I just listened to Candlebox’s song “Sometimes” — for some reason a common title for songs by grunge and alternative bands — and forgot how much I loved the lyrics.  Here’s an excerpt:

Somehow we’ll find a way
We’ll paste it back together
These ripped out pages of old coloring books
Where your gold is silver, my blue is gray
Its all held together by cellophane tape

But we change directions, we watch the tides
And we borrow too much
We form restrictions, we form lines
And we separate you from me

But sometimes — sometimes we carry more weight than we own
Oh, but sometimes — sometimes goes on and on and on and on

Marvelous.

The excellent humor blog at MumblingNerd had a post collecting jokes of the format “My wife’s gone to….”  They are of the following template:

“My wife’s gone to the Caribbean.”
“Jamaica?”
“No, she went of her own accord.”

This old joke, by the way, is the origin of the title of Led Zeppelin’s 1973 pseudo-Reggae song “D’yer Mak’er”.  In the accent in which they spoke, this is pronounced how I would say “Jer-MAKE-er”, which is how they pronounce “Jamaica”.  Languages are funny, aren’t they?

I didn’t know this was a format of a class of jokes, though.  Some of my favorites that he put up:

‘My wife went to a music concert in South Korea’ ~ ‘Seoul?’ ~ ‘No, it was R&B’

‘My wife bought a house in Sweden’ ~ ‘Stockholm?’ ~ ‘No, it was custom-built’

‘My wife’s on holiday just south of London’ ~ ‘Surrey?’ ~ ‘I SAID, MY WIFE’S ON HOLIDAY JUST SOUTH OF LONDON!’

I loved the idea, and made a few of my own:

“My wife’s not going to her conference in the South of England.”
“Kent?”
“No, she just refuses.”

“My wife used to maintain aircraft weapons systems when she was serving in India.”
“Bombay?”
“No, mostly machine gun turrets.”

“My wife’s gone to open a restaurant in India.”
“Delhi?”
“No, a diner.”

“My wife’s gone to sculpt a topiary at an embassy in Russia.”
“Moscow?”
“No, an evergreen giraffe.”

“My wife’s gone to open a toy factory in Nigeria.”
“Lagos?”
“No, Tinker Toys.”

Perhaps too weak:

“My wife’s gone to teach in rural Norway.”
“Hell?”
“Yeah, she doesn’t particularly like it, but that would be overstating it.”

This town in Canada, and the capital of Thailand, are left as exercises for the reader.  Private exercises.

OK, you (a collective proper subset) have asked for it: here is a sneak peek at a scene from my in-progress SF novel.

The assassin didn’t hear anything until Zero spoke.

“Squire?” said Zero.  The assassin spun, as he had a few minutes before, but without pulling the trigger this time.  He wore a fashionable and semiformal orange denim kilt and a black rugby shirt, fringed in hyperwhite.  A pea-soup duster, which until recently had hidden a belt with matching hip-holsters, was swept back.  He was shod in the trendy faux-bare-feet style, and the weapon from his right-side holster was in his hand, pointed at the middle of Zero’s chest.  Zero’s weapon was pointed at the assassin’s face.

“Easy,” said Zero.  “You don’t want to fire that thing.  What’s your name?”

The assassin barked a laugh.

“You’re Terran,” said Zero.  “Male, maybe twenty-five.  You’ve been captured on camera.  They will have looked up your name by now.  I just don’t happen to know it.  Tell me, and I will have something to call you other than Squire or Assassin.”

The assassin equivocated momentarily.  “Seamus,” he said.  “You can call me Seamus.”

“Good, that’s a start.  Seamus.  Thank you.  Now, if you would, please put that on the floor and slide it over to me with your foot.”

Seamus laughed again, a harsh sound like flint striking steel.  “You would like that, no?”

“Yes, I would,” said Zero.  “But not for the reason you think.  Because I abhor killing.”  Zero took a step forward.

“Stop!  I have a gun!” snapped Seamus.

Zero’s head shook minutely, back and forth.  “No, Squire,” he said.  “What you have is a sidearm, if you are military.  A pistol if you are an enthusiast, a weapon if you are an engineer.  You would call it a gun only if you just purchased it last week.  You slipped it through some of the most sophisticated detection screens on this planet.  How did you do that?”

Seamus chuckled.

“That’s OK,” said Zero.  “I’ll guess.  What you have is a Pulsar-7 corundum pistol.  Recent manufacture — maybe this Rat.  Last Pig at the earliest.  Right so far?”

Seamus’s face remained impassive.

“OK.  It’s all ceramic — that’s how you got it into the IPA Parliamentary room.  Room-temperature superconducting ceramic, which is expensive.  From the charred parliamentarians around us –” Zero gestured with his head without shifting his gaze “– you just pulled the trigger and pirouetted.  That means a highly illegal full-automatic modification.  Full-automatic means you wouldn’t have a gnat’s chance of bringing that through a CQA post, even here on Calymon.  Your pirouette probably took at least five seconds.  Maybe six.  That means liquid oxygen-cooled.  I’m still right.”  The last was a statement more than a question.  “As for padparadscha….”

Seamus blinked twice, then tried to hide it retroactively.

“Yeah.  Padparadscha.  You don’t know that word.”  Statement.  “I wasn’t sure until I saw your reaction.  The best padparadscha is from your corner, on Terra.  The Subcontinent.  Padparadscha is corundum.  A beautiful pink-orange.  Great for jewelry, better for lasers, like the weapon in your hand.  You could have bought some of the stone at home.  But you didn’t.  Do you know what that means?”  He didn’t wait for a response.  “It means,” he said, slowly moving his left hand to the collar of his tunic and pulling it down.  “I wore the right color shirt.”  Under his loose tunic lay a form-fitted mailshirt, ashen spidersilk over blood-red ruby.

Seamus’s hand began to tremble the slightest bit.

“Steady,” said Zero.  “Keep your hand steady.  I’m not here to scare you.  I’m here to educate you.  For instance: if you were to calculate the absolute worst place in the Association to commit a mass assassination this week, you couldn’t have chosen better.  You are in the city of Noki.  So, Noki sheriffs.  Province of Ellssiss.  So, Ellssiss marshals.  On Calymon, but at an interplanetary event, so you have both Interior and Exterior Calymonian intelligence services with jurisdiction.  This is an ad hoc Parliamentary session.  Every single attending delegation has native-soil claims to this meeting hall, and they all brought security.  Plus Parliamentary police.  And why are they here?  To discuss the Flaro ‘problem’.  That means that, begrudgingly, both sher and resh Flaronians have the right to carry arms in this hall.  If all the first part of the list wasn’t enough to scare you, the Flaronian bit should.”

Seamus’s hand hadn’t stopped trembling.  After a pause: “Which are you?”

“Which am I?  No.  I’m just a weapons enthusiast.  I like that pistol in your hand.  I like mine more.”

Seamus looked incredulous.  “That?”

“Yes,” said Zero.  “This.”  He slowly rolled it first clockwise, then anticlockwise, letting Seamus see it without moving his aim from between Seamus’s eyes.  “Yes, I know it’s old.  An antique.  A needler-railgun.  Magnetic coils accelerate iron spikes at Mach-several.  This one has a mixed magazine: it can fire four-nought needles — that’s finer than a sable’s hair — up to 6-go bolts, which are thick enough to hammer into teak wood.  It’s an antique, as I said, and it had an antique stabilizing computer in it.  But I removed it.”

Seamus’s hand began to steady as his mouth began to develop a sneer.

“I’m not done,” said Zero.  “I removed it because it would get in the way.  I can control my aim by one two-thousandth of a degree.  That is more than accurate enough to perforate the three dots of an ellipsis on a printed page at a hundred meters.  Your pistol’s computer couldn’t get within two orders of magnitude of that, let alone this one’s old computer.”  He saw the look of naked disbelief on Seamus’s face.  “Oh, you bet your life,” he said with a fleeting grin.  “Squire Seamus, my liege.  Put your weapon on the…”

Seamus’s forefinger depressed the trigger pad.  The biometer measured the patterns of the nerve running through his finger, more individual than any retina print, in microseconds.  With a scream, Seamus jerked his hand, moving the focus of the beam up toward Zero’s face.

Zero had a moment to smell the dusty scorched flax of his tunic and the slightly metallic char of the spidersilk, but he had been right about the color of the ruby: the corundum reflected most of the energy of the beam, scattering it harmlessly, the little that was absorbed feeling like a matchstick dragged upwards along his sternum.

With a fluid snap of his arm, his eyes still locked on Seamus’s face, his needler moved down and to the left, the air snapped with a whip-crack, and the aim of the needler returned to between Seamus’s eyes.

Just at the top of Zero’s mailshirt, the laser beam stopped moving, stopped burning, and a fraction of a second later Seamus’s shriek of rage turned into a howl of disbelief as his nerves informed his brain of what had happened.  Seamus gazed wildly at his wrist, thrashing his arm from the elbow, trying to move his curled digits, no more responsive than the trigger pad had become when the nerves through his finger had stopped transmitting.

“That,” said Zero quietly, firmly, “was a three-nought needle.  I clipped the back seam of the O2 tank in your pistol.  What you fail to feel in your wrist and hand is what it doesn’t feel like when your carpal nerve is suddenly frozen.  If I call for help now, Squire –” Zero’s expression bore a sadness Seamus could not understand “– the doctors can save the rest of your arm.  Reach for your other pistol with your left hand, and the next bolt severs your corpus callosum.  My Squire, my liege, my master,” said Zero, “I do not want that any more than you do.  On the ground, if it pleases you.  Now.”

(Unlike the rest of this site, this content is copyrighted All Rights Reserved.  See here for details of the mcgees.org content license.)

I’ll add this to my short story from when I was 15 and my poem from when I was 18.  We were given the (brilliant) assignment in class to update a nursery rhyme.  This was such a good idea for whoever put it together — the teacher, or if it was on state curriculum or something.  I was assigned “Jack and Jill”.

Jack and Jill (updated)

Jack and Jill drove up the hill and hit another commuter
Jack jumped out and hopped about and fell on his Apple computer
A cop was hailed and Jack was jailed and this was the final decision
For when he struck that Nissan truck he caused a four-car collision

(This is probably either a good argument for why you would have wanted to know me at age 11 or a good argument why you would not have.  Not sure.)

There’s an odd phenomenon in which one collecting field will have some things much more cheaply than in other fields, and some things much more expensively.  Here are some ideas for using other types of stores, or other collecting fields’ supplies, to help with stamp collecting, sorting, and shipping.  There are of course converse cases, but  those belong in other posts. 

Trading cards

• Padded 3-ring binders are much cheaper in trading card collecting than in stamp collecting, and sometimes even cheaper than non-padded ones from the office center.  They’re great if you don’t mind a logo on the front (most have one) — or those can be easily covered with a label.
• “Toploaders” — hard cases — are cheap and great for inserting a stamp or small pane or cutout into to mail cheaply, and are thin enough that they never get tampered with in customs.  These are under 15¢ apiece.  Look for these at Amazon.
• “Penny sleeves” — thin archival plastic sleeves to securely hold a trading card —  are crystal clear (you can easily scan through them, for instance) and are great for stamps.  They don’t seal like most stamp bags do, but they are super-cheap (about $1 for 100 — it’s not just a clever nickname!)  One can fold them over and hold them securely with sticky tape.  Make sure to fold them — you don’t want stamps sliding up and touching tape adhesive!  Here are some at Amazon.

Comics

• Comic “Bags & Boards” have lots of uses.  Put a backing board into the mylar sleeve, slide a stamp sheet in front of it, fold the flap over and seal it.  A “Current Comic” size cut into thirds fits perfectly into a #6¾ envelope; therefore they can be used to stiffen covers sent for first-day servicing or can stiffen FDC-size polybags and glassines.  The bags themselves can hold panes.  These are around 9¢ apiece for a pair of bag and board.  Here are some at Amazon.

Office Supply Stores

• Letter filing and storage boxes are frequently much less expensive at office supply houses than through stamp supply mail-order houses.  If you buy your envelopes in bulk, keep the boxes and store (a smaller number of) full envelopes inside.  The cardboard will almost certainly be non-archival even if the envelopes are — line them or make sure your envelopes are in archival plastic.

Craft Stores

• “Archival mist” — an aerosol can or pump bottle/can full of alkaline fluid to deter yellowing of acid paper — can be a tenth of the cost at a craft store compared to stamp supplies.  This is easier to get in a walk-in store than by mail order, too, because some have shipping restrictions.

Any other ideas for cost savings in philately?  Add them as you like!

I saw a commercial for a ‘Chicken Pot Pie’ Hot Pocket.  Now they’re just messing with us.

Just a matter of time:  “Have you tried the ‘Hot Pocket’ Hot Pocket?  It’s a Hot Pocket filled with a Hot Pocket.  Tastes just like a Hot Pocket!”

Really bad insomnia past few days.  So I’m taking the time to do a bunch of work on the site.

Tonight I revamped my stamp offers page.  It’s now basically a “What I collect, or used to collect before it was all stolen” page, due to lack of funds.

Enjoy!

I collect Machin stamps — the long-running series of renderings of a plaster bust of the head of Queen Elizabeth II.  If you’ve received any mail from the UK since 1967, you are likely to have seen them.  This picture of the Queen — printed in various fashions after a bust sculpted by the late Arnold Machin — is history’s most-reproduced image (in print), with billions that have run off the presses.

This is the picture on Wikipedia:

I collect examples with 22m circular date stamps — the “cancels” — situated squarely on the stamp and clearly readable.  But I set aside other ones that catch my eye.

And this one did catch my eye:

Isn’t that cool?!  I’m working on a Machin album right now — designing specialized album pages to print from my computer.  This image will be reproduced on the album cover, and the actual stamp will appear on the first page.

I plan on a set of pages on this site on the topic of collecting postmarks on Machins, that will have a literature review — if you are a stamp collector or just an interested person, please reply with any suggestions of what else to include.  But until then, I’ll give links to what I consider the best current printed references:

This is a letter I am sending to the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority regarding a negative experience with the 268 bus.  I will update the thread with any responses from the MTA.

16 January 2011

Dear Customer Service Agent,

On 15 January 2011, I was awaiting the 268 bus from Lower Azusa and Halifax, in El Monte, to the Lower El Monte Transit Station.  The bus was scheduled to arrive at 18:22.

The bus was nine minutes late, arriving at 18:31.  Perhaps in an attempt to make up lost time, the driver simply drove past where I was waiting at the stop, despite my signal.  I believe, but am not certain, that it was bus # 7209.

This is, obviously, unacceptable.  The 268 bus is, by far, the least-reliable bus I have encountered in the entire Metro system.  Late, early, and missing buses are the norm, but this is the first time a late bus has refused to stop.  Even if the bus were to have picked me up this time, presuming the driver did not skip any other stops to speed the passage, I would have been nine minutes late to a stop with a 12 minute transfer window.  It is questionable whether I could have made the transfer in any case.

I waited for the next bus, roughly 45 minutes later.  I would like to commend the driver of this bus, # 7023, for his friendliness and professionalism.

Would you please provide an explanation of what happened and a description of what is being done to keep this from happening again?

Photographer Paul Nicklen, in an expedition off Antarctica, captured amazing images when a female leopard seal decided he was floating helplessly.

Nicklen:

“After [the pictured] big female seal realized that I was unable to catch a swimming penguin, she tried different ways of presenting her offerings, elegantly moving toward me in different postures.”

“She no doubt thought that I was doomed and would starve to death, but without her knowledge, she gave me the greatest gift of my career as a wildlife photojournalist.”

Put aside the seal eating the cute penguins.  We, as H. sapiens, are tempted to feed and rescue helpless animals we encounter in the wild.  Is it surprising that other species do, too?

Because it is, to me.  Every time.  And it shouldn’t be.  How arrogant for us to think that we have special empathy that “the lower animals” cannot possess or demonstrate.  I love these pictures and how they remind me that my pretensions of uniqueness as a species are unjustified in many areas.

The site last.fm allows one to “scrobble” (make a record of) a play of a song on one’s music player.  I had to reset my plays a year ago due to scrobbling errors — many tracks were being wildly duplicated.  Now I have another year’s worth of data.  Top 15 artists over the past year, in descending order:

This leads me to two conclusions: (1) I love data mining and (2) my musical tastes are absurdly predictable and haven’t changed all that much over the last ~20 years.

Here’s a wee sampler I put together for you:

I’m watching the pilot of the program ReGenesis.  Crack team of scientists.  Pretty formulaic so far, but interesting characters.

So, there’s reasonably good setup for exposition, and the main character (a molecular biologist) says “OK, Virology 101:  Viruses are very small.  They’re about a millionth of an inch across.  If this room were a cell, a virus would be a pinprick.”

Wait, what?  BOTEC time.  How big is a ‘pinprick’?  I’d say about a tenth of a millimeter.  That means there are 10,000 in a meter, and maybe 80,000 across the room they’re in.  So if a virus is a millionth of an inch across, then by this scale a cell is between an eighth and a 16th of an inch across.  Which it’s not.  A cell’s about 10 microns (1 × 10^-5m) across: off by a factor of 200.

OK, so say we keep the scale.  Divide the cell width by 80,000.  That would make a virus 1 × 10^-10m across.  Which it’s not.  They’re talking about Poxviridae, which is about 2 × 10^-7m across: off by a factor of 500.

So, what’s the actual scale?  A human cell is roughly 50 times the width of a pox virion.  So if they’re in a room 8m across, rather than a pinprick, it’s about six inches across.  The difference between the ratio of six inches to the room and a pinprick is about 2000.

Am I making too big a deal out of this?  Maybe.  But it’s a mystery show.  Presumably, we’re supposed to potentially figure it out while they’re working on it.  Or else, at least have it plausible at the end.

If you’re unconvinced, imagine a traditional detective show.  Someone is talking about how fast a car could have fled the scene of a crime.  But instead of saying “The max speed of a Toyota is about 100mph”, they say “The max speed of a Toyota is about Mach 200″ (that’s about ten times the highest velocity the space shuttle reaches as it goes into orbit).  Or instead of “Just a drop of this poison is enough to kill a man — he wouldn’t have noticed it in his coffee”, they say “Just half a cup of this poison is enough to kill a man”.  Would that be fun in a show?  No, right?

Or let’s say there were a book that some people wanted to put into a science classroom, that instead of saying the Earth was 4½ billion years old, was off by a factor of 2000, and said the Earth was only 2¼ million years old.  That’d suck, right?  But that one’s silly.  Certainly no American would trust a book that said the Earth was as preposterously young as two million years old, right?!  Good thing!

I have converted everything in the Single Malts Pages from static HTML files to the content management system.  Many of them are quaint snapshots in time of my reviews from when I was much less experienced.  Some generated awesome flames, examples of which can be found in the entries for Loch Dhu and Johnnie Walker Green Label.

If you take a look and find any errors, please let me know.