Author Archives: dr.hypercube

News with musical accompaniment

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First – slow news day here in New Hampshire. While waiting for the weatherman to come on the morning news I was stunned to see a story on Nigerian spam scams. Gott im Himmel! How can there be, at this point, someone on the planet who is at the intersection of ‘has access to a computer’ and ‘is clueless about Mrs. Miriam Abacha’. In a nod to just how current the story isn’t, part of the feature discussed a NH man who went to jail for 4 years in 2001 as a result of one of these scams. The poor bastard has already done his time and yet this is news? I offer MC Frontalot’s Message 419 as music to shake your head by.

II. Roman burial unearthed in London. Very interesting stuff – I’ll probably now fly off on a tangent reading about Roman and pre-Roman Britain (Yo! Hadrian!). Ackroyd’s London: the Biography was wonderful, but didn’t go far enough into the really old stuff. The music that goes with this item is appropriate both for it’s last verse (la-la-Londinium) and for it’s focus on the people who built the burg (including the Victorian sewer worker who swiped the Roman’s head). Also, navvy is a great word. XTC’s Towers of London:

Wordly Wise

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A few good words (and terms) I’ve run across recently:

  • Pareidolia – taking a vague pattern and seeing something clearly in it – pattern recognition gone awry. Think of Mother Theresa’s image on a piece of toast. The word is courtesy of Victor the Talking Budgie via the Kircher Society web site. Paredolia’s polar opposite (antonym just doesn’t seem to fit this context) is a phenomenon I’ve heard described as native vision – the ability of a local to see something that someone who wasn’t intimately familiar with the environment would miss. Hmmm… think I need to watch Dersu Uzala again.
  • Prolix – windbag-ish. I’ve read through this word many times, assuming I understood it’s meaning from context. I finally looked it up – huge sigh of relief – I didn’t have my head lodged.

Jollie (1976, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c) incorporated many aspects of the osteology of the group in his work, but as Olson (1985:108) pointed out, the work is “prolix and idiosyncratic” and it is “a labor of love” to extract information from it. The Lost World of the Moa, Worthy and Holdaway

  • Nutpicking – the practice of attempting to discredit a blog by grabbing the craziest comments you can find and claiming that they are representative. A vice that seems to be particularly prevalent among ‘traditional’ journalists.
  • Friedman Unit (abbr. FU) – 6 months.

The Long Horse

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I came across this page introducing an equine variety I’d never heard of before – the “long horse”. There are more photos of long horses here. Apparently the breed is now extinct – too bad – I’d love to have one. Mine would be named (in an homage to Bob Heinlein’s Glory Road) Arse Longa. And when she eventually died the marker would read?

*

Arse Longa
Vita Brevis
Of course!