Difference between revisions of "L"

Revision as of 23:49, 11 December 2006

L.&O.L.
649;

labor unions
43; 50; Western Federation of Miners, 92; 98; St. Petersburg Strike, 595;

La Foam, Happy Jack
477; local pharmicist in Wall o' Death; 485;

Lafrisée, Pléiade
537; sphinxe Khnopffiene in Kursaal in Ostend; with Woevre, 560; Fernand Edmond Jean Marie Khnopff (1858-1921) was a Belgian symbolist painter. A sphinx is a mythical creature with the head of a human (or bird) and the body of a cat; A sphinxe Khnopffiene would then be someone cat-like in the style of Khnopff Wikipediaentry;

The Caress, Khnopff's most famous painting

Lake
262; Wonder if Pynchon's niece had any influence on these passages with Lake, Deuce, Sloat? Also recalls Frenesi and Brock in Vineland, but rougher.

Lambert, Joe
283; shot by Hair-Trigger Bob

Laplacian
239; bar in Cambridge;

Lard Scandal of the '80s, the great
406; there actually was a lard scandal during the Taft Administration, in 1912;

lateener
250; a ship rigged with a lateen which is a triangular sail, suspended by a long yard at an angle of 45° to the mast.

Latewood, Cyprian
489; "embryo Apostlet", a sod (short for "sodomite", i.e., gay man) at Cambridge; to Trieste, 705; talking gibberish, 713;

"laying on tells"
218; God, in poker game; "tells" are gestures or words by a player that give away the value of his/her hand; Wikipedia entry

League of Prizren
653; created on June 10, 1878 in a mosque in Prizren, Kosovo, by 300 Albanian nationalist leaders, mostly from Kosovo, Albania, Western part of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Muslim leaders from Bosnia-Hercegovina and the Sandzak, in order to achieve an autonomous Albanian state, representing the former Ottoman vilayets of Shkodër or Skutari centered near Montenegro, the Illyria region, the Chameria region, Janina or Janjevo centered in Northern Epirus, Bitola in Republic of Macedonia and Kosovo; Wikipedia entry

Lee, Tom
339; his "tong, the On Leong"

Leghorn strawhats
42; a stiff straw hat with a flat crown. See photo.

Leonard and Lyle
441; "oil prospectors" in Sandman Saloon

Leopold
528; King of the Belgians; 543;

LeStreet, Chester
1042; black jazz musician client of Lew Basnight, named after Chester-le-Street, a small town between Durham and Newcastle in Co. Durham, UK. No doubt TRP noted this wonderful name while researching M&D in Durham. Other local place-names he may have been tempted by but didn't use include Thornton-le-Beans and Hetton-le-Hole (which as Hetty-le-Hole could have been an appropriate moniker for Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin).

Levi
473; Hope Kindred's husband

Levi, Eliphaz (1810-1875)
232; or Eliphas; pseudonym of French occultist and magician Alphonse Louis Constant. Levi incorporated the Tarot cards into his magical system, and as a result the Tarot has been an important part of the paraphernalia of Western magicians. He had a deep impact on the magic of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and later Aleister Crowley (who believed himself to be the reincarnation of Levi), and it was largely through this impact that Lévi is remembered as one of the key founders of the twentieth century revival of magic; Wikipedia entry

Lieutenants of Industry Scholarship Program
100;

light
59; "corner light" 61; 62; electric v. gas in London, 232; 431; 437-38; and film, 451; its future, in California, 456; counter-light, 581; 687-88;

Lightarian
60;

lightning
72; sentient ball lightning, 72;

Lincrusta-Walton
610; Lincrusta is an embossed fabric used for covering walls, similar in style to anaglypta. It was invented by Frederick Walton in 1877 and is also called Lincrusta-Walton or Lincrusta Walton. It was designed to emulate more expensive materials and hence be more oriented to a mass market. These materials were used to enrich the interiors of late Victorian architecture and now used for historic restoration projects.

lines of force
55; 122;

Little Egypt
26; at the Chicago World's Fair; 29; Little Egypt was the stage name for two popular exotic dancers, Ashea Wabe who danced at the Seeley banquet at the 1893 World's Fair and Farida Mazar Spyropoulos, also performing under the stage name Fatima, appeared at the "Street in Cairo" exhibition on the Midway at the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893; Wikipedia entry; And then there was that song by The Coasters...

Little Goose-Girls Statue in Göttingen

597; in Göttingen;

Little Hellkite
76; mine in Colorado

Little Nemo
352; Little Nemo is the main fictional character in a series of weekly comic strips by Winsor McCay (1871-1934) that appeared in the New York Herald and William Randolph Hearst's New York American newspapers from October 15, 1905—April 23, 1911 and April 30, 1911—1913; respectively; Wikipedia entry

Loafsley, "Plug"
397; "street-Arab" who delivers note to Chums of Chance

Lobatchevskian
453; function worked up by Vectorists and Quaternionists; named for the Russian mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1792-1856) who developed non-Euclidean geometry; Wikipedia entry

local lunatic
281; for train travelers entering Telluride, like starting a Disneyland ride with this warning: "Beside the tracks at one bend stood a local lunatic"

Lodge, Sir Oliver Joseph (1851-1940)
58; Born at Penkhull near Stoke-on-Trent and educated at Adams' Grammar School, Sir Oliver Lodge was a physicist and writer involved in the development of the wireless telegraph; 228; Wikipedia entry

Lois
468; little girl in Mayva's ice-cream parlor, Cone Amor

Lollipop Lounge
398; personal headquarters of Plug - a "child bordello"

Lombroso, Dr. Cesare (1835-1909)
172; Born in Verona, Italy, Dr. Lombroso, using concepts drawn from Physiognomy, early Eugenics, Psychiatry and Social Darwinism, devised the theory that criminality was inherited, and that the born criminal could be identified by physical defects, which confirmed a criminal as savage, or atavistic; 252; 606; Wikipedia entry

In Vineland, arch-villain FBI agent Brock Vond is a fan of Lombroso's work.

Longfellow
536;

Lorelei
493; blond at Cambridge

Lorentz, Hendrik Antoon (1853-1928)
565; Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pieter Zeeman for the discovery and elucidation of the Zeeman effect. In 1895 in an attempt to explain the Michelson-Morley experiment, Lorentz proposed that moving bodies contract in the direction of motion (see length contraction; George FitzGerald had already arrived at this conclusion, see FitzGerald-Lorentz Contraction). He introduced the term local time which expresses the relativity of simultaneity between reference frames in relative motion; Wikipedia entry

Lost City
435;

Lottchen
621; girl at chloro party in Göttingen;

Louis XV
544; Wikipedia entry

Lowry, Nellie
60; Blinky Morgan's "lady friend"

Lübeck
520; City in northern Germany at the Baltic sea; Wikipedia entry

Lucia
246; waitress in Osteria in San Polo;

Lugosi, Bela
915; see Blaskó, Belá

Luigi
446;

Lupita's
286; in Telluride, "where the menudo can't be beat"

Lutine
122;