I’ll have you know that Cedar Point’s opening-weekend promotion, “Come Rub Up Against Some Lumps Of Matter”, was an enormous hit. And they did nearly as well for Flag Day’s “Experience This Sequence Of Odors” festival. So coming to see a thing be visible in three dimensions is a natural follow-up and sure to be popular.
Also popular? Please? Reading comic strips with mathematics, like I do over on my other blog. I get into a weird discussion about whether, like, “two” exists.
Based on the Reuters article The Man Who Paints Cows.
Headline: Well done. If there’s anything more immediately obviously amusing than painting a cow, it’s painting multiple cows. Oh, a jerboa has novelty value, but nobody knows what a jerboa is, and in any case they don’t have nearly as much material to paint, what with being small? I think? I’m pretty sure they’re one of those mutant little mouse critters in southeast Asia or Peru or something like that. Cows might be used a lot but they hit the sweet spot of promisingly funny to start with and not being strained. Rating: 6/8.
Story: Disappointing. The story reveals that John Marshall paints pictures of cows, not on cows directly. Well, where’s the fun in that? Anyone who wants to paint a picture of a cow can do so. We’re even encouraged to, with popular books in the arts and crafts stores with names like How To Draw Cows and 40 More Cows To Draw and Here’s Some Cows You Missed Before, Do You Maybe Want To Draw Them Too? and Why Are You Hurting The Feelings Of These Undrawn Cows.
If he were painting cows, that is, using cows as canvas, that would be remarkable. It takes something special to go up to a cow and dab paint on it. Mostly it involves being able to paint before the cow loses patience with the whole business. Also it takes some reliable paint, paint that can stand up to being licked by a cow (painted or neighboring). So the article content is most disappointing. Rating: 2/12.
Picture: This story of a man in East Sussex, England, United We Guess Kingdom is illustrated by a stock Reuters photograph of “Dairy cows [eating] gras in a paddock on the New South Wales south coast near the town of Nowra, Australia, September 5, 2014”. While they still remain cows, they are two-year-old photographs of cows on a continent that hasn’t got anything to do with the painting at hand. Rating: 7/4.
Overall: 15/24. May be re-submitted at the end of term.
… And then our pet rabbit suddenly joined a British New Wave band. I don’t know.
Been a bunch of mathematically-themed comics on my other blog, by the way. Saturday had a post, with cheerleading and geometry and all that. Sunday had another, complete with quote from the Magic Realism Bot. Please, enjoy, won’t you?
I’m over forty years old. I have an advanced degree in mathematics. I have lived in Michigan for four years. I have only just this weekend stopped to wonder: what battle is Battle Creek, Michigan, named after?
My best guess: French explorers named the spot for where they refilled their water stocks. Then when the English poked in they figured ‘Bottle Creek’ must be some crazy moon-man mistaken pronunciation and they fixed it to ‘Battle Creek’ and we’ve been stuck with that since. So, yeah, please lock that in as my answer, won’t you? Thank you.
And according to Wikipedia, it’s actually named for a battle in the winter of 1823-24 in which two of the natives got into a fight with two people from a federal government survey party. In the fight one of the natives was wounded. After the fight the survey party fled. So, yeah, it involved not quite as many people as were needed to play the classic game show Password Plus. Although I guess there is a folk etymology that the river’s native name, Waupakisco, itself is some kind of name meaning “battle creek”, for some battle they dunno when it happened or what over, which makes people who know the language roll their eyes and sigh. So there we go.
Instead of city names, especially your city name. Or the name of a beloved celebrity who’s either died or declared that the people complaining about an incredibly racist thing he said are the true racists.
Sorry, I’d like to say something funny about a grand strategy game, or something that’s going on around town. But I’ve been too busy kicking myself over a really lousy performance on my part at restaurant trivia night last night. Also that it’s possible to train fish to spit at certain people’s faces, which solves so many problems! But mostly that the satellite navigator thinks the word is pronounced “rester-aunt”, like, your mother’s sister who can be counted on to nap. I suppose I just don’t understand the modern world.
Last week around these parts I mentioned this huge lump of coal. It was dropped off a train in Lansing over a century ago. It was around in 1976 to take school bus tour groups to. Now it isn’t there. As far as I can tell. I want to give a full report about the spot where it’s supposed to be, so I can say what’s there now. Maybe the coal was gone but it had been replaced with a heaping pile of bauxite, for example, or perhaps potash. Maybe jute or some naval supplies. But I didn’t have the chance to get over there. Well, I got in the area, since it’s near the pet store. But I had to go over to the pet store under emergency circumstances. They didn’t allow for a side trip to go looking for deposits of cinnabar or whatever. But I looked at the place on Google Maps Streetview and I didn’t see anything. I think.
But lumps of missing coal aren’t all the interesting stuff described in Helen E Grainger’s 1976 book Pictorial Lansing: Great City On The Grand. I think there’s supposed to be a colon there. The cover isn’t quite clear. I’m sure it’s not Pictorial Lansing Great City On The Grand That Changed The World. The book’s got, for example, a picture of Ransom Olds’s mansion. He’s the person who invented the Oldsmobile. Just like you might guess if you were bluffing your way through the question “Who invented the Oldsmobile?” and you rejected “Biddle Jehoshaphat Mobile” for no good reason. The Olds mansion was torn down in 1966 to make way for an Interstate, which is a wee bit on-the-nose, people. The mansion had an Aeolian organ that was “sold and delivered to Oregon”. So if anyone in Oregon’s seen an Aeolian organ and doesn’t know where it’s come from, here’s a lead.
Then there’s the Lions Den. It’s also known as “The Lawrence Mansion”, “Squire Haven’s 1861 House”, and “Brauer’s 1861 House”. It is “now, in 1976, the oldest building in Michigan that has a restaurant in it”. Somehow the phrasing of that sentence makes me doubt my conceptual model of restaurants. It shouldn’t. There’s nothing revolutionary about the idea of a restaurant that doesn’t take up a whole building. Or a building that doesn’t have a restaurant. The phrasing just fills me with doubts. I don’t know. Anyway, a neat feature of the 1861 Lawrence Brauer Squire Haven 1861 Mansion House is a glass on top. The book says “the day [construction workers] finished it, all the working crew had a drink from a wine glass and then one of the workers climbed up and put this little wine glass upside down on top of the spire that goes up in the sky from the cupola”. The next page has a picture of the glass on the cupola on the spire on the building on whatnot.
It’s also gone. My love did some research and found that the glass was replaced at least once. And it was painted over and paint-welded to the spire at least once. And sometime last decade the building got declared architecturally unsound. It was down before it could slide downriver and crash into an Interstate. They were planning to build condos there, if I have it right, and then noticed it was 2008 so they decided to instead not build condos.
Now for something that is still there. I know it is because I keep seeing it along Michigan Avenue. But never up close because it’s on the median and there’s not anywhere nearby enough to park without looking weird. I’m glad the book tells me what it is so I don’t have to go experience it myself. It’s a blurry copper-I-guess plaque on a stone that doesn’t look at all like coal and if the book is right it reads:
This block of concrete represents the efforts of Lansing’s pioneer residents in the laying of one of the first and longest stretches of concrete pavement in the world, between Lansing and East Lansing.
That’s like four miles, downtown-to-downtown. Grainger didn’t know when the plaque was put up. The Highway Commissioner named took office in 1933, so, probably it wasn’t 1931, but otherwise who knows? Can we rule out 1954 in its entirety? But that’s all right, because Grainger didn’t know when the concrete pavement was put down either. She guessed not later than 1914. So I want you to appreciate all this. It’s a plaque I technically speaking have not read, put up sometime we do not know, commemorating an event that happened at some time we do not know. I’m not saying this is the funniest thing in the world. I’m saying this is one of the more giggle-worthy things I’ve run across in easily twenty-two days.
So in all, I would like to say that here in mid-Michigan, there are things, or used to be, and that isn’t so bad an arrangement.
From the tutorial for March of the Eagles, a variant on Europa Universalis III that skips Ancient Rome and is all about the Napoleonic Wars, which I picked up because it was really cheap and why not?
So I expect the box there with the ‘OK’ button is supposed to be double-checking you really want to do this (which is pick a National Idea that gives you some benefits). But it’s hidden by the List of Ideas, which can’t be minimized or closed, and it can’t be brought in front of the List Of Ideas, and, oh, I don’t know. I guess that’s a picture of a guy with a bandage around his head on the top bar there, with a 0.88 underneath it, and not a water balloon being filled from a tap.
If you need me I’ll be over in Roller Coaster Tycoon III Platinum.
From about the second tutorial screen to Europa Universalis: Rome, a grand strategy game variant I bought when it was on sale and only just got around to now that I got the mothership game done one time. And depending on how wide a screen you’re looking at this on it might be hard to see what I’m pointing to, so you might want to click on the image until it’s big enough you can read the text easily.
And I am just awestruck by the multiple levels of failure involved with this screen. I would like to know how they overlooked a few ways to make this even better, such as:
So in summary, I would like to note that when one of the trilithons making up Stonehenge fell in 1797, a report in the Kentish Gazette placed blame for the fall on the burrowing of rabbits undermining the wonder. (Pages 39-40). Thank you.
I have a deep love of grand strategy video games. Let me explain the genre. You know Sid Meier’s Civilization, possibly from the guys who spent 1993 through 1998 sitting continuously at the computer mumbling weird things about taking on the Ruso-Aztec alliance? It’s what that grew into. Civilization is still around, but it’s not nearly complicated enough a game for me. I prefer the Europa Universalis line of games, by which I mean, last week I just finished my first-ever complete game of Europa Universalis 3, a game I bought in Like 2009 and hadn’t yet understood. I did win.
Anyway. I was playing China, and along about the early 18th century came this exciting bit of pop-up news:
And I just haven’t stopped giggling about the potential wonders that alternate-history 1722 China hopes to find now that they’ve got an “in” with Connecticut.
In other stuff, my mathematics blog gave me reason to talk about comic strips yesterday. Also, Apparently Frank Page’s comic strip Bob The Squirrel has observed some problems similar to mine.
So there’s this city block near us that’s slated to be torn down. It had hosted a restaurant, a barber shop, a couple other small shops, some apartments overhead, that sort of stuff. It’s scheduled to be demolished and replaced with a new building. That’ll be able to host, oh, a restaurant, a barber shop, a couple other small shops, some apartments overhead, that sort of stuff. Only it’ll be a modern building, which means it’ll be lined with that new kind of brick they have that looks like a fake brick even though it’s real bricks. I don’t know how brick manufacturers have figured out ways to make real bricks look fake, but they have, and they’re going to show off that severely postmodern brick-making technique.
Anyway, behind the doomed buildings was a parking lot. There still is. It had been a metered parking lot. But at some point the city, I imagine but do not actually know, came around and took out all the parking meters. So, you know, free parking lot now that there’s nothing to go to there, which is something.
But it’s got me wondering what happened to the parking meters. Was there some other parking lot in town that had a desperate need for meters and that was finally satisfied? Or did the city decide to take the meters and put them in storage? If so, why, since it’s not like they couldn’t get at least a little spare change from people who figured to use the lot anyway? Or did they just not want to risk some kind of mischief happening, so they put them all in a storage locker? And if all these parking meters are sitting in a storage locker, are we positive someone’s paying the rent reliably? Because thinking of a 20-by-20 unit of parking meters getting impounded just makes me giggle almost to the point it could be heard.
| Trait Father’s Day Cards Say My Father Has | Are They Correct? |
|---|---|
| Sloppy | No. |
| Lazy | Not really. |
| Sports-obsessed | If “thinks there is a best professional sports venue, and that it is Fenway Park, and probably could name a New York Yankee if pressed” (we’re from New Jersey) then yes, otherwise, not really. |
| Beer-obsessed | Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha no. |
| Cranky | Not since he stopped working rotating shifts in like 1984. |
| Full of really good ignored advice | Other than that one about starting a retirement account when I was still in college not really. |
| Mechanically inept | Only if you hold against him that the dishwasher in the old house would not stop leaking even after he replaced it and everything connected to it maybe five times. |
| Flatulent | No. |
| The Human ATM | No. |
| Barbecue-obsessed | If “can barbecue fine, thanks, but is really happier making broiled chicken and other grown-up meals like that” counts. |
| Golfing | No. |
| Napping | Yeah, although usually the cat climbs onto his chest and naps first. But I understand they have an agreement about this. |
| Overprotective | No. |
| Fishing | I cannot imagine my father enjoying anything less than a day out fishing, and that includes “watching the televised Congressional impeachment hearings against my brother on Fox News while waiting at the car dealership for an emergency transmission overhaul to get finished”. |
| Long-suffering | Well, that’s fair enough. |
Also, why are there no cards for father-in-laws? Or a month back, for mother-in-laws? I haven’t done a rigorous survey about this, but I’m going to bet there are more people who actually like their spouse’s parents than there are people needing birthday cards for someone turning 100.
So then this turned up in the “Licensing” section of Wikipedia’s entry on the comic strip Beetle Bailey:
2012 Rolex and Bamford Watch Department created a Beetle Bailey Rolex watch.
And I just don’t even remember what I was getting worked up about before that. I think it was trying to understand my completely irrational annoyance that Hagar the Horrible mentioned potatoes this week. But I just … you know, I just … I don’t know.
OK, so, what’s worse than seeing any city’s name trending on Twitter? Seeing your city’s name trending on Twitter. So, thank you, Twitter, for putting ‘Lansing’ right there as the third item under Trends for most of the last week.
Don’t worry. There’s, as of my writing this, nothing to worry about going on in Lansing. This has to be them Helpfully Localizing my content experience. It’s all been about normal recently. There was a power outage downtown last Friday during lunchtime and that’s been the big news. Sure, that’s the sort of thing that’s fun to go through, especially since it hit the capitol and the state office buildings and stuff. Power failures are the snow days that office workers get. So there’s the understandable thrill of, like, seeing State Supreme Court justices just wandering down Washington Square Street with nothing particular to do.
But is that thrilling enough to last a week? So a State Supreme Court justice figures he might as well head to the downtown peanut roastery. That’s not all that exceptional. Who doesn’t like peanut roasteries? Even the people deathly allergic can appreciate the carpet of expectant squirrels staring at customers who don’t know whether to follow the signs warning DO NOT FEED SQUIRRELS or whether there’s no way they’re getting out alive without dropping at least a four-ounce bag of cashews and running. We would go on about that for a while, sure, but a week? Not worth it.
And there’s one of the smallest measurable bits of excitement coming out of East Lansing. There’s been a ball python on the loose since the weekend. Channel 6’s article about calls it a “runaway” snake, which suggests the lede’s writer does not fully understand snakes. But it’s not an aggressive species, and it’s not venomous. It would eat small animals, but it’s way far away from the peanut roastery, so even the squirrels don’t get bothered by it. So while that’s kind of interesting again there’s no way this is trend-worthy.
One of the top items under ‘Lansing’ was remembering the birth of actor Robert Lansing, 1928 – 1994. Remember him? (Correct answer: no. I’m sorry but there is a Ray Davies song about this.) He was in the original Star Trek. In this backdoor-pilot episode he played alien-trained super-duper-secret-agent Gary Seven, the United States adaptation of the Third Doctor Who. Terri Garr played his human female companion. And if you want to protest that the episode (“Assignment: Earth”) was made and aired in 1968 (1968), years (2) before the Actual Third Doctor was even cast (1970), then let me remind you, time traveller. Sheesh.
And it isn’t like Lansing doesn’t have some stuff worthy of quirky Internet fame. I was reading Helen E Grainer’s Pictorial Lansing, which in 1976 put in book form the school field trip tours she gave kids. It mentions:
One of the early trains to Lansing brought a piece of coal as big as the front seat of a car. It is still sitting by the train tracks on Grand River Avenue east of Cedar Street.
I submit that even in this jaded age, a piece of coal as big as the front seat of a car, and that’s been sitting on the street for a century, is worth looking at. They have a picture of it, sitting in front of the train tracks and some house. But I’ve been to that spot. As best I can figure there’s no huge lump of coal there. The house is gone too. So Lansing apparently had a right big lump of coal that sat on the street corner for a century, and then someone went and took it. Also someone took the house. Taking a house is normal, although good luck explaining to a six-year-old why anyone thinks that’s normal. Taking a huge lump of coal? That’s noteworthy and is anyone tweeting about that? That’s getting freaky. You know, it would be a scandal if a State Supreme Court justice had pocketed both house and coal under cover of the traffic signals all being out.
Anyway. Twitter, stop letting place names trend. It’s not good for any of us. With thanks, trusting, yrs very truly, pls also vide letter of last week, etc, me.
In my e-mail today:
Honestly don’t know whether to be insulted they’re telling me of offers they’re not letting me in on, or if I’m flattered they’re letting me know there are offers that people better than me can get.
So my love and I were at this other hipster bar where a completely different pinball league meets. It was getting near the end of the night and some of the chairs were turned over and put on the tables. This was under the seat of one. The text that’s got me:
Chairs should be inspected regularly for loose or missing screws, metal fatigue, cracks, broken welds, loose staples, and general instability.
And now I am so glad these chairs are not mine. I would be all right on loose screws or staples, but detecting metal fatigue? And for that matter missing screws? And how often is regularly? Daily is way too often to inspect a chair for cracks. But every ten years? Probably they don’t mean that infrequently. It’s not like my teeth, which I once kind of accidentally let go for eighteen years between dentist’s visits. I had two small cavities and the ire of my love, who’s needed a lot more dental work. Chair Master Command would want something more often and I couldn’t live up to that kid of pressure.
Well, here’s some mathematically-themed comic strips I looked at recently, and what I saw there.
My love and I went to a hipster bar yesterday. We’re in the state’s competitive pinball scene, you see, and there’s a monthly tournament held at that bar. It’s a nice place, decorated with abstract re-imaginings of movie posters and a huge picture of Rocksteady and Bebop proclaiming their secret love for turtles. That kind of place. I came in eighth place, although I was the only person to manage the objective in playing Jersey Jack Pinball’s The Wizard of Oz in one ball. Not bragging, just clinging to my meager accomplishment.
Anyway. The bar’s a nice place, but it does not serve food. The manager is cool with people bringing food in. There’s a decent hipster sandwich shop just down the block, for example, and we hear of burrito places nearby and there’s another hipster bar acros the street that we guess you could bring elaborate burgers from. You can peek in on people eating all the easily taken-out cuisine of the area there.
So why was there a real metal fork on the floor?
I mean, I just hate the thought someone brought their real silverware all the way from home and then lost it before even finding out if anyone would beat the objective on Ghostbusters, which nobody did because it was impossible.
Thesis: a two-headed unicorn isn’t.
Show your work. If you don’t have any, show someone else’s. It’ll probably be worth something.
From the 1976 Scoopy-Doo/Dynomutt Hour. Dynomutt episodes omitted, even the ones with Scooby-Doo and the Gang crossing over.
| Word | Appearances |
|---|---|
| ’76 | 1 |
| a | 13 |
| an | 1 |
| and | 2 |
| at | 1 |
| awake | 1 |
| away | 1 |
| Aztec | 1 |
| bad | 1 |
| bats | 1 |
| beast | 2 |
| beeline | 1 |
| Bermuda | 1 |
| bottomless | 1 |
| bum | 1 |
| Camelot | 1 |
| caper | 1 |
| case | 3 |
| cats | 1 |
| chase | 1 |
| chiller | 1 |
| Chinese | 1 |
| claw | 1 |
| creature | 1 |
| creepy | 5 |
| crew | 1 |
| cruise | 1 |
| curse | 1 |
| dark | 1 |
| deep | 1 |
| demon | 2 |
| demons | 1 |
| diabolical | 1 |
| diller | 1 |
| disc | 1 |
| don’t | 1 |
| face | 1 |
| fear | 1 |
| feline | 1 |
| fiesta | 1 |
| fling | 1 |
| for | 1 |
| fortress | 1 |
| fortune | 1 |
| fright | 1 |
| frightened | 1 |
| froggy | 1 |
| from | 2 |
| game | 1 |
| gator | 1 |
| ghost | 4 |
| ghoul | 1 |
| go | 1 |
| grand | 1 |
| gruesome | 1 |
| hair | 1 |
| Halloween | 1 |
| hang | 1 |
| harum-scarum | 1 |
| Headless | 1 |
| heap | 1 |
| high | 1 |
| Highland | 1 |
| hoodoo | 1 |
| Horseman | 1 |
| host | 1 |
| hound | 1 |
| humor | 1 |
| in | 5 |
| iron | 1 |
| is | 2 |
| it’s | 1 |
| jaguaro | 1 |
| jeepers | 1 |
| kooky | 1 |
| lake | 2 |
| lot | 1 |
| make | 1 |
| Mamba | 1 |
| man | 1 |
| meets | 1 |
| menace | 1 |
| monster | 1 |
| monstrous | 1 |
| movie | 1 |
| near | 1 |
| night | 1 |
| no-face | 1 |
| of | 10 |
| old | 1 |
| out | 1 |
| Ozark | 1 |
| prix | 1 |
| quarterback | 1 |
| race | 1 |
| raiser | 1 |
| rise | 1 |
| sacked | 1 |
| sanitarium | 1 |
| scared | 1 |
| scaredy | 1 |
| scary | 1 |
| Scooby | 1 |
| Scooby-Doo | 2 |
| Scooby’s | 1 |
| shark | 1 |
| shocking | 1 |
| snow | 1 |
| spirits | 1 |
| spooky | 1 |
| steer | 1 |
| switch | 2 |
| tangle | 1 |
| tar | 1 |
| that | 2 |
| the | 33 |
| theater | 1 |
| there | 1 |
| there’s | 1 |
| thing | 1 |
| to | 1 |
| triangle | 1 |
| underground | 1 |
| vampire | 1 |
| Venice | 1 |
| Viking | 1 |
| Voodoo | 1 |
| vulture’s | 1 |
| Wamba | 1 |
| warlock | 1 |
| watch | 1 |
| Watt | 1 |
| where’s | 1 |
| willawaw | 1 |
| Wimbledon | 1 |
| witch | 2 |
| with | 2 |
| zombie | 1 |
For the first time in the Scooby-Doo franchise neither Jekyll nor Hyde appear in episode titles. Also there was an episode in Venice that was never put into syndication for some reason? Canada too, and that one had a sea monster and everything. The heck, guys? When I was eight I’d have loved to see Scooby-Doo with a sea monster. You’ll give me the episode where, according to Wikipedia’s description, “the gang meets up with tennis star Jimmy Pelton, who has been cursed by a warlock”, but not a Canadian sea monster? The heck, I mean really, what the heck?
I happened to look out a second-floor window. A couple houses down a woman was sitting on the patio, at the table. She was looking seriously and alertly at nobody there. Maybe she was waiting for someone who’d dashed in for something. I choose to believe she’s haunted by a ghost of the Adirondack Chair, but it’s not like a malicious ghost. It’s someone you can sit down and have an iced tea with. Well, the ghost has iced ghost tea. Maybe some ghost biscotti too, if the ghost has decided it’s a little chilly out and would rather have hot coffee. It’s basically a nice neighborhood.
Dear Twitter Master Command,
Hi there. I wasn’t away. That’s the first thing. Also, you keep promising you’re going to show me fewer tweets like that. You need to shore up that wording. Do you mean you’re going to show me fewer tweets that way, as in that form? Where it’s four days after the original post and even the guy who wrote it can’t remember what he was making a sly, snarky comment about? Or do you mean fewer tweets like “the stuff my friends wrote”? I get the feeling you’re promising me that.
Because that’s the hip thing with social media. You all start out with a simple model: you have friends. Your friends post stuff. You read it. Sometimes you post back. Sometimes they post back. Their friends post back. The friends of your friends post. They’re whack jobs. Your friends’ friends keep posting. You come to like people less. You infer that your friend honestly sees no difference in morality or intellect or human decency between these people and you. The fight takes on a new intimacy. After enough of this you go outside, resolved instead to roll down a hill all day. You see a squirrel. That fact reminds you. You go back to answering your friend’s friend. Finally you stumble across an interesting discussion about whether Cringer remembers the experience of being Battle Cat, and vice-versa, and if so how. It has an exhausting pile of citations from the ramshackle He-Man canon. You come away feeling staggered but forgetting what you were angry about. Then you see it again. It’s a simple model and one that might work forever.
Except that’s never enough. If the social media works then it gets famous. And like Ian Shoales explained, once you’re famous for doing something you don’t want to do that anymore. So the media gets fussing around with algorithms and rearrangements of timelines. Instead of showing people what they said they wanted to see, you go and show them something they didn’t say they wanted to see. Maybe something they said they didn’t want to see. It’s a weird business model. Imagine if you were flying to Albany, New York, because you had urgent business there. You had to go to Huck Finn’s Playland and yell at the amusement park for it not still being Hoffmann’s Playland, even though Hoffmann didn’t want the Playland anymore and he was just going to toss it out.
But then the pilot announces that, you know, we’re going to instead fly to Columbus, the world-renowned “Albany, New York, of Ohio”. Would you feel well-served? I guess it depends whether you could find something to berate in the Columbus area. I’m sure there are. There’s at least two creepy houses in the suburb of Worthington, for example. I seem to be making a case for this. Maybe it’s other businesses that are missing out by just giving people what they wanted. (Do not berate the Worthington creepy house the guy lives in. He’s taken enough abuse.)
But what we expect to see, or expect to not see, or who we expect not to get in bitter quarrels with, is beside the point. None of this is what we really want from social media, not even the stuff we know we want to see, like the Animals Wearing Glasses Daily Picture.
What we want is to find something that’s profound and breezy. We want to experience something insightful and whimsical. It should be eye-opening without ever entering unfamiliar intellectual and emotional territory. We want something epic while still being intimate. More, we want to be the sole true confidant of an enormous crowd. We want to say something un-improvable yet tossed off in a heartbeat. We want to go viral while being that single candle that alleviates some one person’s darkness. We want universal truths that still fit snug where we are in life. We want to do something that’s going to get put on millions of t-shirts, and we want to get a cut of each sale. We want to be reblogged by people we watched on TV when we were kids. We want transcendence with a glace at our cell phones. And then we want to hit reload and get another transcendent moment at least as good. Give us that and we’ll hit ‘like’ or ‘fave’ or whatever silly thing you want. We’ll even pretend to look at your advertisements for stuff we’ve never even known anyone who would ever want interspersed with ads for the thing we bought last week on Amazon.
And that’s what social media is all about, Twitter Master Command.
Hoping you will see to and remedy this problem swiftly I remain,
Yours truly,
Sincerely,
I mean it,
PS: Do it right and we’ll even forgive you suggesting Every. Single. Day. that we follow a person we wouldn’t run over with a forklift exclusively for fear of getting repugnant-person-guts in the forklift’s machinery.
PPS: Obviously Cringer remembers the experiences he has as Battle Cat. The interesting question is whether he remembers it as a thing he, Cringer, does while affecting a character, or whether he remembers Battle Cat as a distinct entity using what is sort-of his body. Please see enclosed citations, omitted for clarity.
So last week the local alt weekly published their annual Top Of The Town reader-survey winners, and this week it apologized about the Best Asian Buffet winner. According to the retraction, the Ukai Habachi Grill and Sushi Bar despite being generally quite good and having apparently lots of name recognition, doesn’t have a buffet. They explained they get a lot of reader-submitted entries, which is fair. They have somewhere around 620 categories for the Top of the Town contest. This includes two separate categories for Best Coffee Shop, which isn’t even my joke[1]. But they can’t vet every place nominated for every category. They have a hard enough time rolling their eyes at every politician someone can name being nominated for “Best Comedian” which, again, isn’t even my joke.
They don’t exactly say who told them that Ukai doesn’t have a buffet. The article says the restaurant said people have stopped by asking for the buffet, which suggests the restaurant asked them to do something about people. But it doesn’t quite say that. It might’ve just been someone sidling up to the newspaper office and whispering an awkward, “Um … you know … I don’t want to embarrass you … but … like … before you do next year … uh … ” and never getting to the point.
The most wonderful thing about this? They admit it happened before. Apparently once the Knight Cap, a steakhouse, won for Best Pizza. The Knight Cap rolled with it, briefly adding pizza to their menu. I like to think they got it from Ukai.
[1] Best Coffee Shop is divided between Best Biggby and Best Not-Biggby shop. Biggby is a local chain that’s omnipresent in the same way jokes about Starbuck’s being everywhere used to be. They’re called Biggby because the place used to be called Beaner’s, and they wanted to expand like crazy, and found out there’s places that’s a racial slur so they figured better to fix that problem now rather than later, and they already had a lot of stuff with large B logos.
The following paragraph is composed of the third sentences of spam posts blocked by whatever it is does the WordPress spam filtering around here. I leave out some stuff about search engines because that’s just way too boring.
Reading through this article reminds me of my previous roommate! Special construction and shaft sealing devices are available for blower service requiring zero or minimal gas leakage into and out of casing. It is the little changes that will make the largest changes. Furthermore, we appreciate your coming to Miami and encouraging me to better fully grasp baking skills. I’ve a presentation next week, and I am at the look for such information.
Even though this person does not exist, it really does make you feel like you know the guy. I appreciate that he’s upfront about his interest in shaft sealing devices, which are certain to come in useful in his Miami baking presentation.
Boy, I hope my post doesn’t get blocked by WordPress’s spam filters. I am at the look for developments!
I did some more comic strip stuff over on my mathematics blog. Please, enjoy that, won’t you?
Meanwhile rather than work too hard, let me give you this to caption:
The correct caption?
Kirk: “I don’t know. Have you tried jiggling the cable?”
If not correct please discuss below.
OK, OK, dream that seemed like it went on for two hours or more. I will take your advice. Never again will I try to sneak out naked to the mall’s movie theater with a bunch of archeologists. While there’s probably someplace I could get some respectable cover there, I wouldn’t have any place to keep my wallet so I’d have to watch the movie from the changing room. Also there’s so many venues for embarrassment with the archeologists, especially when people challenge their key findings and they have to fly, cross-country, to Seattle by way of Los Angeles, which just makes for two hecks of long trips. I don’t even know why the movie was controversial to the archeologists. Maybe something in it presented the Nuditarians in a light not generally accepted by current research.
| Month | Day I Remember To Change The Calendar |
|---|---|
| January | 1 |
| February | 2 |
| March | 5 |
| April | 12 |
| May | 16 |
| June | 3 |
| July | 19 |
| August | September 1 |
| September | 6 |
| October | 2 |
| November | 13 |
| December | 11 |
My love and I were wondering last weekend when MediaWest*Con might be. This is a small but ancient science fiction/TV/movies/et cetera convention that’s been held in Lansing for the past Like 37 years [1]. We had no idea. We only found out about it last year because a friend was going to it and asked if we wanted to meet up for dinner during a slow stretch. It turned out the convention was being held just that weekend, right as we were wondering when it might be.
We couldn’t go. They only sell 700 attending memberships and were sold out. But we found this magnificent question and answer on their web site:
3. Why do you have Apocryphal memberships and allow pets?
We found some people were buying full memberships for their stuffed critters, so we started offering Apocryphal memberships for stuffed or live critters and for alternate identities so as not to take up already limited regular memberships.
As for pets, we had started bringing our dogs to the con so we didn’t have to board them, which cleared the way for others to bring their pets, as long as they get along with the other animals and members (which goes for the humans as well!). Some people miss their pets too much, and some pets don’t do well without their people.
This is my favorite sort of explanation. It’s clear, concise, and doesn’t explain a thing. That thing: wait, there were so many people buying memberships for their stuffed dolls that it was creating resentment in the standby list? How many people was that? Surely not one, because who’d notice that? Ten? Again, nobody would notice ten people not there because toys were instead. 680? That’s more plausible. It suggests there a time in Like 1994[2], when the convention was twenty people and hundreds upon hundreds of plush dolls dressed in Star Trek, Blake’s 7, and Bruce Campbell costumes. All staring at the people who couldn’t get in. And someone declared, “there must be something we can do! And I know what it is!” And that lone person was a stuffed Vulcan-eared teddy bear dressed up like George Francisco from Alien Nation, and was the voice of reason.
Also I like how pets are allowed because hey, pets.
[1] 35 or 38 years depending on how you count some stuff.
[2] For example 1993, 1995, or possibly 1994.
Please, take what you can use. There’s so much more to give.
I did it! I managed to go the month without obsessively watching WordPress’s daily statistics report. But also, I got to see, for the first time since the Apartment 3-Gocalypse, some growth in readership figures again. I’m going to credit this to finally acting cool enough people don’t suspect how needy I actually am.
But the numbers speak for themselves, once someone says them. In May there were 1,198 page views around here. April had a meager 1,043, and March a less-meager 1,107. The visitor count was up also, to a not-so-meager-exactly 677 from April’s 583 and March’s 632.
The number of likes isn’t changing much, one way or another. It was 201 in May, compared to 213 in April and 201 back in March. I may have hit a plateau.
The number of comments was way down, but part of that is an accounting change. I worked out that, apparently, WordPress counts it as a comment if I make a link to the full URL of something, nebushumor.wordpress.com/etc. But if I use the short URL, wp.me/etc, that doesn’t count. So I tried doing that to see how many people said stuff without counting my own cross-linking. This suggests there were 25 for May. And while that’s technically down from April’s 50 and May’s 36, I don’t know how that compares in actual comments. Shall have to wait and see.
And what was popular around here in May? Of course, the lead article was something written by a guy who died when I was seven:
For the monthly list of countries:
I apologize for putting all that in a bullet list when one sentence would do, but I read that it somehow makes readers happier to see bullet lists of things. I don’t know why either. Among my special interest countries: Singapore gave me five page views, India 23, and Poland none at all. Poland, is everything OK? Also the European Union somehow is listed with three page views.
Single-reader countries this time around were:
The (*) countries were single-reader countries last month too. Nobody’s on a three-month streak.
Search terms bringing people here include:
My humor blog starts June with 35,889 page views, from something like 18,551 distinct readers. While it’s overtaken my mathematics blog in visitors it’s still behind in total page views. WordPress says there’s 660 WordPress.com followers, up from 652 at the start of May and 647 at the start of April.
If you aren’t a WordPress follower, or an e-mail subscriber, but have been convinced by seven hundred words about numbers about other readers to follow me, please sign up! There’s a little blue button to “Follow Another Blog, Meanwhile” at the upper left corner of the page, to the left of the headline. And beneath that should be a Follow By E-Mail button. Or you can follow me on Twitter, where I post announcements of these things and also sometimes livetweet the awful cartoon I’m watching for some reason. That sort of thing.
Without denying the slick style of this 1969 Chicago Coin-produced pinball machine, and pointing out the game has got some pretty nice, slick shots to play that make it a pretty engaging electromechanical game …
Shouldn’t their oxygen supply be connected to their space helmets instead of their space pants?
Another Blog, Meanwhile 