Thanksgiving

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How now, you secret, black, and midnight blogs!

Hello.  Good morning.

It’s Thursday.  It is, in fact, the 2nd Thursday in November, which means that, from the point of view of Thursdays in November, we are halfway to Thanksgiving (which in the US is the 4th Thursday in November).

Of course, we are not precisely halfway to Thanksgiving from the point of view of the days of the month of November overall.  Thanksgiving falls on the 27th of November this year‒14 days from today, of course‒so we are not quite halfway there as far as the days of November are concerned, but we are close to it.  If the month had started on a Friday, the halfway point in days versus Thursdays would be the same.

I think that the maximum disjunction would happen if the month began on a Thursday.  The 8th would then be the 2nd Thursday, and Thanksgiving would fall on the 22nd, which is quite a bit larger than 2 x 8.

Mind you, all this depends on starting one’s count in November.  That is not too unreasonable, but one could just as sensibly start counting Thursdays right at or after January 1st (let’s see, this year that’s 46/48 Thursdays, or about 95.833%).  If we did that, we would already be practically at Thanksgiving.  If we counted all days, we might be even closer still, percentage-wise.  Let’s see, 317/331, or about 95.770%.  Whataya know?  I was wrong, the Thursday one is “closer”.  I suspect this varies from year to year, but I’m not interested enough to check.

We could also begin our count at the beginning of autumn, which sort of seems appropriate.  Or, perhaps most sensibly still, we could start right after the previous Thanksgiving, beginning our counting on “Black Friday”.

Jeez Louise, I think I’m losing my mind, here.  Why am I writing about such nonsense?  I mean, yes, it’s interesting to notice how arbitrary and artificial human ways of counting days and things and so on are, so I suppose it’s somewhat edifying, and even could be mildly interesting for a moment.  But I nevertheless feel bad for wasting my readers’ time.

Though, I suppose, in a certain sense, one could say that all time is wasted‒“Plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines” and all that.

“Where do we come from?  The dust.  Where do we go to?  The grave.”

Of course, that last quote was not meant to be a general description of the human condition, but refers to Ray Bradbury’s “October People” in Something Wicked This Way Comes.  I’ve always thought that I’m an October person, since I was born in October.  Like Macduff, in the play from which Bradbury’s title above is taken, I was a C-section, though it would be a hyperbolic* to say that I was “ripped untimely” from the womb.  (Still, does my manner of birth mean I could defeat Macbeth?)

October is over now, in any case, and who** knows if I shall see another.

I don’t know if anyone has ever written about “November People”, but they don’t sound particularly scary nor particularly inspiring.  This assessment is not meant to refer to people born in November!  Several of my favorite people were born in November.

In other news, I did receive my Principles of Neural Science yesterday.  I used my dollar coins to choose a section, and I read it in the afternoon:  it was about neural firing and muscular activation during locomotion, briefly comparing lamprey with vertebrate, especially mammalian, locomotion patterns.

It may seem trivial, and I didn’t learn much that I didn’t at least implicitly know before, but the specifics are new, and all information has the potential to be useful.  We cannot know for certain ahead of time what knowledge might be most beneficial, just as we cannot predict the specifics of progress and invention.

As I said, I chose the textbook page via my coin-flipping process, using my three Sacagawea coins.  I keep a few dollar coins with Susan B. Anthony and/or the aforementioned Sacagawea with me at all times.

I carry such coins not so much for decision-making but because I like to roll them across my fingers when I want to “stop my hands feeling busy”.  I guess it’s a form of “stimming”, and I’ve been doing that particular one since college.  I taught myself to do it after I saw Val Kilmer, as Chris Knight, doing it in the movie Real Genius, which was one of my favorite movies.

Well, this has been a lot of pointless nonsense today, hasn’t it?  I apologize, and I guess I can try to mitigate my offense by at least trying not to produce too much of nothing***.  So I will draw this post to a close now.  I hope you all have a good day.  I will very likely write a post tomorrow, so you can look forward to that, if it’s the sort of thing to which you look forward.

TTFN

*You know, like non-Euclidean geometry.

**The WHO does not know, though with a bit of background information they could probably make reasonable predictions.

***According to the song, that can make a man feel ill at ease.  It can also, according to the same song, make a man abuse a king, which seems like it would be quite a rare situation.

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But can a short blog post be neverending?

It’s Tuesday morning, which is probably not neverending, because if it were, one would never even reach Tuesday afternoon, in which case it couldn’t be neverending, no matter what the Beatles say.

Although…if Tuesday afternoon never begins (because Tuesday morning is neverending) then Tuesday afternoon would also be neverending.  After all, according to the Oracle, everything that has a beginning has an end.  To which I tend to respond, “Yes, at the very least, if one reverses the direction in time in which one is considering a thing, then its beginning is an end.  QED.”

Enough.  I’m writing this post this morning because I have nothing better to do with my time‒or at least nothing better that I am capable of rousing the gumption to do.  I mean, I could always be on brilliant dot org, working on some mathematics or physics or computer science problems, or I could be writing a story‒you know, something productive.  But I don’t think that’s likely to happen.

This Thursday, of course, is Thanksgiving.  You’re welcome.  So, only two more shopping days left.

It used to be that nearly everything was closed on major holidays like Thanksgiving.  And Thanksgiving is still maybe a more “closed for the holiday” holiday than even Christmas and New Year.  But there will always be stores open now‒at least a 7-11, a Wawa, or some other equivalent.  And working at those stores on that holiday will be people who don’t have plans to celebrate with anyone and/or who could really use the extra money so they work.

Anyway, I think it’s still the biggest family holiday in the US.  It’s certainly the time when people travel to visit other regions of the county and exchange viruses from those different regions with the greatest fervor.  This is part of why, in the US at least, there tends to be a big surge of respiratory infections early in December.

I don’t have statistics on that.  I just remember it being the case.  That’s clearly not a rigorous scientific conclusion, it’s my perception of the situation, possibly supported by the experience of other physicians, and possibly by some remembered textbook reference(s).  Anyway, that’s not significant evidence, not if one is trying to make a scientific evaluation.  But I still do think it’s the case, and I think that impression is based on good evidence that I have encountered in the past.

I really don’t have much else to say.  Even this nonsense is too much effort to continue for long.  But who knows, maybe a short blog post will be more popular.  In any case, I don’t know what will happen tomorrow, but I plan not to write a post on Thursday, so this may be my last chance to wish those of you who celebrate it a Happy Thanksgiving.

My wishes are never very effective, unfortunately.  Just look at my life.  But maybe they’ll work better for you than for me.

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I can no other answer blog, but, thanks, and thanks.

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Hello, good morning, happy Thursday—and if you’re in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving.  If you’re a turkey reading this, well, all I can say is, try to let some human know that not only can you read, but you can even use computers and get on the internet.  If you do that, I doubt they’ll be inclined to eat you for a holiday celebration.  To all other turkeys (who can’t read this) I guess I can only give a vain and rather hypocritical apology.

I won’t be writing much more today, since it is a holiday, and I’m already late for getting going with my day.  I’ll also not be editing Unanimity today, but then again, I don’t usually do that on Thursdays.  I once again haven’t yet written anything for IoZ this week, but I have a few more days after this.  Holiday weeks are always peculiar and hectic at work, and they’re associated with even greater difficulties on the psychological level.  But I won’t go into that; people rarely find it entertaining.  It may not be quite as dire as trying to understand the workings of jokes*, but it’s rarely useful, and I suspect that even legitimate cries for help are passed off by most people as mere complaints or even dark humor.

C’est la vie.  C’est la mort.  C’est l’etat.  C’est la guerre.  C’est…le cirque volant des Monty Python.

You see what I mean?

Anyway, enough Tomfoolery**.  I hope that all of you in the United States have a particularly good Thanksgiving, preferably spent with family and/or friends.  And for everyone in the rest of the world, of course, please have a good—if ordinary—Thursday.  And I hope you realize that you have at least one thing for which to be thankful: my blog is shorter than usual this week!

TTFN

turkey

*The comparison is to the act of dissecting a frog: no one’s really that interested, and the frog dies.

**Do any of my readers know the etymology of that expression?

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Fortune brings in some blogs that are not steered.

Hello, everyone!

First of all, I’d like to wish a very Happy Thanksgiving to all those living in the United States.  I hope you have a wonderful day, enjoy a feast with friends and family, perhaps watching some decent football games, and doing any and all other good stuff such as will make you feel thankful.

I wasn’t sure I was going to write anything today; I often skip these posts on holidays, as you may have noticed.  However, such a fortuitous and unexpected thing happened to me today that I simply had to share it.  Talk about being thankful!

I was fiddling around with an older email account, one that I’ve had for many years.  It may even be my very first personal (as opposed to work-related) email, I’m not sure.  Anyway, I used one of its functions to look through the list of all the files that had ever been attached to my emails.  I was, specifically, searching for an old Harry Potter fanfic of mine that I liked quite a bit, but which I’d lost (I wrote part of another at the same time, and I still have that, so it’s doubly frustrating not being able to find the other).  It’s a silly story, to be honest, one that I never even had the nerve to submit to a fanfiction site, but I really would like to be able to find it and read it again.

Well…I haven’t found it.  I’m not giving up, but my Bayesian estimated prior probability of ever locating it is small indeed.

So, why am I thankful?  I’ll tell you.

Some of you longer-term readers may recall me mentioning an old short story I once wrote, and that I had more than half a mind to try to rewrite.  This short story was called Solitaire.  Well, I did NOT find my lost Harry Potter fanfic (title: Disinhibition), but I DID find an older-style Microsoft Word copy of the short story Solitaire!  It’s the complete story!  As written, if memory serves, way back in the early nineteen nineties, or perhaps even the late eighties!

I wrote the story during the summer, when I was visiting the young woman who would later become my wife.  I don’t think we were officially dating then, but if we were, we had just started…it was right after she graduated from university.  In fact, it may have been that summer when we first got involved.

Anyway, she had a summer job with Squibb, if I remember correctly, and was working on a project that was going to keep her up all night.  I’ve always been a night owl, and she worked better with my company (according to her), so I stayed up with her.  I had a spiral-bound notebook with me, probably from my own college stuff, and I decided, while she worked, to write a story.

Solitaire was that story.  I wrote the whole thing that night, almost in its finished form.  It didn’t need much editing.  When she read it, her response was along the lines of, “It’s really good…but what in the world was going through your mind to make you write something like this?”  To that I had no clear answer then, and I have no clear answer now.  It’s just the way my mind seems to work.

I never tried to get it published because, frankly, I couldn’t see what kind of publication would want to release such a dark story.  Now, though, I have just the venue, and I’m going to put it out for Kindle (and will later include it in my eventual next collection of short stories).  It will probably be ready to publish before Penal Colony…which is coming along well, thanks for asking.

I’m obviously even happier than I would have been if I had found the Harry Potter fanfic (though I am still frustrated about that).  In fact, I think the only thing that might make me happier would be if I’d magically found a file containing my complete first horror novel, Vagabond.  Alas, though that was saved as a computer file, I don’t think I ever emailed it to anyone.  If it’s ever published, it will have to have been rewritten.

[This isn’t as heartbreaking as the loss of the first novel I ever completed, back in high school, Ends of the Maelstrom.  Unfortunately, that was 570-some-odd single-spaced, handwritten pages, with much overflow squeezed between lines and into the margins, and I never got the nerve up to begin rewriting it.  My procrastination cost me dearly there, as that book is now lost with all my other worldly possessions from prior to 2011 (see this week’s post in Iterations of Zero for an explanation of why).]

Hopefully I’ll let that be a lesson to me.  Knowing me, though…well, we’ll have to see, I suppose.

But still…wow!  Solitaire, in near-original form, discovered at long last.  Thank goodness for the near-eternal memory of the Internet.  Soon, all of you will have the opportunity, for less than a buck, to read the story that caused the woman I was going to marry to wonder just what the hell was going on in my head.  (She did marry me, so obviously she wasn’t all that worried, though many years later she effectively reversed the decision.)  And, of course, shortly after that, you’ll get to read Penal Colony and In the Shade if you’re so inclined.  And not too much after that, Unanimity will be forthcoming.

You have so much to which to look forward.  I envy you.

TTFN