h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>> Gaol is a spelling I never encountered until fairly recently <<

It was carved in stone over the arched doorway of
one of Halifax's (Nova Scotia) oldest buildings.

I first saw it when I was about seven or eight and
always thought it was some strange Gaelic name.
There's a wee bit of Gaelic here. Safely ignored.

By then c1952 the building was incorporated into a
Uni campus and used as an engineering laboratory
with no obvious sign of its having been a prison
other than the massive stones of its structure which
were fairly common in that old part of town.

It took years, well into my twenties before I ever
encountered it in print or understood what it meant.
How surprised I was to finally hear it pronounced
as 'jail' and learn the history of the building.

I tried to find a photo online and discovered this
nostalgic bit of footage of the old downtown from
1945. You may notice a blind accordion player busking
in the doorway of the Woolworth store. He was still
there in the mid 50s when I was a kid. Later in the
late 60s or early 70s, when he died at his winter home
in Florida it was revealed that he was not blind and
had been earning between 30 and 50 thousand a year,
an outrageous sum for a 'beggar' in those days.
If folks had known he'da ended up in the slammer.
Notice too the 'dancing' traffic cop.

http://youtu.be/RP_mS5WDApY


~jwf~

How many people in that film would end up in GAOL today? So many unattended children. Their parents would be locked up for child endangerment. More importantly, the photographer, himself, would be in the clink for "Inappropriate photography". Surely only a pedophile takes images of children.

I'm being a bit facetious, of course, but these thoughts did occur to me. I find it very disconcerting that there even has to be a "free range children" movement or that photograghing children in public is automatically cause for suspicion of vile perversion.

But I digress.

>> But I digress <<

We all do.
And I have to carry on with this topic now
because I am always fascinated by variations in
perspective and perception.

I have looked at the film again and am conscious
how I sorta saw myself as a child in the streets
of Halifax and gave it no further thought. It was
a much freer time in a city that was always safe.
The movie theaters, the library, the Public Gardens
are all nearby and I frequented these streets often.

But on reflection there are a couple of points worth
noting which you would not be aware. The film appears
to be some family's home movie or a school teacher's
recording of a field trip to the city from a rural area
(Hants County) about 50 miles out.

There is at least one young boy who appears several times,
probably a family member enjoying the visit to the big city.
That they had a movie camera in 1945 says a lot about their
financial and social status which might also explain their
sense of liberty in the post war era.

To that I must add that most of the scenes are along the main
commercial downtown street and the other children were likely
going to or from a nearby school and probably lived in the
residential streets just a block or two away. I see some girls
with school books clasped to their ample young bosoms.

Also...
unseen on a nearby corner is a large Catholic Cathedral called
St Mary's Basilica which had an attached Boys School run by
Jesuits for many decades. The only Catholic school in a mostly
Protestant town it had hundreds of students.

So, in a way, you can rest assured the other young boys you
in the film see were much, much safer in the streets than they
would have been at that school.


~jwf~

Well, that's sort of my point. I never thought these children were in danger. I was just commenting on our culture of fear.

I was a "free range" child before that term was coined. In my day, I was what was referred to as a "latchkey kid". I was the last to leave the house. I'd ride my bike or walk the mile to school. I was the first to get home. (Hence the "latchkey" hanging from a string around my neck.) My sister followed shortly after and it was often at least an hour or more before the first parent arrived home. And this was all perfectly acceptable in the 70's. It was OK to give children a bit of responsibility and we didn't fear every stranger.


Anyhoo...


Oh, I looked up the spelling. It's "Hoosegow". Etymology has it derived from the Spanish, jusgado for a court of judges.

Also, has anyone mentioned Calaboose?

How 'bout Slammer?

Hoosegow! Thank you.
Spanish, eh.
Probably why it was used is so many westerns
usually spoken by some toothless old-timer,
prospector or town drunk of the Festus genre.

And yeah, I used slammer in my rant about
the not-really-blind accordion busker who
might have been jailed for fraud if he'd
ever been found out. It's in the last sentence;
my feeble attempt to stay on topic at the end
of a sidey-ways rambling.



~jwf~

Ok the penultimate sentence, I'd added
the dancing (dodging) traffic cop as an
afterthought.

~jwf~

OK... referring to one of your posts from another thread (Where did you come from...)


From Red Dwarf: Stasis.

Stasis as a jail sentence, mmm, yes.


William Shatner (Canadian) used chryo-stasis as
the standard form of incarceration in 'Tek Wars'.

Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes came out of
deep freeze to heat up Sandra Bullock in 'Demolition Man'

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106697/

But up here in Canada we just call it winter.
And many of us just hibernate.
We are a hibernation.


~jwf~

Well, specifically, I was thinking about Red Dwarf. That's the main pretext of the story. Lister was sentenced to 18 months in stasis for bringing an unauthorized pet on board (Cat) when there was a radiation leak killing the crew.

Her Majesty's Hotel...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFYawv1KV4k

...and one of Australia's hidden treasures Cold Chisel

I've come across the word "hoosegow" precisely twice.

Once in the context of: "Low brow but I rock a little knowhow. No time for the piggies or the hoosegow". Points if you don't need to google that. No more clues, I don't want to give it away

The other context was in the late eighties I learned to use one of the early Macintosh computers, and specifically to do word processing using MacWrite (I think). This was at a time when PC word processors were DOS based. On the screen, there was a black background with just the one font, no bold, italics or underlines etc., no different sizes or justification. You had control over these things, and various control codes gave you some idea of how it might look on the page, but in reality the only way to know for sure was to actually print it out. MacWrite was revolutionary in that it showed you a white piece of paper on the screen the size of the page you were going to use, and showed you just what was going to be printed on it. It's hard to convey just how shockingly amazing this seemed at the time. And there was a word for it - an acronym for the concept of What You See Is What You Get. WYSIWYG. Now... bear in mind that this concept was the central, incredible, by far and away most important feature of MacWrite.

But when you typed the word "WYSIWYG" into MacWrite and did a spellcheck... it didn't recognise it. This omission from its dictionary was baffling enough, but what really tipped it over into offical WTF? territory was the word it came up with as a suggestion for what it thought you were trying to type: hoosegow.

I don't know much about programming. I mostly do engineering stuff, calculating flows or stresses or reaction kinetics or relatively straightforward stuff like that. I don't know jack about semantic processing or language analysis. But I'm struggling to even *imagine* the algorithm that can look at the letters WYSIWYG and come to the conclusion that what you meant was HOOSEGOW. What was even more baffling was that most of the time the suggestions were pretty good - there was just this bizarre, isolated anomaly.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.

I remember (also from the 1980s) that Oracle had a soundalike function which we could use to find, say, similarly-sounding names in a list from the one the user typed. The algorithm was to convert a word into a 4-character string with (if I remember correctly) the first letter of the word followed by 3 digits (each 0-9). Each number indicated a group of similarly-sounding consonants, so, for example, S, C and K may have been grouped together (maybe it was code "0"), B and P may have been code "1", etc. Vowels were ignored, and the algorithm only coded the first three consonants after the opening letter.

So, "Hitchhiker" may have been coded as H123, encoding the groups for the letters T, C and H (if these are in distinct groups).

You could then use this algorithm to list any other words in the list which also encoded to H123. For example, it might list Hutchinson, Hatchett, Hotshot, etc.

Doesn't explain yours particularly, unless your algorithm coded W and H together, and ignored the opening letter, or whatever.

This is off-topic really but the comment about sewing mailbags made me think of it.

I don't know if this is true but I really hope it is.

One of the main occupations of the prisoners at the main prison in New Hampshire is making numberplates. As you may know each US state has its own, state-specific numberplates with the state motto on them. What's the state motto of New Hampshire? Oh yes, 'Live free or die'.

It probably is true. There's a fair amount of government related industry in prisons for things like license plates, furniture, etc. Some prisons are engaged in agriculture to help defray costs of feeding inmates.

The prison where former cops and governmental officials go in Georgia apparently raises blue berries. An older jail officer told me that was how he identified them when they wee brought back to jail for court. Their fingers would be stained blue.

New Hampshire is a weird and wonderful place. It's a magnet for eccentricity.

Oh yes... good old slaves... I mean prison labor.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/06/prison-labor-pads-corporate-profits-taxpayers-expense

Yes, this policy of renting out prisoners for work
in private enterprises is becoming epidemic.

I heard recently that over a million prisoners are
currently engaged - even as the unemployment
rate remains above 10 million Americans.

The idea at first was just that states or the Feds
could employ prisoners but now many large corps
are taking advantage of this cheap labour at rates
well below third whirled countries.

Just yesterday I heard NASA was using prisoners to
assemble special components to assist the 'private
enterprises' contracted to build the new generation
of spaceships.


~jwf~

Building their own disportation vessels?
Where are they going this time? Outsailria?



But anyway, has anyone mentioned Jankers?

From an inmate management perspective, you need to keep them occupied or they'll be sitting around thinking up ways to cause trouble. I don't wee the harm in inmates making license plates, government furniture, or growing their own food.