The Mugwumpery

I know “funny machine translation” has been done to death, but I can’t resist:

Date	: Apr 06 2013 11:58:21 AM
From	: unavailable
To	: Dave

“Hi this is Gabriel Gomez call. I wanna(?) to call here-this(?) myself and let you know that I’m running for United States Senate and evil-berry(?) Republican primary. I’m not a politician I’m in the guy is(?) … ceiling(?) pilot and the-supplement-or-rent-i’ve(?) lived the American dream and I know that it must you can’t(?) be preserved. The rid of lack of ideas in Washington the lack of courage. I hope you’ll visit www. Gomez. Ethel r(?) MA.com. To learn about my plan to reboot(?) Congress term limits a balanced budget amendment and i-live-in-the(?) door just a few of the super boring. All five-four(?) I would love to hear from you to discuss your ideas for how to fix Washington. You can e-mail me at Gabriel at Gomez Apple R M a.com or call us at 6173494113. Again your ideas and more about our campaign.”
… more. Please listen to your voicemail for the remainder of this message.

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If you listen to the message, it doesn’t sound as bad as all that. Does Vonage’s transcription engine really think that “evil-berry” is the most likely thing it heard? Maybe.

Happy Columbus Day, all – the day we celebrate the last man to discover America.

As most people know, Christopher Columbus was by no means the first person to discover America.

Aside from the early visitors and settlers of the Americas whose names are lost to history, and the well-known explorations of Erik the Red and his son Leif Erikson, there may well have been earlier visits from Europe, Africa, or China. It would be surprising if, in the 10,000 years prior to 1492, there weren’t dozens of “discoveries” of America by people from across the ocean.

But that doesn’t diminish the historical importance of Columbus one bit – on the contrary, it makes him all the more pivotal to the history of the world.  Because Columbus was the one, and only, last discoverer of America.

Before Columbus, the Americas were to the rest of the world at best a legend – a story of faraway islands.

After Columbus, the Americas were, definitively, discovered.  They were a known place, not a rumor.

And that only happened once.

I love when seemingly disparate things synchronize in unexpected ways.

According to The Legal Underground,  Nobel laureate Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) “was exceedingly fond of t-shirts, especially those portraying images of Mick Jagger…”

Surprising enough; doesn’t fit our image of Hayek.

But it gets better.  Sir Mick is a fan of Hayek (see 3:35 in the clip below):

Before quitting to start the Rolling Stones, Jagger attended the London School of Economics, where Hayek had taught.

Supposedly, Jagger’s adviser at the LSE “said that Mick Jagger did a careful net present value analysis of the value in attending LSE as compared to the foregone revenue from playing rock and roll. When the dollars came out higher for music, Mick came by and apologized to the adviser, but said he couldn’t afford to continue in school; LSE was just costing him too much money.”

Did I mention that Jagger also owns an Enigma machine?  The rare 4-rotor type.

Now if I could just work Salma in there somehow, it would be perfect.