July 21, 2006

• MATH ALERT!!!
• Shhhhh!
• YOU CALCULATING BASTARDS! *sobs, guzzles whiskey*
• wow, ptc bought mathsoft! they bought arbortext recently, too. what an odd company. the moving sofa constant reminds me of something from a novel. one of douglas adams's dirk gently books maybe?
• Wow! Has he got one for moving an upright piano up a narrow staircase with a 180 turn?
• J. H. Davenport, A "piano movers" problem, SIGSAM Bull. v. 20, n. 76 (1986) 15-17.
• Yes, this owes a debt of gratitude to Dirk Gently's Holistic detective Agency which featured a couch stuck in a hallway and a computer program running to get it unstuck.
• Wow . . okay I don't wanna scare anybody but this exact same thread is going on on a different website. Creepy!
• What are the odds of that happening? *takes out giant calculator*
• Metafilter? Is that still around?
• Not only that there is also the same reference to Dirk Gently. *spooky* Plus a reference to moving a piano. *eerie music*. But our own Roryk hits a homer by referencing the ACM SigSam bulletin (Sigsam = Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation, which i only just found out, no, really).
• CHAINSAW!
• the hammersley solution is very elegant in its simplicity, though i'd be more likely to put gerver's sofa in my living room. the sigsam bulletin was presented as a reference for the moving sofa constant
• So, in your houses, do you have a "couch" or a "sofa?"
• interchangeable terms for me.
• I have a chesterfield.
• Chesterfield. Or couch. Usually chesterfield.
• (Ooh! Too slow!)
• *blows into barrel of pistol*
• Futon.
• I don't know anyone in Canada who called it a chesterfield, actually. Maybe we were all weirdos, but we laughed at you chesterfield dudes. It's a couch. Sometimes a sofa if you're feeling all la-di-da. But never a freaking chesterfield. (I may just be defensive cos living here in the US now I keep having people laugh at the things I say. What? It's polite to use 'washroom' when you're in public, isn't it? Apparently not, since it's the #1 source of hilarity around me these days. Grump).
• Never understood the hilarity over 'washroom' myself, livii. A bathroom is something you have in a house, i.e. where you can go to take a bath. A washroom is where you wash up, among other things. I will admit, though, that there tends to be an age differential when it comes to chesterfields vs. couches. But a sofa is something much more formal, a lower, uncomfortable thing, usually without arms, found in dentist offices and style magazines.
• Just because you pee in public, does not mean you can call that area your "washroom."
• Has no one a davenport?
• or a divan?
• Futon?? Pfft. Go back to Sweeden!! *polishes fenders on good ol' 420hp diesel off-road sofabed*
• I never get tired of laughing at my Canadian-born mother-in-law when she asks for a "serviette". "You mean a NAPKIN?!" I shout. "It's called a NAPKIN!!! SAY IT RIGHT!! HA HA HA HA STUPID!!" She doesn't think it's so funny, but I know I'm right.
• The punch has been spiked!
• You war sofa king we Todd did.
• Many years ago I shared a hospital room with an elderly lady who was very ill and hallucinating. All night she kept yelling out that someone had tied her to the Davenport. My horror was mitigated by my curiosity about what the heck a Davenport was. I have always had a couch, myself. It sounds so poetic.
• Looking at it all wrong, they really should consider the optimal shape of a corner in a hallway of minimum area that will accomodate a given rectangular sofa.
• "She doesn't think it's so funny" Of course not, she's too stupid to understand why it is funny!
• Does nobody have a loooooveseat?
• Having worked as a mover in a previous lifetime I can tell you that this does not require much math, just a good eye and experience. A helpful hint for any monkey that is moving in the near future, take the front door off the hinges. That usually gives you about an extra two inches of clearance which can make a major difference when moving a sofa in or out.
• I would say that this website would have been useful earlier in the week when the couch got stuck both going out of the old house and into the new one, but who am I kidding? My math isn't nearly good enough for this to help me out at all. /math phobic
• I don't have a loooooveseat, but I have a luvseat. I purchased it for 1/4 oz. of weed.
• I don't know if anyone noticed, but those math dudes mistook their phone for their couch. Unless their couch is shaped like a phone, which I guess is possible, but kinda useless.
• I have a luurvseat *and* a couch, but my mother has a chesterfield.
• Futon. posted by Koko Futon, you too, buddy! I have a loveseat. But I call it the couch. It's just big enough for Mr. BlueHorse and I to sit on, but it doesn't encourage visitors. That's ok, we sit around the kitchen table alla time anyway.
• The thing that puzzles me about the loveseat is that it is singular when clearly it's meant for two, so the proper word should really be "loveseats". e.g. in the posts above: "Fishtick has a loveseats and a mother for a couch". "Bluehorse has a loveseats and sits around with Allah". See?
• > The thing that puzzles me about the loveseat is that it is singular but it's one love. it's the luuurve that is being seated, as it were. ot performed while seated.
• I loved the loveseat Gomez and Morticia had - it was kind of shaped like an "S", so they were facing each other when they sat.
• TUM - I think those were called "courting sofas" by the Victorians, who used them to let young couples have some time close to each other while making impossible for cuddling and other hankypanky to go on.
• Americans laugh about washroom? I've never witnessed any such jollity. I have definitely heard Americans freely using the term washroom. What makes me feel weird is people who refer to it as 'the toilet'. Granted that may be a more precise description of where they're going, somehow it just seems too graphic.
• Which is more socially acceptable: "I have to hit the head" or "I'm going to the can"? 'cause those are the two I'm gonna pick from
• I always say, "I'm going to the Little Misanthrope's Room."
• One moment, to make my bladder gladder.
• Flongj: Hello! Interesting user name. Just wanted to let you know, in polite company, it's proper to refer to it as the terlet. What the livin' blue kangaroo is a Flongj? Sounds like some noise Sylvester the cat would make after the bird flew out, and he had feathers in his mouth. Flongj, flongj, flongj, phhutth! OH! ahhh Hi there. No, nothing, just admiring the scenery.
• livii wrote: I may just be defensive cos living here in the US ... Whoa, that's news to me! Hope you are settling in okay. *prepares care parcel of poutine*
• I always refer to going tinkle as "fluid-levelling." It works best when followed up with a large glass of iced tea.
• Does nobody have a loooooveseat? No, lara, no I don't. If you'd ever replied to my emails, maybe I'd have occasion to need one, but in the meantime, no. *holds back tears, trying to maintain taciturn dignity, fails, runs off to the little boys' room*
• close to each other while making impossible for cuddling Freakin' Victorians, right? I like how y'all have taken this to a linguistic level because that math part was scary
• Them Victorians had nothin' on the Colonial Americans.
• I like how y'all have taken this to a linguistic level My math thread has turned into a furniture sale. Curse you monkey mal-mathians!
• You know, there's a simple dilemma to your solution, have a coach burning! It's big among the Greeks at the local college. Does anyone know where this custom originated? What is it about drunken debaucheries by priveliged rich white males that leads inexorabley to the combusting of coaches? /Math? //Carry the two ///Always carry the two
• Probably something to do with getting rid of the bugs that hang around yer lower-rent frat houses. They would buy better houses, but they can't get anyone to cosine the loan.
• In my collegetown hometown, there's a sofa on every front porch. Saves the trouble of moving them in and then back out, I suppose.
• It's illegal to have inside furniture on outside porches here in Ames.
• > My math thread has turned into a furniture sale. i'd take this as a sine that you should tan their hides, storybored.
• I would roryk, if i could only figure out their angle, they can be so obtuse sometimes.
• I have an acute sense that we have reached a degree of hopelessness.
• Right.
• We decide to get away And have some fun Book a room and catch a flight For two weeks in the sun She says, "Hawaii's too expensive." I say, "Barbados isn't bad." She says, "I'd love to see Bermuda" And I say, "Woman, are you mad!"
• There's no sense in a protractored regression to puntificating.