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quote of the day
Dec. 29th, 2011 10:56 pm
"Every barrel of oil that comes out of those sands in Canada is a barrel of oil that we don't have to buy from a foreign source."
. . . ![[info]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
pds_lit and I, in a display of sheer lexicographical wizardry, dazzling joint intellectual endeavour, and straightforward gawdamighty old-fashioned grit, spent part of Boxing Day solving between us the New York Times puzzle spectacular.
We did much of this, it should be noted, without the use of artificial stimulants, performance enhancers, whatever. Only later on, once the battle had to all intents and purposes been won, did we dig out, to aid us in our toils, the by-now-slightly-vinegarish wine left over from our visitors on Christmas Eve.
The sole use of Google was to find a table of past Indy 500 winners. I would have expected to have to use Google also to discover the names of sporting teams based in Houston, but here my lady wife dumbfounded me with her hitherto unknown expertise.
No, no, thank you for the thought, but applause would be superfluous. It's enough for pds_lit and I that we, ourselves, know of our unmuted triumph.
ETA: There was one mystery answer in all this. The clue was ". . . commonly served with a lemon pip" and the answer, finally achieved because we got all the cross-letters, was "LULU". We have no idea why this should be so, and later Googling has left us no wiser. We agreed that "commonly served with a bottle of Coca Cola" might have been a better clue, and moved on to the next word puzzle (of five) in the series.
ETA (2): Further in-depth research by pds_lit suggests the "commonly served with a lemon" bit could (assuming sloppy definition) belong to the first half of the clue, leaving just "pip" -- which is of course a legitimate old-time slang synonym for the old-time slang noun "lulu".
ETA (3): Oh, and there was also an example of the your/you're illiteracy, with a clue whose answer was "your" having to be filled in as "you're". Shoddy, shoddy, NYT.
pds_lit and I, in a display of sheer lexicographical wizardry, dazzling joint intellectual endeavour, and straightforward gawdamighty old-fashioned grit, spent part of Boxing Day solving between us the New York Times puzzle spectacular.We did much of this, it should be noted, without the use of artificial stimulants, performance enhancers, whatever. Only later on, once the battle had to all intents and purposes been won, did we dig out, to aid us in our toils, the by-now-slightly-vinegarish wine left over from our visitors on Christmas Eve.
The sole use of Google was to find a table of past Indy 500 winners. I would have expected to have to use Google also to discover the names of sporting teams based in Houston, but here my lady wife dumbfounded me with her hitherto unknown expertise.
No, no, thank you for the thought, but applause would be superfluous. It's enough for pds_lit and I that we, ourselves, know of our unmuted triumph.
ETA: There was one mystery answer in all this. The clue was ". . . commonly served with a lemon pip" and the answer, finally achieved because we got all the cross-letters, was "LULU". We have no idea why this should be so, and later Googling has left us no wiser. We agreed that "commonly served with a bottle of Coca Cola" might have been a better clue, and moved on to the next word puzzle (of five) in the series.
ETA (2): Further in-depth research by pds_lit suggests the "commonly served with a lemon" bit could (assuming sloppy definition) belong to the first half of the clue, leaving just "pip" -- which is of course a legitimate old-time slang synonym for the old-time slang noun "lulu".
ETA (3): Oh, and there was also an example of the your/you're illiteracy, with a clue whose answer was "your" having to be filled in as "you're". Shoddy, shoddy, NYT.
Over the past 24 hours or so, LJ's system of sending e-mail notifications of comments seems to have been down about 99% of the time. Since yesterday evening I've had just two such notifications, one from
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sci_o_biscuits and one from jaeljael. (Bizarrely, while sci_o_biscuits in fact left two comments [or more?] separated by at most a few minutes, I received notification of one but not the other.)When I checked in my LJ Inbox, however, I discovered a whole bunch of comments of which I'd been ignorant. (I also found a "befriending" of which I'd been unaware -- by one of the Russian bots, so I reported it to LJ Abuse.) The worrying part is that, of course, my LJ Inbox tells me only about comments left in my own postings, not about replies to comments I might have left in other people's blog entries.
I mentioned this to
pds_lit, who found exactly the same was true in her own case. You might, if today seems to have been unusually quiet for you LJ-wise, want to check your own LJ Inbox (or "Manage Your Comments" if you prefer).It's feasible that the server which both pds_lit and I use might have suddenly decided to clamp down on LJ's e-mails as potential spam, but for various reasons I don't think that's likely.
Anyway, my apologies if I've seemed to have committed the discourtesy of not responding to a comment you might have left that demanded an answer. If it was important, please ask again here.
