Imprecise Pangolin

For those running Notebox Mismanager: it will run on 64-bit Ubuntu 12.04, but with a hitch: at least as of 4 May 2012, Ubuntu's new ia32-libs-multiarch package does not install the 32-bit version of libjpeg62 -- the absence of which will prevent Mismanager from running even though it doesn't know what a jpeg is, and indeed produce a completely incorrect error message if you run it from the command line. Hie thee to said command line and do a sudo apt-get install libjpeg62:i386 to solve this problem.

Useless Fragment #57

"It's a perfectly nice house."

"Those...things on the roof..."

"The architect was a little hard of hearing."

"So they actually are cupholders?"

Useless Fragment #56

Blackness impenetrable...
I looked into the abyss, and it looked into me.

I added three sugars and two caps of creamer. They didn't help.

Useless Fragment #55

It didn't take the House of Representatives long to realize that they shouldn't have jumped out of the plane without a parachute -- twelve one-hundredths of a second seems about right.

They immediately took up a resolution of condemnation, but the rushing wind made exercise of proper procedure difficult to impossible, and the whole business might have collapsed save for the realization by one of the subcommittee members that a quorum's worth of members were carrying cellphones with noise cancelling circuitry, and so proceedings continued in that venue by means of conference call -- briefly.

Useless Fragment #54

"As you know, Towson, Mr duPlace wrote this note in a disturbed state of mind -- or rather, being Canadian, province. Inspector lePlod correctly dismissed as insignificant the fact that duPlace was listening to Abba's 'Dancing Queen' on infinite repeat; I myself indulge in the same pastime. What he overlooked, however was that duPlace's headphones had been tampered with in such a fashion as to induce a variable-cycle phase differential between the channels -- such that could induce a hypnotic trance over time!"

"But Moules -- what about all the ducks?"

"Perhaps he just liked ducks, Towson."

"But Moules, there were over seven million of them..."

"Why must I account for every niggling detail?!"

(Useless?) Fragment #53

"In a suitably curved universe, everything we leave behind lies ahead of us for rediscovery."

Useless Fragment #52

We strode across shattered blocks, whiter than sugar, under a sky the color of wine. "Here the Temple of Zyzyphs once stood," said Ki Liet, "upon its thin and elegant pillars that seemed surely too thin and elegant to support the roof."

We paused atop the pile of rubble.

"The architect won an award for futility," said Ki Liet. "--Now we are coming to the Brick Bridge of Ku. Crossing will be difficult.  Some of the bricks only appear to exist."

Useless Fragment #51

G&S ART SUPPLIES AND KINESTHETIC THERAPY SALON read the sign on the window; inside we found -- among other things -- a large pad of sketching paper with a man behind it, sketching. He was wearing an expression of bemused resignation, and glasses. Also a white tie with a black shirt, possibly as a lesson in negative space.

"Be with you in a minute," he said. "Or not, if you walked into the wrong store. Most people seem to."

"We were curious about the kinesthetic therapy," I said.

"It's five dollars an hour plus supplies," he said, setting down his charcoal pencil to contemplate his sketch with a sort of what-is-this-missing look on his face. He had drawn a duck. It seemed fine to me, at least if drawing a duck had been his intention.

"Okay, but what is it?"

"A social license to act like a nincompoop. If you run around yelling 'woohoo' and throwing paint at people you'll be considered insane -- unless you pay for the privilege. That ennobles the whole business and none dare criticize." He picked up his pencil again and drew a bow tie on the duck. "--Perfect!"

Useless Fragment #50

"Here, my finger's come off!"

"Oh, shut up."

"But it was my favorite finger!"

There was an icy pause.

"In your own time, gentlemen," said Death, who was sitting in a chair in the corner, patiently working through a stack of crossword puzzle magazines.

Useless Fragment #49

Initially D. T. Schmidt had been employed by the law firm of Bellicose, Bellicose and Otter, but -- after an unfortunate incident while making a Careers Day presentation to students of the Philadelphia Public School System that involved dressing up as Abraham Lincoln -- had been obliged to take up the obsolescent profession of door-to-door salesman of shoes in the days when people bought shoes primarily over the internet and just couldn't seem to wrap their minds around the concept of a man coming to the door selling them.  Frequently he would have to get their email addresses and send them some spam before they would even let him in the door. Today he was standing on the coast of the Cape of Good Hope, and his wife Jane had just run off with a man who bore a strong resemblance to George Washington, which meant that his worst fear had been realized: he was living in a Tom Holt novel.

"Don't drag me into this," said Tom

Useless Fragment #48

Noblesse oblique, I think, expresses the character of my employer, Mr Melvin Tomes.  When I took on the position of butler I assumed my duties would include the normal variety of activities -- maintenance of the master's wardrobe, administration of his social schedule and so on -- and never dreamed that I would be required to don a costume and fight crime.  And indeed I have not, but the prospect is never far from my mind. What I am attempting to say is that Mr Tomes is an enigma wrapped in a mystery dressed in a Botany 500 suit and a jester's cap with bells. No, I don't think it odd that he mails bananas to persons selected at random from the Mensa telephone book; why do you ask?

Useless Fragment #47

My road to riches began the day Microsoft terminated the Psychokinetic Pointing Device research project merely because of a lack of results after thirty years and my entire division found ourselves unemployed.

We were clearing the basement of potatoes (high Rhine-score potatoes; part of our research -- see THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS) when I found myself digging at a little popcorn hull of memory stuck between the teeth of my mind.

"Biff," I said, "isn't there another use for potatoes?"

"There are many uses for potatoes. You can play hot-potato with them, or make glass out of them, or french fries--"

"That's it!" I cried -- and so began the Psychic Potato Company. You may believe you've eaten some of our products today.

Useless Fragment #46

The sun came up bluish-black and illustrated the house in oily shades.

It was a dead house, slowly crumbling, drying up and blowing away in an almost visible process. Shingles and broken window panes lay in shattered patterns across dead black grass that rose from white earth. Bits of trash slowly blew over them, moving constantly but never actually leaving the yard.

From a tree whose leaves glowed red against a bile-yellow sky a mourning dove descended to hobble down the driveway. The plain greyness of the bird would have brought a moment of relief to an observer, until it blinked up at him with eyes of glistening white.

At the end of the driveway there was a sign:

FOR SALE

TOO LATE

Useless Fragment #45

The ringing in my ears wasn't a hallucination, but while I was figuring that out the machine beeped and took my call for me. It was Aiello from the 12th Precinct.

"Gordon, get over here now.  Alabaster Danny just got booked for homicide."

I stared at the clock next to the bed. 2:45 AM.

Why would they call me at 2:45 to tell me that?

Sure, Alabaster Danny was the least likely person to commit murder I knew -- the undead don't commit murder, unless it's someone they like; after all, they're the ones who have to put up with them afterward -- but even if he had, it was no more than a decease-and-exist order, and they've got retroactive permits for a reason.

Useless Fragment #44

Sarah Sollew, columnist for the Lifestyles section of the Morrisberg Daily Wreckage and heroine of her own personal life, clutched more tightly at the grillwork of the Runaway Shuttle as it roared toward the airport at 65 miles per hour, and idly converted her current speed into metric.

Useless Fragment #43

"We must never underestimate the power of interpretation," said Professor Jones. "For example, here is the emptiest paragraph in the entire corpus of Comstock Mooble--"

Seven times the cock crowed and seven times the pesky toad belched out a cry of injustice as the farmer's axe descended; seven times the backer hoed and seven times the secret code failed to disguise the plans of the evil men. The dos of evil men oft live behind them, but don't quote me on that.

"It consists of mere nouns, verbs and adjectives. It is a literary futility. And yet if we read it carefully, with thoughtful poetic reinterpretation of the words, it can make us weep -- or roar with anger. We need not settle for the author's conceptions.

"Yours is the power. I invite you to savor it."

Useless Fragment #42

It all began when I was relieved of my post at the Good Time Tea Company shortly after introducing our newest line of flavors, which included Egg, Bacon and Chives, French Onion and Coffee.

"But Mr. Scrobe," I said, as I was being hustled down the hallway with the remains of my desk in a cardboard box, "is not our corporate position that Good Time Tea gives the consumer the most for his or her money?"

Mr. Scrobe simply glared in response, and I found myself in the parking lot with no future, until I looked to the past.

My father, you see, never had any trouble making money. In fact he turned out some of the finest dollars anyone ever saw, and in the privacy of his own home.

So I returned to the family business, and the rest is jail time. Except of course that it turned out that people actually preferred my bills to the real thing, and paid a premium for them, and so I ended up with a contract with the Mint instead.

Useless Fragment #41

Thanksgiving Day 1932: Mother and Father are in the living room, sculpting a life-size replica of President Roosevelt out of papier-mache and mashed potatoes, while I and my brother listen to the adventures of Captain Three A.M. on the Wurzelblad tube radio.  (I sometimes wondered why the people behind Captain Midnight didn't object to Captain Three A.M.; I later discovered that the show was actually broadcast from the apartment below us and couldn't be heard outside our own building.  This of course was after we sent in thirty Kellogg's Plop Corn-Oatmeal box tops and three dollars for our secret decoder rings, which never came.)

Useless Fragment #40

Melvin was dead, to begin with.

That was nothing unusual. Death ran in Melvin’s family. Indeed, the Great Hereafter was so thoroughly stocked with Melvin's relatives that Melvin himself was even now investigating unreal estate opportunities in the Great Thereafter.

Useless Fragment #39

Black Sam Staccato came boiling out of the night, guns blazing. "You'll never take me alive, copper!"

I ducked out of the rain of bullets and coshed him over the head with my umbrella. It was a Bennington lead-cored titanium-jacketed umbrella, so he stayed coshed. I removed his guns, applied handcuffs where appropriate and took a picture of the scene with my Instamatic for evidence -- which was pointless, since a man in a black raincoat face-down on a black asphalt street and photographed in the black of night could easily be mistaken for the negative of "Cow Eating Grass".

Useless Fragment #38 (Albedo 0.99)

By the time rumors began to circulate that the meta-artist Equis would wrap the planet Mars in hyper-reflective Mylar it was too late to stop him.

There were inquiries and recriminations, and protests were lodged, but nothing came of it. The vehicle was well underway and could not be stopped; the equations were prohibitive.

And of course there were so many problems on Earth; indeed, so numerous were they that Equis was quickly forgotten, along with his plan.

Until one night, in the bruised blankness men called the sky, a star appeared.

"A star I have made! Equis has not seen one in forever. And how can a man look up when there is nothing to see in this grim ceiling of black and red that we have made for ourselves?"

"Bah! they say to Equis. It will come to nothing!

"But Equis has seen them in the streets as the daylight fails -- the children waiting for the first sight of the piercing through of the sky..."

Useless Fragment #37

"Are you dead?" I said to Fuzzy "The Stoat" Miasma.

"No," said the Stoat.

"Only I am running out of bullets," I said, reloading my .45 in preparation to put a few more slugs through his cranium.

"Sorry, Carl," he said, on account of that is my name -- Carl Marchek, current but soon to be former hit man.

I put a few more slugs through his cranium. "How about now?" I said.

He looked as thoughtful as he could, given how little of the cranium in question was left. "No," he said. "Sorry."

"Not your fault," I told him.

"It's these modern bullets," he said. "No craftsmanship."

He was being kind. I knew I was losing my touch.

Moved: Useless Fragments #18 and #22

Eternity can be a long time, unless you happen to be a photon, in which case it goes by in no time at all.

Or so they said, but I would beg to differ, on account of being a collection of photons myself. No sooner had I taken my chair on the "Science Fiction and Transcendence" panel at the World Science Fiction Convention than I suffered a terrible case of demonstration gone awry by unexpectedly transforming into a purely mental entity that rushed outward into the universe at the speed of light -- to the great surprise of my fellow panelists, who hadn't been expecting much, especially since I was merely a last minute fill-in for Rudy Rucker.

I exploded into space. The planet Earth turned into a speck in the distance, and then nothing at all, as my consciousness expanded in a sphere that encompassed and penetrated everything within it. Things became a bit dull after I had merged with everything within the Oort cloud; four years later I spent an entertaining two days passing through the Centauris, but that novelty didn't last long; I started to appreciate just how little there actually is in the Universe. And then, suddenly and unexpectedly

•

Well, the rest you know. At the suggestion of little Noel (only three, then, but precocious) we set course for California, where we put those giant redwoods to good use building the floating city of Nuevo San Francisco, now home to a half-million. I've already told the story of the Great Los Angeles Public Library Reclamation Dive, and what we did at Hoover Dam, and I know you're tired of hearing about the Bay Bridge Steel Mine, so I'll just close up by reminding you that you must never misuse a magnifying glass.

Useless Fragment #36

Next on the program is a new work of discovered sound by Landesberg Kausman titled SUKHOI 27.

To create the piece, Kausman wired more than three thousand contact microphones to a Sukhoi 27 jet fighter, sampled every noise it made during a thirty minute flight from takeoff to touchdown, and then spent six months in his studio weaving the aircraft's audio profile into a two hour soundscape. Every sound you will hear was derived from the aircraft.

Writes Kausman: "At an air-show in Nice I saw many aircraft performing spectacles, and in the end found myself thinking of Arthur Clarke's definition of the most impressive sound ever made by man: that of air falling mile after mile into a hole drilled through the sky.

"And it is undeniably impressive, that sound: stunning, as hammer-blows often are. And yet, this vehicle -- with its thousands of parts operating within bogglingly small tolerances to keep the ship from falling to earth, operating in harmony -- is it not in some way more of a true orchestra than a mere instrument of violence?

"My question becomes: Is a machine's best use that for which it is designed?

"Here is my answer."

Useless Fragment #35

Once upon a time, in a largely ignored area of Europe, there was a small kingdom. Its king was named simply King, because the kingdom really was terribly small.

One morning, upon waking up in Liechtenstein because he had rolled over in bed during the night, the King wished idly that his kingdom were a little bigger.

Little did the king know that a good fairy, fresh from the San Bernardino School of Good Fairying, was at that very moment passing by, on account of celebrating her graduation with a trip to Liechtenstein. And sad it was, too, that he did not know this, for, if he had, he might have made his wish aloud.

Useless Fragment #34

As alien conquerors go, the Nordonians were not the worst imaginable: every human being, for example, was now granted free admission to Galactic University, largest of all educational institutions. True, most of its classrooms were chemically toxic to human life and the rest were vaguely irritating, but that was generally held to be the fault of the human evolutionary process, and of far less concern than the fact that the Nordonians had come to Earth only to find out why the anime series Automatic Toaster Yellow was in fact titled Automatic Toaster Yellow and might react badly if they ever found out there was no such reason.

Useless Fragment #33

Agent Smith of the Secret Service -- that was his code name, he was actually Agent Jones of the CIA -- pressed the earphone deeper into his aural canal and frowned.

"Yesterday's statement is inoperative. Yesterday's operative has a statement, which is that his stateroom lacks a telephone and the phony television is on the fritz, in that when you turn to channel 13 and pull the brightness knob off, instead of displaying the view from a small camera embedded in the ceiling of the briefing room it simply displays a test pattern; moreover, the test is high school geometry which is fairly disturbing in itself.

"Correction to previous message: for 'Vorpal and Morpork are coming through the tunnel' please read 'Mooble and Comstock are requesting a funnel'."

Agent Smith sat back in his chair and pulled out the earphone; it continued to gabble distantly ("Gautama Buddha is in the house, hoo-ah hoo-ah"). Sometimes he just wasn't sure whether the bad guys were taking their jobs seriously any more.

What I Did Today #5

...was finish the boring technical thing I was doing yesterday.

Useless Fragment #32

There was a strong chemical smell in the the roach-strewn bar on the corner of 5th and Angst, strong enough to drive away all but the most enthusiastic of drinkers. One of them was speaking now.

"Aye, that was a strange detonation, Mr. van Hoorp, but I have one to top even that: the Great Hamburger Detonation of 1905.  It was an experimental model, and it would be decades before anyone tried making another."

"A great setback for cookout technology, Mr. Metwig," said someone near the floor.

"And one that serves as a dire warning to all those who mistake black powder for black pepper," continued Mr. Metwig. "As I can personally attest. I was sewing my finger back on when the secondary concussions and eruptions began--"

Useless Fragment #31

Tshun Moon was a general in the state of Shi. Dissatisfied with the leadership qualities of the Emperor he wrote a book of military philosophy called THE ART OF VICTORY, which, though seemingly straightforward, was littered with allusions that intimated criticism of the Emperor and even rebellion. Unsurprisingly he one day found himself summoned to the Imperial palace.

He obeyed the summons and in due time found himself, accompanied by six trusted lieutenants, ushered into the Great Hall. Emperor Pan Shi was seated upon the throne, alone but for his one personal guard (a slender young man with a painted face), his two most favored concubines Buttercup and Peach Blossom (the nature of the favors involved was much speculated upon), and the aged but loyal General Shin.

The Emperor said to Tshun Moon: "I have carefully perused your 13 chapters. May I submit your theory of managing soldiers to a slight test?"

Tshun Moon replied: "You may."

"May the test be applied to women?"

"Indeed," said Tshun Moon, and watched, his face carefully impassive, as Peach Blossom and Buttercup departed the room by imperial order to return with the remaining forty of the Emperor's concubines.

Tshun Moon divided them into two companies, and placed Peach Blossom at the head of one, Buttercup at the head of the other. He then bade them all take their fans in their hands, in place of spears, and addressed them thus: "I presume you know the difference between front and back, right hand and left hand?"

The girls replied: Yes.

Tshun Moon went on: "When I say 'Eyes front' you must look straight ahead. When I say 'Left turn' you must face towards your left hand. When I say 'Right turn,' you must face towards your right hand. When I say 'About turn,' you must face right round towards your back."

Again the girls assented, and Tshun Moon began the drill. First he gave the order 'Right turn', but the girls only burst out laughing. Tshun Moon said: "Rule seventeen: If words of command are not clear and distinct, if orders are not thoroughly understood, then the general is to blame." And he started drilling them again, this time giving the order 'Left turn'...whereupon the girls once more burst into fits of laughter. And Tshun Moon said, "Rule eighteen: If words of command are clear and distinct, if orders are thoroughly understood, and the soldiers nevertheless disobey, then it is the fault of their officers."

So saying, he ordered two of his trusted lieutenants to behead the leaders of the two companies.

When Emperor Pan Shi saw that Peach Blossom and Buttercup were about to be executed, he was expressed great alarm and said: "It is not Our wish that you should deprive Us of our favored servants. We request that you leave them unmolested."

Tshun Moon replied: "Having once received His Majesty's commission to be the general of his forces, there are certain commands of His Majesty which, acting in that capacity, I am unable to accept. Chapter seven."

The Emperor spoke again. "We request and require that you leave Our forces unmolested."

Tshun Moon, in a room empty but for the emperor, forty-two concubines, a youth, an old man, himself and six trusted lieutenants, made no reply but to turn his face from the Emperor, take out his own blade, and repeat his order.

The two lieutenants raised their swords...

...and, a few rather confused moments later, Tshun Moon found himself on the ground, his six lieutenants in the process of being stomped to death by forty concubines in stiletto heels, and Peach Blossom and Buttercup holding razor-edged fans at his throat.

The Emperor commanded, and certain screens were moved aside in the Great Hall to reveal an audience comprised of the other six generals of the Empire. General Shin dragged Tshun Moon to his feet to face them.

"As I said, I have studied your book," said the Emperor, "and find that it is but two rules short of perfection. Peach Blossom and Buttercup, can you tell me what they are?"

Peach Blossom curtsied and said, "Firstly, one must remember that the forces one is given to command are fighting for the Emperor and not for oneself."

Buttercup curtsied identically and said, "Secondly, never underestimate the Emperor."

"Excellent," said Emperor Pan Shi.

Tshun Moon's book, amended, was accepted as a great work by the generals of the Empire, and his head was placed in a case near the throne as a sign of respect.

Useless Fragment #30

Temporal Physics Department
Division of Applied Paradox

read the sign on the door of Room 517 of the Haight-Zemel Institute. At least it was currently Room 517, having started on the eighth floor and then fallen as far as the basement before its fortunes rose again.

Across the hall, Room 516's sign read merely

Break Room

and it was in Room 516 that Ted and Fred, the Fabulous Beaker Boys, were to be found.

"I personally couldn't care less if you did detonate the sun, Ted," remarked Fred, "but I really do think it somewhat excessive to do it on a weekend. Please consider doing it on Monday morning instead, as it would inconvenience people less."

Useless Fragment #29

"Yes, gentlemen, this is truly is the highlight of my collection," I said, indicating the desk in the middle of the office. "Thomas Jefferson's own design, with triple reciprocating fully reversible inkwell. Rare in itself, but it was acquired at the first -- and to date only -- White House Yard Sale."

"Yard sale?" said Herr von Slumpf. "Really?"

"Indeed," I said. "The proceeds of which were intended to fund a moat, I believe. Nothing came of it, alas; the National Archives interfered in some way, though not before I managed to make away with this prize -- which, incidentally, I later found to contain an ice cream scoop in a concealed drawer. Research suggests it was used by President Nixon. Let us move on..."

Useless Fragment #28

Brains! New brains for old! cried the old street pedlar.

Hallo, said a passerby. Wouldn't that entail an inevitable refund when I change my mind?

I knew I shouldn't have invested in this franchise, said the pedlar.

What The World Needs

...is a remake of THE HUDSUCKER PROXY, directed by Wes Anderson, starring Matt Smith as Norville Barnes, and Gwyneth Paltrow staking her Pulitzer on it.

Useless Fragment #27

McWilliams Vertresatron, master profiler and consultant to Interpol, picked up three eyeballs that had been lying on the evidence table and examined them closely.

"You've wasted my valuable time, gentlemen," he said after a few moments of silent contemplation.  "These are not the signatures of a serial killer who desires to taunt the police and gain fame -- these are the personal eyes of a serial streaker, which popped out unnoticed in his moment of distracted exertion.  Look for a fast man wearing nothing but sneakers and you'll have your suspect. Find a bottle of stem cells in his apartment and you'll secure a conviction."

Useless Fragment #26

Ginger Cakes stepped onto the runway of the Paris Fashion Show resplendent in her Monte Vari anorak, set one foot onto a misplaced cream-puff and went skidding off the side of the platform into a small clump of correspondents for Biff magazine. No one knew what they future might hold, but for now, they were content.

Useless Fragment #25

The Blue Funk crashed through the window of the jewelry store and confronted the team of criminals engaged in robbing the place.

"Oh, what's the use?!" he cried, and collapsed in the corner.

Useless Fragment #24

I had been working at Office Emplacement for nearly three years before I noticed that my manager was an extraterrestrial. I attribute this lengthy delay to deficiencies in my powers of observation, for he was as green as an avocado and of similar complexion.

"Mr. Voobnar," I said to him (I believe that is the correct pronoun), "I can't help but notice that you have the coloration and skin texture of an avocado."

"Naturally, Sherman," he replied, "I am from a planet with a considerably different atmosphere and spectral distribution of solar radiation."

"How unusual," I said. "Would you be terribly upset if I reported your extraterrestrial nature to officials of my nation's government?"

"Feel free," said Mr. Voobnar. "Although it would be redundant, as they know all about it. We have had diplomatic relations for the last ten years and have been residing on your planet in increasing numbers for the last five. --For example, you will note that Marlene, the operator of register 13, is one of my species."

I was considerably disturbed to realize that this was true, not least because I had taken Marlene for my lawfully wedded wife some three years previously; not until now had I realized that she was not human, or for that matter employed at Office Emplacement.

Useless Fragment #23

Last time as you recall, our heroes, Biff, Bam, and Ted, successfully diverted asteroid DVN-096 from its collision course with Earth. Alas, how were they to know that they had set DVN-096 on a different collision course, a collision course with asteroid TUS-797 -- yes, asteroid TUS-797, home of the Collins Project, the only project devoted to preventing the sun from exploding for no apparent reason! We return to our story just as the two asteroids meet in a disastrous impact, leaving the solar system defenseless against solar detonation!

TED
Well, that’s life.

What I Did Today #4

Search-all-notes function ported and revised; compiles with no errors, but doesn't do anything yet.

Useless Fragment #21

On the television an elegant four-stack ocean liner was steaming through the night. A lookout spotted an ominous blot in the near distance.
"Iceberg right ahead!"
On the bridge the First Officer stiffened, and I had a feeling I had seen the movie before.
"Ready the wave motion gun!"
Apparently not...

Useless Fragment #20

In the annals of the Explorers Society the strangest history on record is that of the discovery of the Warambi, an obscure tribe originally believed to live deep in the jungles of Africa until Col. Smythe-Pilkington-Smythe discovered that they commute from South America. Living substantially in a stone-age culture but reknowned for their almost uniformly high computer programming skills, they are a gloomy people whose word for "tomorrow" translates literally as "same again worse".

Useless Fragment #19

"How much is that doggie on the window?" asked Mrs Frobosh, indicating the beagle puppy slowly sliding down the pane in a trail of saliva.
The clerk cast a glance at the dog as it leaped back up the window and attached itself loosely by its tongue. "Oh, fifty cents should do it," he said, guessing it to weigh half a pound.

What I'm Doing Today #3

Working on search-all-files/notes function. Brain does not want to co-operate. Bad brain! No biscuit!

Useless Fragment #17

Today on the Mervin Flim Show we're talking to Edmond Pipgoop, author of GETTING THE MOST FOR YOUR MONET: A Guide To Buying, Selling and Collecting Art. Edmond, most of our listeners here at KROK couldn't afford a Monet if you paid for it. How should they start out?

Well, I recommend they buy my book.

I see. Could you give an example?

Well, were I to start off as a beginner, I would go to my local bookstore and ask for GETTING THE MOST FOR YOUR MONET by Edmond Pipgoop, or were I connected to the Internet I would go to Amazon and punch in the name Pipgoop into the Author Search function to pull up a complete list of all my books including MAKE A MILLION IN REAL ESTATE, DOT COM BONANZA, MLM OK, SPAMMERIFIC, and WINNING LOTTERY NUMBERS.

Well, I'm sure everyone with an interest in art will benefit. Thanks for dropping by.

Useless Fragment #16

There was a new monster under Johnny's bed. It whispered to him in the darkness. It said that he should cut school tomorrow and call Mommy's stockbrocker and order five thousand shares of Borlian Enterprises because Borlian had excellent growth potential, no long term debt and had been underperforming pricewise for some time. When Johnny asked the monster why it didn't just try to eat his toes like the previous monster did, it said it was only temping until the economy improved.

Useless Fragment #15

"King Ice! Queen Snow! Hear my plea and let me go!" cried Vilmot, waving his hands in the air in a series of mystic designs.

Nothing happened, which was little surprise to the passengers of the Route 413 bus. "No, it's no good," said one of them as Vilmot gunned the engine again, making the wheels spin in the frozen roadside mud. "You're trapped in an obsolete belief system. There's no chance of us getting out of this ditch unless you abandon your mythology and adopt a valid religion."

"Now wait just one moment," objected another passenger. "You can't declare a religion invalid simply because its deities fail to respond to invocation. They may have a reason for disregarding Vilmot's plea. Perhaps they object to the bus being full of unbelievers like us."

There was a brief period of discussion among the other passengers; to the first speaker's disgust they agreed that the suggestion had merit and should be tested experimentally, whereupon they disembarked from the vehicle.

"Ahem," said Vilmot. "King Ice! Queen Snow! Hear my plea and let me go!" he cried, and floored the accelerator.

The Flxible Flyer tore loose from the roadside trap and roared off toward Mooble City, leaving the passengers behind.

"There, you see?" said a small passenger. "It was we who had a faulty belief system. Where's the know-it-all critic?"

They looked around, and then at the bus disappearing in the distance. Apparently he had stayed aboard.

The former passengers milled around a while and eventually shuffled off to the nearest bus stop.

What I Did Today #2

Yesterday I set out to add a Notebox Mismanager 3 function to move selected notes to a particular category, which at this point means moving files from wherever they happen to be into a specified folder, plus maintaining the file modification date+time, because QFile::copy doesn't.

About seven hours later I went to bed.

About seven hours after getting up again it sort of works. That's ten lines of code per hour. My brain is inelastic.

As yet it doesn't cope with duplicate filenames. I'm not sure whether it should try. Testing exposed a drawback to the file-scanning code that builds the grid, in that folders containing no .txt, .htm or .html files are ignored. Which makes a kind of sense, but also means that empty disk-based categories are only fleetingly possible. If you move all the significant files out of them, they won't show up on the next run...

Useless Fragment #14

Does your mind seen from afar resemble a tangle of socks -- a colorful melange of soft fuzzy thinking, riddled with holes? Then this is your lucky day, for I, Scrumnik Barnes, am here to save you with my new book, SCRUMNIK BARNES'S GUIDE TO MELLIFLUOUS COGITATION. Follow the exercises laid out herein exactly and precisely, and you will surely achieve something, receive some benefit, simply by applying feng shui to your own neurons.

What I Did Today

Today I set out to add to the grid a context menu containing a function to delete the items selected.

And now for something almost completely different.

Enough of this banter and persiflage; this blog is starting to read like the Pack Rat of Sumatra storyline from Daniel Pinkwater's NORB. Someone wants to know about Notebox Mismanager 3.

NM3 has a long history of false starts and dead ends¹, and has in fact started over again with a project whose source code you will find in the Files section of the Squirrel Technologist site under the name Scratch.zip. As of this moment there isn't much of a reason to download that file unless you're into compiling Qt projects. It's pre-beta, maybe pre-alpha; some of the false starts and dead ends got as far as being compiled on Windows, but this one hasn't.

What does it do, besides compile without errors on Linux? Upon startup it scans through the system's Documents folder and subfolders therein looking for .txt, .htm and .html files, which it loads and then displays in the traditional grid format, presenting each subfolder as a category. There is a popup category navigator. Files can be edited; changes to files are held until the Save Changes function is invoked. And you can select a different folder to scan.

My current intent is to import and upgrade functionality...I'm going to say daily for the sake of the amusement value...with commentary placed here when it happens.

You may now burst into tears.

---

¹ It was I that killed C++. The whole world is switching to HTML5/Javascript device apps and you can thank me and me alone. TREMBLE BEFORE MY POWER!

Useless Fragment #13

The Case of the Whistling Weasel is surely the oddest in my case files, and were I not afraid of legal repercussions I would surely tell it. But I am, so instead I shall remark upon several interesting things I have noticed about honeybees.

Useless Fragment #12

Experts in the field of biomedicine are unanimous in their conviction that no human can survive being crushed by a 160-ton weight, but as I watched the satellite descending upon me I resolved to be the exception.

Useless Fragment #11

"The dam burst!" cried little Willy Bloggs, running into the farmhouse. Naturally we all ran for the back door to get to the stable and it took some talking before he managed to get his point across and by that time the water was running past the kitchen window.
"By gar and by scrumbag," I said, "this is an awful pickle. --Mabel, fetch me another, will you?"
"Kosher?" she said.
"Bless you," I said. "Let's get on up to the roof, shall we?"
We found the horses milling around in the upstairs bedroom; I can't imagine how they'd managed to get up the stairs without us noticing. Had they been there all night? It appeared so, for the dam had in fact gone and foaled in Mama's bed and you can be sure she was not happy about that.

Useless Fragment #10

It was a hot night in the city, and Lieutenant Sam Broggs was pacing in sweat down the length of 5th Street for the third time in as many hours, studying the pavement like it was Kant's Prolegomena. He'd been trained in analytical observation techniques, with special attention to the Pinkerton method, but no doubt about it, those contact lenses were staying lost. And then again, he thought as he rubbed his eyes, maybe the reason he couldn't see them was that he had not in fact lost them. Yes, that appeared to be the case.

Useless Fragment #9

Mrs Tuppence Bagg brought the broom down upon her husband's balding head with a thump. "You horrible man! I shall never forgive you this and no mistake! How could you ever have claimed that Penrose's twistor theory is incompatible with existing observations and do it right in front of me mum!"
"Buggerall!" remarked Mr Bagg, "I knew I should never have married a woman who had a poster of Kip Thorne on her bedroom wall!"
"Heartless beast!"
"Cow!"
"Verminorous insangulate!"
"Brazen article! — Oh, Tuppence, can't you see what I'm trying to say? I love you!"

Useless Fragment #8

Weasels! cried the old man. Weasels!

Be off with you, old man, said the blue chinned constable of questionable qualifications. We need no weasels in this town, indeed we have a surfeit of them.

But these are ISO 9000 certified! said the old man.

Oh really? How much?

Useless Fragment #7

“Has anyone ever told you you look like Death?”
“I’m his brother.”

Useless Fragments #4, 5 and 6

Fate walks among us, thought William Brown, as a large inflatable moose billowed down the street toward him. William Brown was an odd man who constantly fought to get even, having left the insurance business after it had rejected his innovation of actuarial coasters.

REWARD said the sign, just above the illustration of Melvin Korblish and the notion DEAD OR ALIVE. A terrible likeness, thought Melvin Korblish, and he drew a mustache on it. There, that's more like it. Gives me a more obscure look.

On the morning of July 7th, 1998, near a wishing well in the seaside resort of Garth Fumby, New Zealand, three ounces of crumbly red earth simply rose up and ascended into the sky. It may have been a dire portent; alas, no one was there to see it.

Useless Fragment #3

Disturbing the universe is all well and good if that's what you have in mind, but if all you want to do is make a simple peanut butter and jelly sandwich and proceed to create life or make a discovery regarding the decay rates of sigma protons (which are ordinary protons but have gone out for the Rushes) you may find that it leaves something to be desired. I myself once made several breakthroughs in theoretical physics while attempting to soft-boil an egg and although I won the Nobel prize later on I never did get my soft boiled egg. I was very disturbed by that and of course so was the universe.

Useless Fragments 1 & 2

I am not a loser, remarked Bub, even if Daddy did remove all my baby pictures from the family album and replace them with photographs of total strangers. It's just that they were really handsome total strangers. Why I might well have done the same thing had I been in his position and for all I know I may yet.

May Yet, the master spy of the Orient, sneered into his cup of black coffee. Stupid British secret agent man! he snarled, Come to your doom! – only to realize upon taking a sip that his coffee was not coffee at all but alcohol mixed with black powder. He choked and instinctively reached for his cigarette. Halfway through a drag the obvious occurred and he departed through the skylight, not precisely precipitously but that word would come into play shortly thereafter.

Abandoned Stories of Super Science

"Get away from that liederkranz, you scrofulous bum!" roared Dr Heinrich Pfeffernusse.

Things had been going downhill at the Institute for Advanced Particle Physics lately; they had inaugurated the institution with an inquiry into z₀ pseudoquark behavior, but after only three weeks the majority of researchers were mainly involved in investigating who was responsible for cleaning out the microwave, who had stolen whose parking space, and why all the coffee cups were always dirty.  Now Dr Heinrich Pfeffernusse, head of research and winner of three Nobel prizes (Physics 1999, Chemistry 2000, Gardening 2003) had been reduced to lurking in the canteen to see who was swiping his lunch.

"This is not your liederkranz!" screamed Dr Wolfgang Shmutzenheimer (Physics 2000, Chemistry 2001, Copyright Violation 2001, Revoked Chemistry 2001). "This is my peanuts butter and marshmallow sammich and you will kindly get your stinken nose out of my face!"

Dr Pfeffernusse looked closer and determined that in fact it was a peanuts butter and marshmallow sammich and became slightly nauseated. "Disgusting so!"

"You repulse me, you moral dwarf of a man!" howled Dr Shmutzenheimer.  He jumped up and down, scattering peanuts around the room. "You accuse me of villainy without evidence and steal my parking space this morning! You reduce me to incontinence! Begone from my sight and never darken my mind again!"

And Dr Shmutzenheimer stormed from the room, stole Dr Pfeffernusse's Maserati from the parking lot and drove to Sioux City to start a new life as a vacuum salesman (he was not very successful at this -- being a physicist he had different ideas about vacuums -- and retired early at the age of 87).

This disturbed Pfeffernusse, but not until that afternoon.

"Unglaublich!" he said, eventually, and crawled under the sink to wait for the next thief to enter the room -- or tried to crawl under the sink; he found the space was occupied.  "Dr Totenpferdenschlagen!"

"Yes, it is I," said Dr Totenpferdenschlagen. "Do you know, the lab technicians are doing unauthorized experiments in dynamic probability? I wouldn't mind but they're using my deck, and I do so love to play solitaire." He began gnawing at a liederkranz with unseemly ecstasy.

"Dr Totenpferdenschlagen, my old mentor! -- Is that a liederkranz?"

"Yes it is -- and yes it is I, Dr Franz Totenpferdenschlagen, who know your secret, Dr Heinrich Pfeffernusse -- that you are really Bachelor of Arts Joe Perkins from Duluth!"

Dig And Delve

What's in this folder? My goodness, it's full of WordPerfect macro programming information. (My approach to any given thing, like programming WordPerfect, is to dive in, do enormous amounts of research, become a near-expert, lose interest and forget all about it.)

And here are a bunch of WordPerfect documents, which happily LibreOffice can more or less read. (WordPerfect was technically superior to MS Word, which is why Word became dominant.)

• In 1999 I was contemplating a story in which Count Dracula and his daughters escape Van Helsing and sneak out of Transylvania by disintegrating themselves in the sun and having Renfield mail them to America in large manila envelopes. Instant Vampire, just add blood. (I assume that this technique was invented by the Hammer studio people; it raises the obvious question -- what happens when you lose some of the dust? Or mix the packets? I'm amazed that David Cronenberg has never thought of this. I was going to give Dracula the line "Being undead means never having to pay another insurance premium." but that rings hollow now.)

• There was once was a little boy named Vermit. His parents were Guelma and Vorpo, and they did not like him either. They lived in a dark and gloomy castle called Kathundra and fed on dust motes and spiderwebs, until one day Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton knocked on their door and took them all away to Hollywood where they lived happily ever after.

• Here's a story I was going to submit to The Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction until I chickened out. Did I err?

The diminished seventh is the musical Orient Express.

What else needs to be removed from a hard drive that could rate its own episode of HOARDERS?

From 1998, a collection of usenet postings on the state of completion of the finale of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony. Why have I a collection, etc.? Because I was writing a story that might have concluded with transcendental intelligences from the universal unconscious granting my protagonist a performance of the completed work from the realm of Platonic Forms, that's why.

Of course, that ending sort of hinged on the mistaken impression that Bruckner hadn't started it, whereas it seems he nearly finished it. Apparently he numbered the measures all the way to the end, and roughs exist of nearly the entire section.

I eventually picked a completion done by William Carragan, which was good enough for me -- I mean, since it's clear that Anton didn't write the finale as a pipe-organ concerto structure -- although Mr Google now informs me that Sir Simon Rattle has led the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in a Carnegie Hall¹ performance of the latest revision by Nicola Samale, John Phillips, Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, and Giuseppe Mazzuca, which I gather incorporates some previously lost pages of the manuscript that turned up in 2003.

Just beneath NINTHNOTES.TXT is FORCES.TXT, containing information on the four basic forces (electromagnetic, gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear) because the aforementioned protagonist was trying to figure out which one would be the most effective one to suppress in order to make the sun explode. Which is why he would eventually be granted a performance of the finale of Bruckner 9.

I think I must have been reading Philip K Dick.

---

¹ I wonder if anyone thought to bus the orchestra over to the Bronx to get their pictures taken on Bruckner Boulevard...

In which I set the tone.

On my hard disk lies a text file, named simply "003", undisturbed since 12 July 2008. Its contents are as follows:

cartesian donuts

The 1913 Webster says a Cartesian oval is a curve such that, for any point of the curve mr + m'r' = c, where r and r' are the distances of the point from the two foci and m, m' and c are constant. So there you are.

Alternatively it could be a donut that exists only because it thinks that it exists, although that raises the obvious question -- how does it know it's a donut and not a coffee cup...?