The Thinks I Think

At work, listening to music while coding, and the Indigo Girls's "Prince of Darkness" came up on iTunes (apparently, per the "last played" attribute, for the first time in two and a half years). To my surprise, my first and primary association with the song is still the fact that the Carleton Knightingales sang it, not that I would have seen them in some sixteen years.

So: Thinking of you, Angie.

Turkey went in without a problem. Stuffing prepared to be baked (using rendered turkey fat and turkey giblets). Potatoes boiling. Rolls, however, possibly going to have to be written off; dough seems not to be rising, and proofing a second package of yeast suggests that it, too, is dead.

My times continue to be interesting, all around. So instead of commenting on them at all, I link you this image.

Due to a non-disclosure agreement, I can't talk all that much about the new job. That apparently includes how well it's going, because that information would be useful to competitors. But I can safely tell you that yesterday was a day at work, and it looks as if today will be another one.

This column in the Ann Arbor Chronicle offers a really nice insight into people vs. corporations at a personal level, its point very much being that the personal level is all there is. Worth reading.

My brother, with his incredibly unfortunate photo, tweeted a link to this article about Joe Paterno. My wife and I have talked about the scandal enough this week that I'm not going to do so any further here; but my brother is right (as he is more often than you'd expect, but especially about sports) that it's an article worth reading.

( linguistic aside about a sentence from the article )

Meanwhile, a great deal of attention is being paid to Herman Cain's alleged acts of sexual harassment. And I have to admit that I think that's a shame, for a number of reasons:

1. Far, far less interesting to me than whether or not Herman Cain committed any sort of harassment is how unprepared he seems to have been for this fact to come to light.
2. In the meantime, the question of whether Cain broke a law over a decade ago (in a way that was settled out of court) is overshadowing the much more serious question of whether his campaign flagrantly violated campaign finance laws this year.
3. Even if the harassment allegations are true, that fact would be, in my mind, quite frankly at the very bottom of the list of reasons that he's incredibly unqualified to be president. The more people talk about the scandal, the less they're talking about his dismissive reference to Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, the insanity of his 9-9-9 plan (as encapsulated in the best graph ever), his complete loss of words when asked about things like Medicare and the Palestinian Right of Return....

And finally, to make it all better, the 11/10/11 Stephen Colbert sign-off, which you shouldn't watch if you, you know, hate really good singing.

Recently, for reasons I dare not even try to understand never mind explain, I found myself singing "What Do We Do With a Drunken Sailor?". Rare as this is, it's even rarer when I'm at a computer, which meant that for the first time I had the presence of mind to try to check something about it.

One of the things that we do with a drunken sailor is "Put him into bed with the captain's daughter". It's a well-known fact that the "captain's daughter" is another name for the cat-o'-nine-tails, which is why this is a punishment for a drunken sailor. Of course, the correlation between things that are well-known and things that are true isn't very strong. So I thought: at last! A chance to actually check this fact!

Wikipedia, of course, confirms it, which does nothing whatsoever to convince me. Actually, I was hoping it would have a reference, but no, it doesn't. The web is similarly willing to confirm it, similarly without any actual convincingness. Google Books seemed like a good place to look, but the fact that Pushkin wrote a short story called "The Captain's Daughter" somewhat overwhelms the search; you can add "whip", but that's more or less the websearch equivalent of begging the question—of course if you add "whip" to the search, you get hits confirming that it's a whip. As it happens, those books are things like 2010's The Book of Pirates and 2002's Pirattitude!: So You Wannna Be a Pirate? Here's How!, which rank somewhere below Wikipedia on sources I'd trust. (Also a page in Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister, which tells me "These days, however, a taste of the Captain's Daughter can be quite sexy (assuming everyone is a consenting adult)", just before instructions on how to crochet one. I'm also taking this to be less than authoritative.) What's very much lacking from Google Books is any kind of authentic reference to "the captain's daughter" as a flogging device of any sort.

(I was starting to doubt that the song itself was even authentic, but there are indeed results from the late 1800s for "What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor"—for instance, in The Water-Babies, serialized in the early 1860s; and seems to be mentioned with the same title by Dickens in 1856. But I digress.)

My readers being either well-educated in the ways of historical sea shanties, or else as vile a mob of scurvy dogs as ever raised a mug of rum, seem likely to be able to answer with certainty. Why was "the captain's daughter" considered punishment—assuming that that line is as authentically 19th-century as the rest of the song? (Not obviously the case; Google Books only returns one hit for the combination of "What Shall We Do..." and "captain's daughter", and it's from 2010.) I've seen theories—a captain's daughter was simply that unattractive; being found in bed with his daughter by the captain was a guaranteed flogging—but someone out there must know the actual fact of the matter, or know someone who knows.

Someone has decided to share his Google+ posts with me. That's terribly kind of him. However, since I'm not in fact on Google+, this amounts to my having been put on someone's mailing list against my will—and I can't even reply to him, since all the mail comes from a "noreply" address at plus.google.com.

There's "unsubscribe" info at the bottom, but, seriously, I'm supposed to unsubscribe from a mailing list I never joined? What the hell? (In any other email, that would count as a spammer trying to verify my address.)

My feelings about Google+ have tilted from "slightly positive, because hey it's not Facebook" to "markedly negative, because seriously you guys are helping a user spam me?". Is there some sensible way to make this stop, perhaps by emailing some support address at Google to say "so when did you turn evil"?

Last night, the Today Show was apparently here at the NPL convention with a small crew and a reporter. For the icebreaker/mixer, which involved randomizing our table locations, I found myself sitting next to the blonde woman who, as I didn't quite realize, was the show's correspondent. So I introduced myself, and learned her name was Jenna, and that she was from Austin, Texas.

It was much later that evening that I learned who Jenna from Austin was.

Some Con moments are randomer than others.

So it's 3am on a Tuesday, which means that I am--as I am wont to do--watching Syphy. For the past few weeks, Monday-night-3am has been Wolf Lake, a 2001 series with Lou Diamond Phillips about werewolves, that I suspect would have lasted longer if it hadn't been somewhat ahead of its time on the paranormal front (i.e., if they hadn't done it four years before Twilight took off). I was kind of enjoying it, actually. Sadly, they're now back to "Masters of Horror", which has a tendency to be either predictable or stupid or both, even when written by the so-called modern masters of horror. The best episodes have been the one based on James Tiptree's "The Screwfly Solution" and, well, admittedly, this one, which is based on H.P. Lovecraft's "Dreams in the Witch-House".

But the thing that makes me actually kind of happy about the episode is the main character's Miskatonic University T-shirt. Miskatonic University seals and symbols are a dime a dozen if you search Google Images, and they're usually the typical boring college seal design. In this production, however, someone who clearly really cares made the T-shirt with this image, with the sun replaced with a skull.

It's small, but I appreciated it.