The Empty Cabinets of my Mind

Lost Writings

I love old books, and a close friend and family member recently brought up the name of Wallace D. Wattles, who is known for his 1910 publication of The Science of Getting Rich. 

My friend also mentioned that this collection of the writings of Wattles has become available:

A Powerful Life: The Lost Writings of Wallace D. Wattles

Wattles was certainly an interesting man and his name has an interesting history, too.  In fact, wattles in another name for the acacia plant.  Acacias are beautiful pod-bearing shrubs with a number of culinary and industrial uses.  In addition to being used to make gum arabic, which is the ingredient artists used to make watercolor paint spread evenly, acacia is added to numerous foods, including Barq's Root Beer.

Yet More Fun and Games

When I was a tadpole nerds had not yet been invented.  But that would have been me.  Except they called us "drips" back then. 

It never became respectable to be a drip, but nerds have sort of a following now, one step up from geeks. When I learned about the gaming forum called Rugged Nerds I had to think about that name and try to figure out what exactly a rugged nerd might be. A trip to the urban dictionary fixed that. Rugged basically means "awesome" as in part of an oxymoron.

gaming forum

For that matter, "gaming forum" might be an oxymoron. 

I like computer games, but not the time-consuming role-playing kind.  I tend to avoid the violent games, too.  The Rugged Nerds site has eight arcade games, including tetris, snake, and hexxagon.  To get to play them you have to be registered.  To be registered you have to know something about gaming, because they ask a test question.  But if I figured out the right answer, you can too.  If you are interested in gaming, go there.  If not, you can drop the name and impress your wicked nerd friends.

Speaking of names, there is some controversy about where the word "nerd" came from.   Of course there is the Dr. Seuss character, but there are a couple of other interesting theories about its derivation.  My favorite is that since nerds don't tend to drink anything stronger than cola beverages and their arch enemies are really into getting drunk the word "nerd" was originally spelled "knurd" and was simply the reverse spelling of drunk.  Cute, but a more plausible story is that N.E.R.D. was a division of a Canadian firm that hired a lot of those guys who used to run around wearing pocket protectors.  I got that from a web page written by Jim Burrows who describes himself as a hirsute curmudgeonly nerd.