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Orange Crate Art just had its fifty-thousandth visitor. I'm teaching the Aeneid on Wednesday, so I'm marking the visit with a Roman numeral. The bar above the numeral indicates multiplication by 1,000 -- a lot simpler than 50 Ms.

The fifty-thousandth visitor was from Redmond, Washington, from some company called Microsoft, going to my post Cool laptop via a link at Lifehacker.

Overheard

"You're the only person I know who could be frightened by a radish."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Achilles and stochastic

How could I not look at the text of a spam message titled "Achilles and stochastic"? A small excerpt:

Ten years ago a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. But when I end up in the hay it's only hay, hey hey. Round, all around the world. Maybe tomorrow, I'll want to settle down, until tomorrow, I'll just keep moving on. 80 days around the world, we'll find a pot of gold just sitting where the rainbow's ending. Ulysses, Ulysses -- fighting evil and tyranny, with all his power, and with all of his might. He's got style, a groovy style, and a car that just won't stop. In search of Earth, flying in to the night. Thunder, thunder, thundercats, Ho! Thundercats are on the move, Thundercats are loose. Top Cat! The indisputable leader of the gang. He's the boss, he's a pip, he's the championship.

Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of fortune.

And now it's back to reality (grading).

stochastic (Merriam-Webster OnLine)

Tea (take 4 times daily)

I take delight in any "study," no matter how small the sample (75 tea-drinking men in this case), that confirms the wisdom of doing what I like doing anyway:

Regular cups of tea can help speed recovery from stress, researchers from University College London (UCL) said on Wednesday.

Men who drank black tea four times a day for six weeks were found to have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than a control group who drank a fake tea substitute, the researchers said in a study published in the journal Psychopharmacology.

The tea drinkers also reported a greater feeling of relaxation after performing tasks designed to raise stress levels.

And now back to grading midterms (and drinking tea).

Beat stress, drink tea (Reuters)

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In a memory kitchen

I rarely drink water from a juice glass. At work, I drink my way through a 32-ounce Nalgene bottle. At home, I drink water from large tumblers or Dixie cups. But this morning we were out of Dixie cups, and I wanted just a sip of water. So I filled a juice glass at the kitchen sink and had a moment of what Proust calls "involuntary memory," the unbidden return of the past via sensory stimuli.

Drinking this glass of water brought me back to the details of my grandparents' Brooklyn kitchen. The juice glass brought to mind my grandparents' glassware, most likely made by Libbey, with floral designs baked on. Water from my grandparents' tap would turn to a gray cloud in a glass and then clear. Whatever the reason -- aeration? the softness or hardness of the water? -- it doesn't happen at my sink. (And right now I am also remembering being fascinated in childhood by jelly glasses, the way whatever stories they told -- usually of the Flintstones -- ended and began again and again as one turned the glass, like a childhood version of Finnegans Wake.)

Looking around this memory kitchen, I recalled four other details -- cutlery with red plastic handles, a aluminum percolator with a glass knob at its top, a black- and grey-speckled metal roasting pan, and the fluorescent ring that seemed at one point synonymous with "kitchen," anybody's kitchen. I thought about aprons and anisette, but only vaguely. I thought of my grandparents as being in the living room, right next to the kitchen.

Later this afternoon, my wife Elaine made espresso, and the metallic coffee smell put me in my grandparents' kitchen all over again.

Crate art, orange

The Crate Label Museum has lots of orange crate art -- other fruits and vegetables too.

Crate Label Museum (via Armand Frasco's notebookism)

Overheard

"You're like a mental backspace."

"Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Cigarettes and similes

Love is like a cigarette. You know you held my heart aglow between your fingertips. And just like a cigarette, I never knew the thrill of life until I touched your lips. Then just like a cigarette, love seemed to fade away and leave behind ashes of regret. Then with a flip of your fingertip, it was easy for you to forget. Oh, love is like a cigarette.

"Love Is Like a Cigarette," Richard Jerome and Walter Kent, 1936 (transcribed from the 1936 Duke Ellington recording, with singer Ivie Anderson)

Seventeen years ago today, I smoked my last cigarette.

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Proust: "People never cease to change"

People never cease to change position in relation to ourselves. In the world's imperceptible but everlasting march, we think of them as motionless, in a moment of vision, too brief for us to perceive the motion that is bearing them along. But we need only choose from our memory two pictures of them taken at different times, yet sufficiently close together for them not to have changed in themselves, perceptibly at least, and the difference between the two pictures measures the displacement they have effected relative to ourselves.

Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, translated by John Sturrock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 409

Reality trumps satire

During the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, a Texas parent filed a "Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials" seeking the removal of Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 from a high school's curriculum:

"It's just all kinds of filth," said Alton Verm, adding that he had not read Fahrenheit 451. "The words don't need to be brought out in class. I want to get the book taken out of the class."

He looked through the book and found the following things wrong with the book: discussion of being drunk, smoking cigarettes, violence, "dirty talk," references to the Bible and using God's name in vain.

Fahrenheit 451 depicts a world in which the reading of books is prohibited and books themselves are burned.

Parent criticizes book Fahrenheit 451 (The Courier, via Boing Boing)

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