Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

We have two competing, antithetical missions for the Library of American Philosophical Society.

One is to make our truly remarkable collection available for study, just as freely and widely as possible. The other is to protect and conserve all its objects, to pass them on to the future in perfect condition.

Martin L. Leavitt, APS Librarian

I love this idea of two antithetical missions, which I suspect has a much broader applicability in political science, economics, family life, and you name it. I got to hear about it this morning in Philadelphia’s beautiful Library Hall because
Frank is a brand-new member this year at the APS.

Becoming an APS member doesn’t involve a propeller-hat or drinking games with older philosophers. Instead, it’s an opportunity for Frank and spouse to go to lots of amazing lectures on wide-ranging topics–for example, in this current meeting we’ll hear about Chinese poetry, Mayan hieroglyphics, and the courthouse iconography of justice.

I’m afraid we missed “Neuronal Replacement in the Adult Brain,” something I might need just to follow the rest of these lectures.

http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/mtarchive/ibm_shows_delicious_for_the_en.html
(Joho claims he’s rewritten this post with extra snark, or more well-targeted snark, or some other snarkification I didn’t grasp.)

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/11/if_your_softwar.html
Advice to coders, funny, from code queen Kathy Sierra

Flying (two segments) from Kentucky back to Boston, I rampaged through Eurasia with help from Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. But, just in case my diet of mare’s milk went sour, my backpack contained a back-up paperback mystery. (Say that three times, fast!)

Even on long flights with many, many movies, a good book is more absorbing for longer times.

I remember one rocky flight from Chile, with a jolting emergency stop in Ecuador because one of the passengers had a health emergency, when I was completely absorbed by The Perpetual Orgy, a wonderful book of essays about Flaubert that I could have included in my blogpost about books with embarassing titles. (But that book was hardcover, an exception to my rule.)

Here’s a new challenge for Amazon’s API: create a mathematical formula that minimizes book weight and maximizes the number of 5-star reviews for two very different paperbacks. That’s a formula I’d use for picking my airplane-book-pairs.

Wouldn’t you love to eavesdrop on those brand new, mandatory ethics lectures for White House officials? Gee, this so reminds me of the NH Republican Party’s eight-point “Code of Ethics,” which they invented right after getting caught jamming Democrats’ phones in 2002 –illegal behavior which, we learn in 2005, was financed by Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. I hope Bush will save some of my Federal tax dollars by brushing off the NH Republican code for his own team’s use. It sounds like exactly what he’s looking for.

You see, very conveniently, the NH Republican Code of Ethics–while forbidding “false or misleading attacks” and “any activity which would corrupt or degrade” the political process–didn’t obligate them to uncover or punish anyone’s past mistakes or crimes–or even to answer questions truthfully.

…with real nostalgia, by reading a few of the 300-plus list items in “You know you’ve been in Sweden too long when“:

• Your native language has seriously deteriorated, now you begin to “eat medicine”, “open the television”, “close the lights off”, “take a beer”, ”look upon everything” and tell someone to “follow with me” or “you needn’t to!” You start to say “for 2 years ago” and expressions like “Don’t panic” creep into your everyday language.
• The fact that all of the “v’s” and the “w’s” are together in the phone directory seems right.
• The first thing you do upon entering a bank/post office/chemist etc. is to look for the queue number machine.
• You accept that you will have to queue to take a queue number.
• You sing bawdy drinking songs instead of Christmas carols.
• As a student, you accept and even enjoy getting dressed in formal wear to go to a candle-lit 3 course dinner where you will alternately bang on your table and stand on your chair singing songs in praise of alcohol each and every time you attempt to raise your fork to your mouth.
• You are concerned when the picture on the front page of the paper is not of some completely random person watering their garden or of a child holding an animal.

Ewww! As bad as mixing up Hot Brown with Hoppin’ John!

(All of the above are classic Kentucky foodstuffs: meat stew, chocolate candy, ham-bacon-cheez-whiz sandwich, and bean stew over rice, respectively.

Frank and I are enjoying bluegrass friendliness and food this week in Lexington, Kentucky.

“Horses don’t like me, but wolves like me,” says Lulu* over dinner tonight.

“And rhinoceroses,” adds her husband.

“Oh, yes, Robby the Rhino liked me very much. But that was because he saw me with my friend Jane, the veterinarian who collected his specimen.” We then pester Lulu until she tells us this story:

Robby the Rhino was a very fine rhino. His sperm was in much demand, so for many years it was collected by a man who would sit in the back of a Volkswagen Beetle with an artificial vagina. Robby the Rhino would mount the Volkswagen, and produce his specimen.

But as time went on, poor Robby became arthritic. He could no longer mount the Volkswagen. So Jane used to collect his specimen, stimulating him while he walked and hobbled and limped around inside his enclosure.

I was visiting [the big US city] where Jane lived, and she invited me to come visit Robby at the zoo. She was wearing a white zip-up lab coat, and she gave me one also. As soon as Robby caught sight of Jane in her white coat, he got…very happy. We went into his cage, and Jane was working on collecting his specimen. Then she said to me, “Lulu, he likes to have his nose patted. Why don’t you pat his nose?”

Now, a rhinoceros has a very, very big nose. With a horn on the end of it. I’m thinking that if I get close enough to touch him that I could be mincemeat. And then I look out of the cage, and there is a five-year-old boy with his grandparents, all of them staring at what Jane is doing.

So while Jane is saying, “Just pat his nose, he likes it,” I’m thinking that when I do that, they’ll be staring at me. But then I remind myself that not one person in [big American city] knows me, so I get up my courage and I pat Robbie’s nose. And then he gives Jane his specimen. He really did like it.

Now Robby the Rhino is dead, but his sperm lives on. And I, for one, will never forget this story!

* All names have been changed, including the names of rhinos.