Log24

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

Philosophy Notes

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:01 am

Thursday, August 14, 2014

MIT Mystery

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

Robin Williams and the Stages of Grief

A weblog post from Jan. 25, 2014 (click image to enlarge)—

Clues for a Mystery   (Click links for more details)—

Clue 1:  A June 11,* 2014, math death.

Clue 2:  The answer is a surname.

Midrash for Will Hunting:

See Nanavira Thera at Wikipedia and space notes from September 2012.

* According to a (perhaps inaccurate) math department.
June 10, according to other sources cited by the department.

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Game News

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 pm

An essay linked to here on the date of Kuhn’s
death discussed the film “Good Will Hunting”:

“You can be sure that when an experienced movie director
like Gus Van Sant selects an establishing shot for the lead
character, he does so with considerable care, on the advice
of an expert.”

Establishing shots —

1. From a post of January 29, 2014:

2. From a post of April 12, 2011:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110412-HuntingCreditsSm.jpg

Parting shot —

From another post of January 29, 2014:

Note Watson‘s title advice.

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Hellgate Joke

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:07 pm

The title refers to this afternoon's previous post.

Some context for that post from Friday, April 8—
Hello Note (3:33 AM EDT) and Windows (Noon EDT (6 AM Hawaii time)).

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110412-MSNBC-FireworksJoke.jpg

Related material—

Paranormal Jackass and Roll Credits.

The Hawaiian fireworks bunker's resemblance to
the gate of Hell of course does not imply anything
about the afterlife of those who died there.

From the "Roll Credits" link above—

Click to enlarge

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110412-HuntingCreditsSm.jpg

In the above image, the name beneath Will Hunting's license plate suggests
a search for Collinge in this journal (scroll down) that yields, at its end, some music
more appropriate for a wake than "Afternoon Delight."

Monday, March 14, 2011

A Dante for Our Times

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 pm

(Continued from this date two years ago)

"Hell is other people." —Sartre
"With a laugh track." —Cullinane

A sequel to Good Will Hunting and Hereafter

The Emory Board

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Divine Comedy

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:33 pm

The Story Theory of Truth

“We have a need to tell ourselves stories
that explain it all. We use these stories to
supply the metaphysics, without which
life seems pointless and empty.”

David Brooks, NY Times of Nov. 10

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's website has quotes on her soon-to-be-published novel 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

"Hilarious"
"Savagely funny"
"Supremely witty"
"Rollicking"

Description of the novel–

"At the center: Cass Seltzer, a professor of psychology…."

Not to be confused with Professor Seltzer in Wanted  or characters in the films of Matt Damon–

The professor in Good Will Hunting and The Professor in The Bourne Identity

Related material–

Stories and Metaphysics

Sunday, August 16, 2009

Sunday August 16, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:29 am
Refugees

In memory of
Kenneth H. Bacon, dead at 64
on August 15th, 2009.

Bacon was an advocate for refugees.

"Even blue-blooded WASPs were refugees at one time; mine came over from England in 1630, fleeing debts for all I know," he said.

Today's New York Times

The Expulsion from Eden

Click cover to enlarge.

Milton by Sorel

Click for details.

Bacon turned 64
last year on November 21.

Log24 on that date:

From a story in the November 21
 Chronicle of Higher Education
on a recent St. Olaf College
reading of Paradise Lost:

"Of man's first disobedience,
     and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree,
     whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World,
     and all our woe….

A red apple made the rounds,
each reader tempting the next."

________________________

"Do you like apples?"
Good Will Hunting    
 

Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Wednesday April 8, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:12 am

Good’s Singularity

Irving John “I.J.” Good died Sunday, April 5, 2009.

The date of his death was also Palm Sunday and the day of the Academy of Country Music Awards.

Information from Wikipedia:

Good, 92, was a cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park during World War II.

“He was born as Isidore Jacob Gudak to a Jewish family in London. In his publications he was called I. J. Good. He studied mathematics at Jesus College, Cambridge, graduating in 1938. He did research work under G.H. Hardy and Besicovitch before moving to Bletchley Park in 1941 on completing his doctorate.

At Bletchley Park, he was initially in Hut 8 under the supervision of Alan Turing…”

[Related material: the death of Turing (a major fan of the Evil Queen in Snow White) and yesterday’s entry]

Wikipedia states that “I. J. Good’s vanity car license plate, hinting at his spylike wartime work, was ‘007 IJG’…. He played chess to county standard, and helped to popularise Go, an Asian boardgame, through a 1965 article in New Scientist (he had learned the rules from Turing). In 1965, he described a concept similar to today’s meaning of technological singularity, in that it included in it the advent of superhuman intelligence:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make….
— Good, I. J. (1965). ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine‘, Advances in Computers, Vol. 6.”
“Some say the symbol
of Apple Computers,
the apple with a bite out of it,
is a nod to Alan Turing.”– from “Alan Turing and
the Apple
at Flickr, uploaded
on Epiphany 2006 by guano

Alan Turing and the Apple

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090408-TuringApples.jpg

Above: Composite by “guano” at Flickr

Will: Do you like apples?
Clark: Yeah.
Will: Well, I got her number.
How do you like them apples?

— “Good Will Hunting

Happy Spy Wednesday.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

Saturday March 28, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 pm

The Rest
of the Story

Today's previous entry discussed the hermeneutics of the midday NY and PA lottery numbers.

The rest of the story:
 

The Revelation Game
(continued from 7/26, 2008)

 
Lotteries
on Reba's
birthday,
2009
Pennsylvania
(No revelation)
New York
(Revelation)
Mid-day
(No belief)
No belief,
no revelation

726
Revelation
without belief

378
Evening
(Belief)
Belief without
revelation

006
Belief and
revelation

091

Interpretations of the evening numbers–

The PA evening number, 006, may be viewed as a followup to the PA midday 726 (or 7/26, the birthday of Kate Beckinsale and Carl Jung). Here 006 is the prestigious "00" number assigned to Beckinsale.
 

Will: Do you like apples?     
Clark: Yeah.                       
Will: Well, I got her number.
 How do you like them apples?

— "Good Will Hunting

Kate Beckinsale in 'Underworld: Evolution'

The NY evening number, 091, may be viewed as a followup to the NY midday 378 (the number of pages in The Innermost Kernel by Suzanne Gieser, published by Springer, 2005)–

Page 91: The entire page is devoted to the title of the book's Part 3– "The Copenhagen School and Psychology"–
 

Page 91 of 'The Innermost Kernel' by Suzanne Gieser, Springer 2005

The next page begins: "With the crisis of physics, interest in epistemological and psychological questions grew among many theoretical physicists. This interest was particularly marked in the circle around Niels Bohr."
 

A particularly
marked circle
 from March 15:

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

The circle above is
marked with a version of
the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

The square above is marked
with a graphic design
related to the four-diamond
figure of Jung's Aion.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Friday December 12, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:24 pm
Back to the Garden
of Forking Paths

“Somehow it seems to fill my head with ideas– only I don’t exactly know what they are!…. Let’s have a look at the garden first!”

— A passage from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The “garden” part– but not the “ideas” part– was quoted by Jacques Derrida in Dissemination in the epigraph to Chapter 7, “The Time before First.”

“‘For you… he… we aren’t meaning…’ She was almost stammering, as if she were trying to say several things at once…. Suddenly she gave a little tortured scream. ‘O!’ she cried, ‘O! I can’t keep up! it keeps dividing! There’s too many things to think of!'”

— A passage from Charles Williams’s The Place of the Lion, Chapter 12.

“He was thinking faster than he had ever done, and questions rose out of nothing and followed each other– what was to will? Will was determination to choose– what was choice? How could there be choice, unless there was preference, and if there was preference there was no choice, for it was not possible to choose against that preferring nature which was his being; yet being consisted in choice, for only by taking and doing this and not that could being know itself, could it indeed be; to be then consisted in making an inevitable choice, and all that was left was to know the choice, yet even then was the chosen thing the same as the nature that chose, and if not… So swiftly the questions followed each other that he seemed to be standing in flashing coils of subtlety, an infinite ring of vivid intellect and more than intellect, for these questions were not of the mind alone but absorbed into themselves physical passion and twined through all his nature on an unceasing and serpentine journey.”

— A passage from The Place of the Lion, Chapter 10.

Do you like apples?

Good Will Hunting

Friday, November 21, 2008

Friday November 21, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 pm
Gatsby Starts Over:
Cleaning Up the
St. Olaf Mess

St. Olaf College,
Northfield, Minnesota —
From The MSCS Mess
(Dept. of Mathematics, Statistics,
and Computer Science)
November 14, 2008
Volume 37, Number 9

Math Film Festival 2008
The MSCS Department is sponsoring the second of two film-discussion evenings this Wednesday, November 19. Come to RNS 390 at 7:00 PM to see watch [sic] two short [sic]Whatchu  Know 'bout Math and Just a Finite Simple Group of Order Two— and our feature film, Good Will Hunting. Will Hunting is a mathematical genius who's living a rough life in South Boston, while being employed at a prestigious college in Boston, he's [sic] discovered by a Fields Medal winning mathematics Professor [sic] who eventually tries to get Will to turn his life around but becomes haunted by his own professional inadequacies when compared with Will. Professor Garrett will explain the “impossible problem” and its solution after the film.

Background:

Log24 entries of Wednesday, November 19, the day "Good Will Hunting" was shown:
Damnation Morning revisited and
Mathematics and Narrative continued
 

From a story in the November 21
 Chronicle of Higher Education
on a recent St. Olaf College
reading of Paradise Lost:

"Of man's first disobedience,
     and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree,
     whose mortal taste
Brought death into the World,
     and all our woe….

A red apple made the rounds,
each reader tempting the next."

________________________

"Do you like apples?"
Good Will Hunting   
 

Wednesday, October 3, 2007

Wednesday October 3, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Janitor Monitor

 

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/070803-Trees.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Will Hunting may be
interested in the following
vacant editorships at
The Open Directory:

Graph Theory
and
Combinatorics.

Related material:

The Long Hello and
On the Holy Trinity

"Hey, Carrie-Anne, what's
your game now….?
"

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071003-Magdalene.GIF” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Picture sources:
azstarnet.com,
vibrationdata.com.

Personally, I prefer
Carol Ann:

From Criticism,  Fall, 2001,
by Carol Ann Johnston

"Drawing upon Platonic thought, Augustine argues that ideas are actually God's objective pattern and as such exist in God's mind. These ideas appear in the mirror of the soul. (35)."

(35.) In Augustine, De Trinitate, trans., Stephen McKenna (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University Press, 1970). See A. B. Acton, "Idealism," in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed., Paul Edwards. Vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 1967): 110-118; Robert McRae, "`Idea' as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century," JHI 26 (1965): 175-190, and Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art History, trans., Joseph J. S. Peake (Columbia, S.C.: University of South Carolina Press, 1968) for explications of this term.

 

See also
Art Wars: Geometry as Conceptual Art
and Ideas and Art: Notes on Iconology.

 

For more on Augustine and geometry,
see Today's Sinner (Aug. 28, 2006).

 

 

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Tuesday August 21, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:29 pm
Shell Game

The Bourne Ultimatum, starring Matt Damon” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Part I:

Overview of Unix
at pangea.stanford.edu

Last revision August 2, 2004

“The Unix operating environment is organized into three layers. The innermost level of Unix is the kernel. This is the actual operating system, a single large program that always resides in memory. Sections of the code in this program are executed on behalf of users to do needed tasks, like access files or terminals. Strictly speaking, the kernel is Unix.

The next level of the Unix environment is composed of programs, commands, and utilities. In Unix, the basic commands like copying or removing files are implemented not as part of the kernel, but as individual programs, no different really from any program you could write. What we think of as the commands and utilities of Unix are simply a set of programs that have become standardized and distributed. There are hundreds of these, plus many additional utilities in the public domain that can be installed.

The final level of the Unix environment, which stands like an umbrella over the others, is the shell. The shell processes your terminal input and starts up the programs that you request. It also allows you to manipulate the environment in which those programs will execute in a way that is transparent to the program. The program can be written to handle standard cases, and then made to handle unusual cases simply by manipulating its environment, without having to have a special version of the program.” (My italics.)

Part II:

Programs

From my paper journal
on the date
“Good Will Hunting”
was released:

Friday, December 5, 1997

To: The executive editor, The New York Times

Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday

Match the speaker with the speech–

The Speech
“The son of a
bitch stole my…”
  The Speaker Frame of Reference
 1. rosebud A. J. Paul Getty The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97
 2. clock B. Joel Silver Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94
 3. act C. Blanche DuBois The Elysian Fields
 4. waltz D. Bob Geldof People Weekly 12/8/97
 5. temple E. St. Michael Heaven’s Gate
 6. watch F. Susanna Moore In the Cut (pbk., Dec. ’96) p. 261
 7. line G. Joseph Lelyveld Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97
 8. chair H. Kylie Minogue Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97
 9. religion I. Carol Gilligan The Garden of Good and Evil
10. wife J. John Travolta “Michael,” the movie
11. harp K. Shylock Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97
12. Oscar L. Stephen King The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317

Postscript of June 5, 2003:

“…while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time…
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events….”

Vladimir Nabokov

Part III:

The Bourne Shell

“The binary program of the Bourne shell or a compatible program is located at /bin/sh on most Unix systems, and is still the default shell for the root superuser on many current Unix implementations.” –Wikipedia

Afterword:

See also
the recent comments
of root@matrix.net in
Peter Woit’s weblog.

“Hey, Carrie-Anne,
what’s your game now….”

— The Hollies, 1967   

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Wednesday May 31, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 am
Clint Eastwood
 is 76.

In honor of his birthday,
a three-part meditation
on quality:

Part I —

From The Quality of Diamond,
Log24 entries from Feb. 2004:

The Quality
with No Name

And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good…
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?

— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance

Part II —

From Log24 on
Dec. 7, 2003:

Eyes on the Prize

Dialogue from “Good Will Hunting” —

Will:   He used to just put a belt,
          a stick, and a wrench
          on the kitchen table
          and say, “Choose.”
Sean:  Gotta go with the belt, there.
Will:    I used to go with the wrench.

 Location, Location, Location

Part III —

From the website of
Noam D. Elkies,
Harvard mathematician:

SLUMMERVILLE

Somerville,
Where the livin’ is sleazy:
Folk are humpin’
And the chillun is high.
Oh yo’ daddy’s rich,
‘Cos yo’ ma is good lookin’
So hush, ugly baby,
Or I’ll make you cry.

[“Parody by Noam D. Elkies;
not the original lyrics,
of course.”]

Related material
from Log24 on
April 10, 2006:

The image �http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060410-Elkies3.jpg� cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Noam D. Elkies

The Magic Schmuck

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Tuesday April 11, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:33 pm
Dallas

Part I,

from
The Circle is Unbroken,
May 2003:
 
Highballs

“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
 – F. Scott Fitzgerald,
epigraph to
The Great Gatsby

Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:

A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era

– New York Times,
 May 14, 2003

Song title from the
June Carter Cash
album “Press On“:

“Gatsby’s Restaurant”

From The Great Gatsby,
Chapter Four:

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.

Presbyterian Nymph:

Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003 

On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff
traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
 Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
 any function at all, made all the trips!”

Apparently there was some function…

“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
  “Good Will Hunting.”
Part II:

Today’s birthday:
Joel Grey

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060411-Grey1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Grey in “Conundrum,”
the final episode of Dallas

Related material:

Log24 on March 20, 2006

The image �http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051019-TwoSides.jpg� cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

— and the 5 previous entries.

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Sunday December 11, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:02 pm
Intelligence/
Counterintelligence

continued:

Intelligence: A file on James Jesus Angleton at namebase.org, a site run by Daniel Brandt.
 

Intelligence
illustrated:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051211-ulam.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

JFK (l.) and
Stanislaw Ulam (r.)

Counterintelligence: Hollywood on James Jesus Angleton–

"From a screenplay by 'Forrest Gump' screenwriter Eric Roth, 'The Good Shepherd' tells the mostly true story of James Wilson (a character reported to be based on legendary CIA spymaster James Jesus Angleton, and played in the film by Matt Damon), one of the founding members of the Central Intelligence Agency. Beginning as an scholar at Yale, the film follows Wilson as he is recruited to join the secret Skull and Bones fraternity, a brotherhood and breeding ground for future world leaders, where his acute mind, spotless reputation and sincere belief in the American way of life render him a prime candidate for a career in intelligence."

Edward Havens, FilmJerk.com, 8/30/2005

The Forrest Gump Award goes to Good Will Hunting* for this choice of roles.

Counterintelligence
illustrated:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/051211-gump.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Forrest Gump (l.)
and JFK (r.)

* See Log24, April 4, 2003, Mathematics Awareness Month.  For some related material, see Mathematics and Narrative.

Thursday, October 21, 2004

Thursday October 21, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:00 pm

A Date Which Will
Live in Infamy

Log24.net Sunday,
December 7, 2003

Annals of Education:

Eyes on the Prize

Dialogue from
“Good Will Hunting” —

Will:    He used to just put a belt,
          a stick, and a wrench
          on the kitchen table
          and say, “Choose.”

Sean: Gotta go with the belt, there.

Will:   I used to go with the wrench.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041021--GWH2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Today’s saint’s day:
St. Ursula

Today’s birthday:
Ursula K. Le Guin

 The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041021-Award.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Today’s Scripture:

Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04B/041021-Zen.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Chapter 20:

“Then, on impulse, Phædrus went over to his bookshelf and picked out a small, blue, cardboard-bound book. He’d hand-copied this book and bound it himself years before, when he couldn’t find a copy for sale anywhere. It was the 2,400-year-old Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu. He began to read….

Phædrus read on through line after line, verse after verse of this, watched them match, fit, slip into place. Exactly. This was what he meant. This was what he’d been saying all along, only poorly, mechanistically. There was nothing vague or inexact about this book. It was as precise and definite as it could be. It was what he had been saying, only in a different language with different roots and origins. He was from another valley seeing what was in this valley, not now as a story told by strangers but as a part of the valley he was from. He was seeing it all.

He had broken the code.

He read on. Line after line. Page after page. Not a discrepancy. What he had been talking about all the time as Quality was here the Tao, the great central generating force of all religions, Oriental and Occidental, past and present, all knowledge, everything.”

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Thursday July 15, 2004

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:04 pm
Identity Crisis

From a summer movie guide:

“Ready for more international espionage and intrigue? On July 23, Matt Damon returns as amnesiac spy Jason Bourne in the sequel to 2002’s surprise hit, ‘The Bourne Identity.’ ….

At the end of ‘Identity,’ Bourne promised retaliation to Treadstone (the super-secret agency that created him) if it came after him.”

And now…

Bad Will Hunting

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040715-Damon2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix04A/040715-Group.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Super-secret?

You can’t make this stuff up.

Sunday, December 7, 2003

Sunday December 7, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

Annals of Education:

Eyes on the Prize

Dialogue from “Good Will Hunting” —

Will:    He used to just put a belt,
          a stick, and a wrench
          on the kitchen table
          and say, “Choose.”
Sean: Gotta go with the belt, there.
Will:   I used to go with the wrench.

 Location, Location, Location

See, too, Dick Morris on triangulation.

Thursday, June 5, 2003

Thursday June 5, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 pm

Regime Change
at the New York Times:

With Honors

Departing New York Times executive editor
Howell Raines:

"Remember, when a great story breaks out,
go like hell."


Returning
executive editor
Joseph Lelyveld

Good Will's
Oscar

From the date "Good Will Hunting" was released:

Friday, December 5, 1997

"Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday."
— Bernard Holland, C12, N.Y. Times, 5/20/96

To: The executive editor, The New York Times

Re: The Front Page/His Girl Friday

Match the speaker with the speech —

The Speech
"The son of a
bitch stole my…"
  The Speaker Frame of Reference
 1. rosebud A. J. Paul Getty The front page, N.Y. Times, Monday, 12/1/97
 2. clock B. Joel Silver Page 126, The New Yorker, 3/21/94
 3. act C. Blanche DuBois The Elysian Fields
 4. waltz D. Bob Geldof People Weekly 12/8/97
 5. temple E. St. Michael Heaven's Gate
 6. watch F. Susanna Moore In the Cut (pbk., Dec. '96) p. 261
 7. line G. Joseph Lelyveld Page A21, The New York Times, 12/1/97
 8. chair H. Kylie Minogue Page 69, People Weekly, 12/8/97
 9. religion I. Carol Gilligan The Garden of Good and Evil
10. wife J. John Travolta "Michael," the movie
11. harp K. Shylock Page 40, N.Y. Review of Books, 12/4/97
12. Oscar L. Stephen King The Shining (pbk., 1997), pp. 316, 317

Postscript of June 5, 2003:

"…while the scientist sees everything that happens
in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens
in one point of time … all forming an instantaneous
and transparent organism of events…."

Vladimir Nabokov

Friday, May 16, 2003

Friday May 16, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:44 pm

Highballs

“If you can bounce high,
bounce for her too….”
 – F. Scott Fitzgerald, epigraph to
The Great Gatsby

Magazine purchased at
newsstand May 14, 2003:

A Whiff of Camelot
as ‘West Wing’
Ends an Era

– New York Times,
 May 14, 2003

Song title from the
June Carter Cash album “Press On“:

“Gatsby’s Restaurant”

From The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four:

“Highballs?” asked the head waiter.
“This is a nice restaurant here,”
said Mr. Wolfsheim, looking at the
Presbyterian nymphs on the ceiling.

Presbyterian Nymph:

Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate,
in the news on May 15, 2003 

On JFK’s plane trips:
“Whenever the President traveled,
members of the press staff traveled as well.
You always have a press secretary
and a couple of girls traveling….
 Mimi, who obviously couldn’t perform
 any function at all, made all the trips!”

Apparently there was some function….

“Don’t forget the coffee!”
– Punchline from the film
  “Good Will Hunting.”

Friday, April 4, 2003

Friday April 4, 2003

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:36 pm

Mathematics Awareness Month

April is the cruelest month….

Do you know nothing?
Do you see nothing?
Do you remember "Nothing"?

— T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, 1922

From Michael Pearson, Director of Programs and Services for the Mathematical Association of America, in his Liaison Newsletter of January 2003

"For this year's Mathematics Awareness Month, April 2003, the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics has selected the theme of Mathematics and Art….

Financial support for Mathematics Awareness Month 2003 is provided by the National Security Agency."

From a ReelWavs.com transcript of 
"Good Will Hunting":

nsa.mp3 (436K)
Will:  "Why shouldn't I work for the N.S.A.? That's a tough one, but I'll give it a shot. Say I'm working at N.S.A. Somebody puts a code on my desk, something nobody else can break. So I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. And I'm real happy with myself, 'cause I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people I never had a problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', Send in the marines to secure the area 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some guy from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile my buddy from Southie realizes the only reason he was over there was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish to scare up oil prices so they could turn a quick buck. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. And naturally they're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's got to walk to the job interviews, which sucks 'cause the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorroids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they'r servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. So what do I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. Why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president."

From an eulogy for Ivan Illich:

"He frequently cited the Latin maxim 'corruptio optimi pessima,' the corruption of the best is the worst."

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