Robert Moog (1934-2005)

From the New York Times:

Rock groups were attracted to the Moog as well. The Monkees used the instrument as early as 1967, on their "Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones, Ltd." Album. In early 1969, George Harrison of the Beatles had a Moog synthesizer installed in his home and released an album of his practice tapes, "Electronic Sound," that May. The Beatles used the synthesizer to adorn several tracks on the "Abbey Road" album, most notably John Lennon's "Because," Harrison's "Here Comes the Sun" and Paul McCartney's "Maxwell's Silver Hammer."

Among jazz musicians, Herbie Hancock, Jan Hammer and Sun Ra adopted the synthesizer quickly. And with the advent of progressive rock in the early 1970's, the sound of the Moog synthesizer and its imitators became ubiquitous.

Robert Moog, the inventor of the Moog synthesizer, has died at the age of 71.

Link: "Robert Moog, Music Synthesizer Creator, Dies"

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Hemingway's typewriter

I'm reminded of the old Peterman catalogue, which affixed a famous name to most any object, but the following is for real--a typewriter used by Ernest Hemingway:

The typewriter, a Halda, was made in Sweden and is in excellent condition with the ribbon and keys intact. It is fully functional, in its original leather case with somewhat tattered transportation stickers from both the American Export Line and the French Line.

Only $100,000. Are replacement ribbons available?

[Update: It's been sold.]

Link: Hemingway's typewriter.

Ready or not

From a New York Times article, "Many Going to College Are Not Ready, Report Says":

Only about half of this year's high school graduates have the reading skills they need to succeed in college, and even fewer are prepared for college-level science and math courses, according to a yearly report from ACT, which produces one of the nation's leading college admissions tests.

The report, based on scores of the 2005 high school graduates who took the exam, some 1.2 million students in all, also found that fewer than one in four met the college-readiness benchmarks in all four subjects tested: reading comprehension, English, math and science.

"It is very likely that hundreds of thousands of students will have a disconnect between their plans for college and the cold reality of their readiness for college," Richard L. Ferguson, chief executive of ACT, said in an online news conference yesterday.

And what happens when a student experiences the disconnect? Disbelief, indignation, and complaints that "This teacher cannot teach."

[Use mediajunkie as your name and password to read the Times online.]

Andrew Sullivan on self-esteem

The above post made me think of Andrew Sullivan's essay "Self-Esteem: Why we need less of it," which touches on the disconnect between student expectations and reality:

Self-esteem can also be an educational boomerang. Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good, rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. He can then get deeply offended when he's told he's got a C-grade in college, and become demoralized or extremely angry. Weak professors give in to the pressure--hence grade inflation. Tough professors merely get exhausted trying to bring their students into vague touch with reality.

You can read Sullivan's essay by clicking here.

Overheard

In a bank in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a mother talking to her young daughter:

It's a bank, but it's a very cold bank. It's the Bank of America.

Meme

From Merriam-Webster's Word-of-the-Day service:

The Word of the Day for August 18 is:

meme \MEEM\ noun
: an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture

Example sentence:
"Blogs are an interesting way... of seeing which ideas, memes, trends and news events are getting the most comment." (Clive Thompson, quoted in the Sunday Tribune, February 6, 2005)

Did you know?
In 1976, British scientist Richard Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, and in his book he defended his new creation, the word "meme." Having first considered, then rejected, "mimeme," he wrote: "'Mimeme' comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like 'gene.' I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate 'mimeme' to 'meme.'" The suitable Greek root was "mim-," meaning "mime" or "mimic." Dawkins's "mimeme" was formed from "mim-" plus "-eme," an English noun suffix that indicates a distinctive unit of language structure (as in "grapheme," "lexeme," and "phoneme"). "Meme" itself, like a good meme, caught on pretty quickly, spreading from person to person as it established itself in the language.

Attention

From an Ellen Goodman column, "A snail mail tale":

How do you describe the times we live in, so connected and yet fractured? Linda Stone, a former Microsoft techie, characterizes ours as an era of ''continuous partial attention." At the extreme end are teenagers instant-messaging while they are talking on the cell phone, downloading music, and doing homework. But adults too live with all systems go, interrupted and distracted, scanning everything, multi-technological-tasking everywhere.

We suffer from the illusion, says Stone, that we can expand our personal bandwidth, connecting to more and more. Instead, we end up overstimulated, overwhelmed and, she adds, unfulfilled. Continuous partial attention inevitably feels like a lack of full attention.

But now there are signs of people searching for ways to slow down and listen up. We are told that experienced e-mail users are taking longer to answer, freeing themselves from the tyranny of the reply button. Caller ID is used to find out who we don't have to talk to. And the next ''killer ap," they say, will be software that can triage the important from the trivial e-mail.

Meanwhile, at companies where technology interrupts creativity and online contact prevents face-to-face contact, there are now e-mail-free Fridays. At others, there are bosses who require that you check your BlackBerry at the meeting door.

If a ringing cell phone once signaled your importance to a client, now that client is impressed when you turn off the cell phone. People who stayed connected 10 ways, 24/7, now pride themselves on ''going dark."

''People hunger for more attention," says Stone, whose message has been welcomed even at a conference of bloggers. ''Full attention will be the aphrodisiac of the future."

These thoughts remind me of the words from Simone Weil taped to my office door: "Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity."

The language of stamps

From tomorrow's New York Times:

Every other day, when Janie Bielefeldt writes to her husband, who is deployed in Afghanistan, she places her stamps upside down and diagonally on the letters as a way to say "I miss you." Susan Haggerty says "I love you" by putting her stamps upside down on letters to her son, stationed in Iraq.

Noma Byng does the same thing with the letters she sends to her husband when he is serving abroad as a way of trying to convey what words cannot. "You do everything you can to make the letters seem like more than a piece of paper," Mrs. Byng said.

For most people, the front of an envelope is simply a place for addresses and postage, and a crooked stamp indicates little more than that the sender was in a hurry. But for others, this tiny sliver of real estate is home to a coded language, hidden in plain sight, that has been passed down through the generations for more than a century.

You can read "From Love to Longing to Protest, It's All in the Tilt of the Postage" by clicking here.

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Barbara Bel Geddes

From Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958):

[Scottie has been balancing a cane on his fingertip. It falls and he bends forward to retrieve it.]

Scottie: Ouch! Ouch.

Midge: I thought you said no more aches or pains.

Scottie: It's this darned corset. It binds.

Midge: No three-way stretch? How very un-chic.

Scottie: Ah, you know those police department doctors. No sense of style. Well, anyway, tomorrow'll be the day.

Midge: Why? What's tomorrow?

Scottie: Tomorrow--the corset comes off tomorrow. I'll be able to scratch myself like anybody else tomorrow. I'll throw this miserable thing [the cane] out the window. I'll be a free--a free man. Midge, do you suppose many men wear corsets?

Midge: Mmm, more than you think.

Scottie: Really? Well, do you know that from personal experience, or--

Midge: Please.

Barbara Bel Geddes, who played Midge, died this week at the age of 82.

Link to the New York Times obituary.

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Dorris Bowdon

From John Ford's film The Grapes of Wrath (1940):

Rose of Sharon: It seems like we wasn't never doin' nothin' but movin'. I'm tired.

Connie: Women is always tired.

Rose of Sharon: You ain't--you ain't sorry, are ya, honey?

Connie: No, but--but you seen that advertisement in the Spicy Western Stories magazine. Don't pay nothin'. Just send 'em the coupon and you're a radio expert. Nice clean work.

Rose of Sharon: But we can still do it, honey.

Connie: I ought to a done it then, not come on any trip like this.

Dorris Bowdon, who played Rose of Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath, died this week at the age of 90.

Link to the New York Times obituary.

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