Why I'm Just as Glad I'm Retiring:

From an inter-office e-memo sent (and received) on April 23:

Christmas cards and other types of greeting cards should not be sent from one department to another.

 

Syntactaphasia

Open Table last week sent me a confirmation of a restaurant reservation.  It included the instruction that we would be cancelled "unless you call before 10 am on the day of your reservation". 

Um:  suppose our reservation is for 2 pm Thursday and we receive this message on Monday.  Clearly (yes?) a call at 955am Thursday is sufficient.  But what about a call at 1159pm Wednesday?  Or, come to think of it, a call on Monday just after we receive the instruction message? IOW, does the call have to come on the same day of the reservation?  Or is any time "before" enough?

Would the answer be different if the reservation was for next year than it would be for a reservation in the same week?

More to the point, is there a non-clumsy way to restructure the message so that it removes the ambiguity?  Or rather, two ways, one of which allows for an early message while the other does not?

Update:  David A  says:

How about judicious use of parentheses:

before 10 am (on the day of your reservation).

Or,

before 10 am on <>

Or, I think you might be overthinking it a little.

David S adds:

 Aargh.  Eat someplace else.

 Me, I'm also still worrying (I may have written this one before) about the line in the local fishwrap that said "of those who did not die in the first year, even more died in the second."   Well yes, and of those who did die in the first year, none died in the second.

But Can She Do it with Her Teeth?

The staff and management here at Underbelly Central take pride in their conviction that theirs is the only first-class weblog to measure performance in the United States Senate as a function of skill at the castration of defenseless animals.  Up to now, we could discuss only one instance.  Now there are two.

HT JKP.  Alternate headline "A nation of sheep" are rejected because in this case it's pigs.

Are You Ready for Teddy?

Joel suggests that the Davos powwow is Ted Talks for rich guys.  Maybe, but I thought Davos was about exchanging business cards and schmoozing--and that listening to talks (you could arrange it through YouTube) was merely the maguffin.  Like speed-dating.

Joel offers a riposte: remember Grossinger's, the crown jewel of the Borscht Belt vacation hotel circuit.  Joel reports that on "singles weekends," Minnie Grossinger deliberately short-staffed the check-in desk so the queues would build up and people would have to schmooze.  So, Davos as Grossinger's writ large.

At least I guess.  I've never been to Davos.  Or Grossinger's. Anyway, Grossinger's went bankrupt. 

And now that I think of it, I have never successfully completed listening to a Ted Talk.

The New World of Subway Romance

My friend the Crank is a-flutter over the fact that Kindle readers appear to be sopping up Mein Kampf.  Apparently part of the point is that since it's Kindle nobody knows what you are reading, so what the hey.  But this suggests a curious twist in the tradition of underground flirtational literacy.  Used to be that you could pretty easily strike up a conversation based on your neighbor's dust jacket.  It was also a neat sorting mechanism: go for the one with Erica Jong''s Fear of Flying, we would have said; give Mary Daly a bye.

Others have lamented that these days you can't lure in anybody because nobody knows what is behind the grey boards.   But how about "I see you have a Kindle!   So are you enjoying your taste of Hitler?"

Wups, You Missed It

It's 12:12 12/13/13

Hat tip, Sally.

Got That?

You cut a thee dimensional watermelon, you get a two-dimensional ellipse.  You cut a four dimensional ellipse, you get a three-dimensional watermelon.

 Details here.

Gare du Nord-Ouest

PDX, 7 am.  Looks more like a 19c train station than any other airport I know. Or is it a Van Gogh "Starry Night"?

What's a Joint LIke You Doing ....

This is kind of ancient history but it came up in conversation today so I might as well get some mileage out of it. Anyway--back in the 90s I sat on some committees to recommend candidates for judgeships.  Under some sort of rule, we had to ask the candidate whether s/he had ever done drugs.  Most of the  committee members hated the rule--they thought it was crude, intrusive and unhelpful. But hey, rules are rules.  Anyway, answers tended to fall into three categories:

--The short answer is "no." I'm not bragging, maybe I missed out on something important.  But there you are.

--Well, umm, harrumph, ah, but that was many years ago and the records have been expunged.

--Drugs?  What kind of dumb question is that? I was Berkeley in the 70s!  Of course I did drugs!  I drank the bong water!

For valuable prizes,

--Which is most likely to make a good judge?  

--Which is most likely to get the job?

 

Wattle

I will arise and go now,
And go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there,
Of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there,
A hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

WB Yeats, Lake Isle of Inisfree

Wattle, "A construction of poles intertwined with twigs, reeds, or branches, used for walls, fences, and roofs."   Link. Also the activity of constructing same. You apply the clay over the wattle.

And here I thought it was "A fleshy, wrinkled, often brightly colored fold of skin hanging from the neck or throat, characteristic of certain birds, such as chickens or turkeys, some lizards and my fourth-grade teacher."

Wattle I do
When you
Are far away
And I am blue
Wattle I do.

 
 

 

This One is for Taxmom

Grand Canyon Cake:

Update:  yes, very educational,   The White Trash Cookbook instructs (I quote from memory): add a different food coloring to each layer; pour whiskey over the whole.

It's the Intern, They Say

I share the general covert sniggering about the, ahem, unfortunate public "naming" of the Asiana pilots earlier today. I see the National  Transportation Safety Board is now blaming it on a so-far unidentified "intern."  Might be, although I confess I had been playing with a different theory.  Seems to me that the target victim here might have been not the billions of Asians who might choose to take offense at the misnaming,, or the several hundred Americans who might feel embarrassed at the outing of their loutish insularity, but rather the poor dear who got snookered into reading this stuff on the air.   Of course she should have known better and of course that's why there used to be editors, but if this intern story loses its legs, I'd take another look at her disappointed ex-boyfriend.

A Real Porker Corker

The Wichita bureau makes the headline catch of the day:

Spam Doubles as Bull Market Returns

Oh, tee hee, oink oink. 

[Brings to mind my Army buddy who looked art the pink slime on the stainless steel tray and prounced: Government inspected they say, didn't say whether it passed or not.]

But You Knew That: Passion (and Jewelry)

Mrs. Buce hied me off to Best Buy this morning with a refractory Ipad.  I there acquired the services of an intelligent youngster who spent about half an hour fiddling with the device (no charge) before explaining what she thought I needed to do and making it clear that I should do it myself because I wouldn't want to pay her as much as she would charge.  

"Do you want me to write it out?" she asked.

"Nah, I understand," said.

She grabbed a Post-it and pen.  "I'll write it out,"  she said.

While she wrote, I noticed that she was wearing the largest ring I had ever seen outside the Vatican. Turquoise and silver, as in "Indian."

Finally she passed over a couple of Post-its and turned as if to move away to her next, one may hope more profitable, encounter.  Idly I said:

"Do you make your own rings?"

She stopped in her tracks. "No," she said, but then she turned and launched into what gave promise of being a long narrative about the jewelry game and its intricacies. After a minute or two she caught on to herself, put a cork in it, thanked me and turned away.

What have we learned today children?  We learned that everybody has a passion.  But you knew that.

Fun with Constitutional Equivalence

Isn't there a national security exception for the second amendment?  Or enemy combatant status for the guy who ran the Texas fertilizer plant?  Or at least for the Elvis impersonator who tried to assassinate the president with ricin?  Or all Elvis impersonators?

Nerd Sweepstakes: We Have a Winner!

There's an episode of Cheers where the entertainment at the accountant's party is the guy who can recite all the telephone area codes.  I think he loses the nerd sweepstakes to this guy at the Berkeley economics and annual skit party, with charity auction add-on:

Professor Gorodnichenko (who also swept the awards ceremony tonight, winning the Best Professor and Best Adviser awards) donated another auction item-- a check with the amount drawn from a beta distribution with parameters alpha=3 and beta=2, multiplied by $100. The beta distribution is only nonzero on the unit interval, so the check will have value between $0 and $100. The mean of the beta distribution is alpha/(alpha+beta), so the expected value should be $100 (3/5)=$60. The item went for $50 -- so everyone in the audience must have been risk averse, loss averse, financially illiterate, or liquidity constrained (or some combination, like me.)

 Link. That would be Yuriy Gorodnichenko, and he is apparently all in at this game: he also offered to stump up $500 "if Christina Romer or Janet Yellen becomes Fed chair at any time in the future."  Any time?

Happily, My Kids Cannot Say This about Me

Bumper sticker:

Kind of Famous at Burning Tree

Hey Guys, it was Only a Joke!

And here I thought I was kidding: just last Friday I suggested that they might try delivering our Sunday paper by drone.  Turns out in in Southern France, they are doing just that.
 

Green-energy Noir

My friend Larry wrote a novel called When the Sacred Ginmill Closes.  Now this:

#FailedNoir When The Sacred Windmill Closes @lawrenceblock Of all the alternative clean energy source facilities she had to walk into mine.
— greg bernhard (@GregBernhard) March 30, 2013

Heh,   The whole hashtag is kinda fun, BTW.  And FWIW, Larry is on a roll right now: the the forthcoming movie version of his Walk Among the Tombstones is in production and he gets to hang out on with Liam Neeson in a cemetery in Queens.

Did Not Hegel Say that HIstory Repeats Itself

First as tragedy, then as irony?