You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘wikipedia’ tag.
1. The United States used to be so badass that we used the Nazi’s own postal service to deliver anti-Hitler propaganda with Operation Cornflakes.
Operation Cornflakes was a World War II Office of Strategic Services PSYOP mission in 1944 and 1945 which involved tricking the German postal service Deutsche Reichspost into inadvertently delivering anti-Nazi propaganda to German citizens through mail. The operation involved special planes that were instructed to airdrop bags of false, but properly addressed mail in the vicinity of bombed mail trains. When recovering the mail during clean-up of the wreck, the postal service would hopefully confuse the false mail for the real thing and deliver it to the various addresses.
2. Terrified that a waiter will/won’t take/leave your entree/salad? Learn the silent service code.
The silent service code is a way for a diner to “talk” to servers during a meal without saying a word, mainly to tell them that the diner is finished. This will prevent any embarrassing situations where the server would take a meal prematurely. To tell a server you are finished (only a cut of meat is ‘done’), place your napkin to the left of your plate, and place all your utensils together in a “4-o’clock” position on your plate. Utensils crossed on a plate signify that a diner is still eating. If you must leave during the meal, you should place the napkin on your chair to avoid any confusion.
3. If you speak English a ticking clock sounds like “tick tock.” If you speak Korean it sounds like “ddok-ddak ddok-ddak.” These are called “cross-linguistic onomatopoeias.”
Because of the nature of onomatopoeia, there are many cross-linguistic cognates of onomatopoetic sounds. The following is a list of some conventional examples: [including car horns, kissing, pigs, balloons bursting, and water dripping]
4. Thanksgiving is the perfect time to go over your knowledge of Norse mythology. Bone up on some Odin, peruse some Valhalla, and make sure you’re prepared for some Ragnarok.
Norse mythology has its roots in Proto-Norse Iron Age Scandinavian prehistory. It flourishes during the Viking Age and following the Christianization of Scandinavia during the High Middle Ages passed into Scandinavian folklore, some aspects surviving to the modern day. The mythology from the Romanticist Viking revival came to be an influence on modern literature and popular culture.
5. Sometimes it’s comforting to remember that the hedonic treadmill means we can never really be as happy as we want to be. Or maybe “comforting” isn’t the right word….
Brickman and Campbell coined the term “Hedonic Treadmill” in their essay “Hedonic Relativism and Planning the Good Society” (1971), which appeared in M.H. Apley, ed., Adaptation Level Theory: A Symposium, New York: Academic Press, 1971, pp 287–302. The theory has consequences for understanding happiness as both an individual and a societal goal. The concept was modified by Michael Eysenck, a British psychology researcher during the late nineties, to refer to the hedonic treadmill theory which compares the pursuit of happiness to a person on a treadmill, who has to keep working just to stay in the same place. Humans rapidly adapt to their current situation, becoming habituated to the good or the bad. We are more sensitive to our relative status: both that which we recently have and that which we perceive others to enjoy.
Five more dispatches from the always-interesting world of stumbled Wikipedia entries.
1. Did you know that the Nazis dabbled in experimental meth production with a drug called D-IX?
D-IX was a cocaine-based experimental drug cocktail developed by the Nazis in 1944 for military application. Nazi doctors found that equipment-laden test subjects who had taken the drug could march 55 miles without resting before they collapsed.
2. Fonzie did more than jump sharks on a motorcycle. He also adopted a young orphan boy named Danny in the final season and has a statue dedicated to him in Milwaukee.
Arthur Herbert Fonzarelli (also Fonzie, The Fonz or Fonzta!) is a fictional character played by Henry Winkler in the American sitcom Happy Days (1974–1984). He was originally a secondary character but became the lead. By the mid 1970s, he dwarfed the other characters in popularity. Winkler received top billing once Ron Howard left in 1980.
3. Big hegemonic governments engage in nationbuilding. RPGers like myself engage in worldbuilding.
Worldbuilding is the process of constructing an imaginary world, usually associated with a fictional universe. The result may sometimes be called a constructed world, conworld or sub-creation. The term world-building was popularized at science fiction writer’s workshops during the 1970s. It describes a key role in the task of a fantasy writer: that of developing an imaginary setting that is coherent and possesses a history, geography, ecology, and so forth. The process usually involves the creation of maps, listing the back-story of the world and the people of the world, amongst other features. Worlds are often created for a novel, video game, or role-playing game, but sometimes for personal enjoyment or its own sake (see geofiction).
4. William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac wrote a novel together, alternating chapters and using pseudonyms and shooting morphine, called And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks.
And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks is a novel by Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. It was written in 1945, a full decade before the two authors became famous as leading figures of the Beat Generation, and remained unpublished for many years.
Written in the form of a mystery novel, the book consists of alternating chapters by each author writing as a different character. Burroughs (as William Lee, the pseudonym he would later use for his first published book, Junkie) writes the character “Will Dennison” while Kerouac (as “John Kerouac”), takes on the character of “Mike Ryko”.
5. You haven’t really gotten high until you’ve gotten astronaut high, on something called “the Overview effect.”
The overview effect is a transcendental, euphoric feeling of universal connection experienced by astronauts during spaceflight, often while viewing the Earth from orbit, or from the lunar surface. Astronauts who have experienced this state often report that their consciousness has been profoundly, permanently altered towards feelings of peace, connectedness, and heightened awareness of humanity’s place in the cosmos.
- Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad drafts document that pushes statehood, infastructure for Palestine.
- Some aboreal treelines advancing as planet warms, study says.
- Wikipedia to launch controls on editing certain pages.
- CIA used mock executions, electric drills, firearms and other “enhanced” interrogation techniques on terrorist subjects investigation reports.
- Iran puts hundreds of opposition leaders on mass trail under the pretext of destabilizing the government and trying to start a coup.
- North and South Korea to hold talks to re-unite families separated by the Korean War.
- One dies, two rescued after being swept into the sea while hundreds crowded Thunder Hole in Acadia Park to watch huge waves from Hurricane Bill.
Issue #1
Our trailhead lies in today’s featured article for the English wikipedia site on England’s various Gropecunt Lanes. Apparently it was common practice to name a street after whatever it’s primary social or economic function was (Commercial and Congress Streets in Portland are a holdover from this tradition) though this rather frank name has since been bowdlerized to “Grape Lane” without regard to weither or not there were any grapes on the street. We then turn onto the topic of expurgation briefly before veering off towards the quaint, G-Rated page of Thomas Bowdler author of “The Family Shakespeare” who edited Shakespeare’s bawdy, lude and explicit language for the “circumspect and judicious reader.” However he did not go as far as Nahum Tate who—emboldened by years of no one being able to pronounce his name and having a father named “Faithful”—decided to rewrite many of the major tragedies of the English cannon to include happy endings. One of the plays he rewrote was Romeo and Juliet.
Skipping down that path briefly we stumble upon the sisters Cushman. Charlotte and Susan were two 19th Century Bostonian siblings famous for their portrayal of the plays titular star-crossed couple (which would have made for a very interesting interpretation if you ask me). Charlotte is buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Caimbridge, MA along with Winslow Homer, the first guy to go on a public ether binge in the name of science, and Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller upon whose headstone is inscribed: “Call me trimtab.”
This is of course after his observation of an actual trim tab, the very small rudder that initiates a larger change in a ships rudder which in turn alters the course of a ship or keeps it headed straight when it’s on autopilot.
And so we summit on that rather sparse article before we head back down the path to reccomend someone put in an actual picture of a trim tab and not just a shot of knobs in a cockpit.
