Friday Random 10

Metallica, Fade To Black
Ernest Tubb, Two Glasses Joe
The White Stripes, Red Rain
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Give It Away
Nirvana, Milk It
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Dosed
Flatt and Scruggs, Farewell Blues
Metallica, Master of Puppets
Tenacious D, Cock Pushups
Santana, Samba Pa Ti

+10

Flatt and Scruggs, My Cabin In Caroline
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sir Psycho Sexy
Charles Mingus, Open Letter To Duke
Willie Nelson, Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain
Bad Brains, Attitude
Miles Davis, In A Silent Way/It's About That Time
Bad Brains, Rally Round Jah Throne
Flatt and Scruggs, Back To The Cross
John Coltrane, Resolution
Soundgarden, New Damage

Of dingleberries and aarschgnoddle

From Bryson, we learn that the Pennsylvania Dutch have "curiously specific terms" in their dialect of German. One such world is aarschgnoddle:

the globules of dung found on the hair in the vicinity of the anus (and, no, I cannot think why they might need such a word)

One shouldn't have to think hard, as English has its own word: dingleberrry. According to Wikipedia (yes, there is an entry; take that Encyclopedia Brittanica):

A dingleberry is fecal matter stuck in small round clumps to the hair or fur around the anus. It is often found on sheep that have not been shorn for some time and in some other long-haired animals, such as persian cats...The term is popular in both Australia and in rural America, especially the South. The term originates from the now somewhat-antiquated name for the Southern Mountain Cranberry (Vaccinium erythrocarpum).

UPDATE: The OED (of course) has something to add:

[f. dingle, of uncertain origin (perh. DINGLE n. or as in DINGBAT n.), + BERRY n.1]

1. U.S. A cranberry, Vaccinium erythrocarpum, of the south-eastern U.S.
1952 B. C. BLACKBURN Trees & Shrubs Eastern N. Amer. 334 Dingleberry, Vaccinium erythrocarpum. 1974 G. USHER Dict. Plants used by Man 594/2 V. erythrocarpum Michx. (Bear Berry, Dingleberry, Mountain Cranberry). S.E. N. America.

2. Transferred uses. a. pl. Dried faecal matter attached to the hair around the anus. Also transf. slang (orig. U.S.).
1953 BERREY & VAN DEN BARK Amer. Thes. Slang (1954) §124/2 Dingbats, dingleberries, dried adherent dung. 1972 B. RODGERS Queens' Vernacular 19 Dingle-berries (late '50s-late '60s), dried globs of feces hanging to the anal hairs of an unfastidious person. Ibid. 25 Ass... Syn: dingle-berry pie (early '60s); salad bowl (late '50s). 1974 R. K. MUELLER Buzzwords II. 67 Taken from the trade colloquialism referring to the splattered molten particles around a metallic weld on a pipe or vessel. His presentation ‘left a lot of dingleberries’ means he splattered thoughts and inferences all around the main task.

Looking at dingle, perhaps there is something to the supposed connection:

[Of uncertain origin. A single example meaning ‘deep hollow, abyss’ is known in 13th c.; otherwise, the word appears to have been only in dialectal use till the 17th c., when it began to appear in literature. In the same sense dimble is known from the 16th c. Dimble and dingle might be phonetic doublets: cf. cramble and crangle.]

A deep dell or hollow; now usually applied (app. after Milton) to one that is closely wooded or shaded with trees; but, according to Ray and in mod. Yorkshire dialect, the name of a deep narrow cleft between hills.
a1240 Sowles Warde in Cott. Hom. 263 His runes ant his domes {th}e derne beo{edh} ant deopre {th}en eni sea dingle [= abyss of the sea: cf. Ps. xxxv. 6 Vulg. Judicia tua abyssus multa]. 1630 DRAYTON Muses Elizium ii. 29 In Dingles deepe, and Mountains hore..They cumbated the tusky Boare. 1634 MILTON Comus 311, I know each lane, and every alley green, Dingle, or bushy dell of this wild wood. 1636 JAMES Iter Lanc. 357 Amongst ye Dingles and ye Apennines. 1674 RAY N.C. Words 14 Dingle, a small clough or valley between two steep hills. 1757 DYER Fleece I. 134 Dingles and dells, by lofty fir embow'r'd. 1796 SOUTHEY Occas. Pieces v. Poems II. 226 Seek some sequestered dingle's coolest shade. 1810 SCOTT Lady of L. III. i. 12 Both field and forest, dingle, cliff, and dell, And solitary heath, the signal knew. 1876 Whitby Gloss., Dingle, a cleft or narrow valley between two hills.

Hence {sm}dingly a., abounding in dingles, of the nature of a dingle.
1841 HODGSON Hist. Northmbld. II. III. 393/2 Stonecroft burn..joins the dingly channel of the brook. 1855 Chamb. Jrnl. III. 260 Sweet dingly dells and bosky bowers.

Thesis advice

A thesis has to be presentable...but don't attach too much importance to it. If you do succeed in the sciences, you will do later on better things and then it will be of little moment. If you don't succeed in the sciences it doesn't matter at all.
- Paul Ehrenfest (from the Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Quotations)

Not-so-random quotes

'Emergencies' have always been the pretext on which the safeguards of individual liberty have been eroded.
- Friedrich Hayek

Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
- Groucho Marx

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
- Benjamin Franklin

America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.
- George W. Bush

Random quotes

What is ominous is the ease with which some people go from saying that they don't like something to saying that the government should forbid it. When you go down that road, don't expect freedom to survive very long.
- Thomas Sowell

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
- Bertrand Russell

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.
- Mark Twain

The weirder you're going to behave, the more normal you should look. It works in reverse, too. When I see a kid with three or four rings in his nose, I know there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about that person.
- P.J. O'Rourke

Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
- Richard Dawkins

Forgotten English

My favorite bits of Forgotten English:

bespawl: Popular seventeenth-century verb for an insulting gesture, meaning specifically to "bespatter with saliva," whose origins are obscure.

prickmedainty: Sixteenth-century man-about-town who coifed himself in an overly careful manner, frequently seeking the services of a barber, and who was, by Jamieson's estimation, "ridiculously exact in dress or carriage."

fribbler: Eighteenth-century word for a man who expressed profound infatuation with a woman but was unwilling to commit himself to her.

flitterwochen: Old English expression meaning "fleeting weeks," the equivalent of what is now referred to as a honeymoon, or lune de miel in France. In Chaucer's time flitte meant "flee or pass away," as often does the initial passion of love.

farctate: The condition of being bloated or full following a large meal. This term hails from the Latin farcire, to stuff...

Sudoku solver

"Cornell physicist Veit Elser has been engrossed recently in resolving a pivotal question in biological imaging. So he hasn't had much time for brainteasers and number games.

But in discovering an algorithm critical for X-ray diffraction microscopy, Elser and colleagues solved two problems. First, they gave researchers a new tool for imaging the tiniest and most delicate of biological specimens. And second, they discovered that the same algorithm also solves the internationally popular numbers puzzle Sudoku.

Not just one puzzle. All of them."

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Gladwell and Simmons

The Curious Guy (bold mine):

Gladwell: This is actually a question I'm obsessed with: Why don't people work hard when it's in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it's really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn't work hard. It's a form of self-protection. I swear that's why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I'll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don't study for tests -- which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you're stupid -- and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

To me, this is what Peyton Manning's problem is. He has the work habits and dedication and obsessiveness of Jordan and Tiger Woods. But he can't deal with the accompanying preparation anxiety. The Manning face is the look of someone who has just faced up to a sobering fact: I am in complete control of this offense. I prepare for games like no other quarterback in the NFL. I am in the best shape of my life. I have done everything I can to succeed -- and I'm losing. Ohmigod. I'm not that good. (Under the same circumstances, Ben Roethlisberger is thinking: maybe next time I stop after five beers). I don't know if I've ever felt sorrier for someone than I did for Manning at the end of that Pittsburgh playoff game.