27 March 2024

Aspen


I like to end my blogging day with a nice photo at the top of the page.  This one (© Robert J. Ross / World Nature Photography Awards, via The Atlantic) reminds me of being Up North.

Good for her


I have pleasant memories of doing this once, decades ago, somewhere in the Boston area.  So glad to see this young woman keeping the sport alive; it's the feel-good story of the day.


With a tip of the blogging cap to John Farrier, for finding this gem and posting it at Neatorama.  

Word for the day: dredging

I was reading today about how to make walleye pike almondine, and the recipe called for "dredging" the filet.
In cooking, the word dredge means to coat an item of food in flour or breadcrumbs before cooking it.  Dredging in flour requires the item to have some moisture about it, which is the case with most food items. It's a good idea to shake off any excess flour so that the coating doesn't turn pasty or gummy.  The standard breading technique involves first dredging the item with flour, dipping it in egg wash, and then finally coating it with breadcrumbs. This works because the flour sticks to the food, the egg sticks to the flour, and the breadcrumbs [or almond] stick to the egg
I was curious about the etymology, wondering if "dredging" the filet related to "dragging" it through the coating.  Apparently the relationship is only tangential at best.  Dredging items off the floor of the ocean is "From Scots dreg-boat, dreg-bot (from Old English *dreċġ); or alternatively from Middle Dutch dregghe (“drag-net”), probably ultimately from the same root as drag."

But there's a second etymology for the cooking term that is more related to spices than to dragging: "From Middle English dragge, from Old French dragee, dragie, from Latin tragēmata, from Ancient Greek τραγήματα (tragḗmata, “spices”), plural of τράγημα (trágēma, “dried fruit”)."

You learn something every day.

Optical illusions for those in a hurry


Forty of them in eight minutes (many of which I've previously covered in TYWKIWDBI in the optical illusions subcategory).  Via Neatorama.

24 March 2024

So far, so good (31/32)


One bracket has a 2-seed to win it all (Ohio State), the other a 4-seed (Indiana).  Multiple men's brackets already effectively busted.

And on the 34th game, one bracket goes bust.  Pride goeth before a fall.

22 March 2024

Queen Anne style Victorian architecture


The Carson Mansion in Eureka, California
The house is a mix of every major style of Victorian architecture, including but not limited to: Eastlake, Italianate, Queen Anne (primary), and Stick.

More information at the mansion's website

Metallic mercury emboli in the lungs


The result of an attempted suicide by injecting elemental mercury intravenously.  Image via The New England Journal of Medicine, via Reddit, where the salient top comment notes that this is similar to pouring molten aluminum into an anthill.

This example is a bit more dramatic than my 2022 post on mercury embolization - a case where a young man injected himself with mercury to treat jock itch.

Metal umlauts


I've seen them for years but never thought to read about them until the term appeared in a recent NYT crossword puzzle.  Here's a summary from Wikipedia:
A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is a diacritic that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively over letters in the names of mainly hard rock or heavy metal bands—for example, those of Blue Öyster Cult, Queensrÿche, Motörhead, the Accüsed, Mötley Crüe and the parody bands Spın̈al Tap and Green Jellÿ...

Among English speakers, the use of umlaut marks and other diacritics with a blackletter typeface is a form of foreign branding, which has been attributed to a desire for a "gothic horror" feel. The metal umlaut is not generally intended to affect the pronunciation of the band's name.
As Vince Neil recounts: "I can remember it like it was yesterday. We were drinking Löwenbräu, and when we decided to call ourselves Mötley Crüe, we put some umlauts in there because we thought it made us look European. We had no idea that it was a pronunciation thing. When we finally went to Germany, the crowds were chanting, 'Mutley Cruh! Mutley Cruh!' We couldn’t figure out why the fuck they were doing that."

19 March 2024

Reconsidering Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind


I have not previously blogged the 2004 movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but decided to do so today after I encountered lengthly reviews of it at both The Guardian and The New York Times.

For the past 18 years I've been keeping a log of movies seen with my personal ratings of them.  In 2007 I rated Eternal Sunshine 2+, indicating a general dissatisfaction.  In retrospect I suppose I was confused at that time as to whether this was perhaps a time-travel alternate reality story, and I found the humor surrounding the lab technicians distracting.  But in 2021 on a rewatch after some reading about it, I rated it 4+ (top rating, equivalent to "worth a rewatch"), understanding that this was all "real time" and that the subplots with the techs was relevant to the storyline.

So this year I did the rewatch, and it's still a 4+ movie for me.  Here are some blurbs from today's reviews:
The screenwriter Charlie Kaufman — who was fresh off the critical double-hitters “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” — wrote Clementine and Joel’s love affair as a claustrophobic, unspooling maze that earned the movie an Oscar for best screenplay. Kirsten Dunst and Mark Ruffalo were knocking on stardom’s door when they gave delightful supporting performances as haphazard assistants of the memory-erasing company Lacuna Inc.

Along the way, Joel realizes he’d rather have all of Clementine, heartbreak included, than none of her. He desperately tries to salvage the memories as they’re deleted, trapping himself in a maze of his own psyche. The film spins out of control, traversing realities and timelines, until we are left with a teary-eyed Clementine and Joel, who acknowledge the futility of their relationship. “I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me,” asserts Clementine. “OK,” Joel says with a smirk and then agrees to try again, despite knowing the inevitable disaster of their attraction.

“I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you,” Joel says pleadingly to Clementine to get her to stay. “But you will,” she roars knowingly.

One of the reasons why Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, now 20 years old, ranks among the best love stories of the 21st century is that it makes the unique argument that failure is an essential, precious part of romantic experience. It’s only human to want that pain to go away, but the film suggests that literally making it so would be a wish on a monkey’s paw, offering some short-term relief, perhaps, but with unanticipated long-term consequences.

Eternal Sunshine begins at the end, creating a structural loop that Kaufman pointedly opts not to close completely. On his way to work on a cold February morning, Joel Barish, played by dramatically toned down Jim Carrey, impulsively decides to take a commuter train to Montauk and winds up hitting it off with a vivacious stranger, Clementine (Kate Winslet), he meets on the platform. What neither of them realize is that not only have they met before, but they had a long-term relationship that ended in a painful breakup. They just don’t remember anything about it, at least nothing beyond a few tremors of deja vu.

"I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti."

The title is Hannibal Lecter's famous line from Silence of the Lambs.  I learned at the movies subreddit that there is a subtle implication:
Lecter could be treated with drugs called monoamine oxidase inhibitors - MAOIs. As a psychiatrist, Lecter knows this.

The three things you can't eat with MAOIs? Liver, beans, wine.

Lecter is a) cracking a joke for his own amusement, and b) saying he's not taking his meds.

Reposted from 2015 because I ran across this post while browsing the back entries in the movies subcategory of the blog. 

Another type of chess "problem"


Broadcast media (movies, television) have persistent difficulties incorporating chess into their storylines without introducing errors:
There are a ton of chess mistakes in TV and in film,” says Mike Klein, a writer and videographer for Chess.com. While different experts cite different error ratios, from “20 percent” to “much more often than not,” all agree: Hollywood is terrible at chess, even though they really don’t have to be. “There are so many [errors], it’s hard to keep track,” says Grandmaster Ilja Zaragatski, of chess24. “And there are constantly [new ones] coming out.”

Chess errors come in a few different flavors, these experts say. The most common is what we’ll call the Bad Setup. When you set up a chessboard, you’re supposed to orient it so that the square nearest to each player’s right side is light-colored. (There’s even a mnemonic for this—“right is light.”) Next, when you array the pieces, the white queen goes on white, and the black queen goes on black. “When I teach six-year-old girls, I say ‘the queen’s shoes have to match her dress!’” says Klein.

Six-year-olds may get this, but filmmakers often do not. Along with The Seventh Seal, movies that suffer from Bad Setups include Blade Runner, Austin Powers, From Russia with Love, The Shawshank Redemption, and Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls. Shaft and What’s New Pussycat may not have much in common, but they do both feature backwards chessboards.
Further discussion (re dramatic checkmates and tipped-over kings) at Atlas Obscura via Neatorama.

Reposted from 2017 because I ran across it while browsing the back entries in the movies subcategory of the blog.

18 March 2024

Wisteria


The (unquestioned) beauty is deceptive.  Multiple comments at the Pics subreddit post attest to the destructive capabilities of Wisteria vines.

Reposted from 2018 to add this:


Image cropped for size/emphasis from the original in a gallery of homes with gardens at The Guardian.

A blueberry the size of a golf ball


Developed by a fruit and vegetable vendor in New South Wales:
It’s dark blue, about the diameter of a golf ball and it weighs 10 times as much as your average blueberry.  Picked on 13 November, the piece of fruit was this week officially recognised by the Guinness World Records as the world’s heaviest blueberry...

Hocking said while typically a sacrifice in quality is expected with larger fruit, blueberries of the Eterna variety were “firm with a really good shelf life”.

Hocking said the fruit wasn’t an abnormality within the Eterna variety: there were about 20 blueberries of a similar size present when the berry was picked.

He said there was a growing demand for bigger fruit, which he attributed to a shift from using fruit in baking and on breakfast cereal to snacking.

CAPTCHAs - updated re "I'm Not a Robot" clicks


Embedded image 😀 via Interesting Engineering.  Today I learned that CAPTCHA is an acronym.

Reposted from last year to add some interesting information.
Some people have always presumed the 'I'm not a robot button' functions in a way to catch out artificial intelligence pretending to be human by seeing whether or not a robot is actually capable of identifying the traffic lights or marking the box with a tick...

As BBC's QI revealed in 2020, ticking the little box is actually letting the site check things like your internet browsing history to determine whether you're a real person or not.

"Ticking the box is not the point. It's how you behaved before you ticked the box that is analysed," writer, comedian and broadcaster Sandi Toksvig explained to the panel...

"Essentially, when you are clicking ‘I am not a robot’ box, you are instructing the site to have a look at your data and decide for itself.

"If the machine is not sure, that’s when it directs you to click on lightroom pictures of fire hydrants that aren’t there."

World Down Syndrome Day is March 21


The 21st day of the 3rd month was chosen for World Down Syndrome Day because the syndrome is caused by trisomy of the 21st chromosome.  This video was created to encourage "normies" to reexamine their presumptions about the syndrome.

One way to support change is to wear colorful or mismatching socks (because socks are shaped somewhat like chromosomes), and the oddness may generate useful commentary and discussion)

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