Data haunts me. I don’t know why … but it commands me to try to sort it out and figure out what it is trying to tell me. I rarely do. Usually an eight-year-old wanders into the room, looks at the multiple spreadsheets open on the main display, eyes the three Perl scripts puttering away on the backup PC, and then tosses in an accurate assessment of the probable conclusion along with a request for a Coke.

Luckily, the resident geniuses are long off to bed, so consider this. There would be no serious objection to the assumption that the Mallo Cup (by Boyer) is the premier candy for us huddled masses yearning to breathe free. I am a long time fan of the Mallo Cup, although I only recently learned that they have been manufactured (why is it that you eat food that is cooked, but candy that is manufactured?) in a factory in Altoona, PA, along a highway I regularly travelled going from Pittsburgh to Penn State and back.

Along with its magical cheap chocolate, marshmallow center, and cocoanut accents, the Mallo Cup offers its own fake money. Fake money that it seems has been being printed with the same mimeograph machine since the Dawn of Time, that shows a ‘coin’ (worth 5, 10, 25 or 50 points), and an address where you can send in your collected coins for valuable prizes as well as request a catalogue of the treasures available.

The catalogue is actually one side of a glossy 8.5×11″ brochure showing 10 prizes: a $1.00 rebate check, coffee mug, tin of Mallo Cups, canvas tote bag, baseball cap, youth or adult t-shirts or sweatshirts, and a quartz wristwatch.

Based on a collection of 12 coins (not statistically meaningful, but what about this is, exactly?) you’ll average about 25 points per $0.75 Mallo Cup package. Among the prizes offered, the worst deals are the rebate check and coffee mug … at their stated retail values, they can be ‘purchased’ with points at an exchange rate of $0.002 per point (1/5 of a cent). The best value is the Adult sweatshirt, with an exchange rate of $0.0034 per point.

Unfortunately, to get sufficient points for your sweatshirt, you have to buy (and presumably eat) $150 worth of Mallo Cups. After which the sweatshirt is unlikely to fit.

The title of this post is the answer to the question, “Do you spell your name with a V, Herr Wagner?”, the punchline to a joke my parents used to tell, although I don’t know its provenance. But I’ve been thinking about it since finishing “V.”, by Thomas Pynchon, just in time for my book club meeting. What a workout. I think I hold the current record for “Number of times starting ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ without finishing”, and this Pynchon-esque experience has been entirely consistent with that. Thanks to an essay supplied by a friend, I discovered that in my flailing to figure out what this book intends to be, I managed to correctly identify A) a theme about society moving to a tipping point of unrecoverable disorder and, B) the contrasting theme of interpreting this same phenomena from the point of view on the hub of Fortuna’s Wheel. After that, all that I managed to spot were four instances where the screenplay from ‘Buckaroo Banzai: Across the Eighth Dimension’ pays homage to the book. Otherwise I am utterly lost. This book seems devoted to the noble calling of giving young artists and dissertation-hunting graduate students something to work with, but it fails as enjoyable reading … or I fail as a competent reader. Right now I’m too tired of the damn thing to really care.

I also managed, almost in desperation, to read the first Brother Cadfael mystery by Ellis Peters (”A Morbid Taste for Bones”). This was the second of these mysteries that I’ve read (and I think a third lurks down in the book basket somewhere). A very enjoyable book, although I thought the ending was fairly contrived, depending on the modern tendency to think of medieval people as hopelessly ignorant and gullible, and that requirement works directly against the premise the author builds for her protagonist through the rest of the book. It’s a paradox, but also the first book in the series. We’ll assume they get better.

THE SITE has undergone a few changes: all of the puzzle solvers have made the transition over to the new design now, and it is a generally good effect, I think. They all continue to draw pretty good traffic … the Jumble and Word Mining pages get most of the attention, although people do play with the Sudoku, Cryptogram, and Scramble Squares pages too. I finally realized that the Sudoku page was working with an older (and often much more difficult) set of puzzles than what we’re using on The Puzzle Machine, so I’ve pointed that page the The Puzzle Machine’s database instead.

And Quantum Economics (weren’t we just talking about that?) Barb mentioned an experience visiting some Aztec ruins in Mexico during the off-season. With the diminished crowds, they were easy marks as tourists, and were quickly set upon by a group of street merchants trying to sell souveniers. She and her husband started to walk away, but the vendors followed them and Barb noticed that the shouted prices seemed to be getting lower. They then began to run flat out in an attempt to make the hotel, but the vendors kept pace and the prices began to plummet. It is like applying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to economics … you can either know how much something costs, or how fast it is moving, but it is difficult to know both at the same time.