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?
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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

 

[Fawnn]

If this post isn't proof that we all should be praying that Tonk followed 'Hawk's blood test study advice and not tomkow6's, I don't know what is!

[SouthernHawk]

It figures! LOL!!!!

[SouthernHawk]

So There! Thanks, Fawnn!!!!

[Fawnn]

LOL Anytime ;)

[Kathy in Alaska]

No, I won't prescribe any more 'medical catnip' for you: Fourth-year students at the University of MIssouri-Columbia veterinary school make rounds in a classroom, occasionally nuzzled by their patients.

[Kathy in Alaska]

Good afternoon, Aeronaut and Otto, and thank you both for your dedication to the flyover of protection for our troops' Canteen, a place where we offer a "touch of home" for our troops, our veterans, their families, and our allies.

[StarCMC]

Mine's actually teal green with pretty silver floral design. Youknow, I'm wondering if it's actually a burka or another piece of clothing now that I'm thinking about it. It's the piece that the ladies wear over their heads. Probably 8 feet by 4 feet?? Is there another name other than burka or are they one in the same?

[Kathy in Alaska]

WOW! More great news that the media won't report. Thanks, John, for sharing your stories with all of us. This bridge story is really neat. One Iraqi at a time. The word will be spread.

[StarCMC]

ping

[minor49er]

Na, I wouldn't do that.
I like you two, too much.
Now that Tex with his cat-hating acts, I am going to personally make sure that PETA gets him.

[minor49er]

Off to find food. (I have fresh tomatoes! I just need to go decide what to have to go with 'em.) ;)
Have some lettuce, bacon, mayonase, and bread with your tomatoes.
I love BLTs. I just got back from eating two of them for lunch.

[Kathy in Alaska]

P EOPLE
E ATING
T ASTY
A NIMALS

[StarCMC]

Will be praying for you all specifically! Thanks for giving me the privilege!

[minor49er]

I'd like to point out, that every since i told tex that I was calling PETA on him and Mayor, they've both disappeared.
Come on you guys! Just come on out already!
You know, I just had a thought. If PETA made them two disappear, then why can't we make other people disappear?
cough cough tomkow cough cough.

[minor49er]

That's already known, tomkow.
My dad used that same thing to prove to me, back in June, that women are evil.
You know what I told him?
"You forgot to take the 'wo' off of 'women'."

[Kathy in Alaska]

Waffles on Pancake Wednesday.

Thanks, texson66, for your service to our country.

[Kathy in Alaska]

Beautiful flowers this morning. Thanks men of the Military and the Canteen.

[minor49er]

Oh. We're at 195 people.
Take note and make necessary arrangements.

[minor49er]

What?

[minor49er]

What?