I haven't told the landlord

[austin_dern]

I finished most of my moving to the new office, including the critical thing, moving the iMac. I've got to be pretty near the last person to move, other than the person on leave until May, but I've been busy. The process of a couple dozen people relocating their offices, watching how people notice them, reinforces my belief that all you really need to steal any kind of equipment is to pack it in a slightly dusty old appliance box, or maybe wheel it out on a task chair, and look like you know where you're going. Everybody will figure you're moving it from one office to another.

Uncharacteristically, I got waylaid by a silly little side issue. I wanted the cart to roll my computer over, and didn't know the British word for ``cart''. I had to show off my weak pantomime skills (you convey ``holding a metal handle and pushing something wheeled'' without just looking odd) and explain I wanted to push the heavier stuff on a platform with wheels, and eventually we hit it. The word they were looking for was ``trolley''. As I was moving in with boxes there was a kid with a cable reaching across a stretch of outdoor hallway from a public Ethernet port to his laptop, though by the time I had the cart he'd left, and I didn't have to negotiate around his cable.

Trivia: To explore the effects of electricity Stephen Gray, 1666-1736, connected Hauksbee-style glass tubes and spheres to soap bubbles, beef, a red-hot poker, a map, an umbrella, and a small boy. Source: Entertainment for Angels, Patricia Fara.

Currently Reading: Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, by Edwin G Burrows, Mike Wallace. The book is 1,236 pages, and maybe a hundred more pages of indices, which is why it's taking so long. I got distracted by a bit about Lincoln's 1861 visit to the city: Someone remarked to Lincoln on the number of assembled millionaires, pointedly underscoring the city's financial clout. ``Oh, indeed, is that so?'' countered Lincoln deftly, underscoring his political muscle. ``Well, that's quite right. I'm a millionaire myself. I got a minority of a million in the votes last November.''

All right, all his quotes can't be as pithy as the ``fool all of the people all of the time'' one or his great squelch on Grant's drinking, and the 19th century was an era for telling jokes so the guy mocked had no idea you were doing it, and words and context evolve in time, and this was a time when you could have college student slang that was riffs on Aramaic words but ... even so, it's not just me, right? That is an odd thing to say, isn't it? Maybe they wrote it down wrong.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing he's making some sort of joke about the popular vote. Lincoln got 1.8M out of 4.6M votes cast. It was a messy election, bad enough to spark off a civil war.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

It has to be some kind of joke about the popular vote -- nothing else makes sense in context -- but it's really weirdly formed as such. I can't even pin down where the listener is supposed to find a component of it funny.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Well, he means that there were 1.8M pro-Lincoln votes, and 2.8M anti-Lincoln votes. which is where he gets "a minority of one million". The troubling thing is that I'm reasonably sure that Lincoln and his audience probably all found that one a real knee-slapper. American humour of the period does have an element of plain inscrutability that's missing from contemporaneous British humour. The Americans of the Victorian age seem much more "foreign" today than do the British.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

Trolley by golly!

...seems to me you coulda switched your keyboard over to Brit and/or gone to AltavistaSystranBabelfish and done the translation thar..... wooot! :9

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Is that still up? I haven't seen Alta Vista in years, come to think of it.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

ah yes! *wrrrble* world.altavista.net ....although I think MacOS X has the Systran Translation internet interface built into Sherlock... :9