Jedi Concentrate

A nice aid to concentration: Dana Hanna's Jedi Concentrate, a freeware Windows application that dims everything but the currently active window (hit Ctrl-/, F12, or Win-J). As its creator explains, "The purpose is to dim everything on all of your monitors when you need to get to work." I've been looking for a program along these lines for several months and am very happy to find it. Jedi Concentrate is one result of Hanna's An App A Day project -- writing one application a day for thirty days.

This open-source application has already been improved by another programmer, Joe Chrzanowski, who added -- within a day of the program's release -- options for screen opacity and fade speed. Keep that in mind when Microsoft warns that open-source software is an unreliable, unworkable model.

I found Jedi Concentrate via Lifehacker, always a great source for useful stuff.

[2020: This app disappeared some time ago.]

Myth and mixed metaphors

In this morning's paper:

Wildcats chip away at Trojans' Achilles heel

There are so many ways in which this high-school football headline goes wrong. Wildcats don't use chisels. (Gnaw, though gruesome, would be an apt metaphor.) The body part in question is the Achilles' heel. And there's an unintentional (I think it's unintentional, given the rest of headline) comedy in the idea of the Trojans, their city ultimately destroyed by Achilles' fellow Achaeans, having an Achilles' heel.

This headline, as we would say in the heartland, "needs revised."

Avast

From Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day, now featuring words related to pirates:

avast (uh-VAST) interjection

Stop (used as a command to stop or desist).

[From Dutch hou vast (hold fast), from houd vast.]

"The best part, though, is the music. It dips and swells in the game right along with the action. Avast, there's treasure here!"

Vance Jordan and Melissa L. Jones, "Madden NFL Steps Up the Play," Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Aug 27, 2006.

The word avast furnishes the name of avast!, an excellent anti-virus program.

Link: A.Word.A.Day

Link: avast! Home Edition, free for home and non-commercial use

Lotusland

From Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day:

lotusland \LOH-tus-land\ noun

*1 : a place inducing contentment especially through offering an idyllic living situation
2 : a state or an ideal marked by contentment often achieved through self-indulgence

Example sentence:
With its white sands, stunningly blue water, and beautiful sunsets, the island is a lotusland for beach lovers.

Did you know?
In the Odyssey, Odysseus and his men discover a magical land of lotus-eaters. Some of the sailors eat the delicious "lotus" and forget about their homeland, pleading to stay forever in this "lotusland." (It is likely that the lotus in question was the fruit of a real plant of the buckthorn family, perhaps the jujube, whose sweet juice is used in candy making and which has given its name to a popular fruity candy.) The label "lotusland" is now applied to any place resembling such an ideal of perfection, but it also carries connotations of indolence and self-indulgence, possibly derived from the way the sailors refused to work once they reached the original lotusland. The dreamy unreality of a lotusland is a nice place to visit, but you wouldn't want to live there.

Except if you'd already eaten the lotus.

Link: Merriam Webster's Word of the Day

Yellow pages

From an essay by Suzanne Snider on the history of the legal pad:

Explaining the origins of the yellow legal pad is as difficult as explaining consumers' attraction to it. But the attraction does seem to be there: The yellow-to-white sales ratio can be as high as 2 to 1, as it is at University Stationery in New York City, near New York University and The New School University.

Link: Old Yeller: The illustrious history of the yellow legal pad (via Armand Frasco's Notebookism)

Breakfast with Pandora

Last week I discovered David Frauenfelder's blog Breakfast with Pandora ("For a Diet Rich in Myth and Logos," says the subtitle). One post that I found particularly engaging comments on a passage from Iliad 1 as translated by Stanley Lombardo and Robert Fagles. Achilles is promising Agamemnon generous compensation if he will return the captive woman Chryseis (whose father is a priest of Apollo and has asked that god to send a plague upon the Achaean forces). Here is the passage in Lombardo's translation:

All right, you give the girl back to the god. The army
Will repay you three and four times over -- when and if
Zeus allows us to rip Troy down to its foundations.

And here's Frauenfelder's comment:

Robert Fagles' translation was trumpeted when it came out in the early nineties, but it looks like a tricycle next to Lombardo's Ferrari.

Fagles cannot resist retaining just a little of that formal diction that makes readers go cold. . . :

      So return the girl to the god, at least for now.
      We Achaeans will pay you back, three, four times
            over,
      if Zeus will grant us the gift, somehow, someday,
      to raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground.

By boiling down "raze Troy's massive ramparts to the ground" to "rip Troy down to its foundations," Lombardo saves only one word, but over the course of the poem these add up. Plus, who wants to read "raze" when "rip" will do just as well or better? And why would you put "massive ramparts" unless you wanted someone to read the translation in a Monty Pythonesque voice ("HUGE tracts o' land")?

I'm biased, yes. Maybe there are Fagles enthusiasts out there. I came from Richmond Lattimore's translation, which is very close to the Greek, but which, as my mentor used to say, always sounds better after you've gotten through the better part of a pitcher of beer.

These paragraphs are a great example of how to characterize tone in a persuasive way: the clichéd loftiness of "massive ramparts" becomes instantly clear.

I'd add that "somehow, someday" is a very strange (intentional? unintentional?) echo of "Somewhere" from West Side Story.

Link: Comments on Iliad Book One (from Breakfast with Pandora)

Debri

That sign was out again in the supermarket last night. This time my son was with me, and he took a picture with his cell-phone. (Thanks, Ben!)

My son's getting older

"Dad, have you ever heard of a poet called Charles Bukowski?"

Eris

From the BBC:

The distant world whose discovery prompted leading astronomers to demote Pluto from the rank of "planet" has now been given its own official name.

Having caused so much consternation in the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the object has been called Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord.

Enchiladas, anyone?

Link: Astronomers name "world of chaos" (BBC)

Dopyeras for sale

Twelve stringed instruments made by John and Rudy Dopyera, along with two workbenches, are being offered are for sale as a collection. From the Elderly Instruments website:

The Dopyera brothers were born in what is now Slovakia, and came to the U.S. with the wave of Eastern European immigrants around the beginning of the 20th century. (In fact, the word "Dobro" is both a contraction of "DOpyera BROthers" and the word for "good" in their native tongue.) Engineers, tinkerers, businessmen, and accomplished musicians (their family had a history of violin making going back centuries, and Rudy was by many accounts an exceptionally talented and soulful Gypsy-style violinist), the two Dopyera brothers combined their Old World skills and traditions with the booming technology and futuristic tastes in art of pre-WWII America. Who else thought that spun aluminum might be a good material for sound projection? Who else engraved beautiful Art Deco designs on the bodies of their guitars? Only the Dopyeras.

The unusual, experimental, and mostly one-of-a-kind instruments in this collection – John’s unusual (and spectacular sounding!) resophonic violin, Rudy’s balalaika-inspired Lullabyka, the Art Deco-influenced steel body uke and tenor guitar, even the actual workbench on which John perfected the fabled tri-cone resonator system – are uniquely American (and uniquely Dopyera) innovations.

The instruments shown on the Elderly website are fantastic - i.e., "so extreme as to challenge belief" (Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). Who could resist something called the Troika Resophonic Balalaika? Best of all: the Dopyera Resonator Violin, its body looking like a pair of metal colanders painted gold.



Link: The John and Rudy Dopyera Collection (from Elderly Instruments)