Rhino Records made a series of CDs of Billboard Top Ten songs for various years. I wonder, if you summed every sequence of 52 consecutive weeks, how many songs would show in those Rolling Top Tens that never made a calendar year Top Ten?
Being nerdy, I might suggest this to Rhino: package the Top Ten of the chart’s first 52 weeks, and thereafter make a new package each time ten songs not in a previous package have reached the Rolling Top Ten.
I have a very vague – call it abstract – memory of watching the beginning of this movie, but it seems not to exist, so I guess it was a dream.
The main character is a spy’s only daughter. Daddy (now dead) taught her to lose a tail, improvise a disguise, pick a lock, do basic forgery; normal father-daughter bonding stuff. She is now grown up with a career to which such skills are irrelevant, but in establishing scenes she practices them for fun.
She meets a girl (~14) who is running from Bad People and distrustful of the ostensibly Good institutions. She becomes the girl’s protector, and suddenly spycraft matters.
The local spooks become aware of her and are rattled. Who is this new player? Who is she working for? How long has she been here, and what else has she been up to?
A generation ago, it was reported that Readers Digest Condensed Books planned an edition of The Bible, provoking obvious jokes that it would cut three Commandments and four Apostles.
Now that I’m reading the thing, though, I do see where it could be shortened with little risk of offense.
I will likely add to this later.
In some places the repetition makes me think the tale was relayed orally for some generations before being written.
Not a week goes by when I don’t read that some trial court has “granted qualified immunity” to some criminal with a badge. That’s inaccurate. The aggressor was granted qualified immunity by the Supreme Court when it invented that doctrine in 1982.
In the popular mind, I guess that word “qualified” is taken to mean that the officer qualifies for immunity as a consequence of his office. But here it is a legal term of art meaning “conditional”, contrasting with the absolute immunity enjoyed by judges and prosecutors in their abuses of discretion.
When a trial court says to a plaintiff, “No recourse for you, because you haven’t cited a published precedent finding liability with exactly similar facts,” it applies the QI rule; but there is nothing qualified about the dismissal. (The q-word would apply if the judge were to dismiss the case without prejudice, allowing the possibility of a new trial if new facts come to light. Does that ever happen in police cases?)
When the pig is so unlucky as to violate “clearly established law”, he still has qualified immunity, which happens not to protect him for this incident.
The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States begins:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
I was born overseas to US citizen parents, and am thus a citizen by the Nationality Act of 1952 rather than by the literal language of the Constitution. So I have always wondered: as that clause does not apply to me, am I a citizen of any State? and if so which – one or more of those where I have resided, and/or the one where my parents resided before getting on the boat? Perhaps there is something in the laws of those States, enacted before 1868 and never repealed. (The constitution of California, where I dwelt longest, makes no mention of state citizenship.)
Now it occurs to me that the authority for the Nationality Acts must come from the power
To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization
(Article I section 8); so I was naturalized in advance.
In this episode of College Roomies from Hell!, there appears in otherwise Spanish dialogue (the author is Mexican, I believe) the word Sepa, which would be pronounced like French sais pas (“dunno”), which fits the context.
I was thinking about the notion of a brain interface that delivers text to a layer after vision: the user “sees” the letters at their most abstract, but not their graphic details. What would that experience be like? Could it include meta-linguistic features analogous to indentation?
And then I thought: what if the first form of “writing” were something like Morse or ASCII?
Sequoyah, though illiterate himself, saw the power of representing sounds on paper, and thus was motivated to design the Cherokee syllabary (borrowing forms from roman type). Imagine a martian Sequoyah who is somehow aware of humans’ use of digital transmission; what would ghlo create?
How much is known about quipu?