[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't
chew it.

Mark Twain

 

I choose a block of marble and chop off whatever I don't need.

Auguste Rodin

 

Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.

Henry David Thoreau

 

If all else fails immortality can always be assured by adequate error.

John Kenneth Galbraith

 

Food, love, career, and mothers, the four major guilt groups.

Cathy Guisewite

 

You're not famous until my mother has heard of you.

Jay Leno

 

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By the skin of one's teeth

 

This phrase is Biblical, first appearing in the Geneva Bible of 1560 and
copied in the King James Bible of 1611:

 

Yea, young children despised me; I arose, and they spake against me. All my
inward friends abhorred me: and they whom I loved are turned against me. My
bone cleaveth to my skin and to my flesh, and I am escaped with the skin of
my teeth. - Job, Chapter 19, verses 18-20, part of the lamentations of Job
to God about his dreadful situation.

 

The English phrase was a direct translation of the original Hebrew, so it is
very ancient indeed.

 

Since teeth don't have skin, the phrase is hard to make sense of; Bible
translators and commentators have struggled with it down the centuries. The
Douay-Rheims Bible has instead "My bone hath cleaved to my skin, and nothing
but lips are left about my teeth." Other writers have suggested that the
reference is to the gums. Modern versions often imply that Job meant the
same by it as we do today by adopting our modern standard form with by in
place of with. The World English Bible, for example, has "I have escaped by
the skin of my teeth".

 

Job's misfortunes at the hands of God and Satan were so great that he could
hardly have believed he had had much of an escape at all. Was he saying that
the only part of his body that hadn't suffered the boils and sores inflicted
by Satan was the skin of his lips or gums? Was he instead saying allusively
that his bodily afflictions were so great that he had had a narrow escape
from death? One modern writer has concluded:

 

The explanations for the last metaphor are multiple and unconvincing. Its
meaning eludes us. - The Book of Job, by John Hartley, 1988.

 

With such scholarly incomprehension, we can hardly blame English speakers
for possibly having misunderstood it. As usual with idioms, we just have to
accept that people mean by it what they mean by it.

 

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Boot (a computer)

 

Think of footwear, in particular the saying "to lift oneself by one's own
bootstraps". That's hardly a practical proposition, but it does give the
intended idea of a person achieving success by his own, unaided efforts. A
bootstrap is not a bootlace, by the way, but a pair of loops inside the top
of a heavy riding boot, something to pull on to get the foot past that
awkward bend at the ankle.

 

The idea of lifting oneself off the ground by pulling on them is sometimes
said to date back to a tall story included by the German writer Rudolph
Raspe in his book of 1785, Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvelous
Travels and Campaigns in Russia, in which the famous Baron saved himself by
this incredible feat. Some versions of Rudolph Raspe's book include an
incident in which he hauls himself (and his horse) out of the mud by lifting
himself by his own hair. This is so similar an idea that it is highly likely
that it is indeed the source. But somewhere along the way the story became
modified to refer to bootstraps - this seems to have originated in the USA
early in the nineteenth century; at least, the phrase was well known in that
country by the 1860s.

 

In the early days of computing, in the early 1950s, the phrase was borrowed
to describe the tortuous process of getting a computer to start. Since many
computer pioneers were avid science-fiction readers, the immediate stimulus
may have been a well-known and cleverly crafted Robert Heinlein time-travel
short story of 1941 called By His Bootstraps.

 

The process of bootstrapping a computer involved reading in a short program,
either by pressing keys on the console or reading them from paper tape. This
series of commands was just powerful enough to read in a slightly more
complicated program, say from punched cards. In turn, this was just
sufficiently complex to load the whole operating system. Modern personal
computers still do something a bit like this: when you turn one on, it first
runs a program that is permanently wired into a chip in the machine. This
loads a small start-up program from disk, which in turn loads the main
operating system.

 

(A similar process is that of getting a towing hawser from one ship to
another at sea. The hawser is far too heavy and stiff to pass across on its
own, so seamen first send over a light line. Pulling on this brings over a
succession of heavier ropes, the last of which is stout enough to carry the
weight of the hawser itself.)

 

Computer people borrowed the idea of lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps
for this process of starting the computer up. In the early days, the initial
bit of program code was called a bootstrap loader, but this was soon
abbreviated, first to bootstrap, and then to the verb to boot. Reboot, for
repeating the process, followed shortly afterwards.

 

Those of us tempted by recalcitrant electronics to give our computers a
swift kick in a vital place (for which the technical term is percussive
maintenance) are just returning to the original, literal sense of boot ...

 

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In Bangladesh, $5 will buy a beer or a first-class train ticket for a
cross-country trip.

 

One or two alcohol drinks a day can be anti-inflammatory. 

 

The average number of grapes it takes to make a bottle of wine is 600. 

 

Gin and tonic can help relieve cramps. 

 

Move over, Mickey. Napa valley has replaced Disneyland as California's
number one tourist destination, with 5.5 million visitors per year. 

 

Paul Domenech, 34, was arrested for drunk driving, but was found innocent of
the charge when he proved before a jury in Tampa, Florida, that the alcohol
officers had smelled on his breath was from the mixture of rubbing alcohol
and gasoline that he had just used in his performance as a professional
fire-breather. 

 

The largest cork tree in the world is in Portugal. It averages over one ton
of raw cork per harvest. That's enough to cork 100,000 bottles.