One of the side-effects of working on any genre of puzzle is that you can put your head into a kind of overdrive on whatever neurons are firing to solve those puzzles. When I was in high school and living with my Dad, we went through a ‘jigsaw puzzle’ period, when there was always some 3,000 piece monster slowly coming together on the dining room table. I got so I would see jigsaw puzzle-piece patterns in everything. Carpets, wallpaper, piles of sand … anything.

I’ve lately been working on the Jumble puzzle to move it into the blog, and again (it ain’t the first time) got into that mode. I woke up at 4AM today with the inspiration that “Albus Dumbledore” is a jumbled version of “A Doubled Slumber”. Hmmm. As I woke up (I’ve been watching zombie movies lately, so going back to sleep isn’t really an option), the letters slid around to “Double Subdermal”.

So call it what you will, but I place great stock in these Jungian inspirations from the subconscious. This confirms my suspicion that we will learn in this final Summer of Harry Potter, that the good wizard is not dead, but like Merlin, simply sleeps again.

Very few people read this blog, or at least, few read and then link to it, which has caused my blog ranking to drop from the low 100,000s to the point where it is now crowding 2,000,000. But my server logs indicate that the site itself is fairly popular, particularly among those looking for one of the puzzle solvers (see sidebar).

To get the blog stats to reflect the reality would mean incorporating the solvers into the blog itself … right now they are mostly standalone PHP applications. But that causes a problem, since WordPress software is itself a PHP application and does not look kindly on interlopers once it is running. But WordPress also supports an army of plugins that can be installed to add blog functionality, and among these I found James van Lommel’s runPHP plugin for WordPress, which allows integration of PHP code into a Post or static blog Page.

So at the top of the page you will now see a tab for the “Jumble” solver, which has now been blogified using runPHP. After a few hassles fixing my crummy database scripting (I think it was my very first attempt at PHP, so I make allowances), the script ran without modification.

So give it a try, and feel free to link to the Jumble page or this post (hint, hint)! Let’s get those blog stats out of the woods of obscurity and back to the comfortable region of the barely known.

This is about the coolest link I’ve found all week: Night of the Living Dead available as a public domain movie on Google Video. Still an amazingly scary movie. The director, George Romero, filmed the original movie near Pittsburgh, and many of my father’s friends in the local advertising business joined in the production as extras (although to this day I’ve never recognized any of them in their zombie make-up!) The little girl zombie was played by Kyra Schon, who sat next to me in Mr. Yoder’s 11th grade biology class at Peabody High School in Pittsburgh. (No trouble staying awake in THAT class.)

There is a good Wikipedia entry about the movie, its many sequels and spin-offs. Although it indicates Romero felt he was ripped-off when the original fell into the public domain due to an oversight of the original production company, it’s become one of the most downloaded films on the Google site, and that has to be good fuel for the recent sequels ‘Land of the Dead’ and the upcoming ‘Diary of the Dead’ that Romero is creating.

I watched ‘Land of the Dead’ on DVD recently. Each of Romero’s zombie movies reflect a social commentary and this latest has a fun observation of the Bush years. In order to distract the zombies while they loot the countryside, agents of the rich men they work for shoot off fireworks, and the zombies stare at them, mesmerized. But as the movie progresses, a sort of understanding of what is happening emerges among the undead, and by the end of the movie, the fireworks don’t work so well anymore

Just a few links today. At lunch Wednesday, however these things come up, I found myself talking about the Chudnovsky Brothers, featured in the New Yorker magazine profile, “The Mountains of Pi“, about the parallel processing computer built in Gregory Chudnovsky’s West Side apartment (from spare parts and Home Depot supplies) to calculate digits of Pi.

The article I was referring to, however, was the more recent project they took on knitting together high-resolution digital photographs of the Unicorn tapestries at The Cloisters. There is an excellent multimedia resource on the Nova site that discusses this project and the brothers themselves. The 10-minute Quicktime segment is really well done. The New Yorker piece was well done too, but as usual, the entry has vanished off their rather densely commercialized site, and I can’t find a copy anywhere.