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DEC.
31, 2019
TURNING A PAGE ON THE CALENDAR
To
calculate a person's age, one takes the current year (2019, for
example) and subtracts the year of birth (1958, for Michael
Jackson). Had he lived, Jackson would now be 20191958 =
61 years old.
Two
decades ago as the year 2000 approached, someone noticed that
computers typically truncated the date. To save memory space,
years were often represented by merely their final two digits.
It was feared that in the new millennium, Jacko's age would not be
computed as 20001958 = 42 years but rather as 0058 = negative
58 years. Planes would fall from the sky.
People
were in a panic about the problem, which was called Y2K (for Year
2,000). Remember? This
article explains it. Hardworking computer scientists fixed
things just in time, mostly.
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Steve
Lieber says, I think the only thing we learned is that if a
bunch of people work really hard to stop a problem from happening,
lots of other people will assume it was never really a problem.
The
caption for that article's illustration references the T2K
bug. T2? How dare they?! I myself am known as T2,
derived from my Tom Thomas initials. |
On
October 11, 1999, eleven weeks before the Y2K apocalypse, I signed
up for this newfangled service called email. What would be my
address? I made a list of Yahoo! ID
possibilities. I started trying to sign up, but the first
option (t2) was already taken. So was tomtom. I was also
unsuccessful with the trendy-sounding t2k, but Yahoo suggested that
t2k_us was available. Therefore, that's what I chose.
Anyway,
letters that I wrote around that time are in this month's 100 Moons
article. They reveal that the only anomaly I noticed was one
software utility that rolled over the year from 99 to 100. |
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DEC.
30, 2009 LET
NOT MAN

Last
night NBC rebroadcast the September 17 season premiere of Amy
Poehlers sitcom, Parks and Recreation.
In
this episode, her character Leslie Knope promoted the local zoo with
cute faux ceremonies for the animals, such as birthday
parties or graduations. There was a
wedding for Tux and Flipper, a pair of newly acquired
penguins. But then someone pointed out that both penguins were male.
(Some
fundamentalists, convinced that homosexuality is a deliberate sin
against God's law that only willful humans can commit, refuse to
believe that God could have created gay penguins. But
apparently He did. And penguins mate for life.)
The
Society for Family Stability Foundation, accusing the zoo of
endorsing gay marriage, demanded that Leslie separate the
penguins, annul the marriage, reimburse the taxpayers for the cost of
the wedding, and then resign.
She
did none of that; instead, she transferred the birds to a zoo in
Iowa, where gay marriage is legal.
During
the commercial breaks, the writer in me couldnt resist
sketching out a serious speech for Leslie.
Dearly
beloved, when we gathered together at the penguin exhibit, I made an
error not a political statement.
Had
I known both Tux and Flipper were male, I would not have pretended
to marry them. Whatever our opinions on gay marriage, we know a
wedding for two male birds will be controversial. And our zoo
doesnt need controversy. Im sorry for that.
The
SFSF has made four demands. However, I must reject them all.
I
will not resign. Ive learned from my mistake.
I
will not reimburse anyone. We all volunteered our time, so
theres nothing to reimburse.
I
will not annul the marriage. I have never had the authority to
marry or unmarry anyone or anything, so theres nothing to annul.
Finally,
I will not separate the penguins. Instead, theyre on
their way to live happily together in a more tolerant part of our country.
Tux
and Flipper are two of Gods creatures. Irrespective of any of
our human customs, they have mated for life. That is their nature.
What
God hath joined together, let not man put asunder.
DEC.
26, 2009 'TIS
THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS
On
the second day before the holiday, our hockey announcers
wanted to express the number 9 in the Twelve Days of
Christmas format. But no one was sure what the ninth gift
was supposed to be. Nine lords a-milking? Probably
not. Two members of the production staff looked it up on the
Internet. One found nine ladies dancing; the other
found nine drummers drumming. I had not realized
that there are different versions.
On
the first day before Christmas, I went online myself and learned
more about this song.
 |
The
opening verse seems nonsensical. A partridge nests on the
ground, never in a pear tree. Also, fruit trees
cannot be easily delivered, even as gifts.
However,
in France a partridge is une perdrix, pronounced
unna per-dree. To an Englishman, that sounds like a Gallic-accented
in a pear tree. One can imagine the original
version, first in France and later in England:
Le
premier jour de Noël
Mon
véritable amour
M'a
envoyé une perdrix.
On
the first day of Christmas
My
true love sent to me
A
partridge, une perdrix. |

Also,
why is the succession of avian gifts interrupted at number 5 by
jewelry? I learned that the five gold rings were
probably also fowl, as in five golden ring-necked pheasants.
If
the earlier gifts were repeated on succeeding days, as the song
implies, by the end of the first week of Christmas the true
love had sent 7 partridges, 12 turtledoves, 15 French hens, 16
colly birds, 15 pheasants, 12 geese, and 7 swans a total of 84
birds. Imagine that New Years celebration! |
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Finally,
on the first day of Christmas I found a blog
entry that reminded me of my own experience, growing up as
an only child in a happy family. (We're pictured here in 1967.)
Mark
Evanier on December 25 wrote the following reminiscence about his family: |
Christmas
was a special day but it wasn't as special to us as it seemed to be
to others. I was well into my twenties when I figured out what
was going on there. I was then going with a lady who dragged me
into her family Christmas arrangements that year.
Hours...days...whole weeks were spent planning the parties, the
dinners, the gatherings. She spent cash she didn't have to buy
gifts and purchase a new party-going outfit for herself...and the
decorating took twice as long as Michelangelo spent painting the
ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
It
seemed to me more like a chore than a celebration, and one night I
asked her why she went to so much trouble. She said,
"Christmas is important. When I was a kid, it was the one
time of the year when we all got along...or came close to getting along."
There
it was. She'd come from a large and dysfunctional family.
Siblings were forever fighting. Parents drank and split up and
got back together and screamed a lot and separated again. There
was much yelling and occasional violence...
...but
not as much at Christmas. Christmas was when they managed to
put most of that aside. Christmas was when they generally
managed to act the way they should have acted all year. That
was why, when it came around, they made so much of it.
We
never had to declare a holiday cease-fire in my family. We
always got along. There was very little arguing between my
parents or between them and me, and what little occurred never lasted
long. I never had fights with brothers or sisters because I
never had brothers or sisters.
I
never in my life wished I had a brother or sister. Never for
one second. When I went to the homes of friends who had
siblings, I only heard screaming and yelling and fighting over
belongings...and envy from my friends that I had my own room and the
undivided love and attention of my parents. (Evanier
November 8, 2012)
My
folks and I were known to give each other gifts for no special
occasion and to occasionally get the whole (small) local family
together for a big meal. So Christmas wasn't that much
different from the way we lived all year.
A
year or two ago, I told a friend all of the above and his reaction
was on the order of, "Gee, too bad for you." Because
in his household, Christmas was wondrous and festive and the source
of most of his happy childhood memories. I never saw it that
way. I have loads of happy childhood memories. They were
just no more likely to occur around Christmas than at any other
time...and I liked it that way. I mean, you can have Christmas
once a year or you can have it 365 times a year. Peace on
Earth, good will towards men doesn't have to stop later tonight.
DEC.
23, 2019
IT'S AN INFERNAL LIFE
Did
you know that Jimmy Stewart wrote a philosophical dissertation on demons?
Did
you know it appeared more than four centuries ago? Did you
know that its fretting about black magic resulted in witches being
included in the Bible? |
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Jimmy's
text
begins: The fearful abounding at this time in this
country of these detestable slaves of the Devil, the Witches
or
enchanters, hath moved me (beloved reader) to dispatch in post this
following treatise of mine, not in any wise (as I protest) to serve
for a show of my learning and ingenuity, but only (moved of
conscience) to press thereby, so far as I can, to resolve the
doubting hearts of many: both that such assaults of Satan are
most certainly practiced, and that the instruments thereof
merit most severely to be punished.
He
adds: To make this treatise the more pleasant and
facile, I have put it in form of a Dialogue. I myself
often choose to frame my writings as an imagined conversation between
two people.
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But
of course I'm not referring to Jimmy Stewart, the actor. I
speak instead of James Stuart, King of Scotland. He published
DÆMONOLOGIE or to use modern spelling, Demonology
in Edinburgh in 1597.
It
was subtitled In Form of a Dialogue, Divided into Three
Books. The typography of the title page is what catches
my eye.
The
printer wanted to set the title in his largest font, but apparently
he couldn't fit all the characters into a single row.
Therefore, after a hyphen, the last syllable of the title ended up in
a smaller font on the next line, shared with the beginning of the
subtitle. Not cool.
However,
to be fair, in Britain the art of printing was still only about 120
years old. |
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In
1603, after the death of Queen Elizabeth I, the Scottish and English
crowns were united. That meant that the demon expert was now
England's King James I (of Bible fame). Naturally, the book
written by the high and mightie Prince was reissued in
London that very same year.
This
time, the title was reduced in size, In Form received
the largest type, and Dialogue ended up being
hyphenated. Also not cool.

William
Shakespeare must have read this best-seller. Portions of it
inspired his depiction of secret, black, and midnight
hags, the three Scottish witches, in a play first performed in 1606: Macbeth. |
Then
in 1611 the King James translation of the Bible was published,
replacing the Hebrew words for idolaters, mediums, sorcerers,
and ghost whisperers with the English word witch. In
Hebrew, there was no such word. That's according to
Salvatore Prisco, an emeritus professor of humanities from Hoboken.
Dr.
Prisco continues, An example of this usage can be found in 1
Samuel, chapter 28, in which the King James Bible has Saul going to
the witch of Endor to
contact the spirit of Samuel, while the Hebrew, Greek, and Latin
versions have Saul visiting a woman with a divining
spirit. She hardly acts the role of a witch. The
King James Bible conditioned Puritans and Anglicans alike to be
obsessed with demons and witches, thus prolonging a medieval mind-set
among common folk.
In
America, the Salem witch trials would begin in 1692.
Thanks
a lot, Jimmy.
DEC.
20, 2009 
Betty
White understands what Nikita meant.
I
finally got around to watching the October 29 episode of the NBC
comedy 30 Rock, in which the much younger Tracy Jordan hopes
he will outlive Betty. Nice try, Jordan! she
retorts. But I am going to be at your
funeral. I will bury you.
The
allusion was to a famous remark by Nikita Khrushchev, premier of the
Soviet Union. As a Communist, Khrushchev believed what Karl
Marx taught: in the same way that feudalism was replaced by
capitalism, eventually capitalism will be superseded by communism.
At
a reception at the Polish embassy in Moscow on November 18, 1956,
Khrushchev spoke to Western diplomats about the idea of peaceful
coexistence. Whether we exist doesn't depend on you.
If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite
us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is
on our side. We will bury you.
We
will bury you! Paranoid Americans took this as a direct
threat. I remember that politicians like Barry Goldwater
exploited our fears. Time put a belligerent Khrushchev
on its cover, a hydrogen bomb exploding behind him. He was
depicted as dangerously aggressive, an arrogant bully who planned to
utterly destroy America and bury us under the earth.
Even
as a young boy at the time, I realized We will bury you
meant We will attend your funeral, not We will
cause your funeral. Khrushchev was predicting that
America would collapse of its own accord, due to internal faults like
class warfare and immorality, while the Soviet Union would
survive. In Marxs view, the Western economic system
inevitably dies a natural death, and the proletariat is the
undertaker of capitalism. Khrushchev was merely saying,
When you are dead and ready for the grave, the Soviet Union
will be there to do the burying.
Of
course, he was wrong. But thats another story.
DEC.
17, 2019
MIND YOUR PAEONS AND SPONDEES
Is
there a word for a mismatch between the rhythm of a melody and the
natural rhythm of the lyrics? Consider these lines by British
poet Ray Davies. When spoken, the stress usually falls on every
second syllable, as in iambic tetrameter.
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I |
al- |
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ways |
want |
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to |
be |
by |
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your |
side. |
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You |
got |
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me |
so |
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I |
can't |
sleep |
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at |
night. |
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They're
from You Really Got Me, the first hit of his band The
Kinks, released six weeks after his 20th birthday back in 1964.
But the corresponding tune approximates fourth-paeonic dimeter,
with the stress falling on the fourth and eighth syllables.
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I |
al- |
ways |
want |
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to |
be |
by |
your |
side. |
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You |
got |
me |
so |
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I |
can't |
sleep |
at |
night. |
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Together
with the bold five-note guitar riff on the title, those hanging
ninth syllables give the music a weird charm. Here, listen.
YOUR side. AT night. When the Kinks first
performed the song, Davies has said, people actually took
notice. They realised we had something original.
DEC.
15, 2019
SIX SIXFOLD DOUBLES
My
father was once a bookkeeper. The word bookkeeper
famously boasts three consecutive double letters.
But
when veteran puzzlemaker Peter Gordon composed the November 17
Sunday Crossword for the New York Times, he came up with six
consecutive double letters. And he did it six times! The
trick was not limiting himself to a single word.
Just
for fun, I've shoehorned his six multi-word combos into a
semi-sensible sentence. It's about unemployed opera singers,
recently laid off and in need, who've had to find something else.
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Now
a soprano doeS
SAAB
BOOKKEEping |
while
two contraltos have become QuEEN NOOR
ROOMMates |
and
tenor IsAAC
COOLLY
YEEhaws at rodeos, |
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but
others joined the Y, where, seeing a swiM
MEET TEEN
NEEdled, |
the
baSSI
IN NEED
DOOdled
about |
how
their fellow enroLLEES
SEEM MEEk. |
DEC.
12, 2019
WHO AM I?
Jesus
referred to himself as the Son of Man. What did he
mean by that?
In
Matthew 16:13-16, he inquired, Who do people say that the Son
of Man is?
Back
then some guessed he was a reincarnated prophet. Nowadays we
sometimes describe him as a flesh-and-blood person, while at other
times we call him part of the divine Trinity. |
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Jesus
wasn't satisfied with the responses. What about
you? he asked his disciples. Who do you
say I am?
Peter
replied confidently, You are the Messiah, the son of the
living God.
But
what is a messiah, exactly? What does it mean to be God's
offspring? Surprisingly, despite fundamentalists' belief that
the Bible is without error, the divinely inspired Good
Book gives us conflicting answers to the key question: Who was Jesus?
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One
of the Gospels tells of a human teacher proclaiming that although
God our Father is in Heaven, he will soon make his Kingdom come down
here on Earth.
In
another, Jesus claims that he himself is God and has been
always been so, since the Creation! If we're credulous enough
to believe that, we'll never die. We'll rise from Earth and
join him up there in Paradise.
Brother
Billy has invited two unusual Christians to appear on his latest
program to discuss these Crossed
Messages. |
DEC.
9, 2019
I HEARD FROM LEON (NOEL)
Leon
asked, Remember my college dormitory?
(Dirty room.) My roommate and I each had snooze alarms.
(Alas, no more Zs.) We liked to figure out anagrams;
sometimes the solution hits you right between the eyes.
(They see.) Ken Levine posted at least a dozen freaky
anagrams on his blog
no, make that twelve plus one. (Eleven plus two.)
Anyway,
I decided to become a geologist after that queer shake.
(The earthquakes.) But on a big test, I forgot a
decimal point. (I'm a dot in place.) So
then I became an astronomer. (Moon starer.)
And
then came the 2000 Presidential race, Al Gore versus George Bush.
(He bugs Gore.) An election frequently ends in animosity.
(Is no amity.) There was some dispute about the election
results. (Lies! Let's recount.)
I
was into ham radio, so I taught my bride the Morse code.
(Here come dots.) She and I went to a casino, but we
went broke playing the slot machines. (Cash lost
in me.) My father-in-law took it in stride; he's a Presbyterian.
(Best in prayer.) On the other hand, his wife was a
typical mother-in-law. (Woman Hitler.)
Now I'm penniless and lost in desperation.
(A rope ends it.)
DEC.
6, 2014 WAY
UP HIGH, SUDDENLY HERE AM I
Watching
NBC's production of Peter Pan got me thinking. I
imagined I was a youngster attending a live stage performance, with
no prior knowledge of what was about to happen.
The
play starts a century ago in a conventional way, with characters
conversing in English accents about domestic matters. Then a
strange boy enters through a window and tells strange stories about
his home in a strange place called Neverland.
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PETER:
Come with me.
WENDY:
To Neverland?
PETER:
Yes. Well fly!
WENDY:
You can ... fly?
PETER:
Yes, of course. Delta Airlines offers four daily non-stops. |
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No,
wait, thats not how the line goes. Peter claims he can
actually soar up into the air all by himself.
PETER:
You just think lovely, wonderful thoughts, and up you go!
Another
tall tale, I think. Unless they bring out a trampoline, this
actors feet are going to remain firmly planted on the
stage. People cant fly. |
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But
then he actually does rise into the air! To me, this is the
most sensational moment in the play. The impossible is
happening, right before my eyes. Hes flying!
Soon
Wendy's little brother is encouraged to think his own lovely,
wonderful thoughts. In his case, that means candy, or
Christmas. Amazingly, the little boy also soars straight up,
wriggling and squealing in delight! |
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And
now the whole company is soaring about the stage! This
cant be happening!
Nothing
that follows, not pirates nor Indians nor ticking crocs, will be
able to surpass this magical sight. |
DEC.
4, 2019

Time
for another post about complicated intersections I've recently
figured out.
Sometimes
I get a hankerin' to hop in my car and head out to get some of that
good ol' country ham. There are three Cracker Barrel
restaurants within twenty-some miles of my apartment, but I've found
the farthest drive to be the most challenging. |
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That
requires taking the Pennsylvania Turnpike southeast to westbound
Interstate 70 and then hunkerin' down at Exit 57. This
interchange has been improved in the past couple of years. |
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As
I descend the exit ramp, the sign on the right warns that I'll need
to stay in the left lane, which will end at a traffic
circle. I'll want to circulate 270°
counterclockwise and then head towards Hunker.
When
I arrive at the circle, another sign on the left warns me that
traffic from left does not stop.
But
the signs don't tell even half of the story. The new
interchange features a double traffic circle! |
After
the first 270° (shown in green), I'll tunnel under the
Interstate and immediately make another 200° around a second
circle (shown in red). From there, eschewing the first egress
to Hunker, I'll descend the second ramp. That will deposit me
onto West Pennsylvania Avenue in New Stanton, where the restaurant resides.
To
head home afterwards, getting back on the Interstate will be much
easier, requiring only a white ramp on my right (preferably the first
one) and then a gold ramp.
But
I still haven't told you the whole story! |
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Remember
that yield sign warning of non-stopping traffic from the left?
On the map above, I've depicted said traffic as a big black arrow
entering the underpass. It's hidden from my yield sign
because of the huge embankment that holds up the Interstate. I
must carefully creep up to the four white triangles. There I
make not a yield but a full stop. I lean forward over the
steering wheel and look to my left, as far as I can. Seeing
nothing so far, I then hit the gas to proceed double-time into the
traffic circle before I'm clobbered by a not-yet-visible oncoming truck.

It
would be safer if all of the green circle could see all
of the red one through the underpass. The highway
engineers should have made the embankment shorter and built the
bridge longer. However, doing so would have cost slightly more
of our tax dollars.
DEC.
2, 2009 RAINLAND
Youve
heard of the Viking explorer and real estate salesman known as Eric
the Red. To entice settlers from Iceland to move to his
new project, he named it Green'land.
Later his son, Leif Ericsson, also became a famous explorer.
You
may not know about the rest of Erics family. He had two
daughters, Helga Ericsdottir and Freydis Ericsdottir. There was
also another son, Rudy Ericsson, who was called Rudolph the Red
because of his resemblance to his dad.
After
Eric the Red and his family established a settlement on Greenland in
the year 986, his son Rudy sent for his new wife to join him.
However, when she arrived, she discovered she had been the victim of
her father-in-laws false advertising. This land
wasnt green. On the contrary, it was covered by a huge
glacier. And the weather was even more inhospitable than it had
been back home.
Rudy
tried to convince his bride that Greenland wasnt as gloomy as
she thought. Youll see, he said.
Conditions will improve once the rainy season is over.
Rainy
season?! she exclaimed. This stuff falling from
the clouds isnt rain. Its frozen!
No,
its rain, he reassured her.
Its
sleet and snow!
But
her husband was insistent. Rudolph the Red knows rain, dear.
2019
UPDATE: I first heard this punch line 60 years ago, but
in those Cold War days Rudolph the Red was a Communist
from Moscow. By the way, CBS-TV will repeat the animated classic
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer at 8:00 ET tonight just as
it did on this date in 2009! |
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