The New Testament Gateway is ``your comprehensive, up to date, annotated directory of good academic New Testament internet resources,'' including various Bible translations and editions.
Territorians (a/k/a ``Top Enders'') are not disenfranchised at the national level: they elect one member of Australia's House of Representatives, and two Senators. Over the years, culminating in 1974-1978, increased self-rule was granted the territory by the national government, but with some reservations. NT since 1978 has been governed by a Legislative Assembly headed by a Chief Minister. This functions substantially like the government of a state, but its powers are statutory rather than constitutional: it exercises powers that the national government delegates to it by law. In 1995, NT passed a law legalizing euthanasia (the ROTTI Act). Australia's national legislature nullified that law early in 1997 -- something it would not have had authority to do if NT had been a state.
In March 1996, John Howard led Australia's Liberal Party (the main conservative party) to victory in legislative elections and became prime minister. In May, his government unveiled a plan under which NT could become a state by 2001, if the terms were approved by a referendum of Territorians. The terms included a representation of only 3 rather than the usual 12 senators, in consideration of NT's tiny population (about 200,000 in 2005, as opposed to 5 and more than 6 million for Victoria and NSW, the largest states). That September, NT's Country-Liberal Party (CLP, aligned with the national Liberal Party) won its sixth successive election victory, increasing its share of seats in the NT Legislative Assembly at the expense of the Australian Labor Party (sic).
Chief Minister Shane Stone touted his party's increased strength among Aboriginal voters, who constitute a quarter of the territory's population, and claimed this demonstrated Aboriginal support for proposed Liberal plans regarding something called Native Title. (If you're interested in this, see the Wikipedia article on the Wik Peoples v. Queensland decision of the High Court of Australia.) However, all public analyses seemed based on election-over-election returns in districts with large Aboriginal populations. There didn't seem to be any exit polling data, and the limited voting data was subject to varying interpretations. (For example, it was argued that in many districts, the main movement of Aboriginal votes was from Labor to independent candidates.)
The current version of the coat of arms of Australia, granted in 1912, includes a picture of a kangaroo of some sort. That seal appears on the homepage of the High Court. Now where was I?
Following Howard's initiative, Chief Minister Stone pressed on toward statehood. Pressed very hard, in fact. He convened a constitutional convention, with members apparently hand-picked by himself; in drafting a state constitution, that convention basically threw out years of bipartisan committee work in the Legislative Assembly. This performance evidently left a very poor taste, and many Aboriginal voters are believed to have concluded that a state government could not be trusted to protect their rights. In the end, the statehood referendum was defeated.
NT is referred to loosely as a ``state'' in about the same way that the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are in the US, for want of an inclusive term that is more accurate. (This is done mostly implicitly with the plural: ``state [political] conventions'' may be understood to include Puerto Rico's; ``presidential electors from the various states'' is a loose way to say ``presidential electors from the various states and the District of Columbia.'')
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- ``No Trump.'' A person of measured habits, deliberative and slow to adopt new fangled things. Has eaten the same break fast for 30 years. Dresses in earth tones, which is just as well because the clothes are washed with soap flakes and a wash board.
- ``Notrump.'' A slave of fashion, but a person of poor personalgrooming habits. A victim of lastconversation. Oneday, this person may pay money for personalcompanionship. Bigbrotheriswatching.
- ``No-Trump.'' An insecure-nervous person. Wears belt-and-suspenders; underwear always-clean. Walks cat at the end of kevlar-reinforced-chain.
- ``No-Trumps.'' A pretentious fake-ancestries Anglophile. Always uses Acol system. Wears an itchy bespoke ascot acquired on Savile Row.
- ``Sans atout.'' An eater of fresh cheese that doesn't smell that way. Wears a tee-shirt with broad horizontal stripes, and a beret, sans doute.
- ``Trump-negative.'' A physician-wannabe. Wears surgical scrubs to church. Also bridge-negative.
- ``No Trump!'' Wears expensive shoes from back when. Is Marla Maples!
This is just an introduction. Expert players well versed (or well-versed, etc.) in orthographology can infer an entire family history.
In the mid 1980's, NTA was acquired by film partners who renamed it Republic Pictures. There were clearly two reasons why they did this:
- Republic had been a grand name in pictures before its demise in 1957.
- Every year or two in the life of any but the largest media
organization, there must be a major merger or acquisition, probably one
that reverses a previous, equally brilliant business move. If a new
name were used every time this happened, it would be tedious but
straightforward to follow the ins and outs. In order to make the
situation as confusing as possible, it is necessary to
- use similar-sounding names,
- use the names inconsistently, and
- reuse the same names for unrelated companies whenever possible.
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``NTCA is a national association representing more than 550 small and rural independent local exchange carriers providing telecommunications services throughout rural America.''
Simple absorption of a neutron only changes the isotope, and not the chemical species. However, the cross section can be significant for n(AZ,A+1Z+1)e- transmutation.
Now I think of it, I was probably going to scrape out the content of this entry and completely remodel it as an NPT entry, but then I got distracted or something. Definitely something.
In early April of 2001, but not on the first, President George W. Bush told reporters that he no longer uses email because the White House doesn't have access to techies who could rig up a reliable security scheme. (He didn't state it in precisely these words.) NTI is not the sort of acronym one would readily associate with this administration.
Back during the cold war, when people spent more time thinking about the effects of setting off atomic weapons, both the US and the USSR were described as having enough megatonnage to destroy the other side some silly-sounding number of times over. (That's if you just aim for breadth, and don't care that you haven't destroyed hardened silos with that all-important retaliatory capability.) Anyway, the standard expression for this many-times over capability was ``making the rubble bounce.''
More at video encoding. Cf. the similar PAL and radically different SECAM.
One student testimonial on the website:
As an environmental science student, I love being at a university where we are in direct contact with the environment.
Remember the Beach Boys' lyric ``two girls for every boy''? NU's enrollment is 70% female. But shop around, there are probably lots of schools with numbers even more skewed.
Here's a paragraph from George Moore's Confessions of a Young Man (the 1904 edition; Moore was born in 1852), p. 129.
Fancy, a banquet was given to Julien by his pupils! He made a speech in favour of Lefebvre, and hoped that every one there would vote for Lefebvre. Julien was very eloquent. He spoke of Le grand art, le nu, and Lefebvre's unswerving fidelity to le nu ... elegance, refinement, an echo of ancient Greece: and then,--what do you think? when he had exhausted all the reasons why the medal of honour should be accorded to Lefebvre, he said, ``I ask you to remember, gentlemen, that he has a wife and eight children.'' Is it not monstrous?
So nu? What did you expect? It's got some nu and something about ancient Greece; ``in favour of Lefebvre'' is just gravy.
As it happens, however, Hebrew has a word nu that also means `well' in the requisite sense. Often one can tell the etymology of a word by the spelling, since different rules apply for words of Hebrew and non-Hebrew origin, but that doesn't work here (the same spelling applies: nun vav). It seems, however, that Yiddish nu lacks the elementary temporal sense (`now') of the German homonym, so it is probably from Hebrew.
The reason the Canadian postal service originally opposed using NU as postal code was that nu is a French word meaning `naked.' (In Spanish, naked is desnudo -- something like a cognate of denuded. I'm sure this reflects something deep and important about the difference between French and Spanish cultures, but I haven't the time to stop and pay out the line of argument. You're on your own until I get back.) You know, along Grape Road in nearby Mishawaka (nearby to me), there's a store that sells -- in full view of traffic -- ``naked furniture.'' I always get aroused when I drive by. I suppose the same thing happens to Frenchmen (especially lesbian Frenchmen) when they think about les Nations Unies. [You shouldn't feel bad if you don't get that joke. I wrote it, and even I don't get it anymore.] Canada Post was initially leaning toward NN, but wasn't planning to bring the Secretary General up on charges of international double entendre.
That reminds me of an article I read in the 1980's, on vanity license plates. In one US state it turned out they were mindlessly excluding letter sequences on the basis of a list. They didn't bother to make up their own list; they borrowed a Canadian list that was handy. So in Oregon or wherever it was, you couldn't get a license plate with NDP on it, because the government (Canadian, in this case) didn't want members of the New Democratic Party of Canada making political statements on their licence plates.
Here's something: on Lincoln's birthday, 2002, a group called Marmoset released an album entitled Mishawaka (a CD EP with eight songs) through the record company Secretly Canadian (SC, not SC!). Marmoset is a three-piece band from Indianapolis, Indiana, which is about three hours' drive south of Mishawaka, Indiana. After all that free publicity, they won't mind if I point out that the music sounds like an air hammer and knocked off my Quicktime plug-in. Hmmm, maybe we should try that again. Okay, it sounds like 1966 protopsychedelic beginner-guitarist rock, just a tad heavy on the echo effect. According to their label, their ``tunes evoke the same sort of claustrophobic mood that Syd Barrett and Big Star created in their respective world corners a few decades ago, but with a subtle post-punk consciousness which is the distinguisher that separates Marmoset from such idyllic peers as Belle & Sebastian and Badly Drawn Boy,'' eh?
Verbatim excerpt from their history:
It was decided that NUCCA should publish a more scientifically-oriented paper and the name NUCCA News was changed to The Monograph, meaning "learned treatise on a particular subject" and proposed by Dr. Seemann.
The word nuclide was coined to replace isotope in its broad sense. That is, an isotope was originally a nuclear species (with a particular Z and A) having the same atomic number (Z) as another nuclear species. Almost as soon as the ink was dry on the paper that introduced isotope, the word came to be used in situations where a smart-ass could ask ``the same Z as what other nuclear species?'' The answer to this could be (in order of increasing eloquence)
- ``I just mean `isotope' in the sense of some nuclear species characterized by a particular Z and A.''
- ``The same Z as any other nuclear species that has the same atomic number.''
- A piece of radiation shielding across the jaw.
I guess eloquence has its disadvantages, so someone (who certainly deserves no fame for this) came up with the word nuclide for the broad sense of isotope. It's an awkword -- which is a neologism more deserving of existence. It should be nucleide, but it isn't. ``New Clyde,'' yuck.
Oh no -- it's worse than that! It was created to fill another perceived semantic hole than the one it eventually tripped into. Here, straight from the horse's journal article:
There is at present no word in the English language to express the concept of a particular species of atom, differing from all others in the constitution of its nucleus.... Nuclear species and the German Kernsorte... refer to nuclei rather than to atoms.... In recent years the word isotope has come into use for this purpose, less by design than by default.... Evidently a new word is required, and nuclide is proposed.... The new word and its derivatives should be used in such expressions as ``stable nuclides'' and ``nuclidic weight.''This proposal was made by T.P. Kohman in 1947 in the American Journal of Physics. AJP is an often interesting journal, but it's basically for physics pedagogy ideas. It's not a journal for making serious proposals regarding scientific practice, and sure enough, Kohman's wasn't.
A particular AAA entry in this glossary mentions an alumnus who has made a name for himself. NUHS offers a D.C. degree as well as a BS in Human Biology.
In the C programming language, strings are
null-terminated arrays of characters. In Microsoft's ``Hungarian'' convention (abandoned
around 2004 or so) for variable naming, strings are typically prefixed with
str or sz. The second prefix is utterly strange and
totally unmotivated (and I can't understand why I even mention it at this
particular entry). Therefore it's pretty hard to remember, so here's a
mnemonic: in the Hungarian language, the letter
ess represents an esh sound (the sound usually
written sh in English), whereas the letter sequence
sz represents the ess sound that occurs at the beginning of the
English word string. In fact, the English word has been borrowed into
Hungarian in the restricted sense of `character string' (karakter
sorozat), with the Magyarized spelling sztring (plural
sztringek, equiv. karakter sorozatok). Suddenly you realize that
all these years you've been mispronouncing paprikas. (Unless you've
been misspelling it.)
Other languages:
In C++, there is also a string class. In Polish, the
orthographic convention is closer to ours: ess sound is represented by the
letter ess, and esh by sz. So you can think of the Hungarian
convention as ``reverse Polish.''
Most definitions of nulliparous use the word birth, and as typically understood, that's probably precise enough. But hearken unto me.
In Act IV, Sc. i, of Shakespeare's ``Macbeth,'' Macbeth seeks career advice in a witches' cavern. A first apparition warns him against Macduff, the thane of Fife. The second apparition is a bloody child. This apparition gives Macbeth the following encouragement:
Be bloody, bold, and resolute; laugh to scorn
The power of man, for none of woman born
Shall harm Macbeth.
In Act V, Macbeth repeatedly brags (Scc. vii, viii) that he has nothing to fear from any man of woman born, as if he had nothing to fear of any man. When he says this to Macduff, he replies thus:
Despair thy charm;
And let the angel whom thou still hast served
Tell thee, Macduff was from his mother's womb
Untimely ripp'd.
The word birth was borrowed by Old English from some other Germanic language, but it is cognate with the verb bear, which goes back to Proto-Indo-European. It is not certain which came first: the sense of `carry' or the sense of `bring forth fruit or offspring.' In a definition of nulliparous, ``bearing children'' would normally be meant in the second sense.
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Nun buoys are often made by joining two metal cones in a bicone, so they have conical bottoms as well as tops. In US and Canadian waters they're usually painted red, and in UK waters they're usually painted green, so try to remember where you are. Maybe this has something to do with which side you drive on when you disembark.
The best-known Latin news service, that of the Finnish Broadcasting Company (YLE), is a weekly news review entitled Nuntii Latini.
On the web, there's a weekly page of current news in Latin called Ephemeris.
Radio Bremen has a monthly (except July) news review in Latin, as text and audio, archived back to October 2001. There are some associated Hilfe, like glosses for unusual or nonclassical words, a German translation, and a discussion forum. (They also have daily news in Plattdeutsch, text and audio. Daily Turkish text also, but that's nothing unusual.)
I don't think there's much I could add to increase the entertainment value of this entry. Cf. NAHT.
Did you know that peanuts are also known as groundnuts? They grow underground, but they're not roots.
I'm reminded of a scene in one of the old movies about the Battle of the Bulge. ``Nuts!'' was the famous reply of Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe to a German ultimatum demanding surrender, and there is a nice bit of puzzlement when this is literally translated for the German commanders as ``Nüsse.'' (The movie, I can't seem to dig out which one, obviously fills in some unknown detail and adjusts some known detail. It seems quite certain that ``Nuts!'' was the text of the reply sent, and various first-person accounts gave that as the word he used, but in an interview in 1954, McAuliffe said that the word he uttered was shit. A Wikipedia entry for the Battle of Bastogne claims that ``the German translator interpreted the reply as `Go to hell!' '' This isn't much help, since the expression ``geh' zur Hölle'' wasn't used in German; it seems to have been borrowed since then. Provisional clarification, according to a New York Sun editorial: ``When asked what it meant, Col. James Harper replied, `In plain English it means go to hell.' '')
The NUTS is somewhat unsystematically systematic. The basic problem is that it's basically pretty functional, so it will need to be rationalized and improved at some point.
It's an EU thing. Vinny Burgoo explained why in an alt.usage.english posting: ``It would be no exaggeration to say that without NUTS there could be no European Union as we know it. You will find NUTS...''
If you're not specifically interested in waging undersea warfare (USW) or contracting to have a flipper in it, then you might be more interested in the Naval Undersea Warfare Center Newport Weather Server.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for Nevada. USACityLink.com has a page with a few city and town links for the state. There's a State of Nevada Home Page, but it is probably too informative to meet the exacting standards usacity.com applies before it will list it.
Nevada is a community property state.
(jk)
It's been a few years now, and it's not so new any more. I guess that's why now I more often see it called vCJD (q.v.).
Northwest.com is a tourism site for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. Northwest Airlines (see NWA) is at <www.nwa.com>.
The state's area is 47,611 sq. km. Its population was 7,162,000 by the census of 1987, estimated at 7,832,000 for 1997. The capital is Düsseldorf.
It must not require any brains to get out of bankruptcy. How can we have any ``creative destruction'' if Northwest is allowed to continue flying and dragging the industry down to a ground-effect level? Oh, here's something: during the last ten days of June 2007, Northwest canceled 1000 flights due to crew shortages. Anyway, this at least does not immediately drag down the rest of the industry. In fact, United reported a gratifying (to them, anyway) boost in expensive last-minute bookings during June.
You'd suppose lacking crews for 1000 flights is something NWA could have foreseen, but it reflected a new situation. Travel volumes are higher than average during the Summer, and airlines rely on pilots' volunteering to fly extra hours in order to make up the staffing shortage. In a new labor contract negotiated when NWA was in Chapter 11, however, pilots' maximum flight time increased to 90 hours a month, up from 80. I haven't got all the details straight, but apparently the airline can't simply schedule the pilots for hours in excess of the monthly 80 -- pilots have some right of refusal. The extra hours are also apparently compensated at the regular rate, rather than an overtime rate. During June, the airline scheduled pilots for between 88 and 90 hours (no, I don't know what that means in detail). The upshot is that pilots quietly rebelled. The airline has since been making both short- and long-term adjustments. The principal short-term adjustment has been to reduce scheduled August flights by 4%. At the end of July, NWA had to cancel flights again.
To get back to the logo: it takes various forms. There's a close-up form suitable for small icons, showing only the upper-left quadrant of the circle and the downward-pointing red arrow, and there's a full form which has the NWA initialism in lower case extending from the middle of the circle to outside right.
NWA is the stock ticker symbol for the company, but they could use something else as the short written form of their name, or they could change their name. Some people think that the coincidence of their name with that of the defunct rap group N.W.A. is unfortunate, but its fans and former members don't seem to be bothered. Googling shows why: even today (June 29, 2007) a search on rap and NWA yields 1,250,000 ghits, while air and NWA yields 1,140,000 ghits, even though N.W.A. stopped recording as a group ten years before the airline first entered bankruptcy. Quite obviously, N.W.A. was simply too prominent for the airline to have had any impact on its brand.
NWA continues to partner with KLM, and I continue to be unafraid to write single-sentence paragraphs.
![[Image: n-doping LCAO-like picture]](images/tokuyasu-mirror/phosdope.gif)
N-type doping by phosphorus is illustrated above by a simple microscopic schematic, with a kind of LCAO implicit.
When an organization with ``National'' in its name decides to become aggressively ``international,'' it typically changes its name, or forgets the expansion of its acronym or something. It's easy to guess why the National Women's Register didn't do this: name-change fatigue. (Well, I didn't say it was easy to guess correctly!)
It all began with a letter to the editor of the (then Manchester) Guardian by Maureen Nicol (in response to some article or other by Betty Jerman). (Yes, definitely the other.) She wrote:
Perhaps housebound wives with liberal interests and a desire to remain individuals could form a national register so that whenever one moves one can contact like-minded friends?
That was in February 1960, about three centuries ago in sociologists' years. Nicol was instantly inundated with registrants, eager to put the years of Eisenhower complacency and conformist domesticity behind them. (Except they weren't aware of it, since this was England and Eisenhower was president in the US.) Nicol founded the Liberal-minded Housebound Wives' Register, soon changing the name to a more wieldy the Housebound Wives' Register. It sounds like the quarantine list for contagious uxorial paraplegia (CUPS). In 1966 it became the National Housewives' Register (NHR). In 1987 it became National Women's Register, and most of the office furniture was instantly filled with high-bond ``scrap paper'' -- three different kinds of obsolete letterhead paper to write on the back of. In 1995, Maureen Nicol was awarded the OBE (or was it an OBE?) in Queen's Birthday honors, for her services to women (viz.: founding what became NWR).
A union for freelance writers working in US markets.
The Villanova University Law School provides some links to state government web sites for New York. USACityLink.com has a page with mostly city and town links for the state.
New York is called ``Nueva York'' in Spanish and ``Nova Iorque'' in Portuguese. For too much on a geographically adjacent subject, see the comments on Nueva Jersey at the NJ entry. The female gender assigned to York by the Iberian languages is slightly puzzling (just a little bit). The English name is derived from the Latin Eboracum. This neuter name and its direct etymons would normally be assigned male gender in western Romance languages, but the connection is evidently too tenuous. Conceivably, the female gender was assigned to avoid the o-i-o sound of ``Neuvo York.'' Possibly it just fell out that way essentially at random, and usage confirmed it.
New York State was settled primarily by classical scholars. As a result,
we have towns named after Cato,
Cicero,
Ovid. We have
a Native American tribe that call themselves the Seneca,
and we have the towns of Rome (with a
military base), Syracuse, and Ithaca. This is off the top of
my head, I'll add stuff ad libitum. Okay, actually, a lot of the
naming was done by one or two Columbia College professors shortly after the
Revolutionary War (which changed the name of King's College to Columbia; see
King's entry for a bit more on that).
Strictly speaking, it's half an octet, but as its name and basic arithmetic suggest, it's not very meaningful in systems that don't use a byte equal to an octet.
Home town of Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), a painter of charmingly folksy pastoral reminiscences and a man authorities now suspect of having been an artist (the allegations are false). Rockwell, a high school drop-out at fifteen, attended the National Academy of Design and later the Art Students League, both in NYC. At age twenty-one he moved to New Rochelle, later moving to Vermont and finally settling in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
In Spanish, New York (usually the city) is called Nueva York. Cf. NJ.
I suspect the ``creative'' accounting involved is common in the, uh, entertainment-product industry. In book publishing, for example, cost computations include a share of overhead that individual authors of less popular titles (i.e., authors of most books) often regard as unfair. Advertising costs are a particular source of resentment, since much of the assessed expenditure is for the pay and expenses of house reps. These costs are nominally similar for all books, but the advertising that gets noticed -- the print advertisements in general-circulation magazines and newspapers -- is feast or famine (for the authorial stars and mice, respectively).
There is also a New York Giants
football franchise. If I happen to see that abbreviated NYG, and if I ever
decide to put the bitter memory of the 1990 SB behind
me, in this or some future lifetime, then maybe they'll get their own entry
here.
There's more -- the sign continued YOU'LL LOVE THEM SO MUCH WE'LL TAKE $5 OFF. I guess if I don't like them they'll charge me extra. That sounds like socially responsible merchandising, of a form that makes obvious why social responsibility is incompatible with a classical free market in the long run.
Wouldn't it be a lot more effective if they were all forced to join the Stammtisch Beau Fleuve, which is already dedicated to communication and action [research] and lunch?
The New York Times has a website, but its registration procedure is asinine and intrusive, if it works at all. I wrote a letter complaining that they didn't need the personal information they were asking for, and got a reply back that was either insulting because it was stupid, or insulting because the writer thought I was stupid. Try The Drudge Report first. Hmmm. I checked back since the WTC atrocity, and they've stopped patting down visitors. Either that, or I have a cookie that reminds them of whichever imaginary demographic I told their registration form I belong to. I remember at one time they wouldn't even accept registrations from Canada. They must have had a surprising number of registrations from zip code 90210.
In 1998, the New York Times celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its (Tuesday) Science Times feature. At least its articles are not guaranteed to contain a serious blunder, like the technology articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education (CHE).
The Princeton Review conducts an annual survey of college applicants and parents of college applicants. In addition to various MC questions, there is a single fill-in-the-blank question: ``What `dream college' would you most like to attend (or see your child attend) were prospects of acceptance or cost not issues?'' (They must have put a lot of thought into the wording of this question, in order to recognize that prospect of acceptance is an issue that might affect which school one might dream of attending. I haven't figured it out yet myself. For a price, the Princeton Review will prepare you to understand these and simpler conundra, so you can ace your standardized tests and go to NYU. Give'em credit for the question's contrary-to-fact subjunctive, anyway.)
In 2006, NYU came out as the first choice of the applicants. This surprised me. Look at the list of the top ten and identify the one that clearly doesn't belong.
- NYU
- Harvard
- Princeton
- Stanford
- Yale
- Brown
- Columbia
- Duke
- Cornell
- UCLA
That's right: UCLA is the only public institution listed. (BTW, NYU didn't make the top-10 list of parents' dream schools for their children.)
What can explain the popularity of NYU, besides the location? It must be fashion, a fad. Were The Olsen Twins really so influential? Hard to say: their admission (to NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study) was announced in December 2003, and PR ran its first poll of this series in 2003-2004. (NYU was first choice for students every year until I stopped updating this datum: 2004, 2005, and 2006.) BTW, Mary-Kate dropped out early in the fall 2005 semester, after high-school drop-out (and proud GED-holder) Paris Hilton stole her BF Stavros Niarchos III. Okay, publicist version: she took an ``approved leave of absence ... to focus on her increasing responsibilities as co-president of Dualstar Entertainment Group and to pursue personal interests'' while Ashley stayed in school.
Just to bring the story up to date: In Los Angeles Superior Court in February 2006, promoter and party planner Brian Quintana won a restraining order against Paris. Quintana said he was the one who introduced her to Stavros. She has accused Quintana of trying to get Stavros to go back to his former GF Mary-Kate. Quintana testified that Paris had shoved him three times, but who's counting? This is one of the benefits of feminism: now men are allowed to complain in court if attractive women make uninvited body contact with them. I'll have to remember that; you never know what might come in handy. I suppose this was relevant to the case, since he also accused her of bombarding him with phone calls threatening his life. She must have threatened to come over and bash his head in with her cell phone. Who knew she had delusions of Naomi-eur? He says he lost clients after they received phone calls from Hilton warning them not to do business with him, but the court apparently did not express skepticism that there are people who take advice from Paris Hilton. She also called him a ``lazy Mexican.'' This was admitted into evidence? The restraining order, to be in effect for three years, required that Hilton remain 100 yards away from Quintana generally, and 25 yards if they're at the same party. [I should have had them to a party at my house. While he was in the middle of the LR, she'd be confined to my BR.] I'm sure she was also required to carry a tape measure at all times.
Early the next month, Paris and Stavros showed they were still into each other by making out at a party Elton John threw. Gosh, it seems to me that such blatant displays of heterosexuality are in poor taste unless I get in on the action. Anyway, I don't have any more detailed information on just what sort of outing they made. The kinds of newspapers I read always leave out the important stuff, and I, uh, didn't make it to that party. Later that evening, at the Soho House party thrown by top talent handlers (``talent handlers''?) Patrick Whitesell (hmmm), Rick Yorn, and Michael De Luca, things took an ominous turn. Mary-Kate was there, and Stavros dared to speak to her. Miss Olsen was with Hilton's ex-BFF and ``Simple Life'' co-star Nicole Richie, as well as Hilton's new enemy Mischa Barton, who was with on-again BF Cisco Adler, who, uh, you need to read the BFF entry. You can imagine how it must have seemed like a spinning axis of evil to poor Paris. With sister Nicky covering her back, Paris stormed out of the party raining tears. According to a spy quoted in the New York Daily News, Stavros was last seen trying to reach her on his cell. April was a quiet month, but in May the break-up became official. You can't tell Paris Hilton's Greek-shipping-heir boyfriends without a scorecard.
Okay, let's get back to NYU, since that's what this entry is all about. Supermodel Christy Turlington graduated (some reports had her cum laude -- they allowed that in public!?!!?) from NYU in 1999 with a degree in Liberal Arts. (Her studies reportedly included art history, literature, and philosophy.) At the same ceremony, music legend Quincy Jones and departing Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin received honorary degrees. Turlington's stay at NYU was relatively low-key: though she began in fall 1995, the news didn't make major papers until March 1996. It was noticed on campus, however; the registrar's office reported (1997) that it was besieged by male students eager to sign up for any course she was taking. Too bad if she didn't take Organic Chemistry. Melissa Joan Hart, star of the TV show ``Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,'' apparently entered the then ``semi-experimental'' Gallatin School program in 1996, the first year of her show's run (1996-2002). In fall 1997, supermodel and actress (``In & Out'') Amber Valletta started as a freshman majoring in environmental politics. There will be no ``model student'' joke in this entry.
Okay, I think we have enough to establish a pattern here -- even a plot: ``Felicity,'' a TV series that premiered on the WB Network in fall 1998, starred Keri Russell as a high-school graduate who impulsively follows her crush (Scott Speedman) to UNY (a fictitious ``University of New York''). It was originally supposed to be NYU, but the school refused to have its name associated with the series.
This diffidence doesn't seem to be institutional, however. The NYU-affiliated Hospital for Joint Disease reportedly offered unspecified ``big money'' to entice the Mets professional baseball team to bring its injuries to them, but the Mets switched back to the Hospital for Special Surgery in 2005.
Iirc, Woody Allen referenced NYU in his movie ``Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.'' He must have had the good sense not to seek permission.
Martin Scorcese (it only just occurred to me that the second c should be pronounced like ``ch'' in English) was a professor at NYU's film school in the 1960's, ``before anyone knew that he was going to be great. He was like a little Il Duce; he would wave his arms around and wax poetic about films. But even though it was wonderful to have this exciting guy as a teacher, I [Dave Hart] was bored stiff because it took so long to make a film happen. I was young and impetuous, excited about life.'' (This is quoted from p. 170 of the book mentioned at the AFP entry.)
I infer from these things that when you're unknown and gifted, you should teach at NYU. Later, when you're young and famous, you should enroll as a student.
``NYU'' stands for New York University, clearly. ``Poly'' evidently stands for POLYnomial, on account of the various forms its name has taken. As of early 2013, affiliation is giving way to ``merger.'' Equally fascinating factoidal objects can be found at the Brooklyn Poly entry.
When Ernest Rutherford, at home in New Zealand, received news of his appointment to a research position at Cambridge, he told his mother ``that's the last potato I pick!''
The common slang gentilicial form is Kiwi, explained at the apteryx entry.