I Dream of Cheesy

The Cheese Dream is an old fashioned dish.  Not something you'll see on a restaurant menu most of the time.  But then, it's not a terribly haute cuisine sort of thing, either.

Basically, it's a grilled cheese sandwich, sometimes (although not always) done open face.  It sits comfortably halfway between the grilled cheese sandwich and Welsh Rarebit.  According to an article In the San Jose News, "Make sandwiches of buttered bread and a spread cheese, sprinkling the cheese very sparingly with a bit of mustard, cayenne and a little minced sweet red pepper.  Brown the sandwiches on both sides in butter in a frying pan or chafing dish, and, just before serving, surround each one with two or three spoonfuls of very hot, rich, tomato sauce."

Man, blogging is making me hungry.

National Guard-- or is it?

Actually, it sort of isn't.

Disclaimer up front-- I've never served in any sort of armed forces, and I only know a few people who have, so I may get something wrong in here.  If so, it's entirely my fault.

But, as I understand it, after perusing several Wikipedia articles and the official National Guard website, the Guard serves two purposes-- firstly, and most simply, they act as a reserve force for the US Armed Forces, and can be called upon by the federal government to serve in a variety of ways on behalf of the U.S.

Secondly, and (to me at least more confusingly), they are based on state militias.  You don't enroll in the National Guard of the United States-- you enroll in the (for example) Massachusetts National Guard.  Which is what confuses me most, I guess-- it's the state National guard.  Oxymoronically named government agencies always leave me scratching my head.  So you serve the state, providing a variety of security functions at the state level-- again for example, the Massachusetts National Guard provided security for the Democratic National Convention in Boston in 2004.  You help out in emergencies at the behest of (I believe) the Governor.  But you are always also available should the President need a hand (for a war, or national emergency, or whatever).

For a country that historically (and still sporadically) struggles with state rights issues, that must occasionally put a soldier in a hell of an awkward position.  I seem to recall hearing something at one point where a state law conflicted with a federal law, and the US Marshals and the National Guard were actually sort of working against each other.  Something civil rights related?  I forget.  If you know, please chime in.

Geological classification

History, at least from a geological standpoint, is very heavily categorized and classified.

At the top level (more or less-- right from the get-go it's a little confused), you have the eon.  There are four of them, going back essentially to the beginning of the Earth.  The first three are also grouped into one supereon (see, I told you it's confused) called the Precambrian, which isn't very interesting to most people since it covers the really early years when there wasn't much life on Earth and only three television channels.

The eons are divided in turn into eras, of which there are twelve in total. Or fourteen, depending on who you ask.  Some of the earliest ones were apparently borrowed from the moon, as if it had any to spare, since there isn't much evidence left around on the much more geologically active Earth.

The eras are divided into periods.  There are at least twenty of these-- much longer than a typical hockey game, although not nearly as long as a baseball game.  Those things go on forever.  You may have heard of the Jurassic Period, for example, notable for its remarkable fossilized animatronics.

The periods are divided into epochs, the epochs into ages, and then the ages (unofficially) into chrons.  After that point, I get the impression that geologists just give up and start cataloging events as happening "that Thursday, you know, after the thing, when all that stuff happened."

It's worth noting that all of these terms are used to refer to time periods in geology.  If you want to talk about the actual rocks, each one has an equivalent-- to wit, (super)eonothem, erathem, system, series, stage, and chronozone.

The Love Song of the Cuddly Koala

...sounds remarkably like a hippo with hiccups.  A hicco, if you will (but only if you will-- I'm not pushy).

I have to admit, I've never met a koala in real life, and if I had ever thought about how they sounded, which I didn't, I would have assumed that they made some sort of typical medium sized fuzzy animal sound.  Like a growl, or a slightly deeper raccoon-like chitter.

But no.  Their mating call, at least, is a surprisingly deep raspy staccato sort of bellow.  Here's a short video clip.

I tell you, if I heard that coming from the trees, "koala" would not be my first thought.

Puts The Hobbit in a new light, really

I promise these won't all be about words-- that's just what I ended up with a couple of days in a row.  Blame the job.  Anyway.

It turns out that "Bilbo" acutally has a meaning, to wit:

: a long bar of iron with sliding shackles and a lock at the end that is used to confine the feet of prisoners especially on shipboard

To be completely fair, that's not the only meaning-- it's also used to refer to "a finely tempered sword."  It is odd however to think of poor old Bilbo Baggins placed in irons in the hold of a ship after a poorly thought-out mutiny attempt.  Both senses of "Bilbo" trace their etymology ultimately from Bilbao, Spain, historically an important source of iron ore and ironworks in Europe.

Pilcrow

"Pilcrow" is the official name for what I've always just knows as a paragraph mark; that symbol that you find in proofreading and occasionally in some of the more pretentious magazines to indicate that a block of text ought to be broken up into paragraphs.  It looks like this: ¶.  Originally, it was written as a capital "C" with a slash, an abbreviated form of the Latin word for "chapter" (according to Wikipedia).  The single (and double) slash often indicated an instruction from a primary scribe (editor) to a later stage in manuscript production, so a C with two slashes would mean, as it does now, "insert a new paragraph here."  You can still see traces of that in the current mark.  This symbol is also sometimes called a "paraph."  According to Wikipedia, it is also sometimes called an "alinea" or "blind P," although even the OED doesn't seem to register those names, so I'm somewhat dubious.

The pilcrow is not to be confused with the pillcrow, a modern mythological bird that flies in your bathroom window at night and steals your medication, which is why you always seem to be short a couple of pills.

Welcome!

Thank you, and welcome to my new blog.  Today I am a fountain pen.

Anyway.  A couple of years ago, I started a blog over on LiveJournal under the pseudonym Sidebernie (it's still there if you want to check it out).  It wasn't terribly original in concept-- basically, it was just a journal that I was sharing with everyone else.  There was one overarching theme-- that I would try to learn something new every day, and post about it, with explanations, citations, and diagrams if needed.  I tried to keep it to actual things, not just "here's a neat cat pic or tech post I saw."  The sort of thing you always wondered about, but never bothered to look up?  I looked it up, and posted about it.  That's why I know what hamstone is, and how to tell which quail laid a particular egg, and why you should be very careful making friends with a platypus.

But Livejournal was bought by the Russians, and the culture changed, and I became tired of the ads and the DDOS attacks by hackers who were Absolutely Not The Russian Government(TM).  So I stopped posting for a while.

And now I'm starting it up again, with a new name, and a new location.  The content will be mostly the same, though.  Sorry.