Difference between revisions of "P"

Revision as of 20:36, 21 June 2007

Packer's Inn
31;

Paco
375; trumpet player

Padzhitnoff, Igor ("Padzy")
123; Randolph St. Cosmo's "mysterious Russian counterpart"; "semi-mythical aeronaut" 761; disappearance in 1914, 1022; c.f. Alexey Pazhitnov, inventor of Tetris.

Palacio del Cristal, El
378; in Guanajuato;

Palmer House
30; Wikipedia entry

pantechnicon
611; Pantechnicon is an old British word for a furniture removal van. It was originally coined in 1830 as the name of a craft shop or bazaar, in Motcomb Street in Belgravia, London; the name is Greek for "pertaining to all the arts or crafts". The shop soon closed down and the building was turned into a furniture warehouse, but the name was kept. Vehicles transporting furniture to and from the building, known as pantechnicon vans, soon came to be known simply as pantechnicons. Wikipedia

Pan-Turanian
756; Pan-Turanism is a political movement aiming at uniting the various Turkic peoples of the Russian empire. The name is derived from Turan an ancient Persian name for the land to the east of Iran.

Paramorphoscope
"'induced paramorphism,'" 114; "paramorphic distortions," 249; 435; 436; paramorfico, 570; used to view map of Shambhala, 609;

Paranoia
33; "counter-transformer" 34; 54; 94; "Something" 132; 180; paranoia querulans (litigious paranoia), 455; Ostend as "western anchors of a continental system" 567; "silent army of operatives" from Hell, 586; 624; 681;

Paris Commune
372;

Parry, Hubert
49; Blake's Jerusalem Wikpedia Entry

Parsons-Short Auxetophone
228; used to record "all T.W.I.T.-sanctioned sittings"

Patio Method
374; silver extraction method

Patrizia
728; with Dally in Venice

Pearls
Pearl Street, in lower Manhattan financial district, location of Vibe Corp., 333-34; "pearl-gray bowlers, 399;

Peary, Robert Edwin (1856-1920)
149; Peary was an American explorer who claimed to have been the first person, on April 6, 1909, to reach the geographic North Pole; Wikipedia entry

Federico Peliti

758; Federico Peliti (1844-1914) was born near Turin, in Northern Italy, and went to India in 1868 as a caterer to the Viceroy, the Earl of Mayo. After the assassination of the Viceroy, he established himself as an independent caterer and hotel director, with establishments in Calcutta and Simla. His Simla restaurant is mentioned in Rudyard Kipling's short story "The Phantom Reekshaw" (1880). He had been trained as a sculptor in his youth, and while sculpting from time to time as a hobby, he became a more and more passionate photographer as time went on. A great part of his production now belongs to the Calcografia Nazionale in Rome. [1]

pelota games
7; Pelota (in Basque and Catalan, pilota; in French pelote, from Latin pila) is a name for a variety of court sports played with a ball using one's hand, a racket, a wooden bat (pala), or a basket propulsor, against a wall (frontón in Spanish, frontoi in Basque, frontó in Catalan) or, more traditionally, with two teams face to face separated by a line on the ground or a net.

Penhallow, Constance
127; Iceland spar magnates, in Iceland; Hallow means to reserve as holy.

Penhallow, Hunter
127; grandson of Constance; witnessing the destruction of the city, 154; "English painter type" 575; one of the Trespassers? 576; switch to nocturnes, 580; in Venice with Dally, 729; one of his paintings, "The Iron Gateway," hanging in Ca' Spongiatosta, 867; with Dally in London, 892;

pennsilvoney
Phonetic play on the Italian word pensione, inexpensive lodging, usually with shared bathroom, or dormitory style.

permanent siege
19;

perpetual-motion machine
6; Perpetual motion refers to a condition in which an object continues to move indefinitely without being driven by an external source of energy. Wikipedia entry

Peter and Paul Fortress
595; in Russia

pétroleurs of Paris
19;

P.E.T.N.
182; PETN (Pentaerythritol Tetranitrate, also known as Penthrite) is one of the strongest known high explosives, with a relative effectiveness factor (R.E. factor) of 1.66. It is more sensitive to shock or friction than TNT or tetryl, and it is never used alone as a booster; Wikipedia entry

Peychaud, Monsieur
368; It is said that the Sazerac drink was invented by Antoine Amadie Peychaud, a Creole apothecary who moved to New Orleans from the West Indies and set up shop in the French Quarter in the early 1800s. He dispensed a proprietary mix of aromatic bitters from an old family recipe, to relieve the ails of his clients (Peychaud's Bitters are still made in New Orleans and sold today, and are an essential component of any truly complete bar), and around the 1830s he became famous for a toddy he made for his friends. It consisted of French brandy mixed with his secret blend of bitters, a splash of water and a bit of sugar. According to legend he served his drink in the large end of an egg cup that was called a coquetier in French, and some say that the Americanized pronunciation of this as "cocktail" gave this type of drink its name (unlikely as that may be); (From The Gumbo Pages. Read on...)

Philippe
655; in Swiss Alps, drilling with Reef; alumnus of Petit Roquette child's prison, 658;

Philosopher's Stone
77; The philosopher's stone, in Latin philosophi lapis, is a legendary substance that supposedly could turn inexpensive metals such as lead into gold ("chrysopoeia") and/or create an elixir that would make humans younger, thus delaying death. It was a longtime "holy grail" of Western alchemy; Wikipedia entry

Philosophic Mercury
77; Mercury minus "everything not essential"

Photography
Detailed references...

picnic
4; 82; 138; 503;

Piggot's
678;

Pigs
Circe, 117; "pigs can fly" 427; "Pitch Integrity Guard" 421;

Pike's Peak
112; Wikipedia entry

Pinkerton, Allan (1819-1884)
43; Allan Pinkerton was a U.S. detective and spy, best known for creating the Pinkerton Agency, the first detective agency.; "The Unsleeping Eye" 51; 112; 171; Wikipedia entry

Piper, Leonora
medium/psychic, 228; Leonora Piper's spiritualistic abilities (or extrasensory perception — the exact nature of her powers was, maybe naturally, unresolved) convinced William James of the truth in Spiritualism; James dubbed her "the white crow."

Piprake, Giles
866; colleague of Ratty McHugh

Plafond Luminex
687;

plasmic hysteresis
555;

Plush, Fiona
894; model for Arturo Naunt sculpture

Pluto
"Chthonica, Princess of Plutonia," 117; "plutes," 93; "some Plutonian bargain," 154; "plutes," "some ruler of some underwoekd," 231; 362; see also, Satan

podpol'niki
663; "underground men" in Russia

Polo, Marco (1254-1324)
432; the Venetian, greatest of medieval travellers. Venetian genealogies and traditions of uncertain value trace the Polo family to Sebenico in Dalmatia, and before the end of the 11th century one Domenico Polo is found in the great council of the republic (1094). But the ascertained line of the traveller begins only with his grandfather.

Polo was the first traveller to trace a route across the whole longitude of Asia, naming and describing kingdom after kingdom which he had seen; the first to speak of the new and brilliant court which had been established at Peking; the first to reveal China in all its wealth and vastness, and to tell of the nations on its borders; the first to tell more of Tibet than its name, to speak of Burma, of Laos, of Siam, of Cochin-China, of Japan, of Java, of Sumatra and of other islands of the archipelago, of the Nicobar and Andaman Islands, of Ceylon and its sacred peak, of India but as a country seen and partially explored; the first in medieval times to give any distinct account of the secluded Christian Empire of Abyssinia, and of the semi-Christian island of Sokotra, and to speak, however dimly, of Zanzibar, and of the vast and distant Madagascar; whilst he carries us also to the remotely opposite region of Siberia and the Arctic shores, to speak of dog-sledges, white bears and reindeerriding Tunguses; From the 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica; 569;

Ponghill, Brad
174; youngest brother of Burke

Ponghill, Buddy
174; brother of Burke

Ponghill, Burke
172; Editor of the Lodazal Weekly Tidings

Poussin
590;

Poutine
468; little girl in Mayva's ice-cream parlor, Cone Amor; also the name of a French-Canadian dish.

Prance, Lieutenant Dwight
761; "scholar of geography and languages at Cambridge"; working for Whitehall, 778;

Prandtl, Ludwig
603; Bavarian physicist (1875–1953) who made key contributions to aerodynamics, most famously the discovery of the "boundary layer" (an zone of still air around a moving object, the physical phenomenon behind the dust which accumulates on fan blades).

Priest, Judas
656;

Prime Number Theorem
590, 597; a theorem giving an approximation to the number of prime numbers less than any given integer N. The specific theorem most commonly invoked under this name is the result by Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), who in an 1849 letter to Johann Franz Encke (1791–1865) proved that the number of primes less than N is approximately given by the integral from 2 to N of 1 over the natural logarithm of x. (Earlier, at the age of 15, Gauss had proposed that the number of primes less than N was approximately N divided by the natural logarithm of N.) Jacques Hadamard (1865–1963) and Charles De la Vallée Poussin (1866–1962) both proved this result independently in 1896. Knowing this result, one can prove that the Nth prime number is roughly N log N, for sufficiently large N. The Riemann hypothesis is equivalent to the assertion that the difference between Gauss's later estimate and the true value is never greater than cN^1/2log N, for some number c. Wolfram MathWorld entry

Princess Casamassima, The
6; an Italian Romance; The Princess Casamassima is a novel by Henry James, first published as a serial in The Atlantic Monthly in 1885-1886 and then as a book in 1886. It is the story of an intelligent but confused young London bookbinder, Hyacinth Robinson, who becomes involved in radical politics and a terrorist assassination plot. Wikipedia entry

Privett, Nate
24; White City Investigations, 43; in Denver, 179;

Propaganda of Deed
81; Propaganda of the deed is an anarchist doctrine that promotes the practical application of anarchist ideas in hopes that such actions will set an example and inspire others. A violent variant of the concept was popular around the world in the late 19th century. According to the 19th century take, it was thought that a spectacular action, such as a political assassination, would ignite a revolutionary fervor among the working classes. Peter Kropotkin, an early proponent of propaganda by the deed, wrote that "A single deed is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets." From the InfoShop Open Wiki

Prokladka, Colonel Yevgeny
754; Auberon Halfcourt's "Russian opposite number"

Provecho, Dwayne
379; in cell with Frank Traverse and Ewball; in Mexico, 642;

Provenance, Wren
"girl anthropologist" 275; 922;

Prudge, Oleander
263; hash-slinger at Nonpareil Eating House;

Premulkoff, Namaz
752; escaped prisoner in Samarkand

Psitticide
387; the murder of a parrot: (Latin order Psittaciformes = parrot). "The commandante, sensing psitticide in the air, came hurrying up."

Pugnax
5; (Latin: pugnax = fond of fighting) sentient canine aboard The Inconvenience; 17; Also, there's a bird called the Ruff (Philomachus pugnax) which is a medium-sized wader; cuisine, 111; 143; Buddha nature, 412; security of Inconvenience left to, 443; "sophisticated defensive system" 550;

Pullman Strike
177; Wikipedia entry

Putyanin
755; "cavalry rogue" who said he'd had Vanya's girlfriend Feodora in St. Petersburg;

Pynchon, Edwin
possibly inventor of an airship, the "Albatross"; DISCUSSION

Pythagoras
500; Pythagoreans, 633; mathematician, philosopher and mystic (c. 569 BCE–c. 475 BCE). Born in Samos, Ionia, he traveled in Egypt and eventually founded a school in Croton, located in what is now southern Italy. He is the earliest person known to have given a systematic proof of the geometrical proposition now called the Pythagorean Theorem; he or his close followers discovered the irrational numbers and the three-dimensional shape called the dodecahedron. Furthermore, Pythagoras coined the term cosmos to express the order and patterning of nature, was the first to give observations showing that the Earth is spherical, and performed significant early experiments in judging how humans perceive sound. Any of these accomplishments would have earned Pythagoras an honorable place in the history of science, but his behavior and that of his followers contained "deep ironies and contradictions," to use Carl Sagan's phrase. Pythagorean doctrine taught that knowledge should be kept secret from the masses, and moreover that the only way to understand the Cosmos was inner contemplation of mathematical ideas without observation or experiment. This attitude stands in stark contrast to the practical approach of Thales (c. 624 BCE - c. 547), Democritus (c. 460 BCE - c. 370 BCE) and other Ionians who grounded their speculations much more fully in observation. Elaborated and immortalized by Plato (c. 428 BCE - c. 348 BCE), the Pythagorean doctrine became a font of anti-rationalism. MacTutor biography; Pythagorean Theory of Music and Color; Pythagorean Numbers; 749; and music, 940; 957;