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

 

[tomkow6]

 

Hi,  StarCMC!

Welcome to the Canteen!

Wanna buy a burka?

 

[SouthernHawk]

Hey Tom - Hold that pose for a few seconds!

[armymarinemom]

Good Morning and God Bless our Troops

I'll take a big stack of pancakes at Burka King

[MeekOneGOP]

Howdy ! Yep ! They said on the radio just a few minutes ago that around 4 p.m. yesterday when the storm was blowin' through that it was 73 degrees. Pretty much unheard of in August. It was a nice spell. We could still use some more rain though.

You have a great day too ! ...

[MeekOneGOP]

[armymarinemom]

LOL, I like it! Ya know the French will take credit as being depicted with hands on head.

[tomkow6]

Here ya go!

[StarCMC]

No thanks -- believe it or not, I actually have one! My SIL & BIL were stationed with the State Dept. in Riyhad for a while and she gave me one. Makes a great tablecloth. Thanks for all you do to keep this canteen open!

Dear Lord, please bless the soldiers today. Keep them in your hand and keep them safe. Thank you, Lord. Amen.

[Soaring Feather]

[SouthernHawk]

..."Makes a great tablecloth"...

LOL ! ! ! StartCMC - Based on the Burkas we have seeen around here, that would make me lose my appetite!!!

[beachn4fun]

Hey StarCMC.......

No thanks -- believe it or not, I actually have one!

In that case can you see if you can get a new/fresh one (at least one) for tomkow? We have no idea how long he has had his.

[StarCMC]

Maybe mine's the dress-up kind! LOL!

[tomkow6]

 Little Blonde FReeper !!

Q: What is it called when a blonde blows in another blonde's ear?
A: Data transfer.

[StarCMC]

Gotta fly all - I'll check back in this afternoon!

Hugs and kisses to the soldiers!

[SouthernHawk]

Good Morning Bentfeather. Thanks for the blessing and may your day be filled with creative energy!

[tomkow6]

Did you say the "dress-up" kind?

[SouthernHawk]

LOL ! ! ! (They must not have bought it from TOMKOW!) LOL!

Have a good one!

[Soaring Feather]

Good Morning TROOPS
Canteen Crew
Radix
Everyone!

Will we have dogs in the Circus?
YES!!

Goldie!

Tomkow's Dog!

oooooops these are not DOGS!!

[minor49er]

Good Morning everybody! Good Morning troops! First of all, thanks to those who sent me the freep-mails:Beachn4fun and SouthernHawk, and thank you to those that I didn't get a chance to reply to last night, I was sleeping.

I am going to do an unusual humor attempt this morning. If any of you guys remember from yesterday, Tex was being a pain, and he was putting out brush fires using cats, BBQing cats, he made a cat cookbook, cat goulash, and there was probably more, I just don't remember. And The Mayor was his accomplice, though he denies it. So I threatened to call PETA and told Tex I'd call 'em today. So for my humor attempt, I am going to post a copy of my PETA phone call:

Me:Helllo? Is this the PETA people
PETA: Yes, who is this?
Me: Minor49er. I'd like to report two people who are being mean to animals.
PETA: Oh really! This will be an accomplishment for both of us. What are there names?
Me: Well, one goes by the name of Texas Cowboy, and the other goes by the name The Mayor.
PETA: And where can we find these people?
Me: At the USO Canteen.
PETA: And where is that?
Me: I don't lnow. Somewhere, I guess.
PETA: Very well, we will be there shortly.
Me: Alright, see you there.
end of phone call.
Not the worlds greatest phone conversation, but it achieved it's purpose.

[MeekOneGOP]

hehe ! It wouldn't be the first time that's happened ! ...