Halfway down the Danube

Pickle festival in Loisaida this afternoon - (Orchard and Stanton Streets, to be precise). Will report when salinity levels rise in the pm due to overconsumption of kosher dills, bread-and-butters, and mmmmmmmmmmm cured tomatoes.

Dating a problem...heh heh heh.

Lyuda's friends and family back in the Old Country.

*chuckles*

She keeps bugging me to find worthy men for them. You've definitely got the spunk to survive a Ukrainian.

*tease*

We're in Germany. We just went to Coburg. They have a big old statue of Prince Albert in the square there.

We're having a baby on Tuesday.

Did you know that the German Catholic Church has "Emergency Saints"? That's the literal translation. Fourteen of them, including St. Margaret of Antioch and St. Erasmus. They have their own holy pilgrimage site, which we visited.

There are many sorts of bratwurst.

Doug M.

C wrote:
I'd talk about the gridiron, but it's too depressing.

Preach it, brother. Cricket is the same. Australia being whupped like a red-headed mule is, of course, 'good for the game'. But a necessary, painful humiliation is - no matter how necessary - still uncomfortable.

OTOH, those whacky French. Did you know that as late as the 1880s le sport was still considered to be horse-racing? This was just before the invasion of games from the UK and gymnasiums from Germany.

There was a certain vagueness about team sports. According to Pierre de Courbertin's memoirs in the 1890s the newspaper le Gaulois referred to "the long flat mallets" with which football was played - apparently confusing soccer with cricket.

Doug wrote:
We're having a baby on Tuesday.

Congratulations and best wishes.

And another boy, too, AIUI. In my young day we didn't know birthdays and sex in advance. There's progress for you.

Well then, Carlos, since you are asking for input, it seems to me that you owe us (me, at least) a spot of Vinogradov blogging.

We are having a partial eclipse of the sun here in Germany! Not that we can tell, since thick grey clouds cover all of the sky. Still, it did get a little dimmer, and a couple of cocks crowed in a tentative, confused sort of way.

I finally got my copy of Pomeranz' _The Great Divergence_. Hooray! I wonder when I will read it.

We are not going to Egypt. We thought we might be, but as it turns out, no.

The boys are watching "Robots" in German. Later we will go to the hospital to have a baby.

Every morning I drink one and exactly one cup of coffee.

Doug M.

First pickles, then parturition, and penultimately paradisiacal parenthood. Post pleasingly presently post-partum.

Well, we're having a _full_ eclipse in Finland today. The best place to watch it is supposed to be Åland. Of course, I'm in Tampere.

I met an intelligent and lovely young lady on Friday. She was a returnee; born in the former Estonian SSR, her mother was a Russian, and her father was an Ingrian Finn.

On Saturday, I took my mother to the cinema to see "Äideistä parhain" ("Mother of Mine"). The film tells a story of a Finnish "war child" sent to safety in Sweden by his mother. Historically, Sweden took in some 70'000 Finnish children back in 1939-1944; some were sent also to Denmark before the German invasion. Incidentally, my mother was meant to be send to exile as well, after her father had fallen in battle, so I thought that she might like the film. She did. [1]

I think that I'm falling for this Slavic lady who works as a teacher at the local University. Mind, she's not the same woman as the one that I met on Friday.

Anyone seen that movie about Sophie Scholl yet? I plan to check it this week.

I had fish for dinner today.

Cheers,
Jalonen

[1] I don't know how to incorporate links within the text, so I'll just include the website of the film right here: http://www.aideistaparhain.com/

> I'd talk about the gridiron, but it's too depressing

They _still_ talk about 4th-and-26 here.

-Dennis

Dennis, they still talk about it in Green Bay too.

The scuttlebutt is that the only reason we still have Mike Sherman as coach is because Favre felt uneasy about learning a new system before he retired.

Robert, Vinogradov starts off similarly to Hardy and Littlewood, but where H and L used definite integrals of the exponential forms of complex functions, Vinogradov used summations instead, and developed techniques which allowed him to sum these functions over more interestingly defined intervals -- say, all the primes less than N -- and in doing so was able to come up with stronger bounds on various inequalities, including one equivalent to the three-prime Goldbach conjecture. But it's very idiosyncratic, and not easily extensible. (This is very much the thumbnail version.)

I had pancakes with lingonberry syrup for breakfast.

Lessee, Carlos, the Panama Canal comes to mind as a possible topic of conversation.

Then there is the upcoming ALCS, which if all goes well should turn the World Series into a long anticlimax for the second year running.

But I vote for the Canal.

Doug,

Felicidades, dude! Most excellent.

I'm going to Trinidad in December. Time to meet the paterfamilias. Yes, I'm frightened. "Don't worry," says my girlfriend, "He doesn't own a gun. We use machetes."

In 1940, there were seven transits of the Panama Canal made by Latvian flagged vessels, carrying over 22,000 tons of cargo. There were only four transits of the canal made by Romanian ships in that year (and one was ballast).

On the other hand, there were 232 transits of Japanese vessels in that year, carrying over 1.5 million tons of cargo.

Incidentally, Carrie, even though I moved the strippers' memoirs to a less prominent position -- that space has temporarily been taken by Grmek's Diseases in the Ancient Greek World and the like (a really good book, by the way) -- I still got twitted for owning a DVD of Secretary. Argh.

More! More! The Canal rocks.

Click my name in the link for a list of false "fun facts" intended to be released as the kind of list that gets passed around in email by unsuspecting non-Snopes-using people.

I was pleased with some of my contributions, including: "The severity of hurricanes has significantly increased since 1914. This is because the Panama Canal opened that year, alowing cooler water from the Pacific Ocean to mix with warmer water in the Caribbean." There's a class of people who would believe that.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/29/fashion/thursdaystyles/29bee.html?pagewanted=print

"September 29, 2005
The Night Life of Bees
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
THERE are 18 precious days until the spelling bee final, and Josh Malamy will not waste a single one. He is boning up on Latin and Greek roots and studying the 794 pages of Scripps National Spelling Bee word lists on Spellingbee.com. Among the obscure words he recently memorized were "chrysochlorous" (a greenish-gold color) and "choumoellier" (an Australian vegetable). He is reluctant to share another for fear of giving his competitors an edge.

If the spelling bee final on Oct. 17 is anything like the twice-monthly bees that have preceded it, the room will be packed. The air will be warm and thick with anticipation, not to mention the smell of beer. After all, Mr. Malamy is 23 and will not be showing off his spelling prowess beneath the blazing lights of an elementary school auditorium. Rather, he will be in a dim, terra-cotta-colored room with touches of brass and wood, at Pete's Candy Store, a bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. About 15 people who have won previous bees over the last several months - including a doctor whom Mr. Malamy considers his toughest competitor - will vie for cash, prizes and bragging rights at the Williamsburg Spelling Bee Finals."

"Adult-only spelling bees, born of nostalgia and spiked with alcohol, have become increasingly popular social activities for brainy hipsters in their 20's and 30's at bars and community centers from Brooklyn to Spokane, Wash. Gone are the days when the sole opportunity to demonstrate one's spelling aptitude was in school. A new kind of bee has emerged, one where participants tackle baffling words between flirty smiles and sips of Yuengling."

Those damn Williamsburg hispters

So.... oh Frère Carlos are you a good speller?

"hispters" um... yeah I was being ironic.. that's it

Yuengling can be found in Brooklyn? Back in the day, we Keystoners kept almost all of it to ourselves.

Frankie, I still misspell "millennium" and the pair "embarrass"/"harass". (Which is funny, because I grew up near the Embarrass river.)

Dennis, yeah, Yuengling is the new cheap beer of Brooklyn hipsters. I've had some very good pitchers of it and some very bad ones. Wish they had Leinenkugel's.