money laundering

some time around 13:32 on saturday, august 15th, my piggy bank exceeded 1000‰ of its capacity. this meant that it was time to smash it open, convert its guts to u.s. dollars, and take it to the bank (BUT NOT BEFORE rigorously cataloguing its contents). here are the oddities contained therein:

a. metal trinkets of unknown provenance: a golf divot tool with a red cross on it and an etched ring that is too big for any of my fingers (i have not tried it on my toes however).

b. tokens: $500 in casino funny money, a nashua, nh carwash token, an arcade token, MBTA and SEPTA tokens.

c. foreign currencies: 7 rupees, 4 eurocents, and 1.19 in canadian fun bucks.

d. archaic u.s. coinage

e. mystery keys (i have no recollection of putting these keys in piggy nor what strange locks that they open)

f. because i was curious and because it is a productive outlet for certain obsessive psychological effects of my meth habit, i checked the minting date of EVERY coin. the oldest: quarter (1965), dime (1965), nickel (1940), penny (1920).

observations: 1. there is a direct correspondence between the colour of a penny and how old it is. whether this is because the u.s. mint changed the sekrit formula for pennies over the years or if pennies have short halflives, i cannot say (nor am i that interested in spending 30 seconds on google to find out).

2. there were almost five times more pennies than any other coin. i assume this is because i am more apt to reüse the other coins but seldom will use a penny for anything other than making a wish at a fountain or buying penny candies.

3. in the end, the u.s. treasury has valued piggy’s guts at $179.53. i have not yet deposited this at the bank but don’t even think of trying to burgle me, i sleep with a blunderbuss under my pillow.

roy g. biv has a posse -or- melvil dewey has got nothin’ on me

laura, my former badminton adversary, recently linked to a very interesting guardian article on the topic of bookshelf arrangement. she then asked her readers how they chose to arrange their bookshelves. i answered that i (after a long period of introspection) finally arrived upon a chromatic system.

this drew a certain amount of incredulity from some mutual friends who impugned me privately and asked if i was goofing or being 1000‰ honest the way that i usually am. as evidenced above (and with this as precedent) you can see that my record of always telling the truth remains without pimple or blackhead. with my honour restored, let me tell you: the benefits of such a system are numerous:

1. utility: as i am a visual learner, in many cases it is the cover rather than the author (or even sometimes) title of a book that i can recall, thus a chromatic index proves very useful when i need to locate an old tome.
2. æsthetics: as exhibited by my dolce & gabana® trousers, rolodex™ wrist-watch, and armani® hair gel, i am all about looking good. and what is more visually appealing than a rainbow? answer: books arranged like a rainbow. another answer less germane: naked babes.
3. ragbaggedness: as the very soul of this blog shows, i get an extreme charge out of random juxtapositions. a system of index that eschews subjects helps to create such serendipital collisions. consider: tin tin living in the same neighborhood as lucky jim, or the new-found meaning of goya’s caprichos when they are being absorbed by bakhtin and his dialogic imagination.

in conclusion, another thing that i arrange chromatically is the drawer where i keep my underpants.

a charming book

in 1941, my grandmother found two, four-leaf clovers on her honeymoon in niagra falls, this launched a 60 year obsession with collecting, preserving and cataloguing them in a little book. a sampling (from top left):

• the 1.5” × 2.5” book is simply labeled, “four-leaf clover book” in my grandmother’s unmistakable scrawl.
• #1: “niagra falls, june 19, 1941.”
• #16: “glenham, 1950.”
• #17: “hawthorne, august 25, 1974.” [there is an unexplained gap between 1950 and 1974 that exactly coincides with my dad being born and graduating graduate school.]
• #25: “july 9, 1985 rossmoor golf course, 13th fairway.”
• #26: “july 19, 1989, raynor found a real one at the park.” [i was so intent on getting into this book that i drew in a clover that i allegedly found a few days earlier]
• #33: august 1993, snowmass village, not exactly a four-leaf clover but we really wanted to find one in colorado. [it is a three-leaf clover with one of the leaves split in two]
• #40: “pennswood village, perimeter walk july 31, 2000.” [this is the final clover in the book and on the final page. my grandmother died a year and a half later]

just as i (and horatio caine) like to examine my own life through the objects that i interact with, so too can this be done with my grandmother’s book. it reveals the places that she lived and vacationed°, her pastimes, friends°, and obsessions. it is every bit an autobiography of her life as an actual biography. there is little doubt that the true subject of the book is not four-leaf clovers—it is my grandmother.

the patina of my keyboard

horatio caine could tell you the following through close examination of this picture:

• that the primary language typed on this keyboard is english (most used keys: ADEINOT vs. most frequent english letters: AEINOT).
• that the user of the keyboard hits the space bar exclusively with his/her right thumb.
• Q: are those le petite écolier crumbs between the keys? A: yes.
• that the most used key is left CTRL, indicating that the user is right handed (as well as supremely tech savy).
• that the the primary typist of the keyboard has extremely well-developed abdominal muscles and most likely read the enitre great books of the western world (2nd edition) before the age of puberty.

is keyboard analysis this century’s graphology? see this also.

the last days of ethan a. hitchcock

on 12 march 2002, i bought a pack of monorchid roller micro pens and a label maker. i decided, for reasons uncertain, to name each of the twelve pens after the various secretaries in william mckinley’s cabinet. to date, i have either lost or exhausted all the pens save ethan a. hitchcock:

• attorney general, philander chase knox: was confiscated by a house of lords security guard whose day i made when i told him that none of the house of commons guards had detected it.
• secretary of the interior, cornelious bliss: i used him to sign a good buddy’s marriage certificate. the priest also used it. the bride asked if she could keep it as a memento, noting that her marriage was made official by a pen called bliss.
• secretary of war, elihu root: i took elihu with me on a 66 day hiking trip and used him to write every single journal entry. he held out until the last week. i buried him on the eastern slope of a mountain with a view overlooking a peaceful valley and a patchwork of pinot noir vineyards. he would have wanted it that way.
• secretary of the treasury, lyman gage: was lost forever at some point on a road trip from philly to miami. to this day, nobody knows exactly what happened to him. perhaps a north carolina innkeeper used him to sign checks. perhaps a clerk in savannah is still using him to write letters to friends. perhaps a group of bored youths smashed him to tarry bits long ago.
• secretary of the interior, ethan a. hitchcock: just last night, i noticed his once majestic streams of jet had withered away to graying scratches. he was my grocery list pen, my taking-down-notes-while-on-the-phone pen, my doodling-in-boring-meetings pen, and my goto pen for other inglamorous day-to-day drudgeries. he lasted so long because my use of pens was slowly being outsourced to computers and palm pilots and cell phones—i rarely wrote with him at all in the last few months. while he didn’t go out in a blaze of glory like his colleagues, he is the winner of the mckinley tontine and his final, stately end shall be curlicues on yellow paper on this blog.

this post in memory of ethan a. hitchcock pen (3/12/2002 - 2/24/2009)

a natural bar graph

notes:

1. i’ve been using these pencils on and off since 1992.
2. The y data is naturally labeled.
3. a more correct title would be: “color pencil disuse by color,” though use is a type of disuse.
4. the pencil on the far left (aqua-green) was never used (for reasons that i can’t go into here) and thus makes for a nice control.
5. notice how the most used colors follow this precise order: blues, reds, greens, browns and are all earthtones.
6. i have no explanation for the cluster of warm colors in the middle.
7. i wonder if someone else’s graph would turn out in a similar fashion or if this is a unique fingerprint of the colors that I dig.

UPDATE (1/30/2010): hello there kottke readers (i am one of you)! you may also get a charge out of my other data visualisation posts or my highlight reel of other curious dispatches—[disclaimer: it is also very possible that you could find them tremendously boooooring (extra o’s added for emphasis).] thanks for visiting me. we are friends now.