bunsen_h

"That's a really wild premise," said Dahl.  "What gave you the idea in the first place?"

"Well," said Jenkins, "there were a lot of clues.  But I think that what really made everything crystallize for me was the trip where everyone was singing."

"Singing?" asked Duvall.

"Singing.  We were on a routine trip to ferry a diplomat to a conference, when we got a call diverting us to a research station.  And, like, a minute after the call ended, Captain Abernathy started singing about what he thought might happen there.  Q'eeng and Kerensky joined in, in kind of harmony, and the rest of the people on the bridge did a chorus.  Then they did a little dance, and then everyone settled back into their routine.  None of them seemed to notice it was odd or remember what happened."

They all stared at Jenkins.  Finally, Duvall said, "Singing.  And dancing."

"All through that trip.  Every time something notable happened, whatever senior officers were present sang a song.  They all somehow knew the words and music.  Well, the words, at least.  I'm not sure if they all knew the music.  Abernathy sounded terrible, and Q'eeng was... words fail me.  His people make beautiful music.  He doesn't.  Anyway, we got to the station, we found out that the monsters' birthdays were messed up by the local leap year, there was one last big musical number, and we never had anything like that happen again."

"And you figured from this that the ship and crew were under the supernatural control of something that liked occasional bits of musical theater," Dahl said.

"It had to be something like that, yes," said Jenkins.

Rule 404: For any subject, there is a website that is supposed to contain porn about it, but which is not working.

The snake I was following yesterday turned out to be a gopher snake, not a rattlesnake, and anyway I did not try to pick it up.

We did see a rattlesnake today, though, and had to wait with our tour guide in the petrified wood forest until the snake could be collected for relocation.

-----

My Nicoll number is 1.  That is, I have conversed with James Nicoll but am not Nicoll himself.

If you have conversed with me but not with Nicoll, your Nicoll number is 2.  And so on, as with the Erdős number.

If you are James Nicoll, your Nicoll number is 0.

If you are one of the James Nicolls who have perished in alternate universes, your Nicoll number is -1.
 

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION

SERIES 1 EPISODE 2:  "THE NAKED NOW"

[...]

Yar: What I want now is gentleness.  And joy... and love.  From you, Data; you are fully functional, aren't you?

Data: Of course, but...

Yar: How fully?

Data: In every way, of course.  I am programed in multiple techniques.  A broad variety of pleasuring.

Yar: Oh!  You jewel, that's exactly what I hoped!

Data: I have found that the articles in Cosmo vary little from month to month.

Yar: That's more than I wanted to know.  Get in here.
 

I tend to be nerdishly amused by literalism, especially when I'm tired.

I am amused that Yoplait's line of Greek yogurt appears to be called "gora".

... Which I suppose must mean "no market"..?
 

Every so often there's an announcement over the hospital PA system, of (possible) relevance to everyone.  Most are about some problem, the "code" announcements.  "Code Red" means that there's a fire, "Green" is for an evacuation, "Blue" for a cardiac arrest; there's "Yellow" for a missing patient and "Amber" for an infant abduction.  "White" is a violent or other behavioural problem; that's for security people to deal with.  They've pretty much used up the available colours (though not purple/violet, for some reason) and have moved on to numbers -- "Code 222" is for a neonatal emergency and "333" is for an obstetrical emergency for the mother.

On Sunday afternoons, there's an all-hands announcement about a Catholic Mass to be held soon in the hospital prayer room.  When I hear it, I think "What, Code 666?"
 

 

This is a book "mash-up" that's very dependent on your knowing a couple of children's books. If you don't get it, it's probably not worth the trouble of an explanation, but the "parents" are L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and Nesbit's Five Children And It.  It's a bit surprising to me how many people think that E. Nesbit's book really was titled Three Children And It, per a Google search.  Four ... was also somewhat popular.

This took much longer to put together than I expected, mostly because of difficulty matching the font for the authors' names.  The font identifiers at www.linotype.com and www.identifont.com came up with entirely wrong suggestions, based on a series of questions about the font's properties; with Adobe's, I couldn't even figure out how to mark the "categories" for a couple of words on the cover of a book.  The identifier at www.myfonts.com took an uploaded image and quickly gave me a couple of possibilities that were pretty much bang-on — I still had to tweak the proportions a bit but it was enough to work with.  I don't have access to the font (Century Expanded Italic) on any of the computers here, but for such a small bit of text, copy/pasting from images of a font sampler didn't take much work.
 

I don't tend to see the glass as half-full or half-empty.  I see it as containing a liquid which appears to be water and therefore (if true) possibly useful if one were thirsty or wanting to cook or do other chemical work, but also presenting a hazard by aspiration or slippage (if spilled), and dangerously fragile, and too close to someone's elbow.
 

For ambiviolent , among others: Bolcom and Morris's Lime Jell-O Marshmallow Cottage Cheese Surprise.  (Transcribed here for your convenience.)