Any talking out loud with any librarian

[austin_dern]

I thought I was joking when I said outside was a band warming up and stomping on balloons. It proved to be a band warming up, and people inflating a lot of party balloons, occasionally popping them. Sometimes I feel like the straight man in my own life.

I was out of my ordinary environs on a consulting mission. A couple of secondary school (roughly, early high school) students had problems with a computer simulation of a neat little problem, light scattering through biological tissues. The university happily sent a Computer Science instructor and me as Monte Carlo instructor to consult for an hour. The students had copied a complex and slightly overdesigned program from a book and were frustrated that its results were wrong.

Some of the trouble was the students hadn't written complex programs in any language, much less C, before. As a consequence they didn't understand the program's structure, or how its components reflected the physical model. I'm glad to say I was the one who ultimately spotted the biggest current problem: they forgot to include a semicolon at the end of a line ``while ((rnd = RandomNumber(0, 1)) <= 0)'' which had undesired side effects on the logic. Now while they still get wrong results, they're wrong in more interesting ways. This we name progress.

Also one of my all-time favorite comic strips ever reran yesterday. I'm happy.

Trivia: To dissect a square into the sum of distinct smaller squares requires cutting it into at least 21 but not more than 55 component smaller squares. Source: Lure of the Integers, Joe Roberts.

Currently Reading: Proteus Combined, Charles Sheffield.

Comments

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

By the way -- you seem like the right person to ask: was that Shermy who appeared in a Classic Peanuts strip a few days ago? It sure looked like Shermy.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

From the 31 March 1969 strip? (http://www.spindizzy.org/austin/2005/March/march-31-1969.gif) ... My goodness. When I saw it the first time I thought it was a rare appearance of 5, but yeah, that's Shermy. (5 has thinner hair, principally, and his `5' T-shirt.) His hair's a little more perked up than I had thought, though.

This has to be among his last appearances in the strip.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

I'm glad you agree! I wasn't sure if I was seeing things, because I didn't know he appeared in the strip this late. He's no longer taller than Charlie Brown, and yes, his hair has changed a bit, but I do think it's him.

I wonder why Charlie Brown is the only character who is always referred to by his full name? It's been like that since the beginning. The exceptions to this rule are Peppermint Patty ("Chuck") and Marcie ("Charles"). No one ever, ever calls him "Charlie."

Speaking of such things... do you know if it was ever established whether "Schroeder" is his surname or his given name? I tend to assume the former.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It's a bit peculiar, but yeah, Charlie Brown for some reason never gets his last name cut off. I don't know whether there's any particular reason just beyond the rhythm of the full name, which Schulz seems to have picked up on pretty quickly. I could swear there's an instance somewhere in the first two Complete Peanuts books where he's addressed just as Charlie, but I don't see it offhand and it's not indexed. I'll dig around when I'm putting off some serious work and report back. (I suppose it's possible Schulz treated the name differently because it came directly from real life; Linus got his first name from Linus Maurer, but not his last.)

There were a few other characters typically addressed by full names, but they were mostly one-shot jokes like Tapioca Pudding. (Charlotte Braun, I suppose, was aimed at becoming a regular, but her personality got shuffled over to Lucy, and anyway using her name in full is just a reflection of Charlie Brown's name.) I'm not sure how to count José Peterson, who got mentioned a lot for a short while but never really had major-character status.

Schroeder ... I hadn't thought about before. I'd thought there might be his last name on a mailbox from early in the strip's run, but I was mistaken -- the strip I was thinking of established his address as 1770 (get it?) James Street, but has no mailbox in sight. Schroeder's name, though, was the last name of a kid Schulz used to caddy with (Schulz didn't remember his first name), according to Peanuts Jubilee.

Calling on web searches ... nobody on Deja Goo seems to have a record of Schroeder's first-or-last name, though it could be in one of the as-yet-unreprinted strips. I have to admit in the (mild) controversy I'd assume Schroeder is his first name, just because it feels odd to have any Peanuts character, even a major one, addressed only by his last name. That he was introduced as Schroeder, not as the Schroders' baby, gives me that feeling too.

And Google turns up a reference to a Schroeder brand of toy pianos made by a German manufacturer in the 1940s ... curious and possibly why the name felt right, to Schulz, though the name was given the character long before he ever touched a piano.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

And Google turns up a reference to a Schroeder brand of toy pianos made by a German manufacturer in the 1940s ... curious and possibly why the name felt right, to Schulz, though the name was given the character long before he ever touched a piano.

I don't know if I would say "long before" -- I'm at school right now and can't check, but wasn't it within the first couple of months after his introduction that he was first shown at the piano? I remember being surprised that his character went in that direction so quickly. Is it possible that Schulz had planned that aspect of the character from the beginning, even if it wasn't revealed immediately?

I guess my reason for favoring the last name hypothesis is simply that "Schroeder" is such an unlikely first name (for an American at least).

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Well .. hm. I guess ``long'' is a mighty flexible word here ... Schroeder first appears on 30 May 1951, and he's first set at a piano (and shows his immediate skill) on 24 September. (The first piece he's identified as playing is his own composition, the next day, Rhapsody on a Theme by Schroeder, and the day after Charlie Brown claims Schroeder's to play Brahms's First Concerto for the New York Philip Harmonic [sic].)

Beethoven doesn't get mentioned around him until 10 October, when Charlie Brown reads him a biography, and Schroeder gets his first Beethoven bust 26 November. And getting farther off topic he doesn't play anything identified as Beethoven until 1 May 1953 -- everything before was listening to the radio or records or talking about such.

Getting back to names ... a list Derrick Bang developed for alt.comics.peanuts traces down people that Peanuts characters were named for and confirms the golf-caddy-buddy origin of Schroeder. Interestingly, Miss Othmar was named for Othmar Jarisch, a friend who ran a humane society. He doesn't have any possible last (or first) names to offer Schroeder but mentions the question.

The announcer of a call-in music request show, shown 8 February 1952, says, ``I'm sorry, Mr Schroeder, but we do not have that record'' (Beethoven's Piano Sonata Number 29), which would support the last-name hypothesis if Schroeder wrote his full name on the request. The announcer just said it was from ``a listener named Schroeder'', which sounds like he just wrote one name.

Talking of Schroeder's hopes to become a composer, Charlie Brown says on 22 February 1952 that there'll be a future ``big three'' of ``Schubert, Schumann, and Schroeder'' ... which also supports it being his last name, if Charlie Brown knew Schroeder's full name and wasn't just using the familiar name and picking two composers for the alliteration.

This is a really interesting question, thank you. I never imagined asking it.

[bunny-hugger.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info. That was longer than I had thought; reading anthologies tends to compress one's sense of time.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh does it ever. For the Complete Peanuts books I've tried to restrict myself to reading just one month's strips at a time, so the book lingers over a month.