Moon type

I saw somewhere that today is the 200th birthday of Louis Braille, inventor of the Braille system of writing for the blind. As his legacy can easily withstand a little friendly competition, I figured it’s a good day to mention Moon Type, the little-known alternative to Braille.

Tell it like it is

In the same sally through the encyclopedia that uncovered Moon Type, Chuck discovered in the entry for “warthog” this caption beneath an illustration: “The warthog is one of the world’s ugliest animals.” This tickled us no end, but a year or two later when the library got an updated edition of the encyclopedia, we were even more amused to see that the same illustration now had a more scholarly and much less colorful caption, along the lines of, “The warthog can be distinguished by its tusks.” We delighted in imagining the outraged protests from some Warthog Appreciation Society that resulted in the politically correct change.

My friend Chuck discovered Moon Type in seventh grade while browsing through a copy of the World Book Encyclopedia in the school library. Developed around the same time as Braille, its alphabet consists not of raised dots but of simplified, recognizable letterforms.


The Moon Type alphabet
(lovingly rendered by yours truly)

Chuck and I decided that Moon Type, as obscure and yet as simple as it was, was ideal for passing coded messages to each other. We committed it to memory and used it thereafter from time to time when we desired an (admittedly light) extra level of security on our written communications — which consisted mostly of jokes, plans for world conquest, and not-fit-for-publication commentary on our female classmates.


“Book.”

On one dismal occasion, that extra security failed memorably. Chuck and I were at the apartment of my girlfriend Andrea (not the Andrea that I married). Andrea’s parents were out of town and I was hoping Chuck would get the hint about giving us some privacy. I wanted to use this perfect opportunity to advance with Andrea to, shall we say, a less consistently frustrating level of physical intimacy. We were having a grand old time, the three of us, but when the hour began to grow late and Chuck was still hanging around, I decided to pass him a coded message — coded once with Moon Type, and coded again by being worded obliquely in case of interception. The message was, “book.” I expected Chuck immediately to apprehend its slang meaning, which we sometimes used, of “leave” — and to be unoffended by the request, and to comply at once while making it look like leaving was his idea, as demanded by the Guy Code.

Unfortunately for me and my hormones, all of those expectations were wrong. I handed him the folded piece of paper behind Andrea’s back. Of course Chuck deciphered the Moon Type immediately — this was in tenth grade, and by now we had been using Moon Type for years. But our usual ability to know just what the other was thinking left him just then, and he said to me in a puzzled voice, “Book?” I tried to shush him and to clarify my intent nonverbally, but this only puzzled him more and he inquired again, within Andrea’s hearing, as to what I could have meant. Now she grew curious too. Ignominiously I tried to change the subject, and then (when that failed) to pretend I’d been trying to remind Chuck about a book he’d borrowed from me, but then why would I have written a coded message about it? Suddenly Chuck got it — “Oh, you want me to leave!” — and he got huffy, and Andrea got pissed off, and that was the end not only of that evening but of all future attempts to, ahem, “advance” with her.

At the time it felt like a disaster for my relationship with Andrea, and indeed it was; but I didn’t realize then that the lasting injury would be my guilt about having offended Chuck, my best friend. In the many years that have passed I doubt I ever apologized to him for it, and though I’m sure in hindsight he considers this incident to be minor and excusable by the ordinary cravenness of teenage boys, I still feel like I owe him this public: “Sorry, man!”


What brings you here 2008

Last year I joked about being disappointed that more of the hits on my blog weren’t sex-related — just 7.7%, counting hits for “vampire lesbian girl scouts.” Well, be careful what you wish for. This year fully 30% of the searches that produced hits on this site were sex-related, and of those, more than half were just looking for my tiny screengrab of Polly Walker naked — and frankly I’m again disappointed. In the same year that I brought you the stars, my own blog-a-thon, and the Bob-o-matic — and that was just January — you guys couldn’t get your mind out of the gutter. 402 posts, something like 200,000 carefully-chosen words, and all you can say is, “Look! Tits!”

Ah well. I’ll keep doing my part to elevate the discourse around here, but clearly if I want to keep my hit-count up I’ve got to throw the occasional bone to the lowbrow crowd.

Polly Walker; atia timon sex; naked polly walker; rome atia tits; “polly walker” nipple 16.3%
Rogaine; how much scalp is to much; script kevin spacey rogaine; itchy red scalp; rogaine before after photos 12.2%
Sex etc.; big bobg sex; jacking off using balloons sex; Masturbate biscotti; sexual positions lego; “Masturbate-a-thon”; Pretty Lady Sex; dildo attached to wall 5.4%
Susan Oliver/Orion slave girl; Green Orion Girl Porn; vina the cage star trek 5.0%
Erect nipples; notable nipples; hollywoods biggest nipples; cathy lee crosby nipples; sarah jessica erect nipples 4.4%
Vampire lesbian girl scouts 2.7%
Cathy Lee Crosby/Wonder Woman; THE ORIGINAL WONDER WOMAN; 1974 tv movie wonder woman 2.7%
James Bond villains; so we meet again mr bond+villain 1.9%
Batman; BATMAN GETS THE SHARK ON HIS LEG; batman hippies; batman mansion, gotham city; rubber shark batman; batman shark repellent bat spray 1.9%
Don Fanucci 1.7%
Star Wars; what date was the first friday in august 1977; TaunTaun Guts; exegesis the empire strikes back; how do lightsabers change colors in star wars; A picture of Han Solos face; will there be a star wars remake 1.6%
Birthday invitation 1.4%
Amy Linker; Amy Linker forest hills ny; Amy Linker Square Pegs 1.3%
Sir Topham Hatt; SIR TOPHAM HATT YOU HAVE CAUSED CONFUSION AND DELAY; thomas kills sir topham hatt 1.3%
Funny epitaph; Jewish headstone 1.1%
e to the i pi plus one; pi e relation transcendentals; arrigo mathematics 1.1%
Jaws ride 1.0%
Penis; kid draws penises 1.0%
Bob Falfa/Martin Stett; falfa vs milner 1.0%
Godfather 0.8%
Computer 0.7%
The Incredibles; lessons from the incredibles 0.7%
Raiders of the Lost Ark; bob falfa indiana jones 4; raiders of the lost ark, medallion; “raiders of the lost ark” “number on the crate”; musical note indiana jones theme 0.7%
Sharon Stone 0.6%
The end of Superman; how fast superman fly circumference; SUPERMAN REVERSING TIME; it is forbidden for you to interfere with time 0.6%
Jodie Foster 0.5%
Nygirlofmydreams 0.5%
Trophy; dna structure trophy design 0.5%
Comcast; threaten to disconnect comcast; PREMIUM CABLE CHANNELS HAVE ARTIFACTS; comcast removing channels 0.5%
Widescreen viewing area; formula “aspect ratio” diagonal 16:9; 4:3 area on 50 in widescreen; 27″ tv viewing area 0.4%
Star Trek/Enterprise/Kirk/etc.; Leonard Nimoy (Spock); “Trek 80” Game; first edition star trek star fleet technical manual; star trek Enterprise uniform sewing instructions 0.4%
Giraffe; giraffe drawn by kids 0.4%
Supertanker; dimensions of water carrying supertankers; become a supertanker captain 0.4%
Joe Costanzo; the primadonna joe costanzo; “Joseph Costanzo Jr. Pittsburgh AND Cafe Costanzo” 0.4%
Bob Glickstein; bang bobg; “danger inc” IMDB bob glickstein; bob glickstein hunter college; bob glickstein jonah blog; bobg clothing for women 0.4%
Dog; dog ate duraflame; “Alex The Dog”; car seat belt dog 0.4%
Pirates of the Caribbean; pirates of the caribbean scene similar indian jones raider of the lost ark knife dress; elizabeth swann red dress 0.3%
Salt Lake Flats 0.3%
Cigarettes/Camels/Still Life With Woodpecker; i haven’t had a cigarette for 9 days; tom robbins camel 0.3%
Thai gem scam; thai export center bangkok 0.3%
Sci-fi spaceships 0.3%
Entenmann’s; fudge ice’s golden cake; bimbo usa to drop entenmann’s 0.3%
Honda Fit 0.3%
James Bond; girls in credits silhouette of bond film; JAMES BOND GREATEST HITS; CONNERY BOND ROULETTE 0.3%
Millenium Falcon cockpit 0.3%
Games Magazine/Calculatrivia Marathon 0.3%
Contact film 0.2%
Vertical speed indicator/altimeter; how does a plane’s climb indicator work?; pitot static tube schematic 0.2%
Making Mr. Right 0.2%
Honeybee/bees in chimney; I am finding bees lying in my kitchen where are they coming from; bees in a fireplace 0.2%
Numerology 2008 0.2%
Indiana University; breaking away iu; “dan heller” bloomington indiana 0.2%
Lego; the ark of covenant made of legos; what is the smell at legoland 0.2%
Pez Museum; Why no Violet Pez?; burlingame museum of pez memorabilia 0.1%
Peter and the Starcatchers 0.1%
Candy; candy with cyclamate; candy invented in 1968; discontinued now and later candy flavors 0.1%
Bdsm 0.1%
Anakin/Padme; why did anakin turn to the dark side so easily; How much do Anakin’s talent, pride and ambitions affect his decision to turn to “the dark side”? 0.1%
Incremental backup 0.1%
Inverted flag 0.1%
Vincent Price; vincent price as the saint; Vincent Price – Freedom of Religion Speech; was vincent price gay 0.1%
Watch neighbor undress; URSULA UNDRESS 0.1%
Bush smile; bush paraguay; bush smirk 0.1%
Fizzies; fizzies magic soft drink tablets; fizzies into the swim meet 0.1%
xkcd; XKCD E I PI 0.1%
Bugsy Malone/Scott Baio; who sings coca cola give a little love and comes back to you; jodie foster in bugsy 0.1%
Carl Sagan; circumference of the earth + sagan; carl sagan “tonight show”; i had a crush on carl sagan 0.1%
Pine Knoll Bungalow Colony 0.1%
Splashdown; meaning of karma slave; “feel so elated” Would you, would you, would you, would you Please bring me joy; splashdown the archer lyrics what does it mean? 0.1%
Cynthia Nixon; cynthia nixon childhood; young cynthia nixon; “manhattan project” “cynthia nixon” 0.1%
Danger 0.1%
Adam Stoller 0.1%

Les quatre cents cool

It’s gee bobg post number 400, and time again to turn the podium over to the Bob-o-matic.


I know where the phallus originates: see figures 1a, 1b. But what’s the matter, energy, and along the way to a wealthy and unsavory businessman known as the to and from e-mail? I’ve been trying to recall the name of a bitch. Check. Deliver a eulogy. Check. Describe how it jibes with the previous few days in which I measured faithfully under identical conditions each day to protest a greedy move by the prevailing political fashions of the story. After ten heart-stopping minutes I believed their fun was just a phase. The girls again, was banned in the 1950’s, still holding out a grape from a pay phone — and walk Alex (I had never learned he was our tour guide, where’s Violet)? He couldn’t bag ‘er for want of a trance. Tom, tonight is the imaginary number 1. Five factorial, for me because it was over. We felt we really must be going. Then they began laughing and clamoring. Steve set the stage properly. Cast a couple are typical murder mysteries, but I think it was called the Joyful Elite. It didn’t help. Exley: You make a guess on my side and reaching under the same to me, since water is heavier than oil, then at the end of Superman/Batman crossover stories, and thanks anyway. Excerpts of my own best efforts to avoid it, recording it, see a correlation between cat allergies and an etrog citron. As a result of 438 square inches knowing that the telecoms and/or the easy way or another descended into the water? Because she chose the wrong conclusion. Subscribers to Comcast Digital artifacts (Con Edison) what year did the fish movie, Hitchcock once explained to her name was Turner leading the pirates would continue to play some roulette. All together to endure the crisis and emerge more tightly knit — the Danger mail system uses (when converting from MSP data to and from time) to dry by a long time I finally got around to follow their instructions? The trials involved in achieving the goal of some psychological jujitsu by Mary Poppins, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg! In two weeks — then dragged the duffel bag (seemed no less dense than the year 2008). The year I sent this message to one side with a better sense of humor, the least electable Democrat. The problem (the problem) isn’t a particular collection of mechanisms for specifying and describing the cloud — let’s assume that the recent wave of non-introductory computer-science courses, which contributed to the Kims’ mistakes, fall into each other’s families — she watches my kids grow up, in retrospect. I said once Bush was crazy, they came from simply walking down the hill beneath the surface. Commander sighs: I had attended a sneak-preview screening of Reggio’s final Qatsi film, from someone who knew this fact and the friend request with the filthy soles of theirs. It’s an annoying case of murder, about a month later. When you get your very own Fizzies fountain. They glamorized the idea that with Steven Spielberg — because Spielberg made Hitchcock feel like crying — Comcast removes West Coast feeds 1, 6 — Comcast, Comcast, crappy broadcast Comcast, reduction in service at all those Western girls? Has it done such a time. I forget what it had — the needed equipment we ran into one another (groan) with — our first surprise came when traffic was backed up in arms about it was the litigiousness of its kind among Splashdown’s songs, leaving a diehard core of doubters free to murder and steal and covet their neighbors’ wives and kick adorable defenseless puppies, but on this trip, or some other innocent program to view the complete list of Perl regular expressions, we made a trek to the altar to witness the awesome power of tyrants is to suspend or nullify elections whose outcomes they don’t because God is everywhere.

Blogjam!

Geez, the end of October, already? So much has happened that I haven’t blogged about — my birthday, another Disneyland trip, a Seattle trip, the pathetic but exhilarating (but pathetic) implosion of the McCain campaign, finishing Anathem, and a little thing called the global credit crisis.

Over the next few days I will attempt to break this “blogjam.”

Enough about me, what do YOU think of me?

Next week, He Shot Cyrus will host the “My Best Post” blog-a-thon, so now I’m thinking about which of my rambling, incoherent compositions on this site are the “best” — i.e., the least rambly and the most coherent.

I’ve got a few favorites in mind, but what about you, my legions of loyal readers? I know it can’t really be When on Rome (speaking of legions), even though disappointingly that’s far and away the most popular page on this site lately, the result of hundreds and hundreds of nipple-related Google searches by individuals who somehow can’t manage to locate anything better on the Internet for their fixation than half a dozen fuzzy pixels (’cause, you know, it’s not like there’s naked girls on the Internet or anything).

If you have a favorite post on this site, please leave a comment about it below. Thanks!

Writing advice

My young cousin Matt is applying to college and I was enlisted to help edit his admissions essay. In the process of doing so I came up with these pieces of (debatable) wisdom about how to write well.


If I had to give just one piece of overriding advice for writing well, it’s this: place yourself into your readers’ shoes. Imagine what they’re thinking while they’re reading your words. Anticipate their questions, their confusion, and their boredom, and then prevent them ever feeling those things.

If you then allowed me to give a second piece of advice, it would be to liken a newly written essay to a block of marble. Somewhere in there is a beautiful sculpture waiting to come out; your job is to remove the extraneous bits that are hiding it. As the writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said, “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” Often the hardest part of writing is looking at a great sentence you’ve composed, full of well-chosen words, and realizing it contributes nothing other than to show off how flashy you can be. You’ve got to rip those out without mercy.

As you then ran screaming from my attempts to give a third piece of advice, I would shout after you, “When you pile too much into one sentence, it’s easy to get bogged down in trying to untangle its twisty, complicated structure, when the better remedy is so simple: just break it up into two sentences! Matt! Maaaaaatt!”

The third time it’s enemy action

I’m getting pretty tired of ideas from my blog showing up in Hollywood movies. First it was the references to Roswell and ancient Etruscan artifacts in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which you read here first. Now I see that the trailer for Tropic Thunder features a scene in which the theme song from The Jeffersons is used in a failed attempt to bridge the racial divide — which you read here first.

Hey Hollywood, those are just the crumbs you’ve been stealing. There’s more and better where they came from. Have your people call my people.

At this rate…

How do you like that — the same weekend that my blog turned two years old, my Google AdSense account — the little kickbacks I get every time one of you clicks on the ads that appear next to one of these posts — also passed a major milestone: I’ve earned ten dollars! At this rate I’ll be able to retire, when the time comes, on over one hundred AdSense dollars!

Come to think of it, that’s only if you consider my mounting AdSense balance to be an arithmetic progression. On the other hand, ten dollars is a thousandfold increase over my balance the last time I reported it almost two years ago. With just two data samples it’s impossible to tell whether the progression is arithmetic or geometric. If the latter, then my balance has been growing at better than 1% per day. At that rate, by the time I retire you will all bow before benevolent supreme dictator Bob and his 8.7 duodecillion dollars, mwa ha ha ha ha ha! Even if the dollar collapses, that oughta be worth something on eBay. Thanks, AdSense!

Deux bornes

It’s July 25th, 2008, the 30th birthday of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, but more importantly, the second anniversary of the day I surmounted the first-post obstacle and started this blog. To be honest, I never thought I’d keep it up as long as I have. Let’s see how I’m doing on the things I claimed I’d be writing about.

  • Fatherhood. Check. (1, 2, 3, etc.)
  • Learning to play music. Check.
  • Improving my fitness. Check.
  • “Greatest hits” from my old website. Check.
  • Reliving past glory:
    • Book-writing. Hardly at all.
    • Plane-flying. Check. (1, 2, 3, etc.)
    • Company-starting. Check. (1, 2, etc.)

I also expanded on this day-one comment:

you should not get the idea that fatherhood put an end to my adventures; on the contrary, it’s my biggest one yet

But I never posted any of my “clever movie-connections puzzles,” so expect to see some of those in the next few weeks.

It’s fitting that on this anniversary, I’ve found ways 12 and 13 that I’m like primordial blogging inspiration Ken Jennings:

And now, to mark the occasion, a few parting thoughts from the Bob-o-matic:

Thinking of upgrading your conventional picture-tube TV to buy a box of detergent powder from a bunch of cops standing around outside and asks the driver got a stern talking-to from some prudish supervisor at work? Did you know about that scene without picturing the camera away from the shadow of the Jedi wish to take the ferry to where he was making me have. It was hard, very good, ’cause you ain’t got charm. The last century, and matzo meal, or those with whose wit and wisdom I could start. When a train came, his own creation, but that was what allowed capital to be ruled by fear. Fight Club, I knew. Oh well, considering that, when I started to become a drag race — which made me finally to disconnect my cable TV provider, complaining about the nuances and complexities of the existing Star Wars on DVD, the girls got in that film gave me a grievous injury at the Primadonna again will be reinforced when we discovered that the story.

The month of no blogging

Historians of the future will wonder why June 2008 was the most miserly month for blog posts here at gee bobg. That is, they’ll wonder about it until they read this post, which will remind them that I’ve just started an exciting but challenging new job, while at the same time also being behind schedule on the side project that was supposed to wrap up before the new job began, but didn’t, so that I am now effectively doing two jobs. This post will further inform them that I’ve been filling much of my scant downtime by playing with my cool new toy: a Sony PlayStation 3 and The Orange Box.

Then, presumably, they’ll stop wondering.

But that won’t stop me from first apologizing for having indulged in the blogger’s loathsome practice of making excuses for a recent dearth of posts, or second from enthusing about “Portal,” one of the games from The Orange Box, which (despite the aforementioned scarcity of downtime) I finished in just a handful of late nights of extremely satisfying puzzle-solving. By the way, historians: the Jonathan Coulton song (“Still Alive”) that plays over the end credits is almost as much fun as the game itself!

Historians of the future will probably have tired of this post by the time I reach the part where I tell how exciting it is now that I’ve finally figured out how to stream music, photos, and video wirelessly from my computer to the PlayStation 3, and will wonder when I’ll shut up about the PlayStation 3 already. That is, they’ll wonder about it until they see that I’m promising to shut up about it right now.

Then, presumably, they’ll stop wondering.

Historians of the future may or may not believe my promise to update this blog more faithfully from now on, but they don’t have to take my word for it; at a glance they can just see whether or not I did. Unlike them, you and I must wait for the future to happen.