Desultor

Props to the Chinese for this.

I gots like a dozen philological posts, all unfinished. I feel I could really let loose on the report that Lt. Col. Stephen Jordan, the head of the interrogation center at Abu Ghraib, was “fascinated” with the CIA. What an apt and interesting word. I’ll probably never finish the post, so you best look it up yourself!

There were interesting articles in the Guardian this morning about the catacombs under Paris and a jail blog by a Britisher in Joe Arpaio country.

They’ve newly painted zebra crosswalks in parts of Somerville. When it’s sunny and you bike over them, they are a glaring white so bright as to confound.

And in front of you a circular rainbow pops into existence on the ground; it glides along right ahead of you. It looks a bit less than ten feet in diameter. It’s on the pavement as well as the white stripes, and slowly fades after you’ve moved entirely past the crosswalk.

This worried me until this morning. Why would I see the rainbow when I’m not even seeing the crosswalk anymore? Fun door-opening and fun cognitive science have opened my eyes to some weird quirks of perception (hey kids! what color is dry new snow on a sunny day?), but this one was new to me, and I had to assume it to be a harbinger of brain damage.

But this morning, biking at a more leisurely pace and willing to look away from the road for a while for science, I figured it all out. The painting process had left a near-invisible coating of dust on the road all around, and it was this that was reflecting up the rainbow. My guess is that they make the road paint on the fly by mixing some goopy junk and some really fine smashed-up crystal powder of some sort, and they didn’t have enough goopy stuff in the mix this time.

At least, I hope you can play this game. I can.

Read outside, in direct bright sunlight. Black ink on white paper does well. The Boston Phoenix is just fine too.

Now go inside, under flourescent lights. The text will appear bright neon green! It’s cool looking.

Stare at it a while without blinking – green, green. Now start to steadily give a good second-long blink every five seconds or so. It will appear dark or black when your eyes first open, and gradually brighten back into the bright, glowing green as you stare at it. It will take it longer to get green after each blink, until it eventually stays black.

According to a Russian anti-virus firm, elite Islamic terrorist hackers are set to cripple the Internet on August 26th.

Maybe they’ll do some sort of DOS against the WHOLE INTERNET using email death threats. Perhaps Mohammed Khan was working on just such a diabolical scheme when they caught him!

One will surely confess onepeat and twopeat to be, respectively, singularly and doubly astonishing.

Zeropeat does not occur. I hereby copyright the word and declare it to be a trademark of Desultor Inc. I also patent the idea of a verbal noun referring to the completion of an action zero times. That shit is not “pending” – it is an active patent. If you try to take food from my babies’ mouths, you will be dealt with forcefully.

The L.A. Times, on the arrest of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan:

He was arrested while uploading information to several Al Qaeda-affiliated websites at an Internet cafe in Karachi, the Pakistani intelligence official said. Khan also was in the process of sending an e-mail death threat to President Bush and claiming that it came from Al Qaeda, according to the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

This is actually quite funny.

Sometimes I read about featherless bipeds and such on a Chinese news site called xinhuanet, or China View, or Xinhua Online.

I tried pronouncing “Xinhua” with my best Chinese accent and it sounded like a Frenchman saying “Chinois”. Is this a coincidence, or an etymology? Does anyone know?

I read today that West Virginia believes in “God Almighty, Sears Roebuck, Carter’s Little Liver Pills and Robert C. Byrd”

This clears up an old mystery, which I haven’t thought of in years. My mother’s mother used to use a phrase, “He has more [x] than Carter had liver pills”. An example: my gramma had more old-time phrases in her vocabulary than Carter had liver pills.

I was always kinda like, “Huh! Who knew Jimmy Carter had liver problems! Old people sure do know some stuff!” But over the years I heard no other reference to this malady of his.

Today I’ve found out that the pills were actually a sort of patent medicine. They were sold from before her birth until, apparently, the 1960s.

She lived in different times. I miss her.

A man left his bicycle locked to a post on the sidewalk, and his helmet clipped to the handlebars.

He carefully put up a sign: “Please do not spit in this helmet.”

Returning, he found the helmet all bespitten.

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.