Diary (December 24, 2020)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Thursday December 24, 2020.

Previous: Diary (December 23, 2020) - Next: Diary (December 25, 2020)

Diary

He Cashes Your Chips

"God does not play dice with the universe. But He does cash your chips."

He Cashes Your Chips

—Fell Swoop (attributed)

Bananameat

Lilo concentrated on pork trees. She succeeded in improving the yield and sweetness of the pink inner meat, while at the same time decreasing the fat-to-lean ratio of the bacon. It made her enough money to improve her facilities, and she turned to new horizons.

Her work on pork trees had brought her to realize that there were many base organisms which had long been neglected because of inability to compete with the artificially created strains people now thought of as staple crops. There had been a time when wheat, soybeans, potatoes, corn, and rice had been the major foods of the human race. Now there was no one alive who had ever seen them.

But they existed in the Life Bank, as did virtually every plant and animal that had lived on Old Earth. It dawned on her that the food she had eaten all her life were all created plants, and that all of them were over four hundred years old. It seemed that the age of invention in plant genetics was behind her, that no totally new staple food had been invented since human civilization had established itself in the Eight Worlds. She did not bother wondering why that was; she set about to invent a new staple.

The result was the bananameat tree, and it was an instant and steady success. As its name indicated, she derived it from tropical fruit stock, but the flavor was not derivative of anything. It was something new, and the attempts to describe it as tasting "like chicken" or "like venison" always fell short.

Lilo did not advertise the fact, but the meat that came closest to the taste of bananameat was human flesh. Her first questionable act, done innocently and in the spirit of investigation, had been to include a tissue culture from her own body in the samples she was analyzing while making a study of human taste parameters. Her first illegal act had been to introduce changes into the culture and transplant sections of DNA into banana genes.

—The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley.

The Very Hungry Chifforobe

The Very Hungry Chifforobe

• Chifforobe @ Wikipedia

Ritchie Boys

The Ritchie Boys were the US special military intelligence officers and enlisted men of World War II who were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. Many of them were German-speaking immigrants to the United States, often Jews who fled Nazi persecution. They were primarily utilized for interrogation of prisoners on the front lines and counter-intelligence in Europe because of their knowledge of the German language and culture.

• Ritchie Boys @ Wikipedia

Notable Ritchie Boys

• Hans Habe
• Klaus Mann
• Oskar Seidlin
• Stefan Heym
• Hanus Burger
• Gerald Geiger
• George Mandler
• Richard Schifter
• Guy Stern
• Vernon A. Walters
• Werner Angress
• Walter Schwarz
• Hans Trefousse
• Alfred de Grazia
• Gilbert de Goldschmidt
• J.D. Salinger

Film

In 2004, the group and its work was the subject of the documentary movie The Ritchie Boys by film-maker Christian Bauer, featuring ten of the Ritchie Boys.

Glass Madame

A sentient glass figurine which owns several specialized bordellos

• Glass Madame

The Glass Madame Mystery series

Glass Madame Mystery - series of books featuring the Glass Madame:

• Vitreous Business
• A Glaze for Anaïs
• Fragile are the Cryptocrystalline
• Anneal Me Forever, My Love

J.D. Salinger

Are your stars out?

Do you know what I was smiling at? You wrote down that you were a writer by profession. It sounded to me like the loveliest euphemism I had ever heard. When was writing ever your profession? It's never been anything but your religion. Never. I'm a little over-excited now. Since it is your religion, do you know what you will be asked when you die? ... I'm so sure you'll get asked only two questions.' Were most of your stars out? Were you busy writing your heart out? If only you knew how easy it would be for you to say yes to both questions. If only you'd remember before ever you sit down to write that you've been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart's choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won't even underline that. It's too important to be underlined.

― J. D. Salinger

Salinger on Chaplin and O'Neill

An unintended consequence of the lawsuit was that many details of Salinger's private life, including that he had spent the last twenty years writing, in his words, "Just a work of fiction ... That's all" became public in the form of court transcripts. Excerpts from his letters were also widely disseminated, most notably a bitter remark written in response to Oona O'Neill's marriage to Charlie Chaplin:

I can see them at home evenings. Chaplin squatting grey and nude, atop his chiffonier, swinging his thyroid around his head by his bamboo cane, like a dead rat. Oona in an aquamarine gown, applauding madly from the bathroom.

• J. D. Salinger
• Chiffonier

TO_DO: The Swinging Thyroids

NAND Game

8 Nand 2 Tetris

• Building computer logic in the oddly addicting "NAND Game"

Rosetta Scone

Rosetta Scone

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles