SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #197 New Moon of January 4, 2011 Contents copyright 2011 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* The year-end holidays are over, and things are returning more or less to normal. The colored lights and inflatable snowmen are disappearing from view, and the voices of the carolers are no longer heard in the land. The days are starting to get longer, although it'll be a while yet before the difference is enough to notice. The midday sun still has a sort of late-afternoon long-shadows look which will linger for another few weeks. I had a birthday coming up, although it'll be past by the time this issue is actually released. My sister's birthday was a few days before mine, between Christmas and New Year's. When we were growing up we always seemed to get short-changed in the birthday department. Some years we didn't even get separate parties. The family would just go out for dinner one evening sort of in between, and that would have to do for both of us. We almost never had the type of party where we would invite our whole class from school. I think we did that once or twice, but that was about It. Part of the problem may have been that I didn't fit in with the other kids all that well. But even without that, my birthday was always either during the holiday break, or on the first or second day of school after the holidays. It just didn't feel like party time. Did others with birthdays around this time of year have similar experiences? ********************* You've probably heard about how one of the main officers of the USS Enterprise (the aircraft carrier, not the Star Trek ship) is in trouble for having made pornographic videos to show to crew members a few years ago. He's been transferred to some sort of onshore administrative job, and those familiar with how such things work expect him to retire soon. One little mistake (or series of mistakes over a period of time) back when he was second in command comes to light, and his career is effectively over. I've been told that that's the way the US military works, at least in this timeline. Things are a little bit different in Timeline A17B (and neighboring timeline B17A). The powers that be in Timeline A17B have decided that the honor of the entire ship had been irredeemably besmirched. They issued orders for the crew to sail the ship out into the middle of the ocean and scuttle it. But just before the plug was to be pulled (or whatever they do to scuttle a ship) the environmentalists started making their voices heard. Sinking a nuclear-powered ship is bad for bottom-dwelling marine life, and the oceans in general. Or something like that. So the orders were changed. The ship was to return to port, where the nuclear reactors were to be removed. Then the crew would erect a bunch of temporary masts on the flight deck and, using sails made from parachute fabric (which the military has a lot more of in their inventory than traditional sail cloth) sail the ship out into the middle of the ocean and scuttle it. This did not sit well with the crew, especially since the wording of the order seemed to imply that they would all go down with the ship, having been hopelessly besmirched by those pornographic videos or, if they hadn't seem them first hand, by having served on the same ship with people who had seen them. So they mutinied. They refused to return to port to have the ship's reactors removed and temporary masts and sails installed on the flight deck. Here's where things got a little tricky. After some rather tense situations the parties eventually agreed to compromise, but the terms of the agreement were different in the two timelines. In Timeline A17B the crew agreed to sail the ship out into the middle of the ocean (using real sails instead of nuclear reactors) and scuttle it, provided they did not have to go down with the ship. Instead, the CIA (or some such agency) smuggled them back home and gave them fake information to put on their resumes so no one need ever know that they'd ever served on that hopelessly besmirched ship. In Timeline B17A, on the other hand, they did not scuttle the ship. Instead the Navy just disowned it. Since it was due to be decom- missioned in a few years anyway, and some estimates put the scrap value at not much more than the cost of disposing of the nuclear reactors and such, they just let the crew keep it. The ship would belong to the crew, free and clear, provided they changed the name and painted it some un-Navy-like color like pink or lavender or orange and purple polka dots so nobody would know it used to be a part of the US Navy. The CIA (or some such agency) even made up registration documents from some made-up country so no one need ever know that this was that hopelessly besmirched ship. There are conflicting stories on where the ship is now. Most say the crew has gone into some version of the entertainment business, setting up a theme park on the flight deck and meeting cruise ships out in the middle of the ocean to cater to their passengers. Some versions of the story have them doing pirate-themed musicals, again using the flight deck as a stage. Or maybe they're renting it out to movie studios as a location for filming. They may even be back in the business of making pornographic movies, and doing other entertainment of an adult nature. Others say they're renting flight-deck space out to little countries that always wanted to do navy-type stuff, but could never afford to have an aircraft carrier of their very own. A few even say they've recruited some mad scientists and are getting involved with the affairs of other nearby timelines. Others say that those are just rumors, at least in the timelines they know about. Alternate timelines can be tricky that way. ********************* Thoughts of my birthday reminded me of an incident at a lunch get-together a few weeks back. It was someone else's birthday, and one of his friends had brought a cake. Someone else asked what kind of cake it was, and seemed annoyed when I answered, sort of jokingly, that it was birthday cake. She had been trying to ask what flavor the cake was (it turned out to be pumpkin) and of course had already known the occasion for it. This leads to thoughts of some of the twists and turns of the English language. If you take a cake into the lab and let the experts examine it, they will be able to tell you with pretty good confidence what kind of cake it is in the sense that it may be chocolate cake, or fruitcake, or pound cake, or whatever. But they're on less firm ground when they start trying to figure out what kind of cake it is in the sense of birthday cake or wedding cake or plain old no-special-occasion dessert cake. It seems that "What kind of cake is this? can have two distinct meanings: Its physical composition, or the occasion for which it was made. If you're lucky you be able to detect residue from burning candles. That would indicate that it was probably a birthday cake. Or if you have a large enough chunk from the right part of the cake you may be able to tell that it seems to have been constructed in layers, with the upper layers smaller than the lower ones: A wedding cake. But even so, neither of those is a kind of cake in the sense of chocolate or fruitcake or the like. Do other languages have a similar ambiguity in this regard? ********************* More thoughts on kinds of cake: Although there may not be any one specific flavor of cake that's eaten only to celebrate someone's birthday, there are some configurations that are specific to certain occasions. One such is putting candles on the cake for birthdays. The kind of cake, such as carrot cake or angel food or chocolate, doesn't seem to make much difference. Putting candles on it makes it a birthday cake. Likewise, if you see a round layer cake with the top layers smaller in diameter than the bottom ones to give a sort of stairstep effect, you would probably think of weddings. Such a cake with candles on the various steps and no human figures on top would seem odd, at least to most people in this culture. Wedding cake is often white cake, to go with the white wedding dress for the bride, so to that extent there may be a specific type of cake that could be considered "wedding cake". But that same recipe can be used for birthdays by just changing the shape and the decorations. And of course you can always use just about any cake recipe for general no-special-occasion cake. Back on the various forms cake can take, there are practical concerns. For a birthday cake you generally want to put all the candles in one area so the person whose birthday it is can blow them out in one breath. If you put candles on a wedding cake some of the ones on the lower levels will be out of reach of the person trying to blow them out because the higher levels of cake are in the way. Putting the cake on a turntable might solve this, but it's a lot of extra trouble and you'd have to spin it pretty fast to get it all the way around in one breath. On the other hand, candles on the wedding-cake configuration might work for something where you want to emphasize teamwork: Station several people around the cake and let each blow the sector nearest them. This might actually make a good wedding or wedding-like ritual, especially if there are more than two people involved. It might also be suitable for the founding of a business partnership, or something of that sort. But still the basic fact remains: There don't seem to be many flavors of cake an expert could taste and declare to be birthday cake or wedding cake or whatever, but there are configurations that are rather specific. ********************* Still on thoughts of birthday cake, I'm wondering how I might arrange the candles this year, assuming I were to make myself a birthday cake. The number is prime, so a neat rectangle won't work. If I do seven rows of ten I'll have one candle left over, while eight rows of nine will have one empty spot. What would work would be alternating rows, in effect interleaving two rectangles. Six rows of six, alternating with five rows of seven, would do it. There are also any number of arrangements that aren't necessarily based on rectangles at all. But it probably doesn't matter all that much, because I'm getting to an age where they don't necessarily try to put one candle for each and every year. They just stick however many candles they have handy up there and hope for the best. And from the standpoint of blowing them all out, that may be just as well. ********************* Back on the just-ended holiday season, I notice that many of the songs stores and such have been saturating us with are more or less generic winter songs, with little or nothing to do with Christmas other than that Christmas comes in Northern Hemisphere winter. Examples include "Jingle Bells", "Winter Wonderland", "Let it Snow", and "Sleigh Ride". These songs vanish at the end of the holiday season along with actual Christmas songs like "White Christmas" and "Silent Night", even though there is little logical reason not to keep playing them. What's interesting about this is that you don't get saturated with seasonal songs at other times of year. There are songs about spring and summer and fall, and you hear one of them now and then, but you don't get barraged with them at the relevant times of year. For example, one fast-food place I go to plays 1950's and 60's pop music. Recently I heard a couple of songs about how the singer's girlfriend is going away for the summer, and he's hoping the relationship will pick up again in the fall. Logically that's something that might want to be played in late spring, but it seems to crop up more or less at random at just about any time of year. So it seems that pretty much the only "seasonal" category of music the major suppliers of background music recognize is "Christmas". ********************* The Almanac The almanac for the coming year is here. I thumb through the astronomical section: It's stuff I'll want to look up later about Solstices and equinoxes, maybe an eclipse or two, But not really reading material. Other articles and even some of the ads are more interesting. But then I come to the calendar pages, One for each month of the new year. January looms as a long block of back-to-work post-Christmas gray. The groundhogs and valentines and long-dead presidents of February offer scant consolation. But then we come to March and April, with their bright promises of springtime. May brings childhood memories of counting the days until school lets out for the summer. Even now, with my school days long past, May always seems a time of transition, a reminder of the passage of the years. As winter howls outside my window June and July seem unreal, Just as winter will seem unreal when June and July are here. The sight of August brings a hint of melancholy, A reminder that the days of summer are numbered And the sun must once again journey southward. Then comes September, with falling leaves Swirling down into October and November. Halloween and Thanksgiving lead my thoughts to festive December, When winter once again howls outside my window As I leaf through yet another new almanac for yet another new year. -- Tom Digby Original 15:29 12/20/2002 Edited 21:05 12/27/2002 Edited 19:05 01/02/2003 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --