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

 

[SouthernHawk]

Good afternoon Ma! Rain - 2 days in a row! How long has it been since that happened last?

Have a FUNtastic day!

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

Thank You for taking the time from your schedule to visit the Canteen.
May God Bless and Protect you and your Brothers and Sisters defending our Freedom.
We are proud of All of you.

[SouthernHawk]

..."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?"...

Sounds like a great plan . . . .

Outstanding days for everyone - On the House!

[Kathy in Alaska]

ms feather, you look smashing in your "feather duster". And charming too! And I'll bet you are just as charming in your Victorian chair.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

Back in awhile
Off to town for a blood test. YUCK! LOL

[SouthernHawk]

Good Afternoon sw! Passed along the OK in '07 info to the LadyHawk! She wants to know if you are a Chiropractor! LOL!!

[tomkow6]

Hmmmm! Looks like a modified BURKA to me....

[tomkow6]

Off to town for a blood test

Did ya study?

[Kathy in Alaska]

PETA you say, "Bring 'em on!"

P EOPLE
E ATING
T ASTY
A NIMALS

PETA is NOT on Ma's list of favorite people.

[stand watie]

NOPE. not a jointcracker/bonebreaker.

ya'll start getting your stuff together for the trip, it will be a GOODIE!

free dixie,sw

[blackie]

I also have a Rush EIB stainless steel travel mug that plugs into a cigar lighter and keeps the coffee hot while driving. :)

[Kathy in Alaska]

Suck it up, Coastie! LOL!! Drink plenty of water before and AFTER!! I know blood tests are not fun for lots of people. Be careful driving home. *HUG*

[Kathy in Alaska]

Fantastic link, ms feather. Bookmarked for this evening.

[Kathy in Alaska]

A KIND WORD!

A special word for our Happy Bumper. Thanks, blackie, for being here every day. d:o)

[Kathy in Alaska]

E! I keep forgetting to tell you, "THANKS" for the windows update reminders. I use a Mac at home and we don't get worms and stuff like that, but I've started also using a PC laptop. So I have to learn about the updates. Your reminders "reminder" me I need to do something to keep it safe.

[Kathy in Alaska]

Did ya study?

Wish I'd thought of that. Very good, Kiddo.

[Soaring Feather]

BAGHDAD IRAQ – For nearly 20 years, the people of the Ghazalyia and al-Shu’lah districts of Baghdad had pleaded for a new bridge to connect their neighborhoods. Instead, all they received from the regime of Saddam Hussein was silence and a foul smelling 30-foot wide river of raw sewage to keep the districts separated.

Thank You John, for the wonderful uplifting report.

My goodness, how the Iraqi people suffered under that despot SADDAM!

[SouthernHawk]

Hope you studied! I wouldn't want to see you fail your blood test. LOL!!!!

I can't get "No Respect" - Tomkow copied my answer from #21 and you gave him the credit! I even gave Tonk a pre-blood test special warm up (#28).

Ma, you must be playing favorites! : (

[tomkow6]

[SouthernHawk]

Hey Tomkow - You wanna buy a burka? (maybe MA will love me now!)