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JAN.
31, 2018 ONCE
IN A BLUE ONE
Some
say that last night's super moon / lunar eclipse was also a
blue moon, because it was the second full moon in the
month. But there's an older definition which I explained here:
a blue moon is the third full moon in a season that
anomalously has four.
The
problem arises because although the actual moon circles the earth thirteen
times every year, most ancient astronomers chose to divide the year
into only twelve so-called months. They thought they
were making the math easier. Each of the four seasons includes
three calendar months (actually two months and parts of two
others). Each of the four seasons also usually includes three
full moons.
Some
cultures have given a name to each full moon, such as this list on
the right.
The
Egg Moon, which I've dyed green
for Easter, is the first full moon after March 21, defined as the
spring equinox by the Christian Church (though not always by the
astronomers). This year the Egg Moon will occur on March
31. The Church uses this moon to set the date of Easter, which
falls on the following Sunday. Therefore the Egg Moon always
appears sometime during Holy Week. (And nobody I know calls it
the Egg Moon.)
Easter
is preceded by the six weeks of Lent, including the Lenten
Moon, the last full moon of the winter
season. (The word Lent, by the way, is said to refer to the
gradually LENgThening days of spring's approach.)
But
what if a given winter has not three full moons but four? This
happened in 1999-2000, and it will happen again in 2018-2019:
December 22, January 21, February 19,
March 20.
The
last full moon of the winter has to be called the Lenten
Moon, because it comes a couple of weeks
after Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Normally it would
be the third full moon of the winter, but in 2019 it will be the
fourth. That winter's third will have to be a Blue
Moon. (The name is said to come
from the old word belewe to betray
because it's a Judas, traitorously butting into the sequence to delay
Lent and thus the Resurrection by four weeks.) |
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The
ecclesiastical experts keep all this straight for us. As
William Roy and Jerome Barlow wrote in 1528:
Oh,
church men are wily foxes!
If they say the moon is blue
We must believe that it is true,
Admitting
their interpretation.
JAN.
29, 2018 IT
WEIGHS A THOUSANDTH OF AN OUNCE
One
of my favorite creations from high school is an empathetic little
essay that I wrote on this date 53 years ago. It's this month's
100 Moons article. |
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JAN.
27, 2018 IS
THE SIBILANT SUPERFLUOUS? |
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The
words pajamas and its alternative jammies
appear to be plural. They always end in an s, like
pants or scissors.
Your
child is wearing pajamas. This other child is also wearing
pajamas. And that kid is in his pajamas, also. They're
all wearing their pajamases.
What's
the occasion? A pajama party, naturally!
What
happened to the s? Make it a pajamas party!!!
JAN.
25, 2008 SHALL
THE LAST BE FIRST?
When
one writes a diary, one begins at the beginning and adds new entries
to the end. That seems normal to me.
But
when one writes a blog (or a web page like this one), one adds new
entries to the top of the page, so that the most recent
posting is the one that visitors find first. That seems a
little odd. If you haven't visited in a while, you'll find
yourself reading the older posts in reverse chronological order.
And if you scroll down to the archives, you'll find that I've listed
the months backwards as well.
The
jury is still out on which method should be used for television
graphics like the one below, showing the World Series winners since
the Yankees last claimed the title.
WORLD
SERIES CHAMPIONS |
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WORLD
SERIES CHAMPIONS |
LAST
7 SEASONS |
- |
LAST
7 SEASONS |
2001
NL DIAMONDBACKS |
|
2007
AL RED SOX |
2002
AL ANGELS |
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2006
NL CARDINALS |
2003
NL MARLINS |
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2005
AL WHITE SOX |
2004
AL
RED SOX |
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2004
AL
RED SOX |
2005
AL WHITE SOX |
|
2003
NL MARLINS |
2006
NL CARDINALS |
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2002
AL ANGELS |
2007
AL RED SOX |
|
2001
NL DIAMONDBACKS |
My
colleagues and I sometimes debate whether to use chronological order
(left) or to put the most recent on top (right). Any preferences?
 
2018 update
I
do have a preference regarding two-team comparisons. The
layout on the left below may be symmetrical, but the one on the right
makes it easier to compare the two sets of numbers.
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AFTER
3 QUARTERS |
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#AFTER
3 QUARTERS |
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12-30 |
Completions-Attempts |
17-26 |
|
#Completions-Attempts |
12-30 |
17-26 |
249 |
Passing
Yards |
158 |
|
#Passing
Yards |
249 |
158 |
181 |
Rushing
Yards |
71 |
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#Rushing
Yards |
181 |
71 |
430 |
Total
Yards |
229 |
|
#Total
Yards |
430 |
229 |
12-80 |
Penalties-Yards |
4-39 |
|
#Penalties-Yards |
12-80 |
4-39 |
30:23 |
Time
of Possession |
14:27 |
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#Time
of Possession |
30:23 |
14:27 |
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JAN.
23, 2018 THERE
WAS ALSO A POPE HILARIUS |
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I've
accumulated a lot of facts over the years, but some gaps have remained.
For
example, I never needed to type Hillary Clinton's first name, so it
took me more than a decade to learn exactly how to spell it.
How many L's? Is it like Hilary of Poitiers or Hilary Duff?
And
I still haven't figured out the Trumps. Which is Ivania and
which is Melanka? |
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JAN.
20, 2018 UPDATE
When
I put together my recollections from January of my favorite year, I
forgot about college basketball's Game of the Century. It took
place 50 years ago tonight. I've added a note here
explaining how I listened to this historic telecast on my radio. |
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JAN.
18, 2018 COME
BACK TO
JAN.
18, 2018
THE
5 & DIME
An
ad as seen on TV implies that these thin socks will
insulate your feet even when the thermometer drops to 35° below
zero. I seriously doubt the added metal makes the shiny socks
any warmer, unless you're going to hook batteries up to those
aluminum wires. |
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But
heres a more believable claim. In a mall near me, this
chain store apparently sells cold-weather gear that will protect down
to 5° below.
We
need that sort of thing! On January 7 the temperature in
Pittsburgh actually did drop to -5°, and for the fourth
consecutive day I chose not to venture outside my apartment.
Going outdoors was not a reasonable option.
Whoops,
I've just been handed a correction. It turns out that Five
Below actually sells cool gadgets and yoga mats and such
to young adolescents. And its name doesn't refer to temperatures
but rather to its prices, which are $5 or less. |
Inflation
has struck again. Thats five times as much as another
discount chain, Dollar General, charged at its 1955 debut, when
department-store owner Cal Turner took his competitors
Dollar Days promotions one step further by converting
this location in Springfield, Kentucky.
And
its fifty or a hundred times as much as the old dime stores.
One of them, the Ben Franklin 5-and-10-cent store seen
below, opened in 1935 in Oberlin, Ohio. The business is still
there, but its prices have gone up somewhat.
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JAN.
15, 2018 T-TICK,
T-TICK
A
new diner has opened down the road from me. On its eastern
wall, there hangs a huge antique-style clock, several feet in diameter.
I
found a similar timepiece advertised on a British website for
£170. However, as I admired it, I noticed something unusual.
Most
large clocks have tick marks for the minutes, 60 of them to the
hour, as I've shown by retouching the far-right picture.
But
this diner's clock, depicted on the near right, has twice as many
marks! They're numbered from 0 to 120. |

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I
can't for the life of me think of any timekeeping method that
involves dividing an hour into 120 half-minutes. (Or, for that
matter, dividing a minute into intervals of 8.3 milliseconds
each.) And I can't find any other examples.
The
extra markings must be what the retailer describes as some
other artistic decoration, added to make the big bare face look
more like a complicated piece of steampunk Victorian machinery.
JAN.
12, 2018 HER
PRICE WAS ONE GOAT
My
first-person retelling of the Bible is reaching back to some of its
more obscure stories.
I
support the traditional definition of marriage, tweets movie
critic Eric D. Snider, who knows his Scripture. It's
between a man and a teenage girl whose father the man's father has
made a deal with.
A
man called Hirah, a friend of one of those fathers, plays a role in
my latest episode. It's set in 1718 BC. Hirah arrives at
a fork in the road leading a freshly shorn goat, with which he
intends to pay his buddy's prostitute. (Even back then,
harlotry was already an old profession.) However, there's a
problem. The woman isn't there, and the locals say she never
was there. They disclaim any knowledge of sex for sale.
It's a mystery. Where's the whore?
The
answer's in Genesis! I'm sure you remember hearing this
inspiring tale in Sunday school.
I
call my version A
Family of Cheaters. |
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JAN.
9, 2008 ELECTRICAL
ENGINEER
When
I woke up this morning, it seemed darker than usual. I
discovered that my electricity was off.
"That's
not surprising," I thought to myself. "A cold front
is moving in, and we're under a Wind Advisory from midnight to
noon. High winds have probably knocked down a power line
somewhere. My neighbors are dark too, so it's not my
power line that's down, but people on the other side of the river do
have lights, so the outage isn't a major regional disaster. The
electric company undoubtedly knows about it, and they'll probably get
it fixed by the time the winds subside. It's nothing to worry about."
I
went back to bed until there was enough daylight to sit by the
window and read. Eventually, the lights came on for one second,
then went off again.
"That's
not surprising," I thought to myself. "They've
probably fixed the downed line, but when they re-energized it, the
power surge tripped some circuit breakers. Now they have to go
around and reset the breakers."
An
hour and a half later, I glimpsed an electric company vehicle, a
bucket truck, heading down my street.
"That's
not surprising," I thought to myself. "The
transformer for this neighborhood is around the corner. They're
going to reset the breaker, and the lights will be back on in five minutes."
In
five minutes, the lights came back on.
I'm
beginning to understand these matters too well.
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JAN.
7, 2018 THE
ADVOCATE
JAN.
7, 2018
OF THE UNDERDOG
Remember
the Ted Baxter System, an apparently profitable way to bet on
football games which I examined on this website 15 years ago?
One of my
readers in Australia has offered an interesting variation on Ted's
method. How does it work? I used it to chart the 2017 NFL
season, and I've analyzed the results in Baxter
Revisited.
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JAN.
4, 2018 WINED
CHILL
Our
remote broadcast crew sometimes receives driving directions to high
school football games. One such set of instructions warned us
about a windy back road.
Was
the road subject to dangerous winds? Or perhaps they meant it
had dangerous curves, in which case they should have called it
winding (rhymes with minding) instead of windy
(rhymes with Mindy).
You're
probably aware that in modern English the word wind, if
pronounced with a short i as in kin, means
breeze, whereas the same wind pronounced with a
long i as in kind means twist.
However,
it was not always thus. Consider the following rueful song, to
which I've added faces. It's from Shakespeare's As You Like It.
As
the second act of the play begins, it's the dead of winter.
The banished Duke Senior is camped out in the snowy woods, yet he
finds this place less distressing than his former palace full of
ungrateful courtiers. His companion Amiens sings:
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Notice
the rhyme scheme. When Shakespeare in his lyric cries out to
the unseen wind, he employs a long i, just like the
long i in the word kind (and, in the next act, mind,
hind, bind, rind, find, and probably Rosalind).
I
assume this indicates that in those days, wind was always
pronounced wined. |
The
Bard continues with a second frigid verse.
I've
spelled one of his words shoarp to complete the rhyme. |
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Times
have changed. Nowadays, breezes get the short end of the i.
We even use the short i for winter. And we use
it for windlass, a winch for wind-ing up a cable or rope.
I
think I'd prefer wine-ter and
wined-lass. Blow!
Blow, thou wine-ter wined!
But
that's just me. I'm not too shoarp.
JAN.
1, 2018 INSIDE
THE PROGRAM CABINET
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During the
first week of the year that I'd later declare my favorite, my college
radio station WOBC broadcast basketball and hockey games on three
consecutive nights. I was still the Sports Director. But
Oberlin wasn't a party school, and I wasn't distracted by
excessive socializing. When it snowed, I didn't go out and
play. I stayed in my room and finished a term paper.
Later I
turned my attention to my new position at WOBC. As Program
Director, I would need to sort out tapes and records that we received
from outside sources, including a comedy about Canadians chasing smugglers. |
Click here
for my latest installment in the 14-month series recalling my life 50
years ago.
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