USO Canteen FReeper Style ~ Pancakes on Wednesday ~ 27 August 2003

Canteen FRiends ~ Radix

[Radix]

For the freedom you enjoyed yesterday...
Thank the Veterans who served in
The United States Armed Forces.

Looking forward to tomorrow's freedom?
Support The United States Armed Forces Today!

Pancakes on Wednesdays

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Welcome to Pancakes on Wednesdays.

Wednesday August 27, 2003

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Here is an amalgamation of trivial facts and seemingly useless data.

Do not forget to hit the hyperlinks.

We have links, lots of them.

SPONDULICKS

Money, cash.

Though originally a bit of mid-nineteenth-century American slang, this has travelled widely, being cast up on the shores of Britain and Australia among other places. It’s a member of a group of words created in a century-long fit of logographical exuberation which also gave the world slumgullion, rambunctious, and absquatulate (not to mention, as Elsie L Warnock did in Dialect Notes in 1913, such otherwise lost treasures as scrumdifferous, hyperfirmatious, and supergobosnoptious).

It would seem from the evidence that spondulicks (either so spelled or as spondulix) was originally American college slang. One of its earliest appearances was in a piece about college life in the New York magazine Vanity Fair in 1860: “My friend the Senior got out of spondulix, and borrowed [my watch] to spout for the purpose of bucking the Tiger” (to interpret, his friend had run out of money and pawned the watch to get some more cash in order to gamble on cards, probably faro). The word was used later by such literary luminaries as O Henry and Bret Harte. From usage data, it now looks to be much more common outside the US, to the extent that the New Oxford Dictionary of English marks it as “British slang”.

Where does it come from? “A fanciful coinage”, the big Oxford English Dictionary says. It has been described as a “perverted and elaborated” form of greenback (you may feel that to believe spondulicks could come from greenback requires a perverted imagination all its own). Eric Partridge suggests it might derive from Greek spondulikos, from spondulos, a species of shell once used as money.

However, Doug Wilson pointed out that that Greek stem is also the source of various English words beginning in spondylo– that refer to the spine or vertebrae. He suggested that a stack of coins may have been likened to the spine, with each coin a vertebra. He found a supporting reference in an 1867 book, A Manual of the Art of Prose Composition: for the Use of Colleges and Schools, by John Mitchell Bonnell. A list of provincialisms included: “Spondulics—coin piled for counting”.

If it is indeed college slang, either explanation may well be the kind of academic joke that would appeal. Otherwise, your guess is as good as mine.

About a hundred dollars

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Happy Birthday

Confucius 551 B.C.

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Lyndon B. Johnson (U.S.) 1908

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Paul "Pee-Wee Herman" Reubens 1952

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Would you like to do some  Sorting with your pancakes?

Assume that n numbered pancakes are stacked, and that a spatula can be used to reverse the order of the top k pancakes for . Then the pancake sorting problem asks how many such "prefix reversals" are sufficient to sort an arbitrary stack (Skiena 1990, p. 48).

The maximum numbers of flips needed to sort a random stack of n = 1, 2, 3, ... pancakes are 0, 1, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, ... (Sloane's A058986), with the number of maximal stacks for n = 2, 3, ... being 1, 1, 3, 20, 2, 35, 56, ... (Sloane's A067757).

For example, the three stacks of four pancakes requiring the maximum of four flips are , , and , which can be ordered using the flip sequences , , and , respectively (illustrated above). Similarly, the two stacks of six pancakes requiring the maximum of seven flips are and , which can be ordered using the flip sequences and , respectively.

It is known that for , if n is a multiple of 16, and .

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1990 - Stevie Ray Vaughn and three members of Eric Clapton's band were killed in a helicopter crash in Wisconsin.

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1912 - The Edgar Rice Burroughs book "Tarzan of the Apes" was published for the first time.

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1921 - The owner of Acme Packing Company bought a pro football team for Green Bay, WI. J.E. Clair paid tribute to those who worked in his plant by naming the team the Green Bay Packers. (NFL)

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1938 - Robert Frost, in a fit of jealousy, set fire to some papers to disrupt a poetry recital by another poet, Archibald MacLeish.

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1945 - American troops landed in Japan after the surrender of the Japanese government at the end of World War II.

Japanese Surrender Certificate

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I am an excellent driver

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2001 - Work began on the future site of a World War II memorial on the U.S. capital's historic national Mall. The site is between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.

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Todays Wednesday field trip is to Xanadu

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Lamborghinis!

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Cincinnatti.

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The maple syrup is defintely supposed to be on the table before the pancakes

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Buick convertible

1949 roadmaster

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hybrid rosebushes

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high functioning autistic

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Wheel of Fortune
Look at these fabulous prizes
Over a hundred thousand dollars in fabulous prizes just waiting to be won

It reminds me of pancakes on Wednesdays

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On this day 40 years ago..........   I can imagine a certain man, in a room, alone. I can almost picture him at prayer concerned about what the morning would bring.   On that day 40 years ago he gave what I consider to be, one of the greatest speeches of all time.

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Pancakes Wednesdays

Definitely

 

[E.G.C.]

Well, when summer comes to an end, the wasps will all go away. That's usually the way it ends up. Although, lately we haven't had any come into our house(LOL).

[Kathy in Alaska]

Good morning, Boys!

[E.G.C.]

BTTT!!!!!

[Fawnn]

Hey Tom - Hold that pose for a few seconds!

That's gotta hurt! ;)

[Kathy in Alaska]

Yikes! I'm late. Back later.

[SouthernHawk]

I think of the celestial graphic on their front page every time I hear the expression "painted by the hand of GOD".

Thanks for the space trip!

[never4get]

Mmmmmm...thanks for the lunch. Too much work and no play is making me a dull boy. Despite such, back to work.

May God bless and keep safe our men and women in the armed services.

[SouthernHawk]

I probably won't feel a thing ! ! ! LOL!

Good Morning and a wish that you have an outstanding day!

[Fawnn]

I probably won't feel a thing ! ! ! LOL!

True! LOL!!! ;)

[stand watie]

HI, Linda.

free dixie,sw

[Fawnn]

Good Morning and a wish that you have an outstanding day!

Good morning to you, and thank you. That's a wonderful sentiment. How about if I take the liberty and extend that "have an outstanding day" hope to everybody in the Canteen, to our ground troops, and to all the ships at sea?

[beachn4fun]

Howdy Ms. Feather. Welcome to Hump Day. Hoorah! Let's get started on the weekend!

[SevenofNine]

Good morning Canteen members

Well don't bogart syrup okay

OKAY

Well report off Hareetz wire reporting that while we asleep IDF made morning house call to Brit national living in Gaza was helping out Hamas leadership OH OH

They didn't come for morning tea

Now report off Interfax wire is reporting that maybe Vlad try get back in Dubya good graces

Report are that he refuse to see North Korea diplomats that visiting Ukraine at this hour

BUSTED IT

AHH Kim Jong I think you might be in KGB doghouse YOU THINK DUDE

[beachn4fun]

(I have this yen for .....(dare I say it) Waffles!

Are you tomkow undercover? Or related to him?

[txradioguy]

Good morning everyone. As always, thank you for your incredible support of all of us over here. Prayers this morning for 547th Maintence Co, D.C. Nat'l Guard. Two of their guys were hurt on Sunday by an I.E.D. (improvised explosive device) that wrecked their 5-ton truck. (The blast blew it completely on it's side) Also hurt was a soldier from 1st AD. I was in a 3 vehicle convoy that cam up on their truck just after it had been hit and was still taking small arms fire. We deployed and secured the truck and treated the wounded and got them back to our base so they could be flown to a hospital. One guy I talked to said it was the second blast he'd survived in 19 days!

Radu - Thank you for that card. It was an extremely pleasant surprise.

[beachn4fun]

minor, you sure are getting the hang of it! LOL. Love the phone call. You've really got them running scared now that you've called PETA! I haven't seen them at the Canteen since! I did hear a rumor that the Mayor was heading to Auburn (sneaking out of town, you think?). Don't know what happened to TCowboy. Maybe just lurking waiting to see if PETA shows up. I sure hope we hear nice things about kitty katz after this.

[Fawnn]

Prayers this morning for 547th Maintence Co, D.C. Nat'l Guard ... 1st AD....

Prayers lifted!

Thank you so much for your service to our country! God bless you and keep you (and those who work with you) safe....

[beachn4fun]

ms. feather.....love that car/hat look. Really nice.

[tomkow6]

[beachn4fun]

Hi ya blackie. Mmmmm.....I'm with you....love my coffee. I'm more partial to Colombian, though. And, a Rush travel mug! WOW! Lucky you.

This one is cool too.....