Difference between revisions of "Chapter 34"

Revision as of 09:41, 4 August 2018

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"Series'll be on tonight, El Duque's starting, maybe against Curt Schilling
El Duque is the nickname of NY Yankees pitcher Orlando Hernandez. In this game, he pitched 6 1⁄3 solid innings, but gave up a game-tying upper deck home run to Mark Grace of the Arizona Diamondbacks in the fourth inning. Curt Schilling of the Diamondbacks pitched on only three days rest.

Vegeta

Vegeta

NAND gate ("I say yes to everything")
In digital electronics, a NAND gate (Negated AND or NOT AND) is a logic gate which produces an output that is false only if all its inputs are true. A LOW (0) output results only if both the inputs to the gate are HIGH (1); if one or both inputs are LOW (0), a HIGH (1) output results. It is made using transistors. Wikipedia

Aki Ross
Aki Ross is a fictional character and the protagonist of the movie Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Aki Ross is voiced by Chinese-American actress Ming-Na. She was expected to be the first photorealistic computer-generated actress to appear in multiple movies in different roles. From WIKI.

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Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured author and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s. She earned her bachelor degree at Barnard College in New York City, and her M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University. She was both a popularizer of the insights of anthropology into modern American and Western culture and a respected, if controversial, academic anthropologist. Her reports about the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures amply informed the 1960s sexual revolution. Mead was a champion of broadened sexual mores within a context of traditional western religious life. From WIKI.

what if I don't know which way to point the lens, what if I miss something really crucial?
foreshadowing GoogleGlasses?

Dubuque
One of the few large cities in Iowa with hills, it is a major tourist destination, attracted to the city's unique architecture and river location. Also, it is home to five institutions of higher education, making it a center for culture and learning. From WIKI.

...in time to witness Derek Jeter's clutch tenth-inning homer and another trademark Yankee win
This extra innings game carried on past midnight, making it the first World Series game played in November(largely due to the rearranged schedules and postseason as a result of 11 September). When the scoreboard clock in Yankee Stadium passed midnight, the message on the scoreboard read, "Welcome to November Baseball". Derek Jeter shortly afterwards hit an opposite field walk-off home run on a 3–2 pitch count from Byung-Hyun Kim. This walk-off home run gave the Yankees a 4–3 victory and tied the Series at two games apiece, making Jeter the first player to hit a November homerun and earning him the tongue-in-cheek nickname of "Mr. November"(itself a play on former Yankee Reggie Jackson's World Series nickname "Mr. October).

Keanu Reeves
Another Keanu reference. Something to this?

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shoat but sweet, as they say around the pigpen
A shoat is a young pig. Get it?

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Steely Dan's "Ain't Never Gonna Do It without the Fez On"
Title of that song: "Royal Scam"

The song is more simply titled "The Fez," from the 1976 album Royal Scam. Likewise, on page 158 Pynchon elongated the title of "Dr. Wu" into "Are You with Me Dr Wu."

Also, the word "ain't" is not in the song. Lyrics are here and they go: No I'm never gonna do it without the fez on.

tchotchkes
Tchotchke is a small bauble or miscellaneous item. Depending on context, the term has a connotation of worthlessness or disposability as well as tackiness, and has long been used by Jewish-Americans and in the regional speech of New York City and elsewhere. The word may also refer to free promotional items dispensed at trade shows, conventions, and similar large events. From WIKI.

this overdue-for-exorcism building
The Dakota, a possible model for the Deseret, is famously known for being the principle location used in the film "Rosemary's Baby" (1968). Of course, it was also the abode, and murder site, of John Lennon. And the site for Time and Again (Jack Finney 1970) Wiki

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doomed to wander those century-old corridors until accounts are balanced, or for eternity<br\> see reference to The Flying Dutchman on page ..., well a bunch of chapters back.

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"Lester was fellow podonok,"
Podonok is a Russian term meaning riff-raff, scoundrel, or scum. lowest of the low.

that Civil Hackers' School in Moscow [...] "Umnik Academy!"
From here...

"UMNIK of NCFU" Club for Young Scientists
Since 2008 foundation of assistance to development of small enterprises in scientific and technical area performs financial support of scientific projects of young scientists (under 28 years), which are commercially significant. Financing is carried out on the basis of results of "U.M.N.I.K.” (Participant of Youth Scientific Innovative Competition) competition. Annually the foundation accepts requests and accredits several dozens of events in the territory of the Russian Federation, within the framework of which money grants for the young people, who have scientific ideas to be commercialized, are planned.

chainiki
Chainik is a computer term that implies both ignorance and a certain amount of willingness to learn (as well as a propensity to cause disaster), but does not necessarily imply as little experience or short exposure time as newbie and is not as derogatory as luser. Both a novice user and someone using a computer system for a long time without any understanding of the internals can be referred to as chainiks. Wikipedia

Bobryusk
probably typo for Bobruysk, a city in Belarus.

Bobruysk (spelled Babruysk there) is heavily featured in padonki slang, as a "fuck off" destination point. So, Misha and Grisha are likely not really from Bobruysk.

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S.Z. Sakall
was a Hungarian film actor; he played Carl, the head waiter, in Casablanca.

The link that establishes a "Jewish" affinity here between the Hungarian Jew S.Z. Sakall (who managed to escape the Holocaust by fleeing from Hungary to the States in 1940) and the Japanese Psyduck, a Pokémon character, is the characteristic gesture ascribed to both: one of Sakall's two acting trademark gestures was apparently to grab his face with both hands (his chin and jaws resting in his palms, fingertips on temples) while squeezing his chubby cheeks (in shock? in wondering despair? – the gesture is shown several times in Sakall's profile on YouTube [1]); and Psyduck also is famous for holding his head (in despair? – his "psy" is after all a homophone of "sigh"). However, I couldn't find Sakall (as Carl the head waiter) making this gesture in "Casablanca" at all. He does, however, make it for example in "Never Say Goodbye", a romantic comedy film from 1946, where he played Luigi, a friendly New York restaurateur (a trailer for the film that shows the gesture briefly, approx. a minute into it, is available on YouTube [2]).

Dilbert and Dogbert
Dilbert is a fictional character and the main character and protagonist of the Dilbert comic strip. He is a white collar office worker who has a rare medical condition characterized by an extreme intuition about all things mechanical and electrical (and utter social ineptitude), an idea that an animated television episode explored and is titled "The Knack". [3]

Dogbert is Dilbert's anthropomorphic talking pet dog from the Dilbert comic strip. He has been a tech support employee, a business consultant, a supermodel, a substitute teacher, a lawyer, a cult leader, a billionaire, a talk radio host, a United States Supreme Court nominee, the director of the FBI, and many other occupations. According to creator Scott Adams, the character is based on, if not a member of, the beagle breed. Dogbert was originally created only so Dilbert would have someone to talk to, but as the strip progressed, Adams developed the character to be an anti-hero, metaphorically personifying the dark, cynical side of Adams's own personality. [4]

Here are More the Dilbert strips where Dogbert is in Tech Support.

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Pizdatchye
Russian пиздаче means, roughly, "fucking awesome."

It's a comparative, so rather "fucking better"

govno

Russian for "shit."

obizhenka

In Russian prison slang, a prisoner who is low man on the totem pole (and therefore, by implication, available to be sodomized and otherwise abused).

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'Teuscher truffles'

Teuscher is a high-end Swiss chocolatier.

'Urban Jumble'
A former flavor of Ben & Jerry's, available only in 2000-2001 according to this page.

The Mikhail Baryshnikov Story
A fictional movie, even though Anthony Hopkins did tend to portray a lot of real-life characters

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FSB... SVU...
FSB = Federal Security Service, see WIKI.

SVU is an editing error / typo. When the KGB was reorganized in 1991, it was broken into two successor organizations: the FSB (responsible for domestic security) and the SVR (Sluzhba vneshney razvedki) = Foreign Intelligence Service.WIKI

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You want secular cause and effect...
Echoes the same, almost identical, line from Gravity's Rainbow, page 663 (Viking Ed.): "You will want cause and effect. All right."

Day of the NYC Marathon
Sunday, November 4 premonition of the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombing? (BE was reased on Sep 17, 2013)

Verrazano Bridge deeply guarded<br\> The New York Marathon traditionally starts on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The start looks like this: [5]

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especially this soon after eleven September
An anomaly. Elsewhere in the novel this date is referred to as "11 September."

Yes, I remember
From page 258.

chemicals from the running<br\> Running causes the brain to internally generate a number of chemicals called endorphins. They are morphine analogs, and responsible for the "runners high"

Scully & Scully

High-end Manhattan gift store established 1934.

eppes-essen
Eppes Essen, besides being a Jewish Deli in New Jersey, is Yiddish for "I will give you something to eat"

recaffeinating marathoners<br\> After a race, marathoners will normally rehydrate (ie make up for water lost during the race and not replenished.) Since caffeine is a diuretic, this must be after the rehydrating stage, when the runners high has worn off, and the finishers are feeling a need to counter their exhaustion.

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Tacitus
Publius Cornelius Tacitus (c. AD 56 – after 117) was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the Roman Emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors (AD 69). These two works span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus in AD 14 to the years of the First Jewish–Roman War in AD 70. Tacitus is considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians. He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature. He is known for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics. From WIKI.

Mizuno Waves<br\> Mizuno makes a number of high end running shoes with "Wave x" names, (eg Wave Rider, Wave Elixir, etc). You could run the New York Marathon in these, if they fit you and you were trained of course. Almost all running shoes have an "eye-assualting color scheme" (not just those from Mizuno), and for any given pair of shoes, one could argue whether the years have not been kind, or whether they were just hideous from day 1. But that's what runners, who are typically Type A, seem to like to buy.

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She should have tumbled ... to the peculiar lightlessness in his eyes...
The Oxford English Dictionary provides one definition of "to tumble": "(tumble to) (informal) understand the meaning or hidden implication of (a situation)"

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what Bobby Darin calls 'beyond the sea'
Bobby Darin performs Beyond the Sea on YouTube. To be a song about longing for a lost, perhaps dead, love, that sure is a happy sounding tune.