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

Canteen FRiends ~ Radix

[Radix]

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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]

I'd never seen "GRINS" before. I like that! ;)

[Kathy in Alaska]

Good sleuthing, but tripod (and angelfire and geocities) won't let us post their stuff. Back to Googling.

[68-69TonkinGulfYachtClub]

"Moral of the story: Never make a woman angry ... there'll be Hell to pay later."

I DID laugh at your joke, honest.

[minor49er]

Maybe this will work then:

[minor49er]

Oh no, wait.
Geocities.
Duh!!!!!!!!!!
Never mind.

[minor49er]

It shows up on my computer, but I don't think it shows up on yours.
Does it?

[Kathy in Alaska]

I'm thinking maybe Tom was seeking revenge.

[Fawnn]

I DID laugh at your joke, honest.

Just when I was about to put you on the "nice" (versus the "naughty") list, I read your tag line. ;)

[minor49er]

My last post was supposed to be to you, but I forgot to change the name in the to-box.

[Fawnn]

LOL!!!! (obviously) ;)

[Kathy in Alaska]

I know it's a pain, but those 3 (that I know of) can't be posted. Sorry! Keep working on your assignment.

[Kathy in Alaska]

Moral of the story: Never make a woman angry ... there'll be Hell to pay later.

ROTFLMAO! Off to email.

[minor49er]

This should work, I don't think it's from any of the sites you named. All: Post back, and tell me if it worked. Please.

[Kathy in Alaska]

Great Pancakes on Wednesday thread, Radix. More good pics and links to follow. Thanks.

[Radix]

 

Drivers from the Army National Guard take several Montana Air National Guard crews into the Helena National Forest to help battle fires Tuesday.

 

The Arizona gas line crisis has motorists waiting in gas station lines all the way to Montana.

 

 

 

A military police vehicle drives through a sandstorm Tuesday while patrolling a highway to Basrah, Iraq. Regularly occurring summer sandstorms can reduce visibility to only a few meters, making patrolling difficult.

 

The new military aggresive camouflage system is met with mixed results. 

 

 

 

Army Maj. Dion Lyons, legal aid to the investigating officer, reads the manual for courts-martial for four Army reservists with 320 Military Police Battalion charged with punching and kicking several Iraqis while escorting them to a POW processing center near Umm Qasr, Iraq, in May.

 

Meanwhile, the Major neglected maintenance of the field barracks and was give 17 gigs in the most recent inspection.

 

 

 

 

Cadets march past the chapel Tuesday on their way to their dorms at the Air Force Academy in Colorado. The cadet corps will get a dressing down because of a weekend underage drinking incident that embarrassed an Air Force Academy still struggling to overcome a sexual assault scandal, the new superintendent said.

 

All of the Air Force cadets passed the rigorous 100 meter march (under 10 minutes) qualification in the recent physical readiness examination.

 

 

 

A U.S. soldier standing next to an Iraqi national flag is reflected in a puddle of water during the inauguration of Baghdad's first renovated fire station, August 27, 2003. Al Bayaa is the first of the city's 25 fire stations to be refurbished and renovated. Most of the fire stations of the Iraqi capital were destroyed during and after the war.

 

After intense photograph analysis, it was determined that the troop's chin strap was not regulation.

 

 

 

Former POW Jessica Lynch is shown on July, 22, 2003, during her homecoming in Elizabeth, W.Va. Lynch, the Iraq war's most recognized soldier, has been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army, Wednesday, Aug. 27, 2003. Lynch, 20, of Palestine, W.Va., suffered multiple broken bones and other injuries when her 507th Maintenance Company was ambushed in the southern Iraqi city of Nasiriyah on March 23. 

 

Single, veteran, blonde, blue, Purple Heart winner, seeks soulmate who is interested in quiet walks at sunrise, target shooting, map reading, and is not of the Islamic persuasion. 

 

 

 

A U.S. soldier pastes a wanted posters of Saddam Hussein on a wall in a district of Baghdad, August 27, 2003. Iraq.

 

Anonymous trooper enters an idea into  a "suggestion box"  on the best method of capturing Saddam.

 

 

 

U.S. House of Representatives' lead by Tom Davis, R-Va., second left, present a banner signed by residence of Lewisville, Tx., to Maj. Gen. Ray Odierno, commander of task force Iron Horse and the 4th Infantry Division, left, during their visit to a U.S. Army base in Tikrit.

 

In an effort to avoid military disenfranchisement in the coming elections, Troops are given an opportunity to use the new "1 ballot for all voters" method. A military arbitrator supervises the vote.

 

 

 

A San Bernardino County sheriff deputy signals to other deputies that bodies remain trapped inside a vehicle that plunged into flood waters in Twentynine Palms, Calif., on Tuesday. A flash flood swept the car off the road, killing two occupants and a rescuer who had saved a third passenger.

 

Just another day at the office!

[minor49er]

It's almost 300 everybody!
Get ready!

[minor49er]

Is everybody ready?

[minor49er]

What?

[Kathy in Alaska]

..."how to rob a bank"...

Now THIS is a keeper. ROTFLOL!

[minor49er]

What?