Log24

(Continued)

The New York Lottery numbers yesterday evening:
897 and 3454. See the corresponding Log24 posts.

Related material: Moloney (op. cit.), pp. 91 and 92.

Today's midday New York Lottery: 444 and 5222.

See Deuteronomy  4:44 and 5:2-22.

(Continued)

An interpretation—

Posts 953 and 2341 in this journal.

Backstory— St. Patrick's Day, 2010.

Last evening's New York Lottery numbers were 123 and 5597.

The 123 suggests page  123 of DeLillo's Underworld .

(For some context, see searches in this journal for Los Muertos  and for Pearly Gates of Cyberspace .)

The 5597 suggests the birth date of literary theorist Kenneth Burke— May 5, 1897.

These two topics—

• the afterlife (in the Latin-American rhythms context of yesterday's Shine On, Edmundo)
• and Kenneth Burke

are combined in Heaven's Gate, a post from April 11, 2003—

Babylon = Bab-ilu, “gate of God,” Hebrew: Babel or Bavel.”

The above observations on lottery hermeneutics, on a ridiculously bad translation, and on Latin rhythms did not seem worth recording until…

The New York Times Book Review  for Sunday, October 30, arrived this morning.

From page 22, an extract from the opening paragraph of a review titled…

Making Sense of It

David Bellos offers a new approach to translation.

BY ADAM THIRLWELL

The theory of translation is very rarely— how to put this?— comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment…. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language…. And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world's multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind's punishment—  condemned to the howlers, the faux amis , the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.

See also Saturday's Edenville.

Continuing this afternoon's meditation on Hollywood
endings, recall the ending of the 1966 David Niven
version of Casino Royale—

"Eventually, Jimmy's atomic pill explodes, destroying Casino Royale
along with everyone inside…. Sir James and all of his agents then
appear in heaven, with angel wings and harps and Jimmy Bond is
shown descending into the fires of hell." — Wikipedia

This evening's NY Lottery numbers are 169 and 1243.

An occurence of 169 in this journal on June 18, 2008—

  As for 1243, see Post  1243 and a recent obituary.

This morning's exercise in lottery hermeneutics is unusually difficult.

Yesterday was Bloomsday (the date described in
James Joyce's Ulysses ) and the New York Lottery numbers were…

Midday  numbers:  3-digit 181, 4-digit 9219.

Evening numbers: 3-digit 478, 4-digit 6449.

For 181 and 9219, see the following—

"With respect to every event, we must ask
 which element has been subjected directly to change."
— Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics
   (New York, The Philosophical Library, Inc., 1959), page 181

That Saussure page number was referenced in the following thesis
on James Joyce's other major novel, Finnegans Wake—

The thesis is from the University of Vienna (Universität Wien ).

The word Wien , in the derived form denoting an inhabitant of that city,
figured prominently in yesterday's news.

As for the evening numbers—

478 perhaps signifies the year 478 BC,
cited in Lawrence Durrell's Sicilian Carousel  as the year
the ruler Gelon died.

For the evening 6449, note that the poem by Wallace Stevens quoted
here on June 15 in A for Anastasios deals with "the river of rivers"…
perhaps signifying time.

Interpreting 6449 chronologically yields 6/4/49.

The film artist  John Huston, discussed in an essay from that date,
might appreciate the representation of the ancient Sicilian
river god Gelas as a man-headed bull on a coin from
around the year 478 BC.

For some perceptive remarks about Durrell, see the
article by Nigel Dennis in LIFE magazine's Nov. 21, 1960
issue (with cover noting Kennedy's victory in that year's
presidential election).

All of the above may be viewed as an approach to the aesthetic
problem posed by Dennis in yesterday's Bloomsday post—

"The problem that arises with this sort of writing is
one of form, i.e. , how to make one strong parcel
out of so many differently shaped commodities,
how to impose method on what would otherwise
be madness."

"The world has gone mad today…." — Cole Porter

For some related remarks, see page 161 of
Joyce's Catholic Comedy of Language *
by Beryl Schlossman (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
and James Joyce in the final pages of The Left Hand of God
by Adolf Holl.

* Update of July 6, 2011—
This title is a correction from the previous title
given here, Moral Language  by Mary Gore Forrester.
Google Books had Schlossman's content previewed
under Forrester's title.

Yesterday's New York Lottery— Midday 346, Evening 104.

Interpretations:

346 as a page number. See The Storyteller in Chance  (March 22, 2009), with its "spinning wheel" link to a passage by Joan Didion.

104 as a date. See 1/04/11— Didion on "a certain vertiginous occlusion of the imagined and the real" in the post The White Itself.

Related graphic art —

This is from a Log24 search, "Windmill + Diamond."

From yesterday morning —

“Play the numbers, play the odds
Play ‘Cry Me a River’ for the Lord of the gods”

— Bob Dylan at
https://genius.com/Bob-dylan-murder-most-foul-lyrics

This suggests . . .

Polydor 2001 566 —

Related searches —

Enigmatic:

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=170618

Circuitous:

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s="+271"

This post was suggested by a detail, the number 777, on the cover of the
American edition of the novel discussed in yesterday morning's post Punctum.

In a New Yorker  "Cultural Comment" column today,
Richard Brody describes a 2004 novel that he says …

"… dramatizes the American character as
vast, manifold, and inchoate;
it can use its prodigious and uninhibited energy
for good or for evil, and it shifts
under the sudden force of unforeseeable events.
The shifts and pivots of the American nation
at large are also those of each individual American.
The grand political stage and the intimate life
are inseparable; identity itself is inextricable
from the currents of history. The novel’s
mighty psychological weight rests upon
a terrifyingly delicate balance of circumstances
that depend on whims of chance." 

I prefer the shifts and pivots in earlier fictions; for example,
those of Robert A. Heinlein, who died in 1988.

Some backstory :  Glory Road  in this journal.

This page was suggested by some lottery numbers from yesterday.

New York lottery today —

This evening's NY lottery results, interpreted as a phone number, yield …

See also posts tagged The Poet's Pineapple …

"The momentary footings of a climb
Up the pineapple, a table Alp and yet
An Alp…."

— Wallace Stevens, "Someone Puts a Pineapple Together"
    (Lines from p. 252 of Partisan Review  Vol. XIV No. 3,
     May-June 1947)

This post is thanks to Nicole Kidman …

E! Online  today reminds us that "Bowie's song 'Nature Boy' 
was ... featured in Kidman's 2001 film Moulin Rouge ."

A YouTube video of the Moulin Rouge  "Nature Boy"
was uploaded on April 1, 2011. That date in this journal —

James Joyce reportedly died on today's date in 1941.

(A sequel to Letters)

See Page 181 in Source of the Finite (St. Augustine's Day, 2014)

and Page 305 in Lost in Translation (50th Reunion Day, Harvard '64).

In memory of reporter Bob Simon —

NY Lottery midday Feb. 12, 2015:

788  2970.

In memory of reporter David Carr —

NY Lottery evening Feb. 12, 2015:

601  1469.

“Bit by bit, putting it together.
Piece by piece, working out the vision night and day.
All it takes is time and perseverance
With a little luck along the way.”
— Stephen Sondheim

See also, in this journal,  528,  1963,  522, and  3273.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
The princess is caged in the consulate.
The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea.
The naked woman on the ledge outside the window
on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or
the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be
‘interesting’ to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes
some difference whether the naked woman is about to
commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest
or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the
human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible
in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens.
We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral
lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select
the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely,
especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line
upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned
to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual
experience.”

― Joan Didion

This evening’s New York Lottery:  659 and 7326.

Continued from Nov. 21, 2010:

“They always print… the lottery.”

The reader may interpret the lottery numbers
as he or she pleases.

Related material: Jersey City in Log24 posts
of April 25 and April 28, and today’s NY Times
image of another Jersey City landmark.

Yakov G. Sinai today won the 2014 Abel Prize.
Earlier, he won the Wolf Prize.

Wolf Foundation press release quoted in the March 1997
Notices of the American Mathematical Society —

On Sinai —

“He is generally recognized as the world leader
in the mathematics of statistical physics.”

This afternoon’s New York Lottery:  813 and 1857.

Unrelated remarks:  813 and  1857.

Continued from remarks of Marissa Mayer at Davos last year —

Related material — This evening's NY lottery…

… and Log24 post number 1424 —

Midrash on yesterday's midday NY lottery:

"Everybody's doin' a brand new dance now…"

The Kernel of the Concept of the Object…

according to the New York Lottery yesterday—

From 4/27

From 11/24

A page numbered 176

A page numbered 187

Evening numbers for the New York lottery
yesterday were 182 and 8691.

One interpretation of the latter number is
8/6/91, birth date of the WWW—

For one interpretation of the former number,
see Random Reference.

The New York Lottery:

CATCH OUR LIVE DRAWINGS:
NUMBERS and WIN 4
Draw Day: Twice Daily
Draw Time: Midday: 12:20 p.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Evening: 7:30 p.m. – 7:40 p.m. 

NY Lottery this evening: 674 and 1252 —

.

Contrapuntal themes:

Related Log24 posts today—
at 11:30 AM ET  (see post 674 ) and
at 7 PM ET (see post 1252).

The Devil at Midday:

Interpreting the midday numbers,
172 and 7817, is more difficult. Perhaps 172
refers to a Zen page number in a post from 
the Feast of Saint Louis in 2003, and perhaps,
in a less saintly manner, 7817 refers to
two posts in which these four digits appear
in product numbers within links— namely,
the Garden Party  "Background" link and 
the Seven Bridges  "wild" link.

Then again, perhaps not.

Last evening's NY Lottery numbers
985 and 3274, interpreted as the
numbers of Log24 posts, suggest
a look at Joyce's nightmare— history.

* The title refers both to a film and to
   a Log24 post, Random Access Memory.

Connoisseurs of hermeneutics will find that interpretations
of three of the above numbers are not hard to come by.

Consider, say, dates, post numbers in Log24, times, and so forth.

For the fourth number, 0131, try the following search:

http://www.m759.net/wordpress/?s=0131.

In memory of art historian John Golding,
whose obituary appeared (finally) in
today’s online Telegraph—

“His most recent book, Paths to the Absolute  (based on
his 1997 series of AW Mellon lectures in the Fine Arts
delivered at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC),
addressed seven abstract artists — Mondrian, Kazimir
Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Barnett Newman, Rothko
and Clyfford Still — and argued that abstract art was
not simply decorative but ‘heavily imbued with meaning
[and] with content’. The book won the Mitchell Prize for
the History of Art in 2002.”

Commentary on Golding’s obituary suggested by
this evening’s 4-digit New York Lottery number,
1051—

Post  1051 in this journal, together with a post from
April 1, 2012 found in a search for the digits  1051
in Log24. That search may serve as a review.

* A phrase from Gravity’s Rainbow

New York Lottery today—

Without imagination, these digits are a meaningless jumble.

With  imagination…

608 might refer to June 8, the Saint's Day  of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
        (See the date July 29, 2002, that appeared in an earlier post today
         as the publication date of Geometrical Landscapes . In this
         journal, a post on that date, "At Random," referred to Hopkins.)

8516 might refer to 8/5/1916. A check of a hometown newspaper
         on that date yields…
         "St. Joseph's Garden Party and Bazaar 22, 23, 24.
          Pictures. Everybody Welcome. Admission to Garden Ten Cents"

And in the evening…

937 might refer to a post on the nihilistic philosophy of Joan Didion, and

7609 might refer to an occurrence of these digits in a link 
          to "7/11" in a post from the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola last year.

For a more cynical view of lottery hermeneutics, see
"High on RAM (overload)," by Jo Lyxe.

Happy birthday to Stevie Nicks.

Mormon Mitt Romney at the Baptist school Liberty University today:

"The task set before you four years ago
  is now completed in full."

I do not know what that task was. In this journal four years ago,
the task was lottery hermeneutics… a subject I doubt is taught
at Liberty University.

The New York lottery numbers from Sunday, May 11, 2008,
in a May 12 post four years ago could be interpreted as
pointing to the date 3/13— 

Say, 3/13, 2006— a date on which this journal quoted some
remarks on the biblical phrase "the fullness of time."

Those remarks were neither Baptist nor
Mormon, but rather Presbyterian.

(Continued)

A meditation suggested by the April 20 post Complex Reflection
and by the life and April 20 death of a scientist who worked
at Los Alamos (home of the Monte Carlo method) and at
the Santa Fe Institute (home of complexity theory).

A search for 286 in this journal yields "Yet Another Cartoon Graveyard."

That June 1, 2008, post linked to poem  286 in a 1919 anthology.

Here is that poem, together with poem 823.

Together, these poems may be regarded as a meditation on
Simone Weil and her brother André Weil or, 
more abstractly, on Love and Death.

Happy birthday to Al Pacino.

"When shall we three meet again?"

Left to right— John von Neumann, Richard Feynman, Stanislaw Ulam

The source of the above book's title, "Analogies between Analogies,"
was misattributed in a weblog post linked to here on March 4th, 2012.
It occurs in a quote due not to Stanislaw Ulam but to Stefan Banach—

Ulam was Jewish. Banach was not.

From a webpage on Banach—

"On 3 April 1892, he was baptized in the Roman Catholic
 Parish of St. Nicholas in Krakow."

See also…

1. a post of Sunday, April 2, 2006,
2. yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery, and
3. post 585 in this journal. 

(At Los Alamos, Ulam developed the Monte Carlo method.)

For Women's History Month—

The Beam of Pink Light

From a post linked to on Lyxe's upload date, Feb. 6, 2012—

“… with primitives the beginnings of art, science, and religion
coalesce in the undifferentiated chaos of the magical mentality….”

— Carl G. Jung, “On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry,”
     Collected Works, Vol. 15, The Spirit in Man, Art, and Literature,
     Princeton University Press, 1966, excerpted in
    Twentieth Century Theories of Art, edited by James M. Thompson.

See also the NY Lottery for St. Luke's Day, 2011, publication date
of the new edition of Philip K. Dick's VALIS  quoted above.

From yesterday's Random Walk—

Followup—

"Oh, hello, old sport."

— The Great Gatsby

New York Lottery, evening of 
Monday, February 6th, 2012:
558 and 0608.

See also posts  558 and 0608.

A Tale for St. Nicholas

Yesterday's midday New York Lottery numbers
were 629 and 2262.

The former suggests St. Peter's Day, 6/29, while
the latter suggests post  2262 in this journal—

On Muriel Spark.

Related material… As a memento mori, the three
Log24 posts from the date of Spark's death—

New York Lottery on Cyber Monday,
November 28, 2011—

Related material: Hannibal Pictures—

… And the New York Lottery, with a wry smile,
signs its Thanksgiving story  J. D. Salinger .

(See 863 and 4034.)

Peter Woit, phrase from a weblog post on October 25th, 2011—

"In possibly related news…."

For 779, see post 779 in this  weblog.

For 8974, see Hollywood Endings.

For 082, see page  82 of Culture and Value , ed. G.H. von Wright, tr. Peter Winch (Oxford 1980) (as quoted by M. Jamie Ferreira in "The Point Outside the World: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein on Nonsense, Paradox and Religion," Religious Studies , Vol. 30, March 1994, pp. 29-44, reprinted in Wittgenstein Studies  (1997))—

Wittgenstein: “God’s essence is supposed to guarantee his existence— but what this really means is that what is here at issue is not the existence of something.”

For 0372, see page  372 in Essays of Three Decades , by Thomas Mann, translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947 ("Schopenhauer," 1938, pp. 372-410)—

THE PLEASURE we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the high and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life's manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.

Truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other. Each by itself, without the support given by the other, remains a very fluctuating value. Beauty that has not truth on its side and cannot have reference to it, does not live in it and through it, would be an empty chimera— and "What is truth?"

“Don’t it always seem to go
that you don’t know what you’ve got
till it’s gone”

— Joni Mitchell, quoted here
     in post 2967.

Today's midday New York Lottery—
2967 and 002.

(This post's title was appropriated from a novel by Brian Morton.)

Yesterday's evening New York Lottery— 229 and 9294.

Alex Ross in the online New Yorker  quotes a bad essay he wrote in college titled…

“The Grand Hotel Abyss: History and Violence in ‘The Shining,’”

which purports to analyze the famous scene in which Jack Nicholson
types the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”:

Nicholson has become a chomping-machine of language,
recycling stock phrases, appropriating whatever
drifts into his path. His words are nothing but echoes….

The lottery's 229 may be interpreted as "2/29." See a post from that date in 2008
involving echoes and the abyss.

The lottery's 9294 may be interpreted as "9/2/94." A search for that date yields
an article from Pacific Stars and Stripes—

That article is echoed  by a later Doonesbury caricature
of a professor discussing echoes  in black rhetoric. That
caricature is from the 2/29 post—

This evening's New York Lottery numbers are 770 and 9703.

This suggests a look at post 770 (Hesse and Bach) and at 9/7/03 (Hesse and knights).

See also Hessian.

'Hardball with Chris Matthews'
for Monday, October 17th, 2011—

FINEMAN: Right. The way to do that, Chris,
is the way that the people who ran against
Mitt Romney on behalf of Senator Ted Kennedy
did it years ago, when Romney was challenging
Ted Kennedy for that Senate seat.
They went out to Indiana — the Teddy people
went out to Indiana, found a plant that
had been shuttered by Bain Capital…

MATTHEWS: Right.

FINEMAN: … as part of a takeover and makeover…

MATTHEWS: A chop shop.

FINEMAN: … and they launched a caravan —
a caravan of unemployed people that went
all the way from Indiana to Boston.
Lights out for Mitt Romney. You have to do it that way.
You can`t do it like resenting the guy who
looks like the guy on the Monopoly card.

(LAUGHTER)

New York Lottery, evening of Oct. 19, 2011— 985 and 8739.

For 985, see Log24 post 985, "Resurrection" (Aug. 4, 2003).

For 8739, see the 8/7/39 TIME cover—

  "TURFMAN WILLIAM WOODWARD
   Before racing comes raising. (Sport)"
— TIME magazine cover, August 7, 1939

  See also… The rest  of the story.

"There is work to be done
  in the dark before dawn."

— Song lyric

Log24 posts suggested by the New York Lottery
yesterday (the Feast of Saint Luke) —

684,  2047,  710,  7900.

(Continued from 24 hours ago)

Saturday evening NY lottery: 302 and 0181.

For 302, see OCODE. For 0181, see the bridge
between page 180 and page 181 in
Disjunctive Poetics  by Peter Quartermain
(Cambridge University Press, 1992).

* For some narrative related to the title,
   see The Deceivers  by Alfred Bester.

"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge." —Nabokov

Suggested by yesterday's evening NY lottery—

Post 4248: The Hunt for Exemplary October, and
Post   942: Links for St. Benedict

Related material—

three-point landing n

— Collins English Dictionary

See also…

     Tiffany Case and…

 The Diamond
in the Mandorla

“He pointed at the football
  on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
     – Glory Road    

University Diaries  today—

"Educated people— with some exceptions, like Nader— like to explore the senses, and indeed many of your humanities courses (like the one UD ‘s teaching right now about beauty, in which we just read Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” with its famous concluding lines: In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art ) feature artworks and ideas that celebrate sensuality."

This suggests a review lecture on the unorthodox concept of lottery hermeneutics .

Today's New York Lottery—

A quote suggested by the UD  post—

"Sainte-Beuve's Volupté  (1834) introduced the idea of idler as hero (and seeking pleasurable new sensations as the highest good), so Baudelaire indulged himself in sex and drugs."

— Article on Baudelaire by Joshua Glenn in the journal Hermenaut

Some reflections suggested by Hermenaut  and by the NY evening numbers, 674 and 1834—

(Click images to enlarge.)

Cool Mystery:

Detective Cruz enters Planck's Constant Café in "The Big Bang."

As for the midday numbers—

For 412, see 4/12, and for 1030, see 10/30, Devil's Night (2005).

For further background, consult Monday's Realism in Plato's Cave.

Lottery hermeneutics for Michaelmas—

New York Lottery the evening of Thursday, Sept. 29, 2011—

499 and 6985.

For 499, see post  499 in this journal ("Angel Night," Sept. 29, 2002).

For 6985, see a Sunday, 6/9/85, review of Amy's Eyes , a children's book by Richard Kennedy.

"Especially for the adult reader, the narrator's musings comprise many of the book's great pleasures. He discusses the seductiveness of numerology, the 'Wayward Daughter of Mathematics'….''

— Edwin J. Kenney Jr.

NY Lottery this evening—

Continued from Themes of Sept. 17—

"And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder."

Lottery hermeneutics for this evening—

747 — Source of the sound effect in a post of April 28, 2009:

"And Kali, ‘The Dark One,’ addressed him with the voice of a cloud of thunder…"
— The King and the Corpse , by Heinrich Zimmer

3695 — Number of a post on Steps Toward Salvation  (Dec. 14, 2008)

NY Lottery this afternoon—

See also post 1115.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it." — Yogi Berra

This evening's NY Lottery numbers were 375 and 3141.

Subjective interpretations—

There seems to be only one relevant result of a Google search for "375 Log24"—

There are, however, two  relevant interpretations of the number 3141—

1. The Saturday Evening Post  3/1/41 article by Jack Alexander on AA—

"The members of Alcoholics Anonymous do not pursue or coddle
a malingering prospect, and they know the strange tricks of the alcoholic
as a reformed swindler knows the art of bamboozling."

2. Post number 3141 in this  journal— Aesthetics for Jesuits.

742

as indicated by Gravity's Rainbow— the end of page 742—

by the New York Lottery on the evening of June 17, 2010—

and by this journal on the afternoon of that day—

Detail from New Yorker  cover (fiction issue of June 2010)

(Continued from Tuesday's "A Story")

Tuesday's story, a collection of four random posts, was
suggested by Tuesday's NY lottery numbers.

That story leads, by association, to Frame Tale in
a post of 2:02 AM on Sunday, May 23, 2010. For related
material, see Death Story, a post of 9:40 PM that same Sunday.

Wednesday's numbers—

—suggest a counter-story…

Escape to Pine Mountain

A website on films about Latter-Day Saints (i.e., Mormons) asks

Was "Escape to Witch Mountain"
based on Zenna Henderson's "People" stories?

The lottery numbers above suggest the names of three women—
none, as far as I know, with any Mormon background—
who might rightly be called, without capital letters,
"latter-day saints"…

1. Madeleine L'Engle (see 529 as the date 5/29),
2. June Christy (a singer first recorded on 5/4/45), and
3. Mary Rockwell Hook, architect of Pine Mountain
   Settlement School, who died on 9/8/78.

These three lives, taken together, may serve as
an antidote to the Death Story mentioned above.

"We tell ourselves stories…" — Joan Didion
"Therefore choose life." —God

For film producer and studio head John Calley, who died today at 81—

"When Death tells a story, you really have to listen." —The Book Thief  (cover)

New York Lottery on Tuesday, September 13th, 2011

This suggests the following random thoughts—

Eight is a gate.

NY Lottery Saturday, Sept. 10, 2011

The sound of singing grows louder.

(A sequel to The Lost Word)

NY Lottery, Sunday, Sept. 4, 2011

The number "38" might refer, notably, to

• The old postal code  of Harvard University,
• the caliber  of one type of handgun…

… and, less notably, to a page number
     that appears in most books.

T.S. Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
was first published in 1919.*

For some background on that year, see the Harvard Class  of 1919.

For a notable instance of the page number  38, see
Poetry and Belief in the Work of T.S. Eliot ,
by Kristian Smidt (first published in 1949 by
the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters).

* "Tradition and the Individual Talent" in The Egoist
   at the Modernist Journals Project:
   Part I in Vol. 6, No. 4 (Sept. 1919),
   Parts II-III in Vol. 6, No. 5 (Dec. 1919)

There is an unwarranted leap here
from "suggests" to "knowledge."

See Under the Volcano  and "harrowing" in this journal.

From a writer's requiem—

"Algis points out that at the end of each story, there should be a moment of validation, a place where a person in authority makes some sort of statement that lets the reader know that the story has reached its conclusion." —David Farland, June 9, 2008

Paraphrase of a version by an anonymous reader at Amazon.com (see previous post)—

"… someone who has no other vested interest in the story… steps forward and says 'He's dead, Jim' or 'Who was that masked man?'"

Moments of validation from today's midday NY Lottery— 4639 and 575.

For "He's dead, Jim," see April 6, 1939* (4/6/39) at St. Joseph's Church in Springfield, Mass.

For "Who was that masked man?," see the Mark of Zorro in Post  575.

* This was a Maundy Thursday, not the Good Friday indicated in the linked narrative.

"Nixon  has no Rosebud."

— Master's thesis on an Oliver Stone film
    (Dan B. Butler, May 2006)

New York Lottery this afternoon: 643 and 8974.

"Some mathematicians are birds, others are frogs.
Birds fly high in the air and survey broad vistas of
mathematics out to the far horizon. They delight in
concepts that unify our thinking and bring together
diverse problems from different parts of the
landscape. Frogs live in the mud below and see
only the flowers that grow nearby. They delight in
the details of particular objects, and they solve
problems one at a time. I happen to be a frog, but
many of my best friends are birds. The main theme
of my talk tonight is this. Mathematics needs both
birds and frogs. Mathematics is rich and beautiful
because birds give it broad visions and frogs give it
intricate details. Mathematics is both great art and
important science, because it combines generality
of concepts with depth of structures. It is stupid to
claim that birds are better than frogs because they
see farther, or that frogs are better than birds
because they see deeper. The world of mathematics
is both broad and deep, and we need birds and
frogs working together to explore it.

This talk is called the Einstein lecture…."

— Freeman Dyson, Notices of the American
Mathematical Society , February 2009

The Didion reading was suggested by the "6212" in yesterday evening's New York Lottery.

See 603 and 3449.*

“The meeting is closed
with the Lord’s Prayer
and refreshments are served.”

* Courtesy of the NY Lottery.

Posts suggested by the New York Lottery today at midday— 632 and 2750.

Note the song linked to a quotation in the latter post—

Click on the link or the quote for the song.

Operation Condor

See Tombstones, Crucible, Sunday in the Park, The Condor, and…

Part I, Midday —

Yesterday's midday NY Lottery "689" suggests (from April 3, 2005)—

689

[fú] blessing, good fortune

The "232" was suggested by today's evening New York lottery, as
was the work of mathematician David Donoho (born 3/5/57).

Donoho is an expert on wavelets and related functions.

This post's title was suggested by the Mexican Hat wavelet
and by the Wallace Stevens poem "The Pastor Caballero"
quoted in last night's post.

As for today's midday lottery, see a reference to 645
in Imago Creationis and remarks from 3354 (3/3/54)
by Pauli on quantum theory and "small macroscopic spheres"
[for instance, Ping Pong balls].

Von Neumann's theory…
"tries to make the imponderable ponderable." — Various authors

As does some poetry.

For further details, click on the hat.

A portrait reproduced here on October 11, 2007—

The above was suggested by yesterday's New York Lottery and by
items dated February  8, 1958 (date of receipt of an AMS Bulletin  article)
and February 1, 1953 (newspaper article on applied game theory).

(This covers three of the four relevant lottery numbers.
For the fourth, see 9/19 and recent discussions of
The End of Mr. Y  (Sunday Dinner and A Link for Sunrise)).

See also Saint  John Neumann.

"He gazed out of the window hoping that somehow everything could make sense to him."

— "Passing in Silence," by Oliver Humpage

"You gotta be true to your code." —Sinatra

Exercise: Trace a path from the June 27 NY Lottery numbers
to the above two quotations.  Hint: See Cuernavaca and
Pilgrim's Progress  in TIME Magazine, May 3, 1948.

For some further background, click on the CBS quote above.
I still prefer, as I did in 1948, less  up-to-the-minute developments.

* The title refers to the phrase "the artist's signature."

This evening's NY Lottery numbers were 531 and 8372.

Hermeneutics—

From a Google search for "531 Log24"—

The "531" linked to in the Sept. 21, 2008, post above is a mini-drama ending at midnight on 5/31, 2008— the conclusion of Mental Health Month.

And the above 4-digit evening number suggests a search for births on 8/3/72 that yields—

Erika Marozsán, Hungarian actress, 38.

Marozsán starred in "Gloomy Sunday—A Song of Love and Death" (A German/Hungarian film from 1999).

Wikipedia informs us that this "is inaccurately claimed to be the world's longest running film."

Whether Marozsán is a Quaternionist, I do not know.

For love, death, and quaternions, see the post Metaphor from Feb. 22 linked to in this afternoon's Sunday Dinner.

This evening's New York Lottery number was 776.
From this journal's post number 776—

ART WARS:

Lindsay Lohan was back in court today.

"The judge… ordered Lindsay may have no more than one friend
over at a time for the remainder of her house arrest" —Star Magazine

"Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call"

— Eustace Tilley

Tracking Shot

Related material—

See also this journal's September 2009 posts.

This  post was suggested by today's previous post and by today's NY Lottery.
For some background to the ioncinema.com post numbered 4210 above,
see, in conjunction with the page headed "Azazel" linked to here earlier today,
the ioncinema.com post numbered 5601.

From the post numbered 460 in this  journal—

At the still point… from the film "Absolute Power" :

Photo credit – Graham Kuhn

I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly plutonic,
But diamonds are a girl’s best friend!

— Marilyn Monroe, modeling a Freudian slip

Ben Brantley in The New York Times  on May 26—

While you theatergoing butterflies out there keep nattering on about the Tonys— who will win, who should win, and so on— I have been focused on an issue of far greater momentousness and urgency. That’s the shameful squandering on Broadway of what our country would seem to believe is our most valued (and infinitely exploitable) natural resource: our celebrities….

Lindsay Lohan: This undeniably talented (and for all intents and purposes, former) film actress poses a special challenge. Her only recent work appears to have been as a paparazzi model and professional partygoer, and a big, line-laden dramatic part like Blanche DuBois might be too onerous to start with. So why not put her in the Broadway premiere of “Finishing the Picture,” a late-career Arthur Miller play inspired by the travails of making a movie (“The Misfits”) with his wife Marilyn Monroe? Having seen a production of this play in Chicago, I can testify that the Marilyn part requires only that the actress playing her be willing to appear asleep and stupefied and, briefly, to walk across the stage naked. For Ms. Lohan, who credibly impersonated Marilyn for a New York magazine photo shoot, this ought to be a cinch. Should an eight-performance week prove too taxing, I suggest Paris Hilton for matinees.

This midnight post was suggested by Sunday's midday 4-digit NY Lottery number, 7286, and by the following web pages:

7286 Style by Lindsay Lohan and 7286 Prisoner Transport.

Some background from a third 7286 web page—

Starlet Lindsay Lohan is bringing her signature Hollywood style to the masses with her new 7286 line. The starlet's stylish stamp is on every aspect of the line, from the name (7-2-86 is her birthday) to the brand's tag line : "Give a girl the right handbag, and she can conquer the world!"

Magic Time!

           For fans of Douglas Adams and St. Augustine

Update of 2:20 AM June 13:

For the midday "042" as a reference to Adams, see Wikipedia. The "828" may be interpreted as a reference to St. Augustine's feast day, 8/28… or, for the more secularly minded, a reference to the time 8:28 PM (to go with the evening "0845" as a reference to 8:45 PM). For further details, see Times of the Times . The midday "7286" is more difficult. See midnight's Broadway Cinderella.

" Try this one."

Today's midday NY lottery number was 176.

An occurrence of that number in this journal—

Umberto Eco,
Foucault’s Pendulum, page 176:

Here, too, you entered through a little garden…

Here is a picture of 176.