Links for February 27, 2020

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Wolfram Alpha word puzzle tools
A page full of examples of Wolfram Alpha tools, many that I didn’t know existed: Cryptogram solver; "Find words found within a specified set of letters"; the venerable Scrabble, anagrams, and word patterns tools; even rhymes. No celebrity initials solvers, I’m afraid.

dCode Word Search Solver
I’ve had the opportunity to look over some word search puzzle content recently. The most tedious part of researching a word search is methodically checking every grouping of letters that shows any possibility of being an accidental word. And this Word Search Solver eliminates that problem. NOW the most tedious part is running every word that this tool finds through the dictionary to be sure it doesn’t meet the criteria that make the intended answers correct. It doesn’t do any good for titles of works and other proper nouns, but it’s progress.

los angeles — George Townley
I love Townley’s illustration, and I feel weird about it. It’s aggressively iconic—doesn’t bother itself with anything in LA that isn’t already on a poster somewhere—and so insistent on a golden hour color scheme that you can’t look at it without feeling manipulated. But just because it’s baldly calculated doesn’t mean it’s soulless, and maybe that (plus the golden hour thing) is why it is a good look for Los Angeles.

Podcast report: The Boring Talks

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Based on episode titles and the concept, "speakers who talk about subjects that may appear boring to others, but they find very interesting," I thought some episodes of The Boring Talks, a podcast from BBC Sounds might be good for mining trivia or research sources. (Which isn’t wrong. "The Lexicon of Breakups" ep opens a window on the clever but sad array of terms coming out of the current craze for taxonomizing the techniques of exiling or forcibly relocating people from one’s life.)

But it can be better than that, and some episodes turn out to be rather brilliant essays. "Book Pricing Algorithms" is a delightful and rambling ten minutes of low-key self-promotion, name dropping, complaining, and only a little more explanation than bemusement.

I’ve listened to five or six of these and the only stinker of the bunch was the first episode, "The End of the World." Perhaps some more anxiety of influence would have helped this to be more than a meh faux-nerdcore bite on I Found Ice Cubes ‘Good Day’, or perhaps the show was finding its legs and veering toward the actually boring.

Also possible: "The End of the World" is a genius double/triple troll and The Boring Talks is even archer and artier than I give it credit for—than I am even capable of perceiving. But if that’s the case, I’m glad that even within my limited capacity I could follow the amazing "The Argos Catalogue," which collides a textbook deconstruction of the British equivalent of the Sears catalog with fanciful headcanon about how the supposed subversive text-beneath-the-text was masterminded by failed utopians fleeing the wreckage of The Whole Earth Catalog. If you can, listen to that one right now.

Links for February 20, 2020

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Academy Awards Search results: Every winner ever (Alphabetical order)
A useful list on its own. From a query that makes the Oscars database stutter more than is comfortable—I’m still afraid to try to output the complete list of nominees, which would presumably be about five times longer. Anyway, my point is that you can get a link to your Oscars search results! News to me! No more recreating in prose the fields I filled out on the query form so some future someone can follow my trail past the search address. You just have to hit the “➦Share” button (from your results page) and copy the URL it gives you.

People by Initials: Search for notable people via initials.
Good tool for puzzle and trivia construction, and fun to play around on. Not suitable as an authoritative research source though, as it’s both incomplete (the “BE” list neglects Billie Eilish, for example) and seems to be populating from Wikipedia.

Funemployment Trivia for 13 February

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While I’m off work, I’m keeping a hand in the game with five trivia questions and answers each weekday.

  1. The Shakespeare play whose action takes place farthest in the past is which problem play set late in the Trojan War?

  2. The Eisner Awards, presented every summer in San Diego, recognize achievement in what art form?

  3. Fill in the blank. The de facto head of the Eastern Orthodox Church leads under the title "Ecumenical ______ of Constantinople."

  4. What keyboardist served as the musical director for the Blues Brothers Band, the World’s Most Dangerous Band, and the CBS Orchestra?

  5. The movie Boxing Helena and the novel The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer are the major 1990s works of what American filmmaker?

Answers here. Warning: So far, all of the answers are on the same page, so if you haven’t played the previous days’ questions, be careful where you scroll.

Funemployment Trivia for 12 February

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While I’m off work, I’m keeping a hand in the game with five trivia questions and answers each weekday.

  1. What presidential scion/future U.S. president served as Secretary of State under President James Monroe?

  2. The Ohio River originates in Pennsylvania and flows into the Mississippi in Illinois. Along the way, it forms the entire southern borders of which two states?

  3. What word fills in both power-innovation blanks?

    The first electric battery was dubbed the "Voltaic ______" and the first manmade self-sustaining nuclear reactor was dubbed "Chicago ______-1."

  4. Some countries’ national animals are mythological beasts, such as China’s dragon and Scotland’s unicorn. Which country’s national animal is the winged horse called the "chollima"?

  5. The baiji, a Chinese river dolphin, was declared extinct in 2006, the first mammal driven to extinction by man in 50 years. What river constituted the entire habitat of the baiji?

Answers here. Warning: So far, all of the answers are on the same page, so if you haven’t played the previous days’ questions, be careful where you scroll.

Funemployment Trivia for 11 February

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While I’m off work, I’m keeping a hand in the game with five trivia questions and answers each weekday.

  1. What genericized trademark is often used by speakers of British English to mean “vacuum cleaner” and “vacuum-clean”?
  2. It’s the number of Pillars of Islam, of Sacred Wounds of Christ, of the Faces of Shiva, of Books of Moses. What is it?
  3. Mongolians traditionally ferment airag (or “koumiss”), their national beverage, from the milk of what versatile animal?
  4. The first modern Olympic Games were held, appropriately, in Athens. What city—a 2,900-km torch relay from Athens—hosted the second games? The city in question predominately speaks one of the two official languages of the Olympics.
  5. The first cultivated variety of coffee bean is named for what Yemeni port city?

Answers here. Warning: So far, all of the answers are on the same page, so if you haven’t played the previous days’ questions, be careful where you scroll.

Funemployment Trivia for 10 February

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While I’m off work, I’m keeping a hand in the game with five trivia questions and answers each weekday.

  1. What chemical element lies between uranium and plutonium on the periodic table?
  2. The band Fragile Rock’s name is a nod to its emotionally vulnerable music, as well as the conceit that its members are not ordinary humans, but rather, what?
  3. What country saw its army defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and consequently withdrew all its military forces from Vietnam?
  4. The word “impeach” derives from the Latin for which body part?
  5. Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock, Mazo de la Roche’s Finch’s Fortune, Warwick Deeping’s The Ten Commandments, and Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche the King-maker were announced on October 12, 1931, as the first five novels to achieve what distinction?

Maybe I’ll get a fancy quiz plugin for this, but until then, answers will appear on their own page.

A cheeky election video, yet …

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I feel bad getting down on Gary Johnson, the former New Mexico governor and current Libertarian presidential candidate. For one, he’s a pot-smoking New Mexican, which practically makes us family. For another, as an erstwhile subscriber to Reason magazine, I feel for those ideological sticklers among them who haven’t yet accepted that their movement only values them as future Republicans and current useful idiots who can spread the Koch gospel that bureaucracy is somehow worse than plutocracy.

But the details have to be discussed. Everybody loves this cuddly Johnson/Weld ’16 video, and I do too, but the card at the end has to disqualify the ticket for being unable to delegate tasks to competent people.

Johnson-Weld 2016. Our best America, yet. You in?

The fucking slogan below the logo—I want to slap the shit out of it. Check out the word spacing: of five chances to put proper spacing between words, it never uses the same spacing twice. You can’t get shitty, inconsistent spacing like this by leaving “Justified Text” on, you have to do it by hand, deliberately. Which means they paid someone to fuck this line up. Furthermore, our liberty-loving graphic artist only comes close to visually balanced spacing once, between “America,” and “yet”.

And that spot is exactly where the huge fucking problem happens. Some dipshit soi disant wordsmith—whom we may presume made enough of a show of valuing language to wear a blue blazer to high school forensics events—somehow wasn’t fucking aware that plopping that dumbass comma down there ruins the entire sentiment the sentence is trying to convey.

Because without the comma, “Our best America yet” means “the best America that we have been part of so far,” which is generic but hopeful and peppy in the spirit of the spot. However, with the comma it suddenly means “the best America that we have been part of—except [unstated reasons that the reader is welcome to fill in or just accept the innuendo of].” It becomes a leading unfinished thought pointedly hanging out an unattached conjunction that rhetorically says “Our best America—NOT.”

This isn’t difficult stuff to get right. Any competent editor is trained to blue-pencil both of these things, and libertarians should know that editors—their wages depressed by free-market disruption of their industries—come cheap.

I don’t even want to get into who thought “You in?” in two different colors made any sense at all.

There’s no excuse for this in big-kid politics. Libertarians, you might ask that your organization try to look a little less like a feckless third party. Or at least don’t put this stuff where I can see it. I’m embarrassed for you.