ssh tiny.christmas

ssh tiny.christmas leads you to a little christmas tree with a global singalong.

Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/tiny-christmas

I am a proud member of the Death and Mayhem team, which participates in the MIT Mystery Hunt every year. This year, our team had the honor of running the hunt.

Here is a puzzle I contributed, titled A Math Quiz. It consists of a list of math problems. I am especially happy that I was able to turn a collection of cute math puzzles into a puzzle-hunt challenge with a word or phrase as its final answer.

New Yorkers love preserved fish – particularly on top of a bagel with a nice hearty schmear of cream cheese. My favorite preserved fish in New York City comes from Russ & Daughters, an icon of New York cuisine that’s been around since 1914.

But this article isn’t about preserved fish of New York. It’s about Preserved Fish of New York, a human man with a very bizarre name.

Top: Preserved Fish
Bottom: preserved fish

Preserved Fish, born in 1766, was a member of the prominent Fish family, which produced centuries of New York politicians.¹ Preserved’s distant cousin Hamilton Fish, for example, was Secretary of State under president Ulysses S. Grant.

A Fish family genealogy indicates that Preserved Fish of New York City was far from the only member of his family named Preserved (pronounced with three syllables as preh-ZUR-ved). The same source helpfully points out “There is no foundation for the oft-repeated story that he was picked up from a floating wreck by a New Bedford fisherman, and therefore named Preserved Fish.” Good to clear that up. The name “Preserved” is actually a Quaker one, coming from a desire that the child be preserved from sin.

Preserved Fish appropriately began his career as a whaler, and soon shifted to selling whale oil. He later became wealthy from the shipping industry more generally. Even during his day, people made fun of his name. The genealogy recounts this story:

“When a vessel near New York Harbor passed another, one called to the other, ‘Ship Ahoy!’, getting the answer, ‘The Flying Fish.’

‘Who’s your Captain?’ ‘Preserved Fish.’

‘What’s your Cargo?’ ‘Pickled fish.’

‘Where bound?’ ‘Fishkill.’ ”

Fish was a key player in New York society, though a quirky one. He got in early as a trader on the New York Stock and Exchange Board, a precursor to today’s New York Stock Exchange. He abruptly abandoned the shipping company he helped run, Fish and Grinnell (leaving it to become Grinnell, Minturn & Co.), and hopped around starting other companies before eventually becoming president of a bank.

For a time, Preserved Fish even controlled Tammany Hall, the political organization that essentially ran the New York City Democratic party, and by extension the city itself. While in charge, he fended off a challenge by the similarly absurdly named “Locofocos”, a group of reformers opposed to government banking, paper money, and entrenched interests in politics. The Locofocos got their name from an incident early in their movement’s history, while they were fighting Preserved Fish for control of the city’s Democratic party machine. When the reformers stormed Tammany Hall,² the party’s leaders shut off the building’s lighting gas. The reformers responded by lighting candles with a new brand of self-igniting matches, the eponymous “Locofocos”.³

The matchsticks, in turn, were named by someone who misunderstood root words. The brand name combined “foco”, a late Latin word for “fire” (think Spanish “fuego”) with the “loco-” in “locomotive”, which many people at the time incorrectly thought meant “self” (it actually means “from a place”). So “self-fire” was the intended meaning.⁴

To editorialize a bit, Preserved Fish has a pretty typical story for a New York Merchant in the early 19^th century. He’s definitely work mentioning in a history book, but probably wouldn’t take up a full chapter. Still, he did quite well for himself as a person with a strange name – I’d say he’s definitely loxed and loaded.

Coming soon: There are too many kinds of barcode

I'm still a believer in the promise of Web 2.0. The idea that giving people a curated space to chat produces tiny sparks of magic.

My wife Liz and I have been running the OpenBenches project for about 8 years - it's a crowd-sourced repository of memorial benches. People take a geotagged photo of a bench's plaque, upload it to our site, and we share it with the world. Might sound a bit niche, but we have around thirty-nine thousand benches catalogued from all over the world.

From the start, we had a comment form under each bench. Of course, we pre-moderate any comments. That helps with our Online Safety Act obligations and prevents spam from being published. We don't collect any personal data, to reduce our GDPR exposure. Our comments are self-hosted using the excellent Commentics - which means we don't send people's data off to a 3rd party.

We thought that this would be used to tell us that an inscription was wrong, or if a bench had moved, or something like that.

We were completely wrong!

People use OpenBenches comments for all sorts of things. Of course, there are a few which provide details about the bench itself:

Other provide a little context about the person:

But those sorts of comments are hardly the majority. The comments break down (roughly) into these categories:

I want to know more about this person

I sat on this bench, searched for the inscription and found this site. I want to share my feelings

Thank you for putting a bench here

This has moved me

My heart has broken

I can't visit this bench, but I'm glad someone has shared a photo

Thank you for adding a photo

I don't know the person this bench commemorates, but I want to let them know they're still loved and remembered

That's nice

Hundreds of people sharing connections. Wanting to express their feelings. Understanding the terrible pain of loss and the hope that, someday, someone will think fondly of us.

You can view all the comments on OpenBenches.org.