Jurph's New Writeups

Haji (person)

2005-08-21T06:46:56Z

"Yeah, we're out there doing shows-of-force mostly. Not like the F-15 guys. We buzz the suspected sites, come in low and fast... crank up the afterburner, pop off a few flares, and make Haji shit his pants."

-- American pilot, 2005 (paraphrased)

Every enemy needs a name. Japs, Huns, Krauts, Nips, Dinks, Gooks, Eyeties. Commies, Roman Oppressors, Southerners, Yankees, Right-Wing Nutjobs, Left-Wing Nutjobs. The list probably goes back until before time. For the Iraq War, we've picked "Haji". Just as every German was "Jerry", every southern black man was "Sambo" or "Jim", now every Iraqi is "Haji". I haven't been over there, so I don't know whether it covers all of them, just the bad ones, or just the good ones, but it's the sort of thing that probably doesn't have hard and fast rules. In case context has not made it clear, the word has become an epithet.

It stems…

lawn jockey (thing)

2005-06-21T21:02:14Z

The story of Jocko is touching, but several problems with the story make it likely that the legend of the lawn jockey is just that: an urban legend. It is unlikely that the original story, from the George Washington era, is true for a few reasons, enumerated by Mount Vernon's librarian Ellen McCallister Clark in her letter to Baltimore's Enoch Pratt Free Library:

No record of anybody by the name of Jocko Graves, nor any account of somebody freezing to death holding Washington's horses, exists in the extensive historical record of the time.
The Mount Vernon estate was inventoried and described by a multitude of visitors, and there has never been any description or evidence of any such statue.

Further, it is hard to credit the stories about the Underground Railroad using lawn jockeys as signals, for the following practical reasons:

Red and green as signal colors meaning "stop" and "go" (or "danger"

…

Weasel words (idea)

2005-06-03T15:04:51Z

"Weasel words" are a collection of words and phrases used in informative and technical writing to avoid completely committing to a statement. If the writer can't say for sure that something is going on, you will see weasel words inserted to reflect the author's confidence. I am most familiar with their use in intelligence briefs, where their placement is something of an art. They generally refer to the degree to which the author is willing to commit to a fact's veracity, and rather than being used to make an assertion, they are mostly used to avoid making an assertion, while still leaving an impression. The downside to weasel words is that they add nuance to a statement which may not be perceived by a careless audience, and if taken out of context, "weaseled" statements end up sounding like assertions that the author never intended.

The phrase comes from that unfortunate and all-too-common scenario, where an author will be slightly misquoted. The nuance of his statement is…

Dream Log: May 31, 2005 (idea)

2005-05-31T15:41:46Z

We met at a house that we had broken into. A local magician had been studying books of African magic, and had summoned six elephants to do his bidding. The elephants were small and weak, like his magic, but their presence was difficult to explain away and they would only grow stronger over time. Each one bore a name engraved on its forehead. He had named them for the six principalities of Rome. We were going after Scipio.

Steve, the arch-mage for whom I was working at the time... well, hang on. In real life, Steve is a United States Marine and really good fry cook. I worked with him in a restaurant in Fenwick Island, Delaware a long time ago. Now he's killing Syrian insurgents who try to sneak into Iraq and kill American and Iraqi civilians to further their own end. In my dream, Steve was my arch-mage. And Steve had studied Aztec magic. He had the aspect of Jaguar…

Is a penny worth picking up? (idea)

2005-05-06T19:32:56Z

Abstract

The perceived and actual value of the United States one cent coin ("penny" hereafter) are compared. The comparison determines whether the energy and time expended result in a net gain or net loss to a test subject encountering a penny which has left circulation and settled in a lower energy state. Obverse/reverse influence on perceived value is examined, and a standard for evaluating the caloric cost of the retrieval is established. High variability of contributing factors led to the creation of guidelines for establishing the expected profit of the sidewalk-to-pocket transaction.

Introduction

The United States of America has circulated a small-denomination coin called the "penny" since 1793. The vast majority of pennies are worth one one-hundredth of a dollar, or one "cent". In 2003-2005, the…

earworm (thing)

2005-03-15T15:37:10Z

n. (EER-werm), from the German ohrwurm: a song whose tune and/or words resonate in one's mind even in the absence of the song. Also connotes the tune's ability to spread from host to host via almost any audio vector.

Howard Rheingold, in his article "Untranslatable Words" (which appeared in the 1987 Whole Earth Review), appears to have been the first to set the English version of this word in print. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the Germans, with their viciously precise language full of laser-guided compound words, and their pop culture bred from a bizarre marriage of Cold War socialism and capitalism, invented the term ohrwurm. Ever since Beethoven and Mozart, the Germans have known catchy music whenever they heard it. Like the Mexican phrase tecato gusano (approx. "the junkie's worm"), it just feels right to describe an external influence that has become internal as a "…