Bango!

I can't believe that after such a long dry spell I hit paydirt twice in two days! And this time it was looking for something I really expected to find.

There's this paper by Brian Mossop that I'm reading to get ready for a conference. It makes reference to some ideas originally discussed by Goffman. Goffman describes the stances of listeners vis à vis speakers. The listener may be the one directly addressed, or indirectly addressed, an accidental overhearer, or an intentional eavesdropper. At least that's what I remember and I haven't read Goffman in a couple of years.

So I check the web for a quick refresher.

Last time I remember looking up "ratified hearer" and getting lots of hits (you can see why I don't trust my memory). A ratified hearer is one who is directly addressed by a speaker, the intended audience. The other category is "unratified hearer" — no, I do not mean unratified heater.

Now Here's Something I Was Surprised Not to Find

Believe me, I've tried to post. I have looked for the most obscure things over the last two months and found every last one of them. Who knew? And now my son's suit coat comes back from the cleaners with little round holes in the shoulder. 'I know how to fix that,' I think. 'This calls for French invisible reweaving!'

You can already see where this is going, can't you? Unlike INVISIBLE REWEAVING (which turns up scads of Shroud of Turin references), FRENCH INVISIBLE REWEAVING turns up a paltry 110 links all referring to The Frenway System of French Reweaving by Fabricon, a perennial eBay favorite. I don't want the book. I want to learn how to invisibly reweave or even learn how to do French invisible reweaving.

Not online, baby!

How Much Does Castro Make?

It was the day before Castro's birthday — pure coincidence; I had no idea — when I began to wonder what he earns. In searching for it I came across this and was convinced to give up.

I Don't Know If This Counts

This is one of those situations like a ball hitting right on the line; is it in or out?

I'm an interpreter working between English and American Sign Language. Here in Missouri we are both certified as to our skill level and licensed. In the rules governing certification there are a number of exceptions: Cued Speech, Tadoma, Alphabet Printing, and Amanubet. I know what they all are except Amanubet. I was looking for a description or explanation of it. There's only one reference and that's back to here. So there is Amanubet on the internet, but there's nothing helpful on it.

Ego Searching: Part 2

As long as I was looking I searched on my family's names. My wife, Melanie, is there, Tracie is down to one listing but poor Jared is nowhere to be found.

Alter Ego-Surfing

I've done ego-surfing — googling my name and turning up matches for myself and a number of other Ben Karlins (in today's search I don't appear until the 13th match). This time I needed a friend's email address so googled him. Nothing. Of course his name is out there. I just needed to know where to look although I still haven't got an email address. Guess I could call and leave a message on his machine.

Whistling Dixie

I was, in fact, humming Dixie this morning on my way to work and got to the second verse when it struck me that I had no idea what "INJUN BATTER" is. It turns out, by the way, that this is not the second verse but just one of many, many verses. Before you follow any of the links in this paragraph, let me warn you that there are a lot of .midi files out there. Beware!

Having been raised in the North, I learned the lyric as "INDIAN BATTER", which still gives no clue as to what it is but turns up hundreds of references to cricket and pakora recipes.

Special Olympics Legend

If you've had an email account for any length of time you've probably gotten the story as junk forwarded by someone you know. At the Special Olympics a racer fell and the other runners turned back, one kissed the boo-boo, and arm-in-arm they all crossed the finish line together. It's a lovely little story and can be found kicking around on the web; it turns up on the Urban Legends website. There the claim is that it has a foundation in truth. If it's true, these Olympians have to have names. That's what I'm looking for. If I could find just the name of the one who fell I'd be satisfied. I have a request out to the Special Olympics organization, I'm checking on-line newspaper archives. I figure if I get a name I can work backwards and search for that on the web and it should take me to a complete account, right? Will let you know if I find anything.

Chicken Leather

I've been looking for something specific and can't find it. Part of the problem might be that I'm not sure how to define my search. Searching CHICKEN LEATHER returns some documents but they aren't exactly what I want. I'm hoping to find information on tanning chicken pelts with the feathers still on. I know it has to be there; maybe as part of the taxidermy body of knowledge. Searching on LEATHER AND FEATHER returned a lot of hits, some of them pretty weird. (I need to be more careful searching at work.) Finally, running CHICKEN PELT and FEATHERS turned up exactly what I expected — nothing!

Lunch Doughnuts

For years I've toyed with the idea of the lunch doughnut. I recently watched The Devil and Miss Jones and they ate tuna popovers (there are two different recipes on the web; one uses packaged pastry, the other is made from scratch; neither is a true popover). My idea is for filled doughnuts stuffed with tuna salad or chicken salad. A little of my thunder has already been stolen by the egg salad filled doughnut. Still, it's an idea whose time has come.

I'm Not Sure If This Counts

In justifying the police response to the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, Mayor Richard J. Daley asked, "What trees do they plant?" While the phrase, even attributed, can be found on the web, I can't find it in context. That is to say, I can't find the rest of the press conference. True, this isn't a deep-web search into the Chicago Tribune's archive; I guess I could try that.

I wonder if I can find Bobby Seale's comment about Judge Julius Hoffman: "He's so old he has to screw his hat on."

Not on the Net

The internet is an amazing collection of information. It's astonishing what you can find if you search for it. It's much more difficult to not find something you search for. Of course there are specific instances of combinations of words that, when put side-by-side inside of quotation marks aren't going to come up in any search. Coming up empty on something you are really trying to find, now that's something.

That's what I'm looking to collect here.

Like this: "HAWAIIAN DIXIELAND" "ALOHA YOU ALL". You may not be familiar with the genre. Hawaiian dixieland was a style that never it beyond a single LP in the mid-'6os. Aloha You All was the premier example of Hawaiian dixieland music. It was a riot. Imagine debarking from a stern-wheeled riverboat at Honolulu and the band -- trombones, trumpets and ukuleles -- playing.

It strikes me that eventually, when the search engines catalogue this page, people looking for exactly the things I haven't found will find them here. Sort of a paradox, isn't it? They haven't been on the net until now and by my complaining that they can't be found, they can be. Kind of like time-travelling into the past and murdering my own grandfather.