Difference between revisions of "G"

Latest revision as of 13:34, 13 August 2009

Gabika
803; works in dress shop with Yashmeen;

Gabrovo Slim
845; "noodle-thin and mournful Bulgarian"; at wedding, 947;

Gage, Lyman Judson (1836-1927)
307; "that old Gold Standard hand and bank president"; Gage was president of the First National Bank of Chicago; in 1892, he was chosen president of the board of directors of the World's Columbian Exposition, the successful financing of which was due more to him than to any other man. As Secretary of the Treasury under President Grover Cleveland, Gage was influential in securing passage of the Gold Standard Act of March 14, 1900, which reestablished a currency backed solely by gold; Wikipedia entry

Galandronome
374; a type of bassoon developed by French instrument maker Galander in the mid-19th century;

Galois, Evariste
601;

Gallows Frame
"Gallows Frame Saloon," in Telluride, 302; "broken gallow-frames," 391;

The Gallows Frame is the structural frame, usually made of steel or timber, at the top of an underground mine shaft. These frames hold the hoisting equipment which raise and lower equipment and miners into the underground mine.

Gamomania
432; "the abnormal desire to be married"

Garçons de '71

19; French: The Boys of '71; annual convention in Paris, 1083; During the Siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian War, 1870-1871, balloons were manufactured within railroad stations in Paris. The balloons were used to get mail and passengers out of Paris. Read on...

Gas Office
607

Gaspereaux, Stilton
436; civilian passenger on Saksaul; in London, 445;

Gatlin, Reverend Moss
49; Anarchist preacher; "we are Stripes and Solids on the pool table of earthly existence" 86; The New York Times, commenting on the Haymarket Square riots in Chicago in 1886, offered the following solution to the anarchist threat, “In the early stages of an acute outbreak of anarchy a Gatling gun, or if the case be severe, two, is the sovereign remedy"; in Denver with his "Anarchist Heaven" car, 465; at tent city in Ludlow, Colorado, 1009;

Gatling
754; The Gatling gun is a gunpowder field weapon invented in the 1860s which used multiple rotating barrels turned by a hand crank. Wikipedia

Gauss & Weber Statue

498; 588; statue of Gauss and Weber, 594;

gaver du visage
225; French for something like "stuff your face", appropriately enough for a "form of gluttony"

Geheimrat
603; title of the highest officials of a German royal or principal court. It has its roots in 17th century Europe when governmental administration was established. The English language equivalent is Privy Councillor. The title disappeared after the destruction of the German Empire in 1918, when the various royal courts in Germany were replaced by the Weimar Republic.

gematria
799; Gematria (Heb. גימטריה, from the Greek γεωμετρία) is numerology of the Hebrew language and Hebrew alphabet, and is used by its proponents to derive meaning or relative relationship. Wikipedia

Gennady
780; "the umnik of [Padzy's] crew";

Gennaro
846: an Exarch; bartender at the L'Espagnol Clignant in Nice; an Exarch, according to Wikipedia: "In the Eastern Christian Churches (Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox and Eastern Catholic), the term exarch has two distinct uses: the deputy of a patriarch, or a bishop who holds authority over other bishops without being a patriarch (thus, a position between that of patriarch and metropolitan); or, a bishop appointed over a group of the faithful not yet large enough or organized enough to be constituted an eparchy/diocese (thus the equivalent of a vicar apostolic)."

Gentleman Bomber of Headingly
236; cricket-ball bombs; 241; 605; 690; spotted at Fenner's cricket ground, 691;

Possibly a nod to "The Girl Who Was Death," a particularly hallucinogenic episode of the late 60s cult TV series, The Prisoner, which begins with a cricket-playing colonel being blown up by a cricket ball bomb.

Gerasimoff, Dr. (Ofitser Nauchny)
258; Chick Counterfly's "opposite number"; w/Padzy, 780;

Gerhardt
517; Austrian Chief Stoker aboard Stupendica, Herr Hauptheitzer; in Swiss Alps, drilling, 655;

German Sea, The
489; 504;

Geronimo
195;Wikipedia entry

Gevaert, Edouard
558; sells Q-98 to Woevre; "unworldly go-between," 559; Connections...

Afghani dirham

596; Sunni Muslim state in Khorasan in modern day Afghanistan that existed from 962 to 1187. It was created by Alp Tigin, a former Turkic slave general, with the city Ghazna (Ghazni) as capital, replacing the ruling Samanids; Wikipedia entry

Ghloix, Dr. Otto
132; "Expedition alienist"; "psychomedical officer" 143; visiting alienist from Switzerland, 686; Lew's alienist, 1041 (originally a 19th century term for a psychiatrist, the term "alientist" is still used in psychiatric hospitals to describe those mental health professionals who evaluate defendants to determine their competency to stand trial.);

Ghosts
132; Icelanders long tradition of, 133; "bad ice, blizzards, malevolent ghosts," 151; 218; Victoria's "ghostly stand-in," 231; "ghost-light," 306; 373; 375; "haunted," 384;

Giambolognese, Signora
865; Venetian resident at pensione in Santa Croce; the name is clearly inspired by "Giambologna" the nickname of the famous flemish artist Jean de Boulogne who worked extensively for Medici in Florence

Giant-Wheel
699; The Giant Wheel in the Prater is an important Viennese landmark, providing a view over the city. The wheel was the brain child of Gabor Steiner (1858-1944) and was built in 1896 by the English engineer Walter B. Basset, who produced similar designs in London and Paris. It was erected in the record time of eight months and was operated for the first time on June 21 1897; More on this website

Gibbs, Professor Willard
29; 158; 318-19; 532-3; 793; Gibbsian, 526; 532; Josiah Willard Gibbs was arguably the greatest American scientist of the 19th century, bringing the power of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics to what had been cookbook and rule-of-thumb chemistry. He demonstrated and extended the value of modeling in "phase space," a graph in which each physical state of a system is represented by a point representing pressure, volume, temperature, etc. ("water in all its phases," 368) Wikipedia entry

Gibson Girls
409; The Gibson Girl was the personification of the feminine ideal as portrayed in the satirical pen and ink illustrated stories created by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson during over 15 years spanning the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; 512; Wikipedia entry

Gift to Young Housewives, A
754; cookbook by Russian Yelena Ivanovna (aka Elena N.) Molokhovets; Banned in Molokhovets's native country since the Russian Revolution, this gastronomic standard for pre-Revolutionary upper- and middle-class Russian households contains recipes for such old standards as cabbage with butter and crumbs, potato pudding, Beef Stroganov, babas, piroq, and pashka. Little is known about Molokhovets' life. Born in 1831 into a military family in the far northern city of Arkhangelsk, she received a good education at a school run by the Imperial Educational Society for Noble Girls. With her husband, an architect, she had ten children. He seems to have been an enlightened spouse who was supportive of her writing. Molokhovets' old age coincided with the turmoil surrounding the 1917 Russian Revolution. She died in St. Petersburg in 1918. Her cookbook, however, lives on. A Gift to Young Housewives went through 29 editions before being deemed too bourgeois for publication under the Soviet regime.

Gigg, Jack
99; Kit Traverse's sidekick

Gilmore, Mr.
187; conductor in New Mexico

Ginger
1076; Stray's daughter

Ginnungagap
127; "the lightless abyss"; Ginnungagap ("seeming emptiness"), in the cosmology of Norse mythology, is the primordial void separating Niflheim and Muspell, the land of eternal ice and snow and the land of eternal heat and flame; Wikipedia entry

Girtonian
492; 498; Of or pertaining to Girton College.

Giuseppina
246; waitress at Osteria in San Polo

Glagolitic
252; The Glagolitic alphabet was invented during the 9th century by the missionaries St Cyril (827-869 AD) and St Methodius (826-885 AD) in order to translate the bible and other religious works into the language of the Great Moravia region. They probably modelled Glagolitic on a cursive form of the Greek alphabet, and based their translations on a Slavic dialect of the Thessalonika area, which formed the basis of the literary standard known as Old Church Slavonic; 799; More from this website

God
" 87; "God's ledger; "God-possesed fugitives," 127; "God dwells in His Heavenly City," 131; rocks as "post-godhead" 209; under God's wing, 211; shin, 237; 534;

Gold Standard
89; The "gold standard" is a monetary system in which the standard economic unit of account is a fixed weight of gold; Wikipedia entry

Golden Age
561;

Gomez, Che
987; "mayor and jefe politico of Juchitán"

Gomez, Eusebio
373; "acting as a subagent" in Mexico, 640; aka Wolfe Tone O'Reilly, 641;

Gonzales, General
985; his suicide after Frank Traverse's máquina loca;

Gordon, Charles George (1833-1885)
240; known as Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British army officer and administrator. He is remembered for his exploits in China and northern Africa. Gordon was killed in Khartoum while defending it against the uprising led by the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Mohammed Ahmed who decapitated Gordon and displayed his head on a spear; Wikipedia entry

Göttingen
226; Werfner at Göttingen; 594; during war with Prussia

Gottlob
588; at Göttingen;

Grace 42; 70; 213; 374; Angela Grace, 399-402; and anti-Grace, 895; 1085; The doctrine of Grace is a central tenet of Protestant theology. The word refers to God's concern for humanity. To be in a state of grace is to be redeemed. In AtD, several characters attain or approach states of grace, beginning with Lew Basnight (p. 42), who enters a transcendent state in which he can see individual details, leading him to become a detective. And, of course, the Chums who, at the novel's end, "fly toward grace."

In previous work, TRP focused on the preterite, the damned in Calvinist theology. Calvin taught that since God exists outside or throughout time, He knows who is elected, who has grace and will go to Heaven. Calvin taught that on earth, the Elect would usually be apparent because God would reward their goodness with earthly success. But here TRP seems more concerned with an Arminian Protestantism, whereby God's Grace is available to anyone (as Gnostic texts state, "If he has eyes, let him see!") Merle and young Dahlia achieve grace simply by understanding the force of their loving relationship.[1]

Grace, Angela
399-402; songstress at Lollypop Lounge who's "ten summers old";

Grace, Dr.
577; appeared to Hunter in a dream, "the mass-grave-to-be of Europe";

Gradenigo, Doge Pietro
247; 880;

499; A cohen, or Kohen, is a member of the Jewish priestly class; 720;

Grand Guignol
1066; The Grand Guignol (pronounced [gʁɑ̃ giɲɔl]) was a theatre (Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol) in the Pigalle area of Paris (at 20 bis, rue Chaptal), which, from its opening in 1897 to its closing in 1962, specialized in naturalistic horror shows. The name is often used as a general term for graphic, amoral horror entertainment. Wikipedia

Grand Hotel de la Nouvelle Digue
526; in Ostend, Belgium; 531;

Granitza
326; small town "above Adriatic Coast in the Velebit range"

grapnel
13; a tool consisting of several hooks for grasping and holding; often thrown with a rope

Grassmann, Hermann (1809-1877)
324; German polymath, renowned in his day as a linguist and now admired as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, neohumanist, all-round scholar, and publisher; Wikipedia entry; Grassmann's 1862 Ausdehnungslehre (literally, "Theory of Extension") is one of the great mathematical works of the nineteenth century. In it the foundations of linear and multilinear algebra are laid and much of the superstructure too is constructed. It is regrettable that such a book on such a subject should, from the moment of publication, have been not much read. Indeed, Grassmann's reputation for impenetrability has persisted to this day; 535; More about Ausdehnungslehre here

"The soles of Lew's feet began to ache, as if wanting to be taken all the way to the center of the Earth," 41; "a secret imperative, like the force of gravity," 80; Time vulnerable to, 457;

Great Airships of 1896 and '7
454; On November 17, 1896 in Sacramento, California, there appeared, on a rainy night, a bright light. It moved slowly west appearing to be about a thousand feet above the rooftops. Hundreds of people saw the light including George Scott, an assistant to the Secretary of State of California. Scott persuaded some friends to join him on the observation deck above the capitol dome and from there they thought they could see three lights, not one. Above the lights was a dark, oblong shape. In 1897 there were many sightings of great airships from California to Texas, however the airplane would not be invented for another 6 years, and neither had large dirigibles or blimps yet been flown. In Aurora, Texas one such ship supposedly crashed into a windmill or tower and exploded. Read more about the 1897 incident and the Mysterious Airship of 1896

Great Game
"BOL'SHAIA IGRA, or, The Great Game,'" 123; 227; reference to Kipling's novel Kim, 756; 772;

The Great Game, a term usually attributed to Arthur Conolly, was used to describe the rivalry and strategic conflict between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for supremacy in Central Asia. The term was later popularized by British novelist Rudyard Kipling in his work Kim. The classic Great Game period is generally regarded as running from approximately 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 a second, less intensive phase followed. Wikipedia

The Wikipedia article has a very interesting section titled "The Great Game Renewed"

With the end of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War, the United States displaced Britain as the global power, asserting its influence in the Middle East in pursuit of oil, containment of the Soviet Union, and access to other resources. This period is sometimes referred to as "The New Great Game" by commentators, and there are references in the military, security and diplomatic communities to "The Great Game" as an analogy or framework for events involving India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and more recently, the post-Soviet republics of Central Asia.

Obviously, we should add Iraq to that list. The parallels are obvious, as is the failure to learn from history or past mistakes.

Great Wife Bazaar of the World-Island
432;

Gretchen
640; Günther's date at Steve/Ramón's ("the restless Valkyrie")

Grey
809; politician

Grimsford, Wes
211; marshal of Jeshimon

Griswold, Uncle
497; Cyprian's corrupting sodomite uncle

Grossmith, George
494; at Cambridge

groundhogs
1021; aka people

growler
226; An old-fashioned siren, the kind that takes awhile to start. By extension, a police car carrying such a siren.

Groznyi
441;

Grundy, Mrs.
400; Mrs Grundy is the personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety (from Thomas Morton's play Speed the Plough, which appeared in 1798), a person who is too much concerned with being proper, modest, or righteous; 427;

Gruntling
944; accountant in Prof. Sleepcoat's party

Guanajuato
127; Iceland Spar mined in, 306; Frank Traverse and Ewball in, 376;

Guitry, Sacha
1066; "J'ai Deux Amants" (French: "I Have Two Lovers" — a recording by Yvonne Printemps, written by Sacha Guitry and Andre Messager Lyrics +. The composer Reynaldo Hahn (see also ATD at page 1065) wrote the music for his operetta Mozart (1925).

guncotton
27; guncotton is Nitrocellulose (Cellulose nitrate) is a highly flammable compound formed by nitrating cellulose (e.g. through exposure to nitric acid or powerful nitrating agent), used in explosives

gutta-percha
603; Gutta-percha (Palaquium) is genus of tropical trees native to southeast Asia and northern Australasia, from Taiwan south to Malaya and east to the Solomon Islands. It is also an inelastic natural latex produced from the sap of these trees, particularly from the species Palaquium gutta. Chemically, gutta-percha is a polyterpene, a polymer of isoprene (trans-1,4-polyisoprene);[2]. It was often used an early insulating material on telegraphs and other electrical equipment. 611;

gynecophobia
501; fear of women