Because today is “Have a Coke Day”, I googled “coke square dance” and came across this gem: The Square Dance Conspiracy. Along with hypothesizing that square dancing was invented by aliens (after all, it’s best viewed from above…), the author, Mark Leeper, notes:

Ask yourself, why are you not even allowed to question the authority of the caller. That should tell you something. And you should ask yourself who your caller is taking his/her orders from. How will you feel when your caller starts giving you:

Waltz that girl across the floor.
Hide some drugs in your desk drawer.
Meet in the center with a right hand star.
Toss a grenade in someone’s car.
Promenade that pretty little thing.
Drill some holes in an airplane wing.

This article (along with some other humorous square dance pieces) is listed in the article co-op at Vic Ceder’s site.

From a college student’s blog:

I went square dancing last night. In and around the square dancing was some kind of churchy juleklip and julefrokost, which Jane had convinced me would be a good time in spite of the churchy bit, and she was right. I hadn’t been seriously square dancing for ages, since the days when my parents would drag me along on their gigs in the basement of the Unitarian church; I learned to square dance by being swung wildly around by crazy old people, and so got around the “boys have cooties and gym class sucks” problems with public education. I know it’s a dying tradition, but it’s fun and I don’t see why nobody does it anymore. Apart from crazy old people of course.

Is computer code protected speech? If not, how does one distinguish between compilable code and other expressions of it? This site explores that issue and contains various versions of code for descrambling DVDs that was enjoined from distribution under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Here you can find a Haiku version, a t-shirt version, and (the reason I’m even mentioning it here), the square dance version.

You may have noticed the little RSS (RSS) button I recently added in the left column.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. By subscribing to my RSS feed in a news aggregator, you can see when I post something new without having to visit the website.

Just when you think you sort of know something, you come across a page like this: Mental Image Practice by Bill Heimann. Okay, I sort of (barely) dance C3A. Out of these 109 situations, I found 6 where I understood the vocabulary.

I actually could do this one, although I forgot about trying to get the whole set up, and just went for where the beau end would end up. But I could go back and figure out the whole formation.

Here I understand the words, but I don’t get how it works. First I know the call, recoil (facing or split recycle, step and fold). So there are two parts, and to do it in reverse order, I guess one would do the step and fold first and then the recycle. So does that mean the initially cross concentric part applies to the step and fold? Or would one apply it to the first part of the call (recycle) and then do it in reverse order: step and fold, cross concentric recycle? Given the result, that has to be correct.

I think I managed to actually do this one.

In all of these, I know the vocabulary, but I don’t understand the parsing.

Here are a couple of pages featuring (silent) dance videos. The dance moves are funny, but even funnier is the commentary.

• How to Dance Properly
• Dancing Properly – Advanced Seminar