So I started reading up on Metric System International units because I remembered being upset that, at one time, they declared the second to be a particular fraction of the length of the year 1900, and it was long after the year 1900 had happened so there was no way of checking. And this brought me, naturally, to the radian, a dimensionless measure of angles that mathematicians like because of differential equations and stuff. And that brought me to the most wonderful sentence I have ever read in my life for whole weeks:
As Paul Quincey et al. writes, “the status of angles within the International System of Units (SI) has long been a source of controversy and confusion.”
Yes. Please. I want to know all about the controversy and confusion over radians. My appetite is whetted well by there being a Consultative Committee for Units — why do I never get posted to a Consultative Committee? — and Richard Nelson writing about how “This ambiguity [in the classification of the supplemental units] prompted a spirited discussion over their proper interpretation.” I want to know the spirits. Apparently the Consultative Committee for Units met as recently as 2021 to talk about whether radians are base units of the metric system but felt like this would somehow cause problems. I’m assuming they’re not problems like, you’re using a meter stick to measure how big to make the replacement window screen and then your window explodes. But there must be something they’re afraid of unleashing on the world and I want to know what they are. More on this as it comes to pass.
I have been reading Dennis the Menace for — well not my entire life. There was a stretch for the first couple years when I wasn’t able to read. But past that, I’ve been reading Dennis the Menace my entire life and it’s just this week I find out Dennis has a middle name? I knew he had a last name, although it took me long enough to settle on “Mitchell” that I would have been in trouble on a game show. But a middle name? That isn’t “The”? Yes, if you proposed that his name was “Dennis The Mitchell” I would have to accept you were right.
Scott Ketcham and Marcus Hamilton’s Dennis the Menace for the 4th of May, 2022. If we can trust Wikipedia, Ron Ferdinand does the art on Sundays and Marcus Hamilton on weekdays. If we trust Comics Kingdom’s credit, the writing is by Hank Ketcham, who retired in 1994 and died in 2001. Maybe he was ahead of deadline but then I don’t know what Scott Ketcham is doing. Well, there’s always paperwork, can’t forget that. You need someone who likes to fill out forms.
Anyway, Wikipedia offers that his full name is Dennis Roger Mitchell, though it doesn’t give a source. The comic strip, I suppose. Also apparently the strip takes place in Wichita, Kansas, if you believe Wikipedia. Wikipedia also claims that Wichita, Kansas, is on the Arkansas River. As far as I know that’s right, so maybe we can trust Wikipedia about this Dennis “Roger” Mitchell thing too. I don’t know.
The Felix character is voiced by … yyyyyyyyyyes, it says Frank Nelson.
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Did I make this up and slip it into Wikipedia as a gag and then forget?
I mean, yes, it looks convincing. That mossy-mold background for the title card is SUCH a DePatie-Freleng touch that it makes me suspicious. If this were really done in the 70s they’d sometimes get their style wrong. Also, Wikipedia says that Fleabag and Spiffy shared a secretary named Goldie Hound. At some point just having the mountain of evidence becomes suspicious.
December 5. You realize you’ve made it this late in the month without hearing about Wham!ageddon this year. Starts a good argument online about whether you can join in late since you think you heard “Last Christmas” a couple days ago but don’t remember if it was in November or not.
December 7. Debate about whether it has to be Wham!’s version or if a cover of “Last Christmas” counts. Two friends stop speaking to one another.
December 8. Running through the grocery store run to minimize exposure to Your Local Christmas Hits Station and also Covid-19.
December 10. You were gone for 35 minutes, how is everybody you know angry about whether the “Sleigh Ride” carol “really” has words?
December 12. Remember that you forgot you were doing Wham!ageddon this year.
December 13. Your bad-movie podcast is about Last Christmas. Debate about whether you can be exempted for the time necessary to listen to the episode. This generates three new factions among your friends, who engage in a Talmudic debate about whether you heard the song if the podcast hosts do a brief, a capella, rendition unburdened by any musical key.
December 14. Get 1600 words into a deep-dive essay about what it means that people do these avoid-the-ubiquitous-thing contests for the fifth time before realizing the author hasn’t gotten to a thesis statement yet and give up on the whole thing.
December 18. Remember that you forgot you were doing Wham!ageddon this year.
December 19. You were gone for 25 minutes, how is everybody you know angry about the “Monster Mash”?
December 20. Debate about whether it counts if you catch yourself starting to hum it to yourself in the shower but are legitimately not sure whether you were just singing in your head.
December 24. You were gone for 15 minutes, how is everybody you know angry about haikus somehow? Haikus? What are people even arguing about over haikus? Even for 2020? Haikus?!
December 26. Debate about whether there even is such a thing as the “We Didn’t Start The Firefest” contest ahead of New Year’s.
January 2. Finally have the somehow two hours, 35 minutes needed to listen to that movie podcast.
Reference: The Impossible Dream: The Building of the Panama Canal, Ian Cameron.
I’m not avoiding them. I just haven’t had the energy to watch stuff even if I like it anymore. So I just have missed out on how they’re changing the Star Trek world. But apparently they’re doing something. I was poking around Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki, and discovered this alarming verb tense in the article about lithium:
Yes, I appreciate that they found an episode to quote for the atomic weight of lithium, especially since they got lithium’s atomic weight wrong. (It should be between 6.938 and 6.997 for most lithium samples.)
I assume this means something exciting has been going on with proton decay in the new shows and I honestly can’t imagine what.
Is this a Lower Decks thing? Again, I haven’t seen it, but it seems like the destruction of all lithium, everywhere, is maybe a Lower Decks thing.
I got to thinking about Fly Me To The Moon, which is not a forgotten computer-animated movie from 2008 because even the people making it did not know they were making it. In the movie, a fly sneaks aboard Apollo 11 and saves it from Soviet flies.
Also the Wikipedia plot summary and the IMDB Goofs Page disagree about whether the Apollo capsule lands in the Pacific Ocean or in Florida. I grant that people of good will could disagree about the contents of an ambiguous scene. And that a movie does not need to have a single reading to be good. But I think if it is unclear whether an Apollo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean or in Florida then the movie is doing something to stoke confusion, is all.
I was reading about the town of Pensford in Somerset, England, because hi there I guess we’ve only just met for the first time. That’s the sort of thing I do, is all. Pensford’s Wikipedia page has this to say about famous residents:
Philosopher and physician John Locke FRS 1632-1704, known as the “Father of Liberalism” lived in John Locke’s Cottage in Belluton within the parish of Publow with Pensford from shortly after his birth until 1647.
And, gosh but that’s a lucky coincidence on John Locke’s part. Just imagine the quarrels he might have got into if he had been living in Thomas Hobbes’s cottage instead. They probably still had the quarrels anyway, but they would have had to argue about who was in whose cottage too.
So how many people do you think would have to fight a dedicated Wikipedia edit war for about a month before people would accept as true that folks in the United Kingdom spell the US state name “Colourado”? I think we could do it with, like, six people unshakable in their resolve.
And then I’m done with this thread until I decide to rewrite it all as one big coherent 700-word essay. And again, this is drawing from Wikipedia. So Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes tried to make wallpaper out of shower curtains sealed together. And this turned out to be bubble wrap. It wasn’t used as a packing material until 1961, though, when IBM started shipping their IBM 1401 computers wrapped in the stuff.
And now I’m picturing that scene. Fielding and Chavannes are sitting there, disheartened. They’ve used their steam iron to seal together dozens of pairs of shower curtains, and not gotten a single piece of usable wallpaper out of any of it. Finally, one of them, disgusted with their failures, tosses the wrap, where it lands on an IBM 1401 variable-wordlength decimal computer with six-bit plus word-mark and parity big-Endian computer that “fell off a delivery truck”. And then they both freeze, looking at what’s happened. And then look at each other. And the years of anxiety and frustration and cruel failure wash away as they realize they hav seen the future, and it pops.
There are many historic events I would like to witness. The first transmissions along the transatlantic telegraph cable. The first person to build a house, rather than extend shelter from an available cave or copse of trees of whatnot. Merkle’s Boner. Whatever the heck the Invasion of the Sea Peoples was. And now, to this, I add whatever conversation happened between Alfred Fielding and Marc Chavannes that resulted in a declaration I must conclude had the substance, “gentlemen, we have all the wallpaper we could ever need — it’s right here in these shower curtains!”.
And I apologize for disappointing everyone who wanted to hear me talk about how a forgotten cartoon from 1960 is not all that bad, considering, if you watch it generously. But, first, the particular cartoon up next is interesting in a complicated way and I need time to warm up to that.
Also, I read on Wikipedia that bubble wrap was “initially created as a failed wallpaper”. I need time to recover from realizing that I will never, however long and hard I try, craft such an apparently-effortless whimsical absurdity, in such perfect word economy, as “a failed wallpaper”. No, no, save your condolences; I know my strengths and my limitations. I just sometimes look out at the greatness I cannot have.
I know how long it takes me at the beach to just pile together enough sand to make a little one-foot-across round island right at the shoreline. Extrapolating from that, a supercontinent would take me more than a full week.
I … mean I’m flattered but … how?
Also I would like to say I was looking up Supercontinents because did you know that Pangaea was not the only time that all the land in the world was huddled together in one continent? That the continents have been breaking apart and coming back together over and over again? That this cycle of all the world’s land reuniting and then splitting up again has happened something like ten times that we know of? Doesn’t that give you the same awesome thrill of “being five and knowing dinosaurs were a thing”? Yeah, I wanted to share that with someone. Not because I thought anyone was going to expect me to make a supercontinent for them.
Also I have this silly thing moved up to today because I wasn’t able to write my Mary Worth plot recap on time. Stuff, you know? And things? There has been too much of all of that lately.
In June 2011, it was put for sale and bought in early September to an undisclosed buyer.
So … in 2011 — in this decade — someone just went to a major amusement park, bought a drop tower ride, carted it off, and we don’t know who? I mean, the owner’s neighbors have to have sometime said, like, “Hey, did the blue duplex down the street always have a 251-foot-tall metal tower in the front yard?” You’d think we could find who bought the Kennywood drop tower just by looking up more. I don’t know how it’s been kept a secret eight years now.
I just wanted to bring to your attention Charles I D Looff, builder of something like forty carousels, a bunch of roller coasters, and other amusement park rides. Particularly I’d like you to look at his photo on Wikipedia, since it shows him in the full flower of 19th Century Moustache Art. What Wikipedia fails to mention is that the photograph was taken from that time in 1895 when he went on a tour-group visit to the White House and was just naturally mistaken for actually being the President. It was fourteen months before anybody even realized! He might have won re-election except he started an unnecessary quarrel with the New York Customs Inspector about public ownership of the bimetallic tariff.
Also by the way he was born in a town called Bad Bramstedt, and I choose to pretend I believe that’s because it was bapped on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper after Holstein’s troubles during the Revolutions of 1848.
So I got to wondering about Mötley Crüe because you know what? Stop asking such nosey questions. Anyway I got to thinking about the metal thing of putting hilariously unneeded umlauts over things. Mostly letters. Like, where did this tradition come from, and why, and who started it, and why did umlauts catch on when perfectly good other diacritics like cedillas went unused. I figure there’s no way of actually researching this, so instead I’m just going to edit the band’s Wikipedia page to say they were the first band to put unnecessary umlauts in their name. Then go back two months later to edit it into saying they were the last metal band to put unnecessary umlauts in their name. The plan being that two months after that, I would go to the discussion page and see where the argument had gotten. Which is a great idea except that it’ll take four months to get results, by which time I’ll have completely forgotten ever caring about the subject. But the important thing is that I can name my imaginary 80s glam metal band “Unnecessary Umlauts”. I don’t mean all the time. When they do a Command Performance for the Queen they’ll be the “Unneedful Umlauts”.
So a couple years ago my love got a bag of desiccant. By legitimate means. And for purposes society would generally approve of, too. I’ve had enough of these scurrilous rumors. I don’t know how these things get started. But then I also don’t know how to spell “desiccant”. I’m going with what Wikipedia tells me. Wikipedia also tells me “a desiccant is a hygroscopic substance that induces or sustains a state of dryness in its vicinity; it is the opposite of a humectant”. I haven’t even been awake an hour yet. What’s Wikipedia doing talking to me like that? Have some consideration.
Anyway, this was only a bag of desiccant. Like what you get in a tiny paper envelope that you’re warned not to eat with your new shoes. What stands out about this is we had a lot of it. A big bag full. I should manage expectations. I’m prone to hyperbole that people take literally, like when I said the styrofoam packing-peanuts incident covered the green-roof part of campus to a depth of eighteen inches. So when I say it was a big bag of desiccant I realize I’m leading you to think it was something at least twelve percent outlandish. Like, a bag of desiccant large enough to roll down the street and crush the auto-care place with its inspirational despair sign.
They’re still warning us about buying back our past. I hope the person in charge of picking a message that’s inspirational yet filled with dread at life hasn’t gone on sick leave or something.
This was a much more reasonable-sized bag. Big enough to hold comfortably with one standard-issue hand. About what you would need if you wanted to make a loaf of sourdough bread all wrong. Still, it’s a lot, considering how little desiccant we need. It was more than we would need at once even if we were eating all our shoes. So we had trouble once the bag came to our attention and we figured we should do something about it.
I had a working plan. I was figuring to let it rest on a horizontal surface until it broke. (I mean the bag. I can’t bear it when horizontal surfaces break.) The dinner table looked like a good choice. The bag was a decent prop for holding trade paperbacks open, at least if I wasn’t too near the center of the book. But understand that I have a condition where I have to stack stuff on horizontal surfaces. I’ve sometimes stacked stuff on top of books I’m currently reading and have left open to page 184. It runs in my family. Neither of my parents have ever gotten to page 186 of a book without a major cleaning project either. My love does not put up with this nonsense. This is good, as otherwise I would someday die in a tragic desiccant-and-book avalanche. Once it was clear I was fine with leaving the bag on the dinner table until I died of old, dry age, the quest for what to do with it was on.
The obvious plan: put it up on Freecycle. Freecycle is a great web site that lets you match usable stuff you don’t need with people in your city, even in your neighborhood, who will never pick it up. We’ve used it before. It’s given us many chances to argue the morals of someone who made the cruel false claim they would take a couple pressure-treated wood 4x4s “Tuesday”. They were our pressure-treated wood 4x4s and we had the receipts to prove it, so let’s stop with the rumors. They’re on the side of the driveway if you want them.
So what did we have to lose by trying? Not the bag of desiccant, for one. Someone in the neighborhood promised to come by the next morning and pick it up, and we promised to pretend to believe them. We didn’t figure on getting up to meet them. It takes time for us to get ready to have Wikipedia tell us stuff. Never mind how hard it would be to give a thing to a person who would like that thing. So my love set the bag inside a plastic freezer bag, because it was raining pretty steady. We didn’t know what would happen if we exposed a full bag of desiccant to an autumnal rain, but also figured we didn’t need that kind of trouble too. We set it between the screen and front doors where our imaginary Freecycle partner could pick it up.
And yet! The next morning there was some kind of noise at the door. And the bag, and the bag inside it, and the desiccant inside, were gone afterwards. We have no explanation for this phenomenon. But we do have our suspicions.
This doesn’t have anything to do with the bag of desiccant, or the rain, but it turns out posting any picture at all seems to make stuff more popular and I’m still not sure if I want to include that photo of the auto care place’s sign above.
Deep suspicions. Because we’ve been in the rainy season. The day we set the bag of desiccant out the area got an inch and a half of rain. The goldfish in the pond were asking if we needed quite this much rain. But a couple hours after parties unknown to us took this bag, the rain stopped. I’m not saying there is someone altering the mid-Michigan weather using a not-that-large bag of desiccant. I only ask how we can say for sure that’s not going on.
My love got on to reading about Midget Car Racing. If this seems quirky to you please understand the context: we visited the amusement parks of Denver last month. All right, the context doesn’t help but trust me, it makes sense in it. Anyway, my love ran across this declaration which has to be the boldest dare I have seen from Wikipedia in a long while:
OK. So go ahead, Wikipedia. I dare you to list the notable midget car races.
Wikipedia’s entry about Rodger Ward explains “he began racing midget cars in 1946 after he was discharged from the Army. He finished poorly. His skills improved in 1947 and by 1948 he won the San Diego Grand Prix”. I agree this is quite the improvement and I’m only a little sorry nobody’s demanded a citation for the claim that he improved in 1947.
They have one, and it’s a free-style race that happened to have a midget car in it.
Please know that I do not mean to mock people just because have interests that just aren’t mine. I mean, all my interests are weird and idiosyncratic and half-wrong. Just, like, I’m a pinball enthusiast and I don’t think I could honestly say there were more than two significant individual pinball games ever played, and one of them was the fictional one from the movie Tommy. And do not get me started on my questions about the legitimacy of the match between Tommy and Elton John. You will be torn between laughing and being bored.
So as a functional know-it-all I enjoy writing in the “nonfact” mode, that is. That is, using the structure of nonfiction writing to spread some kind of amusing nonsense. I should do it more. A Partial Review of the Plants and Animals of Australia is one of those pieces, and it even let me use some of my own pictures of real animals in a real zoo, and it foreshadows the Mark Trail plot recap due on Sunday. As a bonus, researching this piece caused me to run across the Wikipedia sentence “The Tasmanian rainforest is considered a Gondwanan relic”. Not a funny sentence? Maybe it isn’t. But it has this wonderful rhythm to it that delights me. I will cling to this bauble of words and don’t care what other people think of me for it, unless they think something good or bad about me for it.
Uhm … so far as I know nothing of note is going on with Bill Schorr’s comic strip The Grizzwells. It seems to be just fine. Haven’t heard anything about it being cancelled or changing syndicates or anything. Haven’t heard anything about it changing artist or writer. Nor about it changing the premise any. It’s just I’ve learned that I get a lot of readers who want to know what’s going on with some comic strip or other. So, yeah, I’m weak. I like the strips where the rabbit turns up. He’s named Warren, which seems like it ought to be inevitable. The porcupine is named Pierpoint, which is kind of inevitable but not so much so as to stand out.
But yeah, it’s just carrying on like normal like it’s been since … wait, since 1987? Really? This thing’s been going on since like Star Trek: The Next Generation was new and we were telling ourselves no, this Ferengi episode really was as good as we needed it to believe it was? Huh. Oh, and before The Grizzwells, Bill Schorr did a comic strip about a frog who fools the locals into thinking he’s an enchanted prince. I like that premise but I can also see why it didn’t quite last four years in syndication. Ah well. Also wait, so Bill Schorr rates a page on Wikipedia, and the comic strip Conrad that ran from 1982 to 1986 rates a page on Wikipedia, but The Grizzwells, which has been running since the aliens trans-reversed Steve Dallas’s brain, doesn’t? The heck? You know?
I’m sorry, but I just ran across how “Witchcraft,” made famous by Frank Sinatra, was recorded and released afterElvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and that just doesn’t make any sense. Like, “Heartbreak Hotel” is old, sure, but it’s clearly way closer to the present day than “Witchcraft,” which sounds like it ought to have come out during World War II as a revival of some tin pan alley song originally composed during the Era of Good Feelings. But there the record is: more time elapsed between the publishing of “Heartbreak Hotel” (27th of January, 1956) and “Witchcraft” (“Late 1957” sometime) than between “Witchcraft” and David Seville’s “Witch Doctor” (1st of April, 1958). The heck, right? Also I guess it’s the 60th anniversary of the proof that singing-chipmunk technology was at last practical? Is that a good thing? Anyway this is why I can’t figure out which of my 18 folders marked ‘php’ contains the php code we actually need.
So I’m still thinking about that article on Wikipedia about the 1979-80 Ruby/Spears cartoon Fangface. If I were younger and stupider I would quibble with the article’s assertion that Fangface was “highly derivative of Scooby-Doo”. I mean, the whole point of Scooby-Doo was the protagonists solving a mystery, clues coming to the viewer as they did the characters. With Fangface there wasn’t any particular mystery; there was some nefarious evildoer, established right away, and the point of the episode was figuring out how to overcome his schemes. There is a much clearer line from Josie and the Pussycats to Speed Buggy to Fangface and oh what point has my life brought me to now? Someone please wrestle me away from the computer.
In 1979, the second season titled Fangface and Fangpuss aired as a segment on The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show and introduced a new character: Baby Fangs, Fangs’ infant cousin who turns into a baby werewolf called Fangpuss (which contradicts the opening narration stating that only one werewolf is born into the family every 400 years, but, of course, that werewolf could be born through another family which may be married to the Fangsworth family).
What if Santa isn’t always cancelling Christmas because he’s kind of a jerk and instead he’s just wracked with the sort of Imposter Syndrome that my whole generation is dealing with all the time? Like, “This mouse wrote something mean in an upstate New York newspaper in September! A competent Santa doesn’t have to deal with issues like that! … And it’s snowing too? Oh I can’t even.”
Which I’ll grant is not all that deep an observation, but the alternative is to fret about the ways the rules of that snowfall magic seem to get tossed willy-nilly about in Frosty’s Winter Wonderland. I mean there’s something about just tossing in a snow-parson into things that seems dangerous. So let me conclude with this observation from Wikipedia’s page on Frost’s Winter Wonderland:
The engine on the train is a 2–4–2 or an American type steam locomotive. Locomotives of this wheel arrangement were used most common during the 1800s on American railroads, and from the 1830s until 1928, were given the name “American” in 1872, because of how they did all the work of every railroad in the United States. These types of engines have eight wheels (two leading wheels, four driving wheels, and two trailing wheels).
Irish film actresses (148 entries, two subcategories)
Irish stage actresses (141 entries, four subcategories)
Irish television actresses (164 entries, two subcategories)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer contract players (251 entries, one subcategory, Shirley Temple)
People educated at Woldingham School (23 entries)
People from Boyle, County Roscommon (6 entries)
People with acquired American citizenship (400 entries, one subcategory, “Fictional people with acquired American citizenship”, which doesn’t list Nero Wolfe who I thought was born in Montenegro?)
The one where Worf’s Brother saves this village from a planet-wrecking crisis and everybody acts like he’s the jerk.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Ted Baxter gets a job as a game-show host that he’d be great at, and everyone pressures him to give that up so he can go on being a local-news anchor who’s not any good at it.
That Aladdin where Iago gets the Genie’s powers, and he makes a mess of things his first day and feels like a total failure, even though, what, you figured you were going to be an expert the first time you tried something? Why is this talking parrot unrealistic about the speed of his ability to master genie powers?
The Star Trek: The Next Generation where the Evil Admiral built an illegal cloaking device and everybody’s all smugly disdainful of him but they use it anyway because doing without would be a little inconvenient and nobody calls them out for this hypocrisy.
The Far Out Space Nuts where their Lunar Module got stolen, but the planet has a machine that can duplicate anything, and Chuck McCann gives the thing a picture of the Lunar Module and the machine makes a really big duplicate of the picture, and he and Bob Denver were expecting it to make a new spaceship for them because what were they expecting?
The 1980s Jetsons where Elroy accidentally stows away on the Space Shuttle.
Also, while I do not remember this at all, Wikipedia claims this was the plot of a 1987-season episode:
George discovers that he has become stressed out lately due to his teeth, so his dentist creates special false teeth to relax him—but end up stressing him out even more.
Dennis the Menace and Gnasher is the British comic strip that started the same day in March 1951 but five hours earlier owing to time zones. This is very slightly famous in circles where you might talk about the Dennis the Menace comic strip.
Anyway, down in the US comic strip’s page is mentioned:
Dennis & Gnasher: Unleashed! (2017-present, animated)
This all brings me to the question: wait, Dennis’s father is an aerospace engineer? Really? I must have known that at some point, there’s no way Young Me could have let something like that go without memorizing. But what the heck?
![Wikipedia Header: 'Supercontinents through geologic history [edit]'; text: 'The following table names reconstructed ancient supercontinents, using a general definition, with an approximate timeline of millions of years ago (Ma).' The funny part: the boilerplate link 'This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.'](https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/expand-supercontinents.jpg)
![Wikipedia subheading: Notable midget car races [ edit ]](https://nebushumor.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/notable-midget-car-races.png)
Another Blog, Meanwhile 