).

The Art of War - Sun Tzu, for the reasons Sylvia Li gave. No more needs to be said.

Guns, Germs, and Steel / Collapse - both by Jared Diamond (counts as 1 book for this bookclub). The first has some fascinating ideas about why civilizations rose quickly in some places; the second has some fascinating ideas about why some failed.

Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting - Daniel Dennett, because it is your destiny.

Posted January 11, 2008 2:49 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Bruce @54, I've added your entire comment to my reading list. At the top of it, actually. Thanks for that!

Sylvia Li @46, it seems to me that asking which books you'd want to make other people read is pretty similar to asking "what ideas would you want other people to have". So, if you were the empress of the world, what ideas would you want people to have? Ideas don't have to be packaged in books... ...despite the huge proportion of people who did/are/will work in publishing among our hosts' readership.

Posted January 11, 2008 3:13 AM by Dena Shunra

dido - holy heck. I think you're about 4-5 years younger than me, I graduated in 1989 from North Pole.

I went to Nikolaevsk 1&3 (skipped 2, taught by Mrs. Lockwood). Jimmy Howard, who taught up there, is one of my uncles. Went to Anchor Point 4-8, and Homer 9&10. You must be about the same age as Seth or Cheryl?

I grew up on the North Fork on the family homestead, and still have family in Anchor Point, Homer, Ninilchik, and Clam Gulch. I live in Fairbanks/North Pole these days.

On a sad note, if you ever look at the Anchorage Daily News online, a plane of Old Believers coming back from Kodiak for Christmas crashed this weekend. Some of the people that died were boys I went to school with at Nikolaevsk. It's been a grim reminder, and even though I haven't seen most of them in over 25 years, I still feel sad for their families and remember them as kids.

Oh, and congrats on making it for the classics. I have opted to settle for translation, but still like to pick up a Latin text now and then. Did going to school in Nikolaevsk make learning to write Greek any easier? I still read Cyrillic, and my Russian accent is ok, but my actual speaking skills are pretty much limited to tourist phrases.

Posted January 11, 2008 3:21 AM by Tania

Sorry, but I realized Diana Wynne Jones, Donald Westlake, Josephine Tey and Reginald Hill are not on my list. We're just going to have to stretch the definition of "8". Like I said, sorry about that.

(If any one knows how to get in touch with Andrew Dalziel, let me know.)

Posted January 11, 2008 3:27 AM by dido

In terms of stretching minds, I'll settle for these four:

Dawkins - The Selfish Gene
Gould - The Mismeasure of Man
Frazer - The Golden Bough
Morgan - The Aquatic Ape

And for all our sakes, I'll add one website
http://www.ipcc.ch/

Posted January 11, 2008 4:35 AM by Andy Brazil

The Tyranny of Words by Stuart Chase. I haven't read it as an adult, so I don't know how it would look to me now, but it made a large useful difference back then--it's an intro to General Semantics, and has the sensible idea of grounding your words in specific experiences.

As a side effect, it makes being verbally abusive somewhat difficult. At least to my mind, verbal abuse has the underlying premise that the subject is defective by nature and forever, and if you're keeping a grip on what you can actually know, you realize that you can't know that much about anyone.

Posted January 11, 2008 4:52 AM by Nancy Lebovitz

More than Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hofstadter's collection Metamagical Themas did a huge amount to shape my head, especially the sections about the Prisoner's Dilemma. Hofstadter was strongly influenced by Robert Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation, and I'll throw that one in too, since it's well-written and short.

Posted January 11, 2008 5:05 AM by David Goldfarb

Steve C. @8 : 25th January 2003, apparently. I can only assume that either the thread title's been retconned since, or Teresa was remarkably prescient (Open Thread 2 wasn't until July 2003).

Posted January 11, 2008 6:48 AM by Dylan O'Donnell

Kathryn @ 26

My gut reaction was to scream Nooooooo and talk you out of going altogether. Southern Germany is the place NOT to be around the narrische Zeit. Thus speaketh the girl from the North East, where we are much more sensible.

But then it occurred to me that you might enjoy this kind of thing - takes all sorts, they tell me ;) - so if you insist on exposing yourself to Teh Crazy, and taking your wardrobe limits into account, how about this?

1 - It's a brewery, score.*
2 - They only let in folks dressed in white! Score?

I warn you again, though. They go mental, the southern types, at Faschingszeit.

Right. Having now prepared you sufficiently, I consider my duty done. (Because once one accepts Teh Crazy, there is sooooo much fun to be had. But be prepared, and bring tape to stick lower jaw in place. Also, there will be much Blasmusik. Ouch.)

Have fun! I hope it snows for you. They get the best (read: most) snow in all of Germany down there.

* BTW, Bavarian beer can be, er, challenging if you're a hardened lager drinker. I'm just saying.

Posted January 11, 2008 6:56 AM by Sus

Dylan, 61: My word. Those threads had 84 and 126 comments respectively.

Tania: so, what do you translate, exactly? Are you making a living at it? I ask because...

All: I'll be unemployed starting in May. Does anybody know of any word-related jobs lying around?

Posted January 11, 2008 7:43 AM by TexAnne

JKRichard@27:I prefer the python beer/wall framework. :)

Posted January 11, 2008 7:43 AM by Jules

Dylan @61:

Thanks for the links!

I note that the first topic drift on the first Open Thread happened at comment 4.

Drift early, drift often, say I.

Posted January 11, 2008 8:07 AM by abi

My suggestions for books everybody should read:

Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jane Jacobs

Platform for Change, Stafford Beer

The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture, Paul C. Bauschatz

Maritime Supremacy & the Opening of the Western Mind: Naval Campaigns That Shaped the Modern World, Peter Padfield

Posted January 11, 2008 8:34 AM by Graydon

Neunundneunzig Luftballons
Achtundneunzig Luftballons
Siebenundneunzig Luftballons
Sechsundneunzig Luftballons
Fünfundneunzig Luftballons...

Posted January 11, 2008 9:02 AM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

This one takes a byte longer...

FF buckets of bits on the bus,
FF buckets of bits,
take one down
short it to ground,
FE buckets of bits on the bus!

Posted January 11, 2008 9:06 AM by Mike Bakula

Although I grew up with bottles accidentally falling off the wall, I now tend to pass them around. It probably has something to do with my favourite version (which is really only funny for one round, even if you're drunk already):

Infinity bottles of beer on the wall,
Infinity bottles of beer,
Take one down, pass it around,
Infinity bottles of beer on the wall.

It does have the advantage that you have to be too drunk to sing before you lose count.

Posted January 11, 2008 9:16 AM by Paul Duncanson

Books for the confusement of people:

Joyce's _Finnegan's Wake_, of course.

The _Illuminatus!_ Trilogy, even more of course.

And (a fairly new addition) Hal Duncan's _Vellum_/_Ink_. A scarily brilliant work (arguably a failure in some ways, but it's only a failure because it tried to do so much), harder to read than _Illuminatus!_, easier than the Joyce.

Posted January 11, 2008 9:36 AM by Nix

Up here in Ottawa we always sang 'should happen to fall', though I also always wondered what the bottles were doing on the wall to begin with. Are they lined up on shelves? Held up by velcro or superglue? 99 is a lot - is there a room somewhere wallpapered with beer bottles? (The dream home, I expect, of many of my Canadian friends...)

Posted January 11, 2008 9:38 AM by Sylvie G

TexAnne: Oh no! But at least maybe you could use the opportunity to move to somewhere nicer. (Montreal's very nice. Also, you speak French.)

Posted January 11, 2008 9:39 AM by Jo Walton

When the next Open Thread is started, will it be #100? Or, as with Y2K, will it be #00, causing Reality's collapse, thus squeezing the contents of the disemvoweller all over everything?

Posted January 11, 2008 9:41 AM by Serge

Mike Bakula @ 68

0x01 buckets of bits on the bus,
0x01 buckets of bits,
take one down
short it to ground,
**** STACK UNDERFLOW 0xFE7FE9176 ****
PANIC WHILE PANICKING
reboot ....

Posted January 11, 2008 9:41 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

TexAnne @ 63... Does anybody know of any word-related jobs lying around?

I wish I did.

Posted January 11, 2008 9:42 AM by Serge

> So, if you were the empress of the world, what ideas would you want people to have?

That I was doing a good job as empress. Failing that, that empresses should be removed in a non-violent manner and kept in relative comfort once deposed.

Posted January 11, 2008 9:44 AM by Alan Braggins

Um, guys,

The spider was always eensy-weensy.

Philistines.

Posted January 11, 2008 9:45 AM by Nathan

#73: I worry more about the thread after that.

Thread 101.

Posted January 11, 2008 9:54 AM by Jon Meltzer

65535 bottles of beer on the wall,
65535 bottles of beer,
Put another one up on the wall,
Zero bottles of beer on the wall ...

Posted January 11, 2008 10:01 AM by Jon Meltzer

Jon Meltzer @ 78... Is that in binary or in hexadecimal?

Posted January 11, 2008 10:08 AM by Serge

One fluffy tribble is munching on grain
One fluffy tribble on board,
Turn your back and allow it to snack,

Two fluffy tribbles are munching on grain....

Posted January 11, 2008 10:09 AM by abi

No, you get eleven fluffy tribbles.

I have heard and sung both the passing-around and the falling bottle songs, with both beer and pop. It's kind of like the Big Rock Candy Mountains-- cigarette or peppermint trees? Little springs of lemonade or alcohol? It depends how stubborn your parents are.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:18 AM by Diatryma

Did you know that "color" rhymes with "cruller"? This may be important later ...

Posted January 11, 2008 10:20 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Someone's spending too much time on rhymezone.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:24 AM by abi

Two T Rexes running down prey,
Two T Rexes with prey,
If both those T Rexes should happen to meet
"SON, THIS GEOLOGIC ERA ISN"T BIG ENOUGH FOR THE BOTH OF US!"
One T Rex with plenty to eat.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:26 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

abi
Oddly, that was my own fevered brain came up with that. I was noodling around with a couple of lines, trying to find the right meter, when that popped out. I expect my subconscious is busy writing an Ode to Krispy Kreme. Never fear that if it's ever finished, it will be placed in a repository along with other long half-life hazardous materials.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:35 AM by Bruce Cohen (SpeakerToManagers)

Bruce @86:
Bring it out when it's funny.

As for me, I was walking away from the computer when this one struck.

Ten old amendments in the Bill of Rights
Ten old amendments are law
"Executive privilege", the President cites.
Nine old amendments in the Bill of Rights

Posted January 11, 2008 10:38 AM by abi

For book recommendations, I agree with Bruce Cohen (#54) on things that drastically widen the perspective, like Eisley (whom I read as a kid, from the family library) and Stapledon (caught up with him a bit later -- H.S. or college). Somebody else mentioned the Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, and I see the widened perspective there in another sense: an almost microscopic brilliance of attention that can also go big.

For a born pessimist and fretter, looking at things on a well-beyond-human scale can be cheering!

Posted January 11, 2008 10:43 AM by Faren Miller

Alan Braggins @76:

You might want to read Alan Bennett's The Uncommon Reader.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:50 AM by theophylact

The beer version, I always heard as "take one down, pass it around".

But then there was my junior high's version:

Ninety-nine bottles of nail polish on the wall
Ninety-nine bottles of nail polish
If one should happen to fall off the wall
Get on your bike and go back to the mall.

Ba-dum-dum.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:54 AM by Leigh Butler

In the spirit of Paul's contribution...

99 bottles of beer on the wall
99 bottles of beer
Take one down, put it back up,
99 bottles of beer on the wall

Really good for giving adults that sinking feeling of dread.

Attributable to teenage teetotaling geeks at the "nerd camp" in Southern Louisiana where I met the young man who'd become my husband six years later.

Posted January 11, 2008 10:56 AM by Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little

#90:
If one should happen to fall off the wall
Get on your bike and go back to the mall.

I remember that! Mallory sang it that way once on Family Ties.

(I can't remember important stuff to save my life, but useless 80s sit-com trivia? I'm your gal.)

Posted January 11, 2008 11:01 AM by Sylvie G

Abi @87 - no fair, singing that from the relative safety and civilization of your neighborhood... ...here you'd need to be in a free speech zone to do it.

8 zillion foolish TSA rules for the folk
8 zillion foolish rules for the folk
Election year comes home to to us all
8 zillion and some-odd foolish rules for the folk.

Linkmeister@44: reading it is the closest I've come to total breakdown since the month I spent typing backwards all day and painting things all night (this was a job. It was wildly lucrative, but tended to unravel my mind in most disconcerting ways). This is the first book I've ever needed an herbal relaxant for.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:04 AM by Dena Shunra

One time traveller eating some soup,
One time traveller eating some soup,
And if one time traveller should fall into a loop,
There'll be two time travellers eating some soup.

Two time travellers eating some soup,
Two time travellers eating some soup,
And if two time travellers should fall into a loop,
There'll be four time travellers eating some soup.

Four time travellers eating some soup,
Four time travellers eating some soup,
And if four time travellers should fall into a loop,
There'll be eight time travellers eating some soup.

Eight time travellers eating some soup,
Eight time travellers eating some soup,
And if eight time travellers should fall into a loop,
There'll be sixteen time travellers eating some soup.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:06 AM by Serge

Because this should be shared and his work is just to great not to spread:

The Deadlock Song


Paul Kwinn

"Son, be a colonist", is what Dad said to me
"It's a cushy life, and you'll get alien real estate for free"
So I talked to the recruiter, to see if this was so
He smiled at me... the nicest smile... and said "Kid, don't you know?"

A colonist's job is easy, a colonist's wage is high
A colonist's pension plan would make a civil servant cry
There's never any danger, there's always lots of fun
And as for job security, it's better than a nun's

[spoken:] Kid, I'd like you to meet somebody. His OFFICIAL title is
"Commander", but I'd like you to think of him as more of a Social
Coordinator.

[Chorus:]
If I ever get back home again
If I ever get back home again
If I ever get back home again
That recruiter's gonna die.

[spoken:] I'm here to tell you folks: it wasn't QUITE like he said...

Some say the Cyth are evil, they say they're misunderstood
"If you'd just do things our way, it would serve the greater good"
They seek to reach a higher place, a new enlightened mode
Meanwhile if you get in their way, your brain just might explode

The Re-lu seem to think they simply cannot be outclassed
They're so urbane, that less cultured folk
[spoken:] (like, say, the Queen of England...)
...seem barbaric by contrast
Their access privilege to your brain includes both read and write
They turn your units into theirs and no one's left to fight

[spoken:] "Bob! Bob! What's wrong?!"
"I dunno Jim... they just seem like such nice fellas..."

[Chorus]

Ch'ch-t need new worlds to expand, more than the others do
For like their cockroach cousins, there's never just one or two
They multiply like vermin, make tireless labor crews
And carry off your resources like ants at picnics do

The Maug are weak and sickly and their horns are mostly fake
The Cyth took their home planet, more poisons for to make
But for such whining wheezers they're an engineering bunch
Give them a rock, and they'll invent the warp drive before lunch

[Chorus]

The Uva Mosk think that they're Mother Nature's strong right arm
And they are more than willing to blast those who'd do her harm
Their camouflaging units will pop up behind your lines
So you'd better "Give a hoot", 'cause you won't like their littering fines.

The Tarth are big, the Tarth are tough, the Tarth will cause you pains
They're not too bright, but when you can head-butt buildings, who needs brains?
They make the greatest farmers, but as spies they suck, you see
They try to hide their 6-foot width behind a 1-foot tree.

[spoken:] This is KGAL, your News and Information Station on Gallius 4.
Here with a correction to last week's editorial reply is noted public figure: The Ubergeneral:
"Tarth cooks make best streudel. That's all. Just streudel."

Add to that the Skirineen, who'd sell their Mothers' eyes
And you can see why I might not think this job is a prize
So if I manage to survive, I'm going back to Earth
But I think I'll keep my laser gun... just for sentimental worth.

[Chorus]

Posted January 11, 2008 11:17 AM by Michelle

A Treatise on Human Nature by David Hume - This book will teach you the connection between the match and the flame. (Hint: There isn't one.)

Collapse by Jared Diamond - This book is about hacking civilizations--what makes them tick; what makes them fail? (I know, Bruce, but think: imitation=flattery)

River of Fire, River of Water by Taisetsu Unno - This book is about everything good that religion has to offer. It taught me to love the world.

Orientalism by Edward Said - To understand the underlying dynamic in any West/East interaction, you need to read this book. A must read for anyone who wants to make sense of modern world politics.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman - Omnia mutantur, nihil interit.

(I got The Shock Doctrine for Christmas, and I've been looking forward to reading it. Now I'm a bit nervous. =)

Posted January 11, 2008 11:24 AM by heresiarch

#92: I remember that! Mallory sang it that way once on Family Ties.

Oh, is that where that came from?

Damn, that girl in 6th grade totally passed it off as her own invention!

Heh. Plagiarism from the mouths of babes.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:25 AM by Leigh Butler

Sus #62: Lager, schmager. Give me an Ayinger Dunkel-Weisse any day. :)

Posted January 11, 2008 11:29 AM by meredith

It's possible that it's both of their inventions. A lot of clever bits from junior high came from TV, including some I did my best to invent.

For books people should read, rather than books people will like... any pair of books about the same topic that contradict each other, and a book on rhetoric and constructing arguments. One tells you what to look for, and the other two provide examples.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:31 AM by Diatryma

Nix, 70: I keep promising myself I really will go back and finish Vellum one of these days. I love the idea of it, I appreciate what he's trying to do with it, and people who I like and admire speak highly of it, but boy do I keep bouncing off it something terrible.

My impression of Duncan, reading some of his online writing, is that he doesn't have a whole lot of instinctive sense of when his point has been made already, which may account for some of my issues. (Of course, it's a trait I grit my teeth at partly because I know it's a fault of mine as well.) And I also get the sense that he's the kind of guy whose first impulse on seeing a stained-glass window is to reach for a hammer; I don't know how fair that assessment actually is, but I'm sure it's affecting my reading as well. I'm still determined to keep going, though it's moved several spaces down my list these days. FWIW, I fought with Illuminatus! for about the first half too, and then it sucked me right in, so I'm keeping my hopes up that sooner or later I'll be able to appreciate its brilliance in a more than abstract way.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:37 AM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

#100: Dan, you have just put into words my exact impression of Vellum, and I wish I'd said those things when I had to review it. It's one of those books where I greatly admire the writer's skills and the profundity of his discourse, without caring for the result in the slightest. I simply couldn't bring myself to care about any of these people, or be concerned with what happened to them.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:42 AM by Dave Luckett

dido 57: Around here we say "for very large values of 8."

I'm going to do my 8 piecemeal, as I think of things. The first one is A Rulebook for Arguments, which gives a good introduction to arguing, as well as writing an argumentive essay; and as far as discussing fallacies...this book amounts to an installation manual for a pretty good bullshit detector.

Another book which I not only wish everyone would read, but that everyone would have inscribed on their head, their heart, and their doorpost is Getting to Yes, which is about negotiating without either "giving in" or taking unfair advantage of the other side. It's an excellent manual for relationships (though certainly not intended as such), as well: it's both harder and more important to "separate the people from the problem" in relationships, and the book explains not only why you should, but how you can.

Posted January 11, 2008 11:57 AM by Xopher

Dave @ 101:

I simply couldn't bring myself to care about any of these people, or be concerned with what happened to them.

Yeah, I'm with you on that one. The main characters weren't human in a way that I found easy to relate to. Which, to be fair, is a tricky thing to do when writing about mythology. But the characters are where Vellum falls flat, in comparison to The Sandman or Little, Big.

OTOH, if I ever find myself being compared (even unfavorably) to Gaiman or Crowley, I'll be a happy writer.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:03 PM by A.J.

OK, you'll all be looking for a break from politics. Nevertheless, I am slowly reading through hunter S Thomspsons "Fear and loathing on the campaign trail '72".

I have a horrible feeling that all the bad stuff as described in the book is still happening now, only bigger.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:07 PM by guthrie

Books:

The Last of the Wine by Mary Renault
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
Master and Commander* by Patrick O'Brien
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
A Drinking Life by Pete Hammil
Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
The Tempest by William Shakespeare
The Essential Rumi by Rumi
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

*and onward

Posted January 11, 2008 12:12 PM by Mary Dell

69,:

we used to sing that as

Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall,
Aleph-null bottles of beer,
Take one down, pass it around,
Aleph-null bottles of beer on the wall.

From just after we learned about countable and uncountable infinities in math class

Incidently of something else entirely, is it just my own neuroses, or is anybody else bothered by "Stupidest drug story of the week", wanting it to be "Most stupid drug story of the week"?

Posted January 11, 2008 12:21 PM by Martin Wisse

Mary Dell @ 105... Speaking of Wuthering Heights, TCM showed the movie last night. I was quite surprised when the opening credits named the author as Emily Bronté - not Brontë.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:23 PM by Serge

I'm British, and the spider is incy-wincy, while the green bottles are sitting on the wall and accidentally fall.

On a related note - there were ten in the bed, and the littlest one said, Roll over!

Books everyone should read... Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. JE Gordon's The New Science of Strong Materials. And more parochially, John O'Farrell's Utterly Impartial History of Britain - Or, 2000 Years of Upper-Class Idiots In Charge.

But mostly, I just think that people should read. As much and as often as possible. I may be overly optimistic here, but I think that learning-by-reading has a natural tendency to sift people to the good end of the good-to-bad stratigraphy of books.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:32 PM by Sam Kelly

Guthrie, when I was a sophomore in high school, each of us in my Government class had to do a report on an election. Candidates, major issues, et cetera. I got 1972.
I had never heard of Hunter S Thompson. I had no idea, going in, that the book was not a scholarly reference. I am still surprised that it was the only source* I had for some things. I'm not sure what my teacher thought of it, but I know I was confused.

*books, not newspaper articles. My source-fu was weak back then.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:34 PM by Diatryma

Aarrrgh, speaking of idiots at DHS, they're pushing ahead with the "Real ID" plan:

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hGWEcbtYTTl9RTiO3YS_POnaYJ9gD8U3ESUO0

Posted January 11, 2008 12:41 PM by Clifton Royston

Dave, 101: To be perfectly fair, another reason I think I struggle with Vellum whenever I try to get back into it is that after the opening sections, I was hoping it would be much more like Imajica than it wound up being. I try to be conscientious of not giving "you didn't write the book I wanted to read" any real weight, but I do feel some frustration that there's a promise of sensawunda in this very grand tapestry that gets set up in the beginning and has not (so far as I've managed to make it through, anyway) paid off much. I'm certainly willing to accept that I'm the one with the problem, though.

You never know what's going to set any particular reader off, especially when you start experimenting. A friend who sang the praises of Vellum found the metatextual games in City of Saints and Madmen to be a little too clever for his taste, where I think that kind of thing is delightful and fascinating. De gustibus, obviously; and if anything understanding this makes me even more inclined to defend unorthodox approaches to art, even if they don't work for me personally.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:48 PM by Dan Layman-Kennedy

Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie Fielder;

Civilization and Capitalism by Fernand Braudel; 3 vols.: ; The Structures of Everyday Life; The Wheels of Commerce; The Perspective of the World;

The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir;

The Slave Ship: A Human History, by Marcus Rediker

The Great War for Civilization; CIVILIZATION: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Fisk;

Anything by Ryszard Kapuscinski.

Others have included Shock Doctrine and Guns, Germs and Steel.

What a well-read crowd this is!

Love, C.

Posted January 11, 2008 12:58 PM by Constance Ash

According to xkcd, one comes across very few hits when googling "died in a knitting accident".

Posted January 11, 2008 1:00 PM by Serge

Tania a long time ago:
I'm pretty sure I know Cheryl, she was a bit older than I was; my parents live on the North Fork still. Mrs. Lockwood was my teacher as well. Zowie.

Sam Kelley 108: the littlest one said, "I'm crowded, roll over."

Posted January 11, 2008 1:01 PM by dido

Serge, I actually Googled "died in a blogging accident" and got nearly 2000 hits. I suppose his numbers could be in thousands.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:05 PM by Xopher

Another book that changed the way I think, which I think I've mentioned here before, is Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering by Marita Sturken. My copy of it is missing right now, which is driving me batty, because I usually want to refer to it at least once a week.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:09 PM by ethan

Xopher @ 115... I also got a high number too, but some of them appear to be duplications, and others are metaphorical deaths by knitting. Would it be beyond xkcd to go thru and tally the actual deaths?

Posted January 11, 2008 1:15 PM by Serge

I got about 814 for skydiving, 2300 for blogging, 115 for knitting, and 10 for haberdashery.
You cannot report these statistics via xkcd without changing them.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:23 PM by Diatryma

When I google "died in a knitting accident" I get 17 results, most of which seem to be inspired by the xkcd strip. You guys are using the quotation marks, right?

Posted January 11, 2008 1:23 PM by Jules

Or are you believing the "about" figures, which are notoriously inaccurate? Click through pages until you get a message saying that duplicated results have been omitted, that'll tell you how many there _really_ were.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:26 PM by Jules

Xopher, you write in #115:

Serge, I actually Googled "died in a blogging accident" and got nearly 2000 hits. I suppose his numbers could be in thousands.

You just made another one!

Posted January 11, 2008 1:26 PM by Bill Higgins-- Beam Jockey

#108, Sam Kelly -

The ten that were in the bed - what were they? I was taught that they were monkeys, but I've run across people who were taught a version with a racial epithet.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:28 PM by R. M. Koske

"died in a haberdashery accident" is turning up something interesting... I guess the last four links on that page are spamblogs that are pulling phrases from the google common searches list (as used by, e.g., google suggest) and autobuilding spam pages around them.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:29 PM by Jules

There are different version of ten in the bed-- I learned it with just numbers, singing. There's a chanting version, too

Five little [two-beats] jumping on the bed
One fell off and bumped his head.
Mama called the doctor and the doctor said,
"No more [two-beats] jumping on the bed!"

I've heard it with monkeys and Indians, mostly monkeys.

Jules, you're right about the About figures; I didn't know they were inaccurate and wanted quick results.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:35 PM by Diatryma

R.M. Koske - they were children. Though I think that was implied rather than being explicit in the lyrics we sang. At least, I can't fit anything beyond those two lines (and the associated N-1) into the tune in my head.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:38 PM by Sam Kelly

Jules @ 119... That's what I was doing wrong. Further googling confirmed that nobody died in a rhyming accident.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:42 PM by Serge

#83 ::: Bruce Cohen

Did you know that "color" rhymes with "cruller"? This may be important later ...

[Tune from whatever the song is that starts "Morning has broken..." by the former musician once named Cat Stevens...]

==============

The color of cruller could be much duller,
But to a muller, they don't go crunch
Brains that get nuller, caught by a guller,
Still in the truller,
Let go eat lunch!

Posted January 11, 2008 1:45 PM by Paula Lieberman

Diatryma 109: ...when I was a sophomore in high school, each of us...had to do a report on an election...I got 1972.

When I was a sophomore in high school, 1972 was the most recent election. But I had never heard of Hunter S. Thompson, either.

ibid, 118: You cannot report these statistics via xkcd without changing them.

See my monograph "On the Heisenbergian Observer Effect as Manifest in Google Reporting on Popular Websites," for an in-depth discussion of same.

Bill 121: As did you, by quoting me. In this post, however, I have not. Subtleties.

Diatryma, op. cit., 124: In the sung version I learned, the entities in the bed are never identified, and the "Little One" sings out "Roll over! Roll over!" in all verses but the verse for "There was One in the bed," where the LO sings "Good Night."

The chanted version you cite also has a sung version; sung, that is, all except for the last line, which everyone shouts together, louder each time. For us it was always monkeys, not that that wasn't a common way to refer to small children regardless of race. When I learned it, the one who fell out BROKE his head, and the doctor said "Don't let the monkeys jump on the bed!"

Posted January 11, 2008 1:53 PM by Xopher

Paula 127: He did not write the tune. It's a Welsh folksong, I'm led to understand. I'm not sure he even wrote the words, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:56 PM by Xopher

Paula @127, Cat Stevens is most definitely still a musician. He's living and working as Yusuf Islam and his voice and music have mellowed out and ripened into even greater wonders than they had in the past.

His latest offering, An Other Cup, was my favorite album in 2007. One of his pieces was with Youssou N'Dour, The Beloved; it seems to have a direct channel to my firmware - I'm unable to refrain from dancing when I hear it.

Posted January 11, 2008 1:58 PM by Dena Shunra

I haven't seen 1491 by Charles Mann mentioned yet in the "books everyone should read" thread. This was my "push-on-everyone" book of 2007.

Posted January 11, 2008 2:02 PM by lorax

I realized just after I posted last that I know the roll-over song from Wee Sing in Sillyville and nowhere else. There's a standardizing effect when kid songs are distributed widely* and a tendency toward mildness. I know I learned some songs in Girl Scouts that I later heard via Wee Sing, but others came straight from the videos.

I didn't like the countdown songs and chants when I was little. They were boring. Something like "Boom chick-a Boom" was more fun, because there was room for creativity in multiple directions.

*See Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts edited by Josepha Sherman, which didn't get my regional variants

Posted January 11, 2008 2:05 PM by Diatryma

I knew the same two "N in/jumping on the bed" things that Xopher mentions in 128, but I never considered them to be at all related.

The versions I learned had slight variations from his, though:

In the sung "Roll over! Roll over!" version, the entities were bears, and in the "One in the bed" verse the little one says "I'm lonely". I have a dim recollection that this version may have been transmitted via Sesame Street.

The doctor in the chanted "jumping" version says "No more monkeys jumping on the bed". I never encountered a sung version of the jumping version.

Posted January 11, 2008 2:13 PM by lorax