"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.
29 February 2012
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!"
"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!"
28 February 2012
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 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.
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.
27 February 2012
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.
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.
26 February 2012
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!"
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?
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...
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:
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...?
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...?
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