The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tau Wedel:

What, no interesting facts about the number 117 yet? Here's one:

In Danish, the number 117 can be used to mean "a whole lot", as in "I have told you 117 times already.". When used in this way, it can also carry connotations of annoyance or irritation, in the sense that the unspecified number is unreasonably large. Curiously, 117 cannot be used in this sense when not embedded in a noun phrase: if someone asks "How many phone calls did we receive today?" and gets the response "117", it means exactly 117 calls, but in the statement "We've received 117 phone calls today.", it means some unspecified large number of calls (with an undertone of "more phone calls than I care to deal with in a day"). I don't know where this usage comes from, nor why it uses 117 instead of some other number.

Also, if you haven't looked at the source code for that webpage yet, you should do so. It is excellent.

Here's two glitches that apparently went unnoticed:

The photograph that terrorized London: The word "March" in the first sentence is highlighted.
Greyhawk's flags at half-staff: The apostrophe in the title has turned into an underscore.

To go with the Particle about the not-really-narcoleptic cat, here's a video of an an actually narcoleptic dog.

Comment statistics for Tau Wedel on the Making Light blog

Total: 4 comments. View all these comments on a single page.