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Sep-17-11
 | | Domdaniel: <Annie> Help. Drowning. Apart from some seriously cryptic and tenuous links, I see no reason to connect 'Helle' with surfing. Is it a Beach Boys song? A technical term for a wave tunnel (or Hellebore)?
Did Polynesian Hellenics invent the surfboard?
I'm starting to miss the obvious. I completed a pretty difficult cryptic crossword last night, unscrambling a few really fiendish clues en route. But the very last one I got was not only easy, but chess-related -- something about "a man taken on board", with 'piece' the answer. |
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Sep-17-11
 | | Annie K.: <Dom> just Helle and (or 'in') high water... :) |
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Sep-17-11
| | Domdaniel: Aaaaaaargh.
This is a high water mark. Years building my cryptic cred, and then a moment of blankness. Bit like chess, rilly. |
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Sep-17-11
| | Annie K.: Awww, it's ok sweet, we still believe in you! ;) |
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Sep-17-11
| | Domdaniel: Maybe it's just <connotation overdose> - I *have* been doing a lot of crosswords recently. When the internet reached Britain, somebody pointed out that 'surfing' was a foreign and deeply alien activity (Cornwall hadn't been discovered yet, and nobody surfed the Atlantic breakers off the west of Ireland). It was said that 'surfing the net' should be called something else in England. One idea that appealed to me was "pottering in the virtual allotment". It captures the purposeful pointlessness of the activity rather well. |
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Sep-17-11
| | Annie K.: Too many crosswords can have that effect, yeah. :)
Hmm, one's online experience is what one makes of it. |
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Sep-17-11
| | Domdaniel: Tonight's reading: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_ROHKHBnDz... Yes, I actually have this book. Mostly postmodernist nonsense, but with a Canadian texture which I like. <Ohio> Don't be taken it: it's not about the King, despite the cover pics. |
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Sep-17-11
| | Domdaniel: <one's online experience is ...> Hmm, one's online experience? Yikes, initially. (5)
= Hooey. |
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Sep-17-11
| | Annie K.: Definitely too many crosswords. :p |
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Sep-17-11
| | Domdaniel: I knew reading Wordsworth would eventually turn up trumps. Any poet who finds phrases like 'marble index' can't be all bad. <Newton ... with his prism and silent faceThat marble index of a mind
Forever voyaging through strange seas of thought
Alone.>
And now this, which seems apposite somehow:
<A Moralist perchance appears;
Led, Heaven knows how! to this poor sod:
And he has neither eyes nor ears;
Himself his world, and his own God.> |
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Sep-18-11
| | Domdaniel: Some judicious cleansing in one of the other arenas, I see. Probably just as well. |
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| Sep-19-11 | | mworld: I saw this on a license plate today: God Said It.... I believe it & that settles it. |
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Sep-19-11
 | | perfidious: <mworld> That's priceless! |
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Sep-19-11
| | Domdaniel: The Lord is my bus driver, I shall pay no fare. |
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Sep-19-11
| | Domdaniel: During a bout of number sickness, I found a sequence that isn't in the (vast, and vastly reputable) online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. It starts:
1, 5, 17, 29, 53, 73, 109, 137, ... and goes on through such numbers as 1277 and 100601. Yes, it looks like the primes of form 4n+1, with some left out (13, 37, 41 etc). It can be defined as those primes of form 4n+1, or their products, which exceed a square by 1 when multiplied by 10. ie, primes of form 4n+1 (and their products) such that 10(p^2) = a^2 + 1. The innaresting bit is that I can prove that the values of 'a' include every number ending in 3 or 7. And this is a necessary and sufficient condition. *skips boring explanation, 'new' math style, cuts to bottom line ...* Therefore, for all y, (10y ± 3)^2 is of form 4n+1.
QED.
I'm calling it the Domdecimal Sequence. |
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Sep-19-11
| | Domdaniel: 1. Cricket trumps Poker. Svid bowls ex-Goth Grinch Gris. 1b. Does 'Grischuk' really mean 'Grey vomit' in Old Slavic? 1c. Old Irish had a colour word, 'glas', which meant both 'green' and 'grey'. They found that the wrapping of grey flags and the <wearin' o' the grey> didn't have the same ring to it. 2. Was there really a 1930s movie with the line "Cocaine ... or cards?" or did Pynchon make it up? 2b. No, I most certainly have not. Not for years. Though I've played some poker and bridge, barebrained, OK? Colour words ... hmmm. Might go there next ... |
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Sep-20-11
| | perfidious: <Domdaniel: ...2. Was there really a 1930s movie with the line "Cocaine ... or cards?" or did Pynchon make it up?..> I've no idea, but it's conceivable that one might have been set early in that century (in the days when Coca-Cola, among many other things, actually contained cocaine) when the US government hadn't yet proscribed its use. The one reason that may never have happened in any movie was due to the Hays Code: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hays_C... Will Hays was a moralistic SOB. |
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| Sep-20-11 | | mworld: snuff was pretty indispensable stuff. |
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Sep-20-11
| | Domdaniel: <perf> No argument from me about Hays. By the time they reinvented 'bedroom' scenes - think Doris Day and Rock Hudson (oops) sitting up in twin beds, male in pajamas and legally married wife in Hollywood burqa - things got really ridiculous. Maybe I'm thinking of Ronald Reagan's monkey business in 'Bedtime for Bonzo'. But movies from the twenties and *early* 1930s - before Hays got a grip - can be surprisingly explicit. Occasional nudity, even. And dubious subject matter, as in Browning's 'Freaks'. Not to mention King Kong. "Can you remember Fay Wray
That exquisite satin-draped frame?"
Making the unreal reel. |
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| Sep-20-11 | | Shams: <"Can you remember Fay Wray
That exquisite satin-draped frame?">
Nice, I figured you for a Tim Curry fan. I think it's "delicate" though...time for a refresher, <Dom>, Saturday at midnight, wear hosiery! |
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Sep-20-11
| | Domdaniel: <Shams> If you promise not to rain on my parade ... A small independent cinema - The Classic, now closed - in Dublin ran The Rocky Horror Show every Saturday night for 18 or 20 years. I knew the owner well, and used to drop by once or twice a year to see the hardcore fans singing along. And all the rest. I wouldn't even *try* to watch it on DVD.
I'm not sure I count as a Tim Curry *fan* either, though I recall seeing him as a Demon in Ridley's Scott's 'Legend', opposite a teen Tom Cruise. |
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Sep-20-11
 | | OhioChessFan: <<Ohio> Don't be taken it: it's not about the King, despite the cover pics.> It's all about the King.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsVH... |
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Sep-20-11
| | Domdaniel: <Ohio> Just in case you thought the phrase "don't be taken it" was some sort of Irish slang ("arrah, sure, don't be taken it" said Paddy, downing his 18th pint...) - it isn't. It's a typo. I meant "Don't be taken in".
Even Homer nods. I've seen him, on The Simpsons.
Y'know, I'm kinda starting to believe in the King. One of them, anyhow. |
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Sep-20-11
| | Domdaniel: Innaresting. Is the line "Cocaine or cards?" from Fritz Lang's classic piece of German Expressionist cinema, *Dr Mabuse Der Spieler* ...? Sometimes translated as 'Dr Mabuse the Gambler' ... but as everyone *here* knows, a Spieler is also a *player*. Mabuse is as much a hypnotist as a gambler.
http://atowninblackandwhite.wordpre... In some fictional offshoots he becomes a German super-villain. One story opposed him to a Nazi Superman. But ... it could still be a Pynchonism, as there's a lot of fictionalized German film in Gravity's Rainbow -- such as *Alpdrucken* and other films by Gerhard Von Goll, aka Der Springer. "Flight is given only to Der Springer". |
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| Sep-20-11 | | Shams: <Domdaniel> Have you read anything about the fellow Pynchon roomed with at Cornell? This is half trivia question, half curious inquiry. I find the fellow compelling, the one I'm referring to, that is. |
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