SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #172 New Moon of December 27, 2008 Contents copyright 2008 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* This issue, which is a little bit late, was due a couple of days after Christmas. That reminds me that I've long associated the days right after Christmas with a kind of melancholy feeling. I think it started when I was a child. Christmas would be over, and I would start looking through the coming year's calendar in hopes that it would show Christmas coming again soon. But it never did. There was always a long list of other special and not-so-special days that would have to come and go before I would be able to have another Christmas. Many of these times, like summer vacation days at the beach, would be enjoyable enough in themselves when they actually came around. But they weren't Christmas, and when looked at from the vantage point of the first few ordinary post-holiday days they were just something I would have to get to and get through to get to Christmas again. Our birthdays, my sister's in late December and mine in early January, provided a brief respite. But they weren't really all that big a deal, at least not most years. And nobody ever seemed to invite us kids to stay up late for New Year's Eve. As January wore on the dull gray feeling would fade. I think it was pretty well gone by Groundhog Day, although there was no definite end to it that I could point to. I just thought about it less and less, until eventually I wasn't thinking about it at all, and was just taking each day as it came. ********************* Speaking of wishing for Christmas to return sooner than after a whole year, many merchants are unhappy with the way this last holiday shopping season turned out. Are they wishing they could do it over? Maybe they are and maybe they aren't, but how about if they could have some more holiday shopping seasons this year? We could declare a number of other holidays, such as Valentine's Day, May Day, and Labor Day, to be gift-giving holidays with Santa Claus and decorations and carols and presents, just like Christmas. In fact, they would be better than Christmas because they have nothing in particular to do with Christ, and are thus not limited to Christians. These would be days when Santa could visit children of all religions, including those with no religious affiliation at all. Likewise, Christians would no longer have any grounds for complaining about their holiday being taken over by secular interests. Thus these would be days when merchants would be free to exhort citizens to do their patriotic duty to help the economy by spending money without having to worry about offending anyone. ********************* When I said Santa would be able visit everyone on the new economy- boosting gift-giving holidays, I neglected to mention one exception: Terrorists. Terrorists, almost by definition, are Bad. No Santa Claus for them. In fact, that's how you would be able to know who to be afraid of: If Santa doesn't visit someone on one of these new holidays, it'll be because that person is a terrorist. So as you're out gift shopping for the new holidays you'd better make sure that Santa visits you and all your friends, so people won't think you're all terrorists. Thus by declaring these new gift-giving holidays we kill two birds with one stone: We help the economy and we fight terrorism. (Note to environmentalists: The bit about killing birds is just metaphorical, except for turkeys for holiday dinners.) ********************* Someone I know keeps a deck of Tarot cards. Every day this person draws a card and meditates on it. One day recently the card was the Ace of Pentacles. But they made a typo when they posted about it on their blog. That got me to wondering what kind of deck would have Tentacles as a suit, and what the various cards in that suit would signify. And what of the other suits? What might they be, especially if their names are just a letter or two different from the "normal" Tarot suits? Pentacles: Tentacles? Swords: Words? Swards? Awards? Wands: Hands? Bands? Winds? WAMDs? Cups: Caps? Cops? Pups? What would the various cards in those suits signify? And don't forget the Major Arcana. Any experts out there who might venture some guesses? ********************* There's a fast-food place I go to fairly often that has a big sign up near the counter about how Quality is a high priority with them. It's their "Secret Ingredient". There are several paragraphs of text about how much they care and how well they treat their customers and how they'll make it right if something's wrong, and so on. Since this is a fast-food chain, most of the sign is silkscreened or whatever the standard process for printing mass-produced signs is nowadays. But the word "Quality" is in individual glued-on plastic letters, presumably for emphasis. Or at least it was. The "y" had been missing for weeks. Maybe it fell off, or maybe some impatient rush-hour customer with nothing better to do while standing in line kind of helped it along, but be the causes as they may, the sign had long been proclaiming that their Secret Ingredient was "Qualit". Then the "t" went the way of the "y" and the Secret Ingredient became "Quali". It had been that way for maybe a month. As far as I could tell nobody on the staff ever noticed. Or if they did, nobody did anything about it. Today things were different. The "i" and "l" have swapped places, so the Secret Ingredient is now "Quail". Will it get noticed now? FOLLOW-UP: The above was written in early December. As of this morning (December 29) the sign still said their Secret Ingredient was "Quail". How much longer will it remain that way? ********************* Someone in an online discussion of some political matter said something to the effect of "We will win when the people opposing us (who are mostly older) die off." I've heard that statement before, and I feel less and less happy about it as I get older and older. Even when I'm on more or less the same side of the issue as the younger generation, I feel like I'm being lumped in with people they would rather be rid of. And now another question occurs to me: Is that a reason to oppose medical research that may increase longevity? After all, if in general people will be living longer, it'll take longer for that old-school opposition to go away. ********************* We've been playing Twenty Questions in one of the online communities I'm in. The object of the game is to guess some person, place, thing, concept, or event by asking twenty yes-no questions. Not many of the attempts succeed. It seems kind of discouraging. Was the game this hard in the past? Was it about the same, or did people win more often? If they did, why? I don't think we're that much worse at figuring out what questions to ask than our grandparents were. Or has the universe of eligible objects gotten bigger? In these days of almost-magical technology and late-breaking world news and Google and Wikipedia, are there more things the Mystery Object might be? Even if the number of different kinds of objects in the world is about the same as it always was, has the average (or somewhat above average) person heard of more of them? In other words, is the needle harder to find nowadays because haystacks have gotten bigger? Has anyone studied this? ********************* A few days ago a bunch of us went out to dinner at a fairly nice restaurant. We were seated around a table. Directly in front of each person was a space for their main plate of food. To the left were a couple of forks, while to the right was a knife and spoon. There were also napkins and glasses and such. So far, so good. The problem was a set of additional, smaller plates, apparently for appetizers and butter and such. These were right smack dab in between each pair of place settings, as if to mark the boundaries between each person's territory and that of the next person on either side. So which one were we to use? Had we been at a rectangular table we might have been able to tell by looking at the ends, but alas, our table was round, a circle with no beginning and never ending. Someone finally broke the impasse by making an arbitrary decision and announcing it to the rest of the group. But it occurred to me later that we need not have been forced into such a choice. I had a solvent-based marking pen with me, so I could have drawn a line down the center of everyone's plate to define the borders. Each of us would have "owned" the right half of the plate to our left and the left half of the plate to our right. But what if others didn't want to get that intimate with their neighbors? Well, had I passed a convention hall on my way to the restaurant, and had I had friends who worked there, and had there been a convention of manufacturers of pocket-sized battery-powered diamond-bladed china- cutting saws there at that time, I might have been given a number of said saws as gifts or something. Then I could have passed them around the table, along with safety glasses, earplugs, and instructions, and we could have sawed the offending plates neatly in two, right along the lines I would have drawn with the marker. Then each of us would have had our own separate places to put our appetizers and butter and whatever: A half-plate on our left and a half-plate on our right. Sawing china plates in two with diamond-bladed saws could have been rather noisy and might have disturbed other diners, but the noise would have lasted only a few minutes. Unless, of course, people at other tables had the same problem and wanted to borrow the saws after we were done. Then the noise might have lasted longer. In any event, it would not be a constantly recurring thing. Once enough of the restaurant's stock of small plates had been sawn in half, the servers could set them out that way to begin with, so subsequent customers would not need to saw them again. ********************* During a discussion of old technology someone mentioned using X-ray machines for fitting shoes. They were common in my childhood, but were banned sometime around the 1950's. Now many in the younger generations seem to have never heard of them. They just think it's some kind of tall tale or something. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope ********************* The shoe-fitting thing reminds me of this: Generations of Memories At the poetry reading, a woman half my age Waxes nostalgic about railroads: Fond memories of streamlined diesels. The steam-belching monsters of my childhood Are only the stuff of legend, As unreal as fire-breathing dragons. This leads me to wonder: When her children and grandchildren are doing poetry of their own, What version of this poem will she write? -- Tom Digby Original 09:04 10/07/2002 Edited 14:51 10/07/2002 Edited 14:19 10/10/2002 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --