Updates

I found this image which asked people in various states if they considered themselves part of the “Midwest.”

I found a page called: What’s Going On With ‘Nonplussed’?:

And to make things worse, some of the beginnings of words which appear to be prefixes aren’t prefixes at all, even if they seem to function in the same manner.

Why are we bringing this up? Well, we didn’t want to tell you in this way, but we didn’t want you to hear it from someone else, either. There’s a new sense of nonplussed that people have been using, and…well, we’d just like to give you fair warning in case our descriptivist nature causes us to take action. This new sense appears to stem from a mistaken belief that the first three letters of nonplus are there to indicate that someone is something other than “plussed” (although what being plussed would entail here remains a mystery).

The gist is that “non” is not a prefix in this situation.

An image I found on some weird Facebook group.

From On Paper:

Anticipating the likelihood of Yankee chicanery (agreement concealing the actual figures could easily be finagled sub rosa)…

From Once Upon a Tome:

With a smile that did not reach his eyes, he began to shed books everywhere, in a determined fashion that didn’t brook arguments. As he did so, he launched into a breathless diatribe about how important these incunabula were…

From Once Upon a Tome:

From his paper-strewn desk in a dimly lit corner of the shop he watched over the books, guarding them with a suspender-clad perspicacity cultivated over many years…

Someone posted a Confederate war monument to Reddit. It’s located a couple hours outside Dallas.

Following the war between the states (1861-1865), many confederate veterans who had so faithfully fought to defend their homes and country against the ravaging yankee invaders found little left on their return and set out for a new life in Texas. During the 1870’s these courageous pioneers settled northwest Comanche County. These veterans established farms, school; and Churches and brought the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization to the frontier. to the honor and memory of these brave patriots this memorial is dedicated by their grateful descendants…

That summarizes the average lost cause perspective.

Note the language:

• “the war between the states”
• “ravaging yankee invaders”
• “courageous pioneers”
• “the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization”
• “brave patriots”

It was placed in 2005. Here it is on Google Maps.

An article in CNN calls this entire thing into question: What is an IPA? A deliciously happy accident of beer history or the colonial marketing of a frugal recipe?

While the beer shares a history with India and the British Empire, the IPA moniker owes more to national pride and business savvy than ingenuity.

Credit for popularizing the pale ales sent to India goes to a brewer named George Hodgson, who invented a hoppy ale he named after himself. […]

Hodgson had an exclusive beer contract with the British East India Company. He supplied the company – which in turn supplied India’s British – with Brown ales, porters and his October Beer, a “stronger, hoppier and more bitter cousin of the regular pale ale,” […]

In the 1820s and ‘30s, Hodgson’s competitors gave the October Beer style a new name, India Pale Ale, merely to evoke their patrons’ sense of imperialist pride.

In Once Upon a Tome I found this:

…guests were often left to circumperambulate in a nervous manner…

I looked it up.

to walk or go about or around, esp. ceremoniously

I found this quote about the movie Showgirls:

Elizabeth Berkley chews the scenery to shreds, and the supporting cast makes for a glorious wallow into a dumpster fire of debauchery against the backdrop of Sin City.

It’s an interesting way to say that she wildly overacts.

In an article about Boeing:

Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.

They seem to be used “neoliberal” here to mean an organization obsessed with financial performance to the exclusion of everything else.

I saw a Reddit post that said Croatia was mentioned in the Bible. Sure enough, in 2 Timothy 4:9-10:

Do your best to come to me quickly, for Demas, because he loved this world, has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica. Crescens has gone to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia.

In a tabloid report about a celebrity having dinner.

The reality star and Kardashian ex hit up Catch Steak in Los Angeles Friday, and just check out the pics … looks like a pretty deep crew chowed down with the father-of-three.

The concept of “deep” when applied to a group of people seems to just mean “many.”

In the movie The Laundromat, a character mentions a Bible verse – Isaiah 61:1 – and says, “The theology of liberation, the Catholic Church used to call it..”

Here’s the verse:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.

In an article about King Charles’s cancer diagnosis:

The disclosure was a break with the family’s tradition of being reticent about making health issues public.

From The Deepest Map:

Decartes created the way to change the visual world into a world of numbers, and vice-versa, that is now called Cartesian geometry. Draw two perpendicular axes on a page, and any point placed on the page can be identified by two numbers.

In a Reddit discussion of creepy towns (reprinted on Buzzfeed), someone mentioned this:

Belvidere, Illinois – A single highway completely encircles this north-central Illinois city. The Grange, a formerly secret society, runs the city behind the scenes.

I did some searching but couldn’t find anything about The Grange being a “secret society” or controlling Belvidere.

I discovered that Prince William Sound in Alaska is home to Bligh Island and Bligh Reef, named for the captain. This is odd because I can’t see that Bligh ever sailed anywhere near Alaska.

In Alias Emma (another spy novel, coincidentally):

The plan was to text Chernov from her number, inviting him to an afternoon assignation at the Four Seasons.

In a ruling over a case of prosecutorial misconduct, the judge said:

McAfee ruled that either Wade or Willis would have to leave the case, as an “odor of mendacity remains” over the circumstances of their relationship.

An entry of the newsletter “Noted” had this information:

Is “Bohemia…dead,” as the landlord in Rent claims? Is Bohemia even possible anymore? The real Bohemia – as its own self-governing realm – crumbled long ago. It was a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire and survived as part of the Hapsburg empire. Today, Bohemia is subsumed within the Czech Republic.

In Hidden Potential, there’s a footnote after the phrase “The New Encyclopaedia Brittanica.”

Tradition demanded that, new or not, the book still be spelled using the diphthong…

I assume they were referring to the “ae” together.

From a NY Times article about car theft in Toronto:

The bread and butter of thieves are the most prosaic cars, like Mr. Wilson’s Honda CR-V, or Ford F-150 trucks.

I took a picture of a book page, but I can’t remember what book:

The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasms, in his 1512 textbook De Copia, stressed the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books, using “an appropriate little sign” to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples, and pithy remarks worth memorizing.” He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.”

This fits with the quote from the Stalin book (above).

I found a 1985 book called “Albion’s Seed,” which details what happened to four distinct ethnic groups that migrated from the UK to the United States.

In an article about hate speech on Substack, I found a quote from the BBC which characterized The Great Reset as:

A vague set of proposals from an influential organization has been transformed by online conspiracy theorists into a powerful viral rallying cry.

An article in the NY Times entitled “A Moonshot Plan to Fill a Cavernous, Dilapidated Armory in the Bronx” brought to my attention The Kingsbridge Armory:

The estimated $1 billion redevelopment of the armory, a 1917 Romanesque arsenal on about five acres in Kingsbridge Heights that was once home to the National Guard …

Wikipedia has some history:

During World War II the armory was active in the war effort. Herbert Lehman, a former governor and U.S. Senator, ceremonially reviewed 10,000 troops there at a 1942 event. It was one of the few registration sites in the city for immigrants from enemy nations. After the war the city offered it to the United Nations General Assembly as a temporary meeting place until the main UN building was finished.

In 1957 the two rear buildings were constructed. It was designated a city landmark in 1974. At that time the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission called it “an outstanding example of military architecture.” Over the years following, the main armory building was neglected, and by the 1990s, the Guard units who called it home were running most of their operations from the annex buildings on West 195th.

I took a picture of a book page, but I can’t remember what book it was from:

The hospital was now an empty shell, a Potemkin facility with a doctor who wasn’t really a doctor and no patients.

In a NY Times article about Harvard University:

Harvard’s decision to create task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus – usually the most anodyne of institutional responses…

In this case, the word is used to mean something that is supposed to represent action, but is a fairly timid response in reality.

This was a word in the NY Times crossword. The clue was:

Belligerent, in British slang

The Jesuits play heavily into the plot of Shogun. They are portrayed as generally greedy and conniving.

I found a reference in Shogun, which was set in 1600. During a storm, a sailor said:

“…it wasn’t in our orders to sail into the unknown. We should be back home by now, safe, with our bellies full, not chasing St. Elmo’s fire.”

Interestingly, the Wikipedia page for the subject notes this:

Accounts of Magellan’s first circumnavigation of the globe refer to St. Elmo’s fire (calling it the body of St. Anselm) being seen around the fleet’s ships multiple times off the coast of South America. The sailors saw these as favorable omens.

In Shogun, that’s exactly where the ship was – it had just passed through the Strait of Magellan and was sailing north up the coast of Chile.

(Is this a mistake? Should the character have said “…not chasing St. Anselm”? Magellan sailed in the 1520s, so perhaps the name changed in the intervening 80 years.)

I’m reading Shogun by James Clavell, and it turns out the last book in his Asian Saga was named Gai-Jin (with the hyphen).

In an article about JPMorgan:

A large commercial customer of the bank told me it “gave” its banking and hedging business to JPMorgan because it believed that the bank’s imprimatur would give the borrower credibility in the market.

In an article about politics:

Still, he said he was proud of the work of the committee, which over many decades has earned a reputation for fecklessness and secrecy.

From Teach Yourself To Live:

Ordinary British citizens are apt to read of millionaires, peers, and other wealthier persons, in death or life being mulcted of vast sums with equanimity, if not approval.

I ran across this: The Oubliette: A Torture of Unspeakable Horror

An oubliette was a specialized type of dungeon, with the only entrance a trap door at the top, agonizingly out of reach of the prisoner.

Often this horrible prison was shaped like a very narrow passage, not wide enough for the prisoner to sit down or even get down on his knees. He was forced to stand or lie prone as he starved to death. He could tilt his head back to see the grate, far above his head and out of reach, but that was all.

It includes a poem about the oubliette and a couple of videos of oubliettes that have been discovered in castle ruins.

From a description of some mummies in Italy.

The natural mummification of the Mummies of Venzone is due to particular environmental conditions that occurred in some tombs of the Cathedral in which the Hypha bombicina Pers developed, a mold with the property of dehydrating tissues inhibiting decomposition.

This term has come up in Letterkenny a few times. That show is Canadian, but it’s set in a town named for the Irish town of Letterkenny and populated with Irish immigrant descendants.

I’ve been watching Moonlighting – the groundbreaking “dramedy” from the 80s – and I feel like it was the first post-modern TV show, specifically in how it was self-aware and broke the fourth wall.

Consider the finale of season 2. At the end, David and Maddie are being chased by the bad guy. They literally run off the shooting set (a hair salon) and into the backlot of the TV studio, as someone on the crew says, “Wait, we have two more minutes of dialog on this set!” A chase ensues through the studio property until they run back onto the Blue Moon office set.

The bad guy is holding them at gunpoint when suddenly a crew member grabs his gun and says he has to get it back to the prop department, as other crew members start to break down the set around them. The actor playing the bad guy complains that he doesn’t know what happens to his character, so David explains to him how his character’s life ends up.

David and Maddie then walk off the now-empty set again, into the parking lot. They have a discussion, still referring to each other as “David” and “Maddie,” even though they should logically be Bruce and Cybill at this point. Then they get into their – presumably personal – cars and drive away, ending the season.

The buffet at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is called “The Bacchanal Buffet.”

I watched a video entitled Where Did All The Manic Pixie Dream Girls Go?, about how the trope died out.

Here’s a video of someone making The Met Cloisters out of gingerbread.

The real building is a museum in Washington Heights.

There’s a short mention of Kinmen in Chip War:

China’s Fujian Province is right across the straits from Taiwan. In the harbor of Fujian’s historic port city of Xiamen sits the Taiwanese-controlled island of Kinmen, which Mao Zedong’s armies repeatedly shelled during the tensest moments of the Cold War

In Chip War, there’s a discussion of why we needed to move away from the vacuum tube and towards “solid state.”

This was a leap forward in computing or it would have been, if not for the moths. Because vacuum tubes glowed like lightbulbs, they attracted insects, requiring regular “debugging” by their engineers. Also like lightbulbs, vacuum tubes often burned out. A state-of-the-art computer called ENIAC, built for the U.S. Army at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945 to calculate artillery trajectories, had eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. On average, one tube malfunctioned every two days, bringing the entire machine to a halt and sending technicians scrambling to find and replace the broken part. ENIAC could multiply hundreds of numbers per second, faster than any mathematician. Yet it took up an entire room because each of its eigh-teen thousand tubes was the size of a fist. Clearly, vacuum tube technology was too cumbersome, too slow, and too unreliable. So long as computers were moth-ridden monstrosities, they’d only be useful for niche applications like code breaking, unless scientists could find a smaller, faster, cheaper switch.

That “smaller, faster, cheaper” switch was the semi-conductor or transistor.

Interestingly, John Cage is also known for “As Slow as Possible,” which is a musical composition where the notes are meant to be held (on organ) for as long as possible. One performance, currently underway, will last 624 years.

From a very silly Netflix series called Obliterated, one character reports that something is “five-by-five,” which causes another, less experienced character, to hesitate and then say, “…uh, ten-by-ten.”

The one responds:

No, you don’t double it, Lerner, it’s still just five-by-five.

In an article about George Santos:

A Republican-led House managed to purge a serial fabulist from its ranks…

In Chip War:

Most of China’s scientists resenting [Mao] for ruining their research – and their lives – by sending them to live on peasant farms to study proletarian politics rather than semiconductor engineering. One leading Chinese expert in optics who was sent to the countryside survived rural reeducation on a diet of rough gains, boiled cabbage, and an occasional grilled snake, as he waited for Mao’s radicalism to subside. While China’s small cadre of semiconductor engineers were hoeing China’s fields, Maoists exhorted the country’s workers that “all people much make semiconductors,” as if every member of the Chinese proletariat could forge chips at home.

In Hidden Potential, there’s a discussion of the origin of the word:

[…] cursor derives from the Latin currere, “to run,” and sometimes translates to “running messenger”, or “errand boy.” It was originally the name for a part on the slide rule – the piece that moves back and forth – and some computer pioneers borrowed it.