For more, see Chassis Dimensions in the NTEA's glossary of Truck Equipment Terms.
sat in a corner,
eating his Christmas pie.
He stuck in his thumb,
and pulled out a plum,
and said ``What a good boy am I!''
Actually, it was almost certainly a blackberry, but that didn't happen to rhyme with thumb.
In the Dissecting Room feature of The Lancet, in vol. 357, iss. # 9249 (6 January 2001), Hugh Tunstall-Pedoe published a short essay entitled ``Jack Horner and biomedical literature.'' It was a parable of priority in research and publication, but it was by no means the first article in a scientific journal to mention Jack Horner.
Most instances seem to occur in the biological literature. The earliest one I can find was ``Lambda as Little Jack Horner,'' on p. 64 of the 22 March 1972 issue of Nature New Biology [a short-lived offshoot of Nature (London)]. The article byline is ``from our Molecular Genetics Correspondent.'' Citing four recent articles, it observed that phage λ could be made to integrate (or observed to integrate, in practical terms) in a much broader range of bacterial DNA sites than had been previously, by deleting the usual site of its integration. On the same page, there was a small box announcing ``First Korner Lecture.''
The example concerning a land war in Asia was borrowed from The Princess Bride, a movie released in 1987, but it is always timely. And undergarments were also not a central concern of Cleese's statement (about which, more below). However, Debra Ginsberg does have something relevant on page 219 of Waiting.
... Waiters and waitresses don't get much leeway [in ``style''] when they are required to wear a uniform, so some become quite creative in finding ways to make the most of their physical attributes. In this restaurant [to which she gives the fictitious name Baciare, `to kiss'], the uniforms were designed with old Italian waiters in mind and consisted of a jacket, pants, and tie [alas, they don't go shirtless, as we soon learn]. One waitress put darts in her work jackets so they tailored her torso. [Ouch! That must hurt!] Combined with her skintight black pants, this made her look like some sort of futuristic cyberbabe on assignment from the future [she mustn't have got first choice]. A less outrageous touch employed by various waitresses involved wearing a black bra under the white shirt so that the design of the undergarment was just visible enough for the imagination to run wild.
None of this works so well if you have a deep natural tan.
From the first chapter of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the first description of Julia:
One of them was a girl whom he often passed in the corridors. He did not know her name, but he knew that she worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines. She was a bold-looking girl, of about twenty-seven, with thick hair, a freckled face, and swift, athletic movements. A narrow scarlet sash, emblem of the Junior Anti-Sex League, was wound several times round the waist of her overalls, just tightly enough to bring out the shapeliness of her hips.
(The word you're thinking of is pneumatic. By the way, Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.)
While waiters and waitresses must usually conform to a uniform dress code, more often than not a host (hostess, seater, greeter, whatev-er) does not. For insight into that, see All dressed up and no place to go.
John Cleese's statement about mistakes is part of a speech entitled ``The Importance of Mistakes,'' which he delivered to a training and personnel conference in New York. The speech was excerpted in ``No more mistakes and you're through!'' an article by Dyan Machan in vol. 141, issue 11 of Forbes (May 16, 1988), pp. 126-7. Here's an excerpt of the excerpt:
I want to suggest to you that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes--I might almost say a positive attitude toward them--we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically and unsuccessfully.
Of course, if you now say to me, ``Look here, you weird limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?'' I will reply, ``No, Mac. There are mistakes and mistakes.'' There are true copper-bottomed mistakes like wearing a black bra under a white blouse, or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. I'm talking about mistakes that at the time they were committed did have a chance.
The entire speech was released as a training video shortly afterwards ($95).
Various versions of the quote are strewn across fortune files and the Internet. Here is a typical one of the longer versions:
I want to suggest to you today, that unless we have a tolerant attitude toward mistakes -- I might almost say ``a positive attitude toward them'' -- we shall be behaving irrationally, unscientifically, and unsuccessfully. Now, of course, if you now say to me, ``Look here, you weird Limey, are you seriously advocating relaunching the Edsel?'' I will reply, ``No.'' There are mistakes -- and mistakes. There are true, copper-bottom mistakes like spelling the word ``rabbit'' with three M's; wearing a black bra under a white shirt; or, to take a more masculine example, starting a land war in Asia. These are the kind of mistakes described by Mr. David Letterman as Brushes With Stupidity, because they have no reasonable chance of success.
For all I know, Cleese may have delivered similar remarks in different speeches. If all the quoted versions originated in the same speech, I incline to the view that most of the variation among versions is due to silent elisions and mistranscriptions rather than to embellishment.
- From Andrew Young's memoir, An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement
and the Transformation of America (1996), pp. 95-96:
Our voter registration drive [in Thomasville, Ga., for the 1956 elections] was not as successful as we had hoped--we were able to register only a handful of people. But our efforts helped Eisenhower carry Georgia by increasing the rolls even a little and encouraging those who were registered that it was an important election. Black voters in the South were still voting Republican, although most made an exception for Franklin Roosevelt. I voted for Eisenhower too. The Southern segregationists were all Democrats, and it was the black Republicans like John Wesley Dobbs, John Calhoun, and Q.V. Williamson who could effectively influence the appointment of federal judges in the South. The best civil rights judges in the South were the Eisenhower appointees: Frank Johnson in Alabama; Elbert Tuttle on the U.S. Court of Appeals; Brian Simpson, who would save my life in Florida; Minor Wisdom; and Skelly Wright on the D.C. Court of Appeals were all Republicans. These judges are among the many unsung heroes of the civil rights movement.
John Minor Wisdom was appointed a judge of the US Court of Appeals for the the Fifth Circuit in 1957. We have a short list of oddly-named judges. You're probably wondering how Brian Simpson saved Andrew Young's life. It's not so dramatic and hardly clear-cut; I'll fill in later.
In 1653, the native Iroquois sent word to the French in Quebec, requesting that a "Black Robe" -- as Jesuit missionaries were referred to at that time -- travel to their country. In July of the following year, Father Simon LeMoyne made the multiday journey to the land that would become Syracuse and Onondaga County.There, he lived among the native Onondaga -- a part of the Iroquois Confederacy -- for several months, and toured the entire region. It was Father LeMoyne who reached the salty shores of Onondaga Lake and realized its potential. At one time, Syracuse was known as the salt capital of the world.
A search on ``Simon Le Moyne'' at the Le Moyne College web site turns up nothing, but a google search does the trick. Father Le Moyne's work is commemorated in the seal of the college. The Le Moyne College yearbook is called ``The Black Robe.''
Clothing is frequently used in synechdoche. In Act II, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's ``The Tragedy of Macbeth,'' Macduff says to Ross,
Well, may you see things well done there: adieu!The old robes is the murdered King Duncan; the new robes is Macbeth, to be crowned at Scone (thither Ross).
Lest our old robes sit easier than our new!
Why is black wool cheaper? My guess: to reach to most hues and saturation levels by dying, it's harder -- if it's even possible -- if you start from black wool than if you start from white wool. But what if you like darker tones? This looks fashion-dependent. Cf. black monks and white monks.
Alternatively one may imagine a graph of use, and regard the ``leading edge'' as the initial rise from zero. In that case, the leading edge is not the technology adopted but the ``first-adopters'' or ``early adopters'' or avant garde. Depending on the technology, and the quality of its first implementations, this group might be called ``visionaries'' or ``foolhardy suckers.'' In either case, this group typically bears the brunt of early bugs and lack of support or implementation experience. Hence, this is the edge that bleeds. (Franklin had an apposite comment, taken somewhat out of context in the defensive driving entry.)
The bleeding edge is sometimes described as being just ahead of the cutting edge. I'm not going to be the first one to analyze that metaphor.
It is meant to maintain parity between the currencies of Belgium and Luxembourg, each currency being legal tender in the other country. The countries also hold their gold and exchange reserves in common.
Both countries are members of the EU and participate in the Emu, so some functions of BLEU are obviated, but BLEU is considered a success and will continue in existence.
Sacre bleu! Don't you feel stupid for asking, huh? You know that saying about there being no such thing as a stupid question? Of course you do! That's an example.
Blimp, like blizzard, is a recent word of unknown origin. bl, like gl, is one of those phonemic units that seems to function a bit like a morpheme, in the fashion that Roman Jakobson advanced as a common mechanism. (I revisit this at the ground entry.)
``Type B: limp'' is apparently just someone's guess, with no historical support.
For a bit more related to blimps, see this LZ entry.
- Henry Dandolo, doge of Venice: guiding spirit of the Fourth
Crusade. (Okay, a doge is a duke and not a cleric, but we have
to demonstrate that all religions are equal in all details that matter
to unbelievers, and it's hard to do that if we are fastidious about
facticity.)
- 'Abd al-Aziz ibn Abdallah ibn Baz: ``traditionalist'' (more
correctly Wahabi) head of Saudi Arabia's Council of Senior Islamic
Scholars, from the early 1960's on. Among his fatwas were prohibitions
on fortune tellers, women driving cars, and the importation of those
scandalously short veils that reveal part of a woman's face. In 1990,
he issued a fatwa approving a jihad against Iraq, allowing non-Muslim
troops on Saudi territory during the Persian Gulf War. He was grand
mufti from 1993 on, and I think it was also in 1993 that he declared
that the earth is flat.
- Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman: leader of Gama'a Islamiya (`Islamic
Group')
Rahman was acquitted of conspiracy charges in the assassination of
President Anwar Sadat, convicted of conspiracy in the 1993 bombing of
the World Trade Center and sentenced to life in prison, and suspected
of conspiracy in various other terrorist acts.
- Sheikh Ali al-Nakas: nothing. (On April 14, 1996, he was sentenced
to a year in jail by Bahrain's State Security Court, on charges of
incitement against the government. Fourteen other Shi'ite Moslems held
in connection with anti-government protests received longer sentences.
- Sheik Ahmed Yassin: leader of the Hamas terrorist organization until he was killed by an Israeli missile in March 2004. He was described as only half-blind.
BTW, I saw a headline behind the window of a newspaper box on December 10, 2005, claiming that blind dating is coming back -- as an alternative to online dating sites.
. * | * . | * . | * * | * * | * . | * . | . * | . *
braille: . . | . . | * . | . . | . * | . * | * * | * . | . *
* . | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | . * | * .
German: äu au eu ei ch sch ü ö ä
French: â ê î ô û ü œ
(It's okay to push the rod thing up or down with the side of your cell phone, if the other hand is holding food and you're steering with your knee.)
The term was subsequently used in advertising to describe anything in any remote way resembling a great explosion or causing a great sensation. The war movie Pearl Harbor, released in Summer 2001, was often unironically called a blockbuster. Over 350 bombs were exploded in the filming of that movie. Cf. bikini.
Blogs are entry-wise inverse-chronological, which is as irritating as the beginning of this sentence. Catching up on previous entries (or, for that matter, reading a blog for the first time) is often confusing unless you scroll up to the top of each successive entry and then scroll down to read it. Obviously, they should be inverse-chronological by individual line. Wait here, I've got to get an aspirin.
In many respects, including the general politically rightward and libertarian tilts, it is a written form of talk radio. For important examples, see
- InstaPundit.Com
- BLOGGER (start your own at the related site blog*spot)
- AndrewSullivan.Com
There were half a million blogs in July 2002. To get a grip, try blogdex.
You could think of blogs as one-person chat rooms. Really quite crass, and I am glad that I can guarantee to you our faithful readers that we of the SBF would never do anything remotely similar. (There are also consortium blogs like Daily Kos.)
Regarding that scrolling business -- I'm told some people ``scroll down'' to the top of an entry, and then ``scroll up'' as they read down through it -- the idea being that the text is moved upwards as they read down through the lines in a fixed window. A similar confusion makes a tedious hassle out of defining the signs on angles of a general rotation. The solution is simple: pick one standard convention and stick to it. My standard is this: the intransitive verb scrolling is referred to the eyes: if you ``scroll downward,'' your eyes are looking for something further down on the page. Transitive scrolling is referred to the image motion: ``scrolling the text downward'' means scrolling upward so that the text moves downward through the window. Everyone should use my (SBF-standard) convention.
- In what seems to be the older sense in English, blood represents or emphasizes biological kinship: blood brothers are brothers by birth (as opposed, say, to the other kind of blood brothers). I'm not sure what distinction is normally meant here. It might be meant to distinguish full brothers from half-brothers (brothers with one parent in common), step-brothers (either half-brothers or sons of an adoptive parent married to one's natural parent), or brothers-in-law. But it might just be emphatic.
- In the other sense, brother is understood to represent the obligations, prerogatives, or other social implications of brother status, but the blood is real. In ceremonial practices known both in Africa and aboriginal America, a commingling of blood is used to consecrate a social tie between two men who usually are not brothers. I think the practice was unknown among the English until the age of exploration, whereas expressions such as ``brothers in the blood'' date back to at least as early as 1400.
The term seems to be meant mostly in the second sense nowadays and, along with the newish ``blood sister,'' is often used completely metaphorically -- that is, the relationship is like as to one consecrated in blood. That's good, because blood makes me queasy. For a different take on degrees of brotherhood, see the germanus entry.
When my father was in the hospital after his first heart attack, a nurse came in at one point and said that visitors (indicating Miguel) had to leave. My father protested that Miguel was his brother, and the nurse commented suspiciously that they didn't look like brothers. So my dad said that they had different fathers. He didn't mention that they also had different mothers. For a related kind of thinking, see the twins entry.
Glucose passes through the lining of the small intestines much more rapidly than other sugars. Other sugars, in addition to being absorbed much more slowly, are grabbed by the liver and converted to glucose. Since the conversion process takes a few minutes, while absorption through the small intestines takes hours, most of the single-ring (``simple'') sugars that started out as something other than glucose are present in the blood as glucose. Thus, although some other sugars are dissolved in the blood, for all practical purposes blood sugar is glucose. Cf. Chem 7.
- Bloomsbury is a neighborhood of London, England. In November 1919,
there was a running argument in the Times (London) letters section,
regarding the origin of the name. I'll type in the details as soon as
the librarians refresh the toner in the microfilm printer.
Bloomsbury is home to the ``British Museum,'' London University, and many antiquarian book shops, and may be regarded as the intellectual center of London by those who like to think in such terms.
- A political party that appeared in July 1765, led by the Duke of
Bedford. Also known as the ``Bedford party'' and ``Bloomsbury gang.''
- A set of creative types associated with Bloomsbury (defn. 1),
principally through their friendship or acquaintance with Virginia
Woolf, who lived there. Given the fuzzy definition, there is a core
of generally agreed members and a larger number of people on the edges
of the group whose membership is in dispute. The core included
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
Leonard Woolf (VW's husband; 1880-1969)
Vita Sackville-West (VW's friend and lover)
John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
Lytton Strachey (1880-1932)
Roger (Roger Elliot) Fry (1866-1934)
Duncan A. (Duncan Andrew) Grant (1885-1978)
Vanessa Bell (VW's sister)
Clive Bell (1881-1964; VW's brother-in-law)
Adrian Stephen (VW's brother)
Saxon Sydney-Turner
Molly MacCarthy
Francis Birrell (1889-?)
Gerald Shove
H. T. J. Norton
VW was considered a brilliant writer for much of the twentieth century, and she certainly wasn't a slouch. Among literary types, she's still considered more famous than Maynard Keynes. On account of her fame and reputation, and because there's this name (Bloomsbury), there's an entire library of books on the Bloomsberries, Bloomsburyites, and everything else they were called. - Bloomsbury Publishing. At 38 Soho Square, in London. The publisher with the rights to J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. [Scholastic contracted for the US rights. In addition to Americanizing the spellings and punctuation, they also changed the traditional ``philosopher's stone'' to the presumably more accessible ``sorcerer's stone,'' in the title and text of the first book. (Because of the title and relevant dialogue, the film was distributed in two English-language versions: US and ROW.) US and British publishers tend to compete for Canada, but in this case Bloomsbury negotiated the rights with Raincoast Books which, as you can guess, is based in Vancouver. Back in 1999 both versions of the first book (Philosopher's and Sorcerer's) could be found in Toronto. However, Raincoast Books has exclusive rights to sell and distribute the book in Canada, and the Scholastic edition should not be on store shelves (new) there.]
Political analysis in 2004: polling microscopy.
For those unfamiliar with the concept, and for those seeking terminal ennui, sale is explained at the yard sale entry.
``The purpose of this organization is to enhance the educational, social, recreational, cultural, and psychological environment of the Siena Community by promoting activities that are relevant to ethnic minorities in general and the Black and Latino in particular.'' (My emphasis.)
Wow, man, like -- far out! The word ``relevant'' just brings those old memories crashing back. It evokes tears of nostalgia, just like the scent of tear gas.
A common way of identifying blue dogs in the US House of Representatives is as those Democrats whose districts went substantially for the Republican standard-bearer in the previous presidential election.
Almost any weak optical scattering by particulates and inhomogeneities will be approximate Rayleigh scattering, and so strongest for short wavelengths. Hence, the sun looks yellow high in the sky and red near the horizon. Light from the moon is colored in the same way. However, since the moon's light is a dim reflection of the sun's, its color is paler (technically less deep, or less saturated). This results from the fact that the color-sensitive cones in the retina crap out at low intensity, so low-light vision is dominated by the color-neutral rods. One of the more subtle effects of color vision, one of those called the Perkinje effect, is that sensitivity to low-intensity red light is less efficient than sensitivity to blue and green. That is, the red-perceiving cones crap out earlier. This has a slight effect of making the moon bluer than it might normally seem, if atmospheric conditions dim it achromatically (i.e., if the view of the moon is obscured by opaque particulates that primarily absorb rather than scatter light). However, for the moon to appear perceptibly blue probably requires something more. Volcanic ash that has segregated by size in the atmosphere can occasionally do it. Spectacular weird sunsets widely reported after the eruption of Krakatoa were probably due to this effect.
In July 2000, Air University Press published Once in a Blue Moon: Airmen in Theater Command -- Lauris Norstad, Albrecht Kesselring, and Their Relevance to the Twenty-First Century Air Force, by Howard D. Belote, Lt. Col., USAF (CADRE Paper No. 7).
Also in 2000, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) published More Than Once in a Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings by American Artists, by Neil O. Alper and Gregory H. Wassall (Research Division Report #40). I guess moonlighting made them blue.
Was the color blue chosen arbitrarily? We address that question elsewhere, but let me put forward a hypothesis here. Before the 2000 election, most major polling organizations predicted a slim popular-vote majority for Bush, the Republican candidate. Gallup predicted the smallest majority; Zogby was the only major pollster to predict a majority for Gore, and came closest to predicting Bush's ultimate winning margin of negative half a percent. But the important point here is that the media might have expected the majority of voters in the Democratic-leaning states to end up blue, hence the choice of color scheme. Now, I'm pretty sure this hypothesis is wrong, but I wanted an excuse to mention the polling situation before the election, so there you go. I state a hypothesis I consider less improbable at the red-state entry.
Incidentally, there was a lot of speculation before the election that, given the closeness of the vote, the electoral vote might go the opposite way from the popular vote. That happened, of course, but not as expected. After the 2000 election, and especially after the 2004 election, the blue states were evidently the states with the higher proportion of voters who were blue about the outome of the election.
We seem to be getting a bit off-topic here. At a separate entry we explain Bollywood to the uninitiated.
Nietzsche, always a sickly fellow, was appointed to the chair of classical philology at Basel when he was 24. There he met the historian Jakob Burckhardt, whom he came to admire greatly. (You wouldn't get the idea from his books that he could really admire anyone, would you?) The admiration wasn't mutual. Burckhardt is said to have remarked,
``That Nietzsche fellow? He couldn't even have a healthy bowel movement.''
Scattered other relevant stuff:
Mornings at his ashram, Mohandas Ghandi (or Ghandiji, or Mahatma Ghandi, as he
was later known) would typically ask his, uh, staff or whatever if they had had
good bowel movements. Barry Manilow's initials are BM. It reminds me of an
observation of W.C. Fields. He noted the identity of
the first two letters of the closely allied terms ``alimentary canal'' and
``alcohol.'' Could this be a mere coincidence? ``Hardly,'' he scoffed.
(Fields, incidentally, was born William Claude Dukenfield. He used various
pseudonyms as a scriptwriter, including Mahatma Kane Jeeves.) There's a bit
more specifically about BM at the CCU entry.
There's a bit more excrementitious or at least
GI-related stuff at the
Veep entry.
![[column]](images/column.gif){kind=small}
There is a series of student texts of Classical (Greek and Latin) works
called the Bryn Mawr Classical Texts. Here's a list.
There are two respected series of emailed reviews of scholarly literature called the Bryn Mawr Reviews (BMR), namely Bryn Mawr Classical Review (BMCR) and Medieval Review [used to be BMMR, now TMR (for The MR)].
On the subject of BM and beverages, I own a book by one B. M. Smirnov (Boris Mikhailovich), a member of the erstwhile Academy of the Sciences of the USSR, Moscow, who wrote Otristatel'nye Iony. I have Negative Ions (McGraw-Hill, 1982), a translation by S. Chomet.
BMD's aren't normally used for vote counting. The ballots marked by a BMD are transfered through a ``privacy sleeve'' (shades of cone of silence) to an optical scanner or ballot box.
If anybody wants to commit mass murder, they can buy a delivery vehicle from the North Koreans, say, a warhead from any of a number of states, and shoot. The most we could do is hit back at whatever innocent party is still in the vicinity of the launch site. It's still MAD.
- Association of Loading and Elevating Equipment (ALEM)
- Automated Material Handling Systems Association (AMHSA)
- British Industrial Truck Association (BITA)
- Federation of Manufacturers of Construction Equipment & Cranes (FMCEC)
- Industrial Cleaning Machine Manufacturers' Association (ICMMA)
- Lift and Escalator Industry Association (LEIA)
- Storage Equipment Manufacturers' Association (SEMA)
The BMI is invalid for anyone under 18 years old, serious athletes and body builders, pregnant women (duh), nursing women, and the frail or sedentary elderly. It's also invalid for everybody else. ``Invalid'' in the sense of ``poor prognosticator of future health'' and ``not a measure of lean/fat ratio.''
Incidentally, the otiose number that is 25 (threshold of overweight) was 27.8 for men and 27.3 for women. In 1998, when the NIH lowered the threshold, 35 million previously non-overweight Americans became overweight. Clearly, the NIH is one of the major causes of overweight in the US today.
The great utility of BMI is to remind people that obesity is not a weight condition -- it's a condition of weight relative to height. Therefore, if you're obese, you're not really overweight -- you're just undertall. It turns out to be just as easy to get taller (and stay taller) as it is to become lighter (and stay lighter). Food for thought. (I did not coin the word ``undertall.'' It occurred in a Garfield cartoon.)
``The main goal of BMP is to increase the quality, reliability, and maintainability of goods produced by American firms. The primary steps toward this goal are simple: identify best practices, document them, and then encourage industry, government, and academia to share information about them.''
The welcome text on their homepage (which can be hidden by Javascript-called images) is misaligned. Depending on the size of the window in which it is viewed, differing portions of the first paragraph are hard to read because they overlap images. Gotta give credit due, though, the text-browser version is well set-up.
One study has indicated that children's metabolic rates fall below the sleeping rate while they watch TV. TV: TM for children! [Other animals can do this.] Of course, ``sleep like a baby'' has always been an odd simile, as haggard new parents will testify.
Here's a BMR calculator that's very nice, but doesn't work. There're a couple of fatuously precise formulae here.
An increasingly popular measure for health discussion is the RMR (resting metabolic rate) which has the great advantage of being practically measurable.
There's an old Yiddish curse that goes [in translation] ``May you grow like an onion -- with your head in the ground.''
It's probably bad form to scratch your head while puzzling this one out.
Since the use of punctuation in initialisms has declined and can now seem old-fashioned, it is natural that the punctuated form (B.-M.T.) has come to be used exclusively for the original private company, in contradistinction to the BMT lines within the current subway system.
- You can take the driving exam on paper or by pushing buttons on a machine. The old paper exam is still based on the information in the driver's license brochure. The ``computer'' test? You're on your own.
- License branches are open late Thursday and closed Monday -- and most crowded on Tuesday.
- The light season is the last fifth of the year. If you can put off registering from the beginning of October to the end of October, it'll make an enormous difference. Even from the 18th to the 25th is a big difference.
(There is an exception to the closed-Monday rule: all full-service license branches are required by law to be open until 8pm the day before any election, and open early on election day, solely for the purpose of issuing driver's licenses and state identification cards.)
The BMW 507 is a legendary vehicle that you can find out about at many places on the web, such as BMW world. From the front it has a look that's a little bit like a Triumph. The picture below right is of a custom 1957 BMW 507, built by Pichon et Parat of Sens, France. [Click for a larger (360 KB) image.] I guess they couldn't have made it in Sedan, France. I should probably mention that the sedan chair and later the sedan (vehicle type) are not believed to have anything etymologically to do with the city of Sedan. Cf. coach.
![[sexy, sexy car]](images/cars/BMW507.jpg)
The car was for the personal use of Raymond Loewy, who designed the custom body. Loewy was a legendary (yes, more legends) industrial designer; if you can't see the bloodlines of the Avanti and even the Corvette in this picture, you're blind. Here's a rear view served by Loewy Design. (Their brief bio mentions some of his projects -- the Coca-Cola bottle, the original Air Force One for JFK, Lucky Strike, Greyhound Bus, the Pennsylvania S-1 Locomotive (see locomotives collection), the Exxon and Shell (not to mention BP) logos, NASA interiors for Skylab and the Space Shuttle, and of course the Avanti. But of course they can't cover the man's entire oevre briefly. The more extensive collection in the gallery doesn't even include the United Airlines plane paint scheme, introduced in the mid-fifties -- an important, as-usual fashion-setting commission.
In 1962 Loewy donated this car to the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM). It is now on display at the Petersen Automotive Museum (a part of the LACM founded in 1994).
(At the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend, you can see a video about the designing of the Avanti. According to Loewy Design it's the only car ever to have been exhibited in the Louvre.)
Boron nitride has a high-pressure allotrope, CBN, that is harder than the hexagonal-plane low-pressure-stable isotope, just as graphite has a harder high-pressure allotrope in diamond. Unlike graphite, however, hexagonal BN is already pretty hard. In abrasives applications, the low-pressure allotrope is sold as ``Norbide.''
Also, back when Braniff (was still in business and) had given all of its planes garish solid-color VW-beetle-like paint jobs, Braniff flights were referred to in control-tower communications as ``jelly beans.''
The same act created the provinces of Ontario and Quebec (that's the province that eventually was renamed Québec) out of the former Province of Canada, restoring the division of former Québec into the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada, respectively, that was implemented in 1791 and rescinded in 1841. I tell'ya.
People often speak redundantly and pleonastically of the ``BNC connector.'' We're gonna get the language police on your case.
A very common connector for 50-ohm coaxial microwave cable. Really the most common by far, but optimists deny it. Designed for operation to 11 GHz, not bad operation (VSWR less than 1.3) to 4 GHz. What do you expect from quick-disconnect system? You want performance, use a threaded connector like TNC, N-type, 7/16, triax...).
[The precise expansion of the BNC acronym is a much-disputed matter. Here is the unauthoritative straight poop, or scoop, or whatever: it does not stand for Berkeley Nucleonics Corp., not British Naval, not Banana Nutmeg Chocolate.]
Maybe: Bayonet Neill Concelman.
Barclay's Bank was giving American Express some competition in the traveler's check business. Whatever happened to them?
In Shakespeare's ``The Tempest,'' Miranda has a little speech in the first scene of Act V:
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beautious mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!
(She has just met her future father-in-law.) A word is probably in order here about this play, since it was the obvious inspiration of such classics as Gilligan's Island and I Dream of Jeannie. Unfortunately, I'm too busy at this time to do justice to these classics. The only reason I'm putting this entry in at all is a novella by Aldous Huxley, who could trace his descent not just generally to the early hominids, but also specifically to Thomas H. Huxley (Canis darwiniensis, or ``Darwin's bulldog''). The book describes a dystopia of the twenty-sixth century -- a sex-obsessed, pill-popping, hedonistic society in which the process of human procreation has become highly technologized, and children don't know who their fathers are. Many children are born suffering to a greater or lesser degree from fetal alcohol syndrome, and this disability relegates them permanently to an underclass. Civilization, in other words, has finally been established on a rational basis. I don't know about you, but to me this sounds oddly familiar.
Anyway, as you may imagine, the BNW phrase enjoyed a vogue after Huxley's book was published in 1932. Archibald MacLeish published a sort of open letter to Thomas Jefferson, in the form of a poem entitled ``Brave New World.'' It basically took Americans to task for not struggling bravely to extend freedom. This was first published in the September 1946 issue of Atlantic Monthly. It's hard to be certain, from the vague contemporary references in the poem, what precise time frame is meant. It is just possible that it was written in the 1930's. From 1939 to 1944, MacLeish served as Librarian of Congress, and from 1944 to 1945 as Assistant Secretary of State; in that six-year period he claimed he wrote but one poem (this wasn't it), so this ``Brave New World'' might have been left over unpublished from before the war. But it doesn't seem to be.
The BNW phrase must have had a powerful resonance at war's end. A best-selling novel also published in 1946, B.F.'s Daughter, used the phrase also. (Page 154, line 9 of my copy; you should be able to find it.) See BF entry for more about this book.)
In some cases (like the two above) one cannot be certain whether the allusion is to Huxley or directly to the bard, or if the writer is pretending to just happen to be using brave in an archaic sense. In other cases, the Huxley connection seems obvious. In the negligible poem ``The Proposition,'' published in 1993, Sylvia Kantaris mentioned the BNW of condomless sex.
But I only wanted to point out that Huxley didn't single-handedly revive a phrase that had somehow sunk into complete obscurity: there were earlier examples. Not surprisingly, for example, the phrase occurs in the egregiously prolific Bulwer-Lytton's Orval (1869). (For a bit more about Bulwer-Lytton, see It was a dark and stormy night.) A most interesting use of the phrase is by Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), who published a poem entitled ``The Gods of the Copybook Headings'' in 1919. The named gods apparently represent ignored wisdom, as it is encapsulated in proverbs like ``stick to the devil you know.'' The poem ends thus:
As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man--[This poem was published a number of times and with slightly variant titles. It's possible that the original version had some final punctuation in the line that ends with begins, but there isn't in any of the versions I've seen, including that in Rudyard Kipling's Verse: Definitive Edition (Doubleday, 1940).]
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:--
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!