Simply coming to work every day
Doesn’t have a whole lot of cachet
But you can make a name
Get in the Hall of Fame
When you come day in, day out to play
Event: Cal Ripken Jr. plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record, which had stood for 56 years
Year: 1995
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Ripken_Jr
Posted in This Day in History | 
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I’m posting late again, and it looks like this time the delay didn’t even give anyone the chance to get in a last-second submission. I will blame the slowness on . . . solar flares. Or wait, no: a syzygy. That makes sense.
As penance, I will go through people’s answers in reverse order, because I’m pretending that that’s more difficult for some reason. Dragon cleverly sidestepped the trap and did not guess that A was Abigail, even though the first character looks a little bit like a collapsing capital “A.” She is also roughly correct in her guess of how I was rendering her name with Japanese syllables; in this case, “Abigail” becomes abigeeru. Unfortunately, that’s where her correctness streak ended, because Abigail is actually located at . . . oh wait, she said D. That’s correct. Good job. Now, man’yogana were not intended to be used for their meaning, but if they were, then the name abigeeru here would mean something like “a current of all-the-more restful righteousness and dependency.”
Shirley was half right on her masculine/feminine guesses; A and B are the male names here, and C and D the female. She may be disappointed that she wasn’t able to pick out her own name, but she shouldn’t be too upset, as it’s one she herself described as lovely, impressive, and charming: C. In fact, maybe that was what she really intended all along, but modesty forced her to say that she thought this combination of positive attributes belonged to someone else. Our Japanese rendering of “Shirley” is shiyaarii, which is more complicated than everyone thought it was because we have to use two syllables, shi and ya, to approximate the sound sha. Of course, the system of man’yogana is over 1300 years old, and it would be silly to assume that all the sounds were pronounced exactly the same back then as the syllables they are associated with today. For example, what is now sa could very well have been sha back then. But since we can’t know for sure what it sounded like (recording technology was still relatively primitive in the 700’s), we’ll just go with this.
Shirley’s name is rather more difficult to give a meaningless meaning to, since it involves more obscure characters, but it’s something like “children doth be in a nook about 2.5 miles from Italy.”
We wish that A Fan would be sorry after he made that regrettable pun, but unfortunately his guess was correct: A is deebido, or David. He is “changing into clothes specially designed to accommodate his nose.”
And now it seems that Theoman finally knows everyone else’s pain, not having the first clue what to do here. His presumed name is, of course, located at B, and is read (in our modern way) as shiodooru. He is “fastening together recollections of these ideas of wisteria.” Sounds very Proustian.
Now that that painful ordeal is behind us, let’s try it again. Since Shirley seems to be so fascinated with English kings, let’s try picking out some of their names. Listed below are the four most common names used by the Kings of England, and the one most common name used by Queens of England. And we’re talking post-Norman Invasion, here, because I don’t know how to pronounce “Æthelberht,” let alone write it in centuries-old Japanese.
Posted in Know Your Picture Characters | 4 Comments »
Though some people don’t like to admit it, there are actually a lot of problems in life that can be solved by ignoring them. If your car gets buried in snow, you don’t need to spend hours digging it out; just wait until spring and you can drive again, as long as you don’t mind having severely rusted brakes and a steering wheel so sluggish you could kill it with salt. The dumpster outside your house doesn’t have to be emptied every week; eventually one of your neighbors, unable to stand the sight and the smell, will do it for you. As you can probably imagine, these solutions tend to lead to a whole new set of problems, but the point is that the original undesirable situation was fixed simply by not thinking about it.
Peter’s dilemma was not this kind of dilemma.
Bum ba da da dee ba buuum
Despite Peter’s trying to focus all his thoughts on baseball, wheat, or anticipatory repudiation, the mystery tune remained stuck in his head for the entire seven-minute, forty-two-second duration of the subway ride (staring at his watch was yet another way in which he had tried to distract himself). All the while, it kept getting louder. It also seemed to be getting lazier, for around the four-minute mark it stopped repeating the whole six-second sequence and started “skipping,” playing only the first seven notes over and over again.
Bum ba da da dee ba buuum
It was a good thing that the few available spaces left in his mind were crammed full of numbers and times, because that was the only way he could have known when to get off the train. The blaring music made it impossible to make any sense of the stop announcement—not that it would have made any sense on a normal day, either: “MFYXT (static): MREEPARONI PFAZZZZZZ.” (NEXT STOP: DIPAOLI PLAZA).
The tune was not entirely without its advantages. It came in very handy when he stepped off the elevator, which he only did because the person next to him nudged him sharply and said something that might have been, “This is your floor, right?” Or it could have been, “Have you seen my frog suit?” As a life-long debater, he had always been better at speaking than listening, but that morning his comprehension skills were so sub-par that he was ready to chuck his putter, his driver, and the whole rest of his bag of clubs into the water. This childish but satisfying mental image tantrum—along with everything else that had gone wrong since he entered the subway—distracted him from the Par-4, 500-yard, double dogleg 18th hole ahead: an outraged Mr. Abrahamson.
Bum ba da da dee ba buuum
It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be. Or, to put it another way, Peter had no idea how bad it was. Mr. Abrahamson did not shout, scream, snarl, spit or flail his arms around like he was boxing an invisible kangaroo. That was not his style. He could take apart a mind much more subtly, like a safecracker. A seemingly gentle phrase here, a possibly meaningless question there, and before you knew it you would be bawling like a baby and agreeing with anything he said, admitting that you killed Jimmy Hoffa, that you were Jack the Ripper, that you murdered Julius Caesar.
Of course, that was all dependent on you being able to hear a single word he was saying. To Peter it just looked like he was being calmly lectured by a man with a vaguely disappointed look on his face, every once in a while taking a step to the left or the right, now and again fixing him with a piercing stare that was rather unsettling even though he had no idea what he was talking about.
Bum ba da da dee ba buuum
“I’m sorry, Mr. Abrahamson. It won’t happen again.”
Mr. Abrahamson, nodding in mild satisfaction tinged with regret, said, “See that it doesn’t.” (Or possibly, “Word to your mother.”) After the old man had retreated to the elevator, Peter’s coworkers, who had watched the entire thing from various unsuccessful hiding positions, approached with looks of wonder.
“Dude, that was . . . brutal.”
“I’m surprised you’re still standing.”
“You sure you’re feeling okay?”
“You need a shot of something? I’ve got a bottle of the good stuff in my cube.”
“It’s no big deal,” Peter said modestly. “You just have to think of yourself as a rock on the beach and let the waves wash over you.”
That is, that’s what he would have said if he had been able to hear them. Instead he nodded and smiled, looking like a person with a mild concussion trying to convince everyone that he’s fine. He said his Hellos and his Good Mornings and quickly worked his way to his cubicle.
Bum ba da da dee ba buuum
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