xefer

In Pale Fire, Nabokov coins a couple of great collective nouns when he writes "... an anthology of poets and a brocken of their wives ..."

The Brocken is the highest peak in the Harz mountains of Germany and is where witches are said to gather on Walpurgis Night. So it was quite a subtle dig.

Scientific American during this period was a great magazine with fantastic graphics. I used to really look forward to each issue. Sometime in the 90s they made a decision to make the magazine more “accessible” to the general public. The style of graphics became much more cartoony and the articles themselves somewhat more simplistic.

...

I believe there is a reference to this law in the movie “No Country for Old Men”.

The movie was set in 1980. In the famous coin toss scene Anton Chigurh explicitly states that the date on the quarter is 1958 and that it had been traveling for 22 years. That means it was a silver coin. The US Coin Act of 1965 changed the make up of coins from 90% silver to cladded nickel and zinc. The old silver coins very quickly disappeared from circulation. Any remaining ones were snatched up especially when the price of silver skyrocketed when the Hunt Brothers in Texas tried to corner the silver market in 1980, right in the time period when the movie was set.

So basically Chigurh had no business having a 1958 silver quarter in his pocket.

I think Cormac McCarthy was implicitly showing Chigurh was a dispassionate force of evil driving out the good.

I've seen people mention putting some sort of "use it or lose it" time limit on the money, so that people are motivate to inject it directly into the economy instead of just sitting on it.

I'm not sure how feasible such a thing is or if it would hurt the cause of keeping the economy moving.

That was an interesting note about the FPC. It's something I've wondered about for years ... and proof I didn't read until the very end of the linked article I guess :)

It reminds me of the small vestigial canal in Cambridge, the Broad Canal, that is one of the last remnants of a much larger canal network that ran through East Cambridge. I've always wondered why that last bit hasn't been filled in. It's a man-made canal, so if anything, filling it in would restore the original land. There's an old steel draw bridge spanning the canal that I don't think has actually been opened in 20 years. The bridge is actually a bit of a burden: the state recently did a good job widening the walking/bike bath along the Charles River but there's a pinch point at the bridge because the old pedestrian walk way across the bridge is so tight it can't readily accommodate the bike traffic it gets a lot of now.

There has to be some reason why they've left the bridge. My dad said when he was a kid he remembers barges delivering coal to the power plan that runs along the north side of that canal. It's all gas powered now, but I wonder if it could use coal in an emergency and they've left access to the plant for that reason?

On the subjects of Boston, its new-ish Seaport District and "Make more land": was it ever under discussion to simply fill in the Fort Point Channel completely? That could have potentially knitted the Seaport development into the city itself.

If I recall correctly, during the "Big Dig" work they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to run the new harbor tunnel road under the channel and deal with the water, and mud, etc. The entire South Bay has already been almost entirely filled in as can be seen on the map at the top of the linked article. Why not just finish it off entirely? Does it serve any actual purpose at this point?

I always feel like a bit of a wet blanket when it comes to the Seaport. Sure, it's nice to see the development happening, but it still feels very car-centric and cut off from the rest of the city. Just looking at a satellite image shows that there's a lot more roads and parking than actual buildings. It also feels very disconnected from the city center. Getting into town requires a fairly long walk across one of several windy, car-filled bridges.

You’re correct. If you listen to what he’s actually saying it’s told from the perspective of Hader and it only shifts when he’s doing an impression of Cruise or Rogan.