Blockwriter

Here's another free tool for writing, Sadhana Ganapathiraju's Blockwriter (Windows only), inspired by Khoi Vinh's still-hypothetical Mac program of the same name.

Blockwriter offers an extremely simple (some will say limited) writing environment: no deleting by backspacing; no cut, copy, or paste; no options to change window size or font size. The delete key replaces letters with bullets. There is no option to print, but Control-S will save what you've written as a text file. If you click to close the program before saving, there's no prompt asking if you'd like to save your work. The most enticing feature, for me, is the dark screen that covers the desktop (and any other open windows) as long as Blockwriter is running.



Blockwriter is alpha software, with at least two possibly annoying problems. One: if you minimize the Blockwriter window, everything remains dark, with no way to get the program back (it's necessary to call up the Task Manager -- Control-Alt-Delete -- to close the program). Another problem (explained on the programmer's website) involves involuntary auto-scrolling.

Blockwriter might be a little extreme for ordinary writing (I'm always fixing typos on the go, so I miss the backspace key), but it might be just the ticket for someone who needs to eliminate all distractions and get something said. Blockwriter offers a writing environment that manages to be both austere and inviting.

Update, January 22, 2007: A new version of the program fixes the two problems described above. Thanks, Sadhana!

Blockwriter (requires .NET 2.0 from Microsoft)
Blockwriter (Khoi Vinh's program proposal)

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Fooling burglars with turntables

WFMU's Beware of the Blog has made available for download a 1972 LP, Play It Safe! Vol. 4. It's a recording of a man and woman talking, to be played over and over to fool would-be burglars into thinking that someone is home in an empty house. The record came with a set of "special reusable ties" with which to rig various turntables and let the record repeat.

Here's a sample of the conversation, silly enough to make me think that someone -- either the actors or a writer -- was having fun with this assignment. The woman (no doubt a "wife") has been trying to persuade the man (no doubt a "husband") to buy some new clothes:

She: Why not go out and get some nice clothes for the nice frame?

He: What, that funny stuff they're makin' now?

She: It's not all funny.

He: Well, it looks funny to me.

She: What's funny about it?

He: Well, they take -- they take some of the older stuff and they jazz it up too much, you know? Too many pockets on stuff now.

She: I can take pockets off.

He: Either that or they don't put any pockets at all.

She: I can put pockets on.

He: Well, what's the sense of that?

She: Well, if you need it.

He: Oh, I'll tell you what -- the ones I buy with pockets, you take them off . . .

She: [Laughs.] I'll save the pockets . . .

He: . . . and you put 'em on the ones that don't have them.

She: . . . and put 'em on the ones you don't want, right.

He: That makes a lot of sense, you know? That makes as much sense as my going out shopping for myself.

She: I'll go with you!

He: That's worse.

Thinking about this LP reminds me of a brief episode from my days as an apartment-dwelling graduate student in Boston. A young couple -- they seemed to be recent immigrants -- moved into the first-floor apartment below me. They both worked all day, and they must have feared burglars, because every day, for perhaps a week or more, they left a 45 of Kool and the Gang's "Joanna" playing on a turntable, from early morning to early evening. I'd leave my apartment, come back hours later, and the song would still be playing, same as it ever was, same as it ever was, same as it ever was:

Joanna, I love you.
You're the one,
The one for me.

After a couple of weeks, this couple (and Kool, and the Gang) disappeared. When I'm in a supermarket and hear this song playing over cheap speakers, my memory can still supply the bass line, same as it ever was.

Play It Safe! Vol. 4 (WFMU's Beware of the Blog, via Boing Boing)

Brian Boyd on literary studies

We love stories, and we will continue to love them. But for more than 30 years, as Theory has established itself as "the new hegemony in literary studies" (to echo the title of Tony Hilfer's cogent critique), university literature departments in the English-speaking world have often done their best to stifle this thoroughly human emotion.

Above, the opening paragraph of a powerfully argued piece by Brian Boyd (author of a great two-volume Vladimir Nabokov biography) on culture, biology, and the present state of literary studies.

"Getting It All Wrong" (The American Scholar)

High school

In the New York Times this morning:

In past eras, good high schools provided the educational foundation for an intellectual awakening in college. But for the mostly affluent students in private and competitive public schools -- from T.J. (as Thomas Jefferson is known) to urban intellectual cocoons like Bronx Science and Stuyvesant -- high school has become the defining academic experience. The much-touted leap to higher education has become more of a lateral step, or even a letdown.

"Our students find college not as challenging," says Temba Maqubela, dean of faculty and assistant head for academics at Phillips Academy, the boarding school in Andover, Mass. Former students have written to him expressing frustration with college courses that are too basic. (Consider this collegiate-sounding offering from Andover’s English department: "Feasts and Fools: The Topos of the Festive Social Gathering.") Andover alumni tell John Rogers, dean of studies, that college "is not as difficult as their experience here," he says.

"The Incredibles" (New York Times, registration required)

Word 2007

Lifehacker posted a screenshot tour of Microsoft Office 2007 yesterday. For me, It confirms what I'd already decided -- that I have neither need nor desire to buy Office 2007. I prefer extreme simplicity in my Word layout. Here's what a Word window looks like on my computer:



I have only a handful of icons along the left margin: New, Open, Save, Save As, Zoom, Read, Print Preview, Print, and Format Painter. I do all sorts of things (font, italics, indents, margins, and so on) from right-click menus and the keyboard. (This image by the way is from a Windows XP computer on which everything has been made to look nicer with FlyakiteOSX.)

Here for contrast is Word 2007:



According to Walt Mossberg's favorable review of Office 2007 in the Wall Street Journal, the large blue "ribbon," as it's called, cannot be customized. There is though an option to auto-hide it. Me, I'm sticking with my simple Word set-up.

[Update: I've since switched to OS X and iWork's Pages.]

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James Brown's ski party

"Hey, are you really the ski patrol?"

In a comment on an earlier post, Jeanne Meyers recalled James Brown's brief appearance in Ski Party (1965). I found the clip on YouTube. It's a remarkable bit of Americana. Four suavely-dressed African-American men enter a ski lodge, having rescued a frozen "Mr. Pevney" from the cold. The lodge is filled with young white adults. One of them recognizes that the newcomers are not the ski patrol but "James Brown and the Flames." (That should be Famous Flames, young lady.) The expectation is that some entertainment is in the offing: "You're gonna sing for us, aren'tcha?" says another young woman, who was wondering one paragraph up whether these men were really the ski patrol.

What strikes me is not that a star is expected to entertain (hey, I want to hear him too) but that JB and company don't stay a moment longer than their performance. JB is, literally, out the door when his song ends, and the Flames are gone before that. There's no question of inviting these men in as guests, to sit, warm up, have some cocoa. There's no time for JB and the Famous Flames even to pick up their coats (or JB's skis). They save a life; they sing and dance; and they disappear into the cold. At least they're wearing ski sweaters.

And let the record show that not even a ski sweater could stop James Brown from being James Brown.

There were many links to YouTube for James Brown last week, but this clip (posted on December 27) seems to be overlooked, with only 300-odd views. (The picture is a digital mess at the start, but the sound and image otherwise are far better than in the other copy of this clip on YouTube.)

James Brown sings "I Got You (I Feel Good)" and immediately leaves the premises (YouTube)

Wal-Mart's bright idea

From a New York Times article on Wal-Mart's (yes, Wal-Mart's) efforts to increase sales of compact fluorescent lightbulbs:

A compact fluorescent has clear advantages over the widely used incandescent light -- it uses 75 percent less electricity, lasts 10 times longer, produces 450 pounds fewer greenhouse gases from power plants and saves consumers $30 over the life of each bulb. But it is eight times as expensive as a traditional bulb, gives off a harsher light and has a peculiar appearance.

As a result, the bulbs have languished on store shelves for a quarter century; only 6 percent of households use the bulbs today.

Which is what makes Wal-Mart’s goal so wildly ambitious. If it succeeds in selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs a year by 2008, total sales in the United States would increase by 50 percent, saving Americans $3 billion in electricity costs and avoiding the need to build additional power plants for the equivalent of 450,000 new homes.

Having lived with these bulbs for four days, I can't agree that the light is harsh. Nor am I bothered by the bulbs' resemblance to soft-serve cones. (Don't people usually keep their lightbulbs under shades or enclosed in fixtures anyway?) Compact fluorescent bulbs take a bit of time to reach their full brightness, but their advantages make that slight delay easy to accept. I can remember as a kid having to wait for the radio and television to warm up.

Power-Sipping Bulbs Get Backing From Wal-Mart (New York Times)

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Optimistic about print

Walter Isaacson (President and CEO of the Aspen Institute) is optimistic about print:

I am very optimistic about print as a technology. Words on paper are a wonderful information storage, retrieval, distribution, and consumer product. That is why I appreciate the fact that many Edge forums are transformed into books, and it's why I hope someday that there is a gorgeous Edge Magazine that I can flip through and touch. Imagine if we had been getting our information delivered digitally to our screens for the past 400 years. Then some modern Gutenberg had come up with a technology that was able to transfer these words and pictures onto pages that could be delivered to our doorstep, and we could take them to the backyard, the bath, or the bus. We would be thrilled with this technological leap forward, and we would predict that someday it might replace the internet.

From the Edge Foundation's 2007 forum, "What Are You Optimistic About?"

Perfect vegan banana bread

Elaine Fine makes perfect vegan banana bread, as she herself agrees.

Recipe for perfect vegan banana bread (from Elaine's blog)

Movie recommendation: Trouble in Paradise

My wife Elaine and I just discovered a wonderful film, Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932). Now I understand what the phrase "the Lubitsch touch" means: Trouble in Paradise is one of the wittiest, most artful movies I've seen. I'll share ninety-two-seconds' worth of dialogue.

[We are in Venice. A garbageman on a gondola has just picked up the trash. A baron (played by Herbert Marshall) stands on a hotel balcony, smoking and looking out on the water. The Baron is waiting for his new lady friend, a countess (played by Miriam Hopkins). A waiter (played by George Humbert) brings the Baron a menu.]

Waiter: Yes, Baron. What shall we start with, Baron?

Baron: Hmm? Oh, yes. That's not so easy. Beginnings are always difficult.

Waiter: Yes, Baron.

Baron: If Casanova suddenly turned out to be Romeo, having supper with Juliet, who might become Cleopatra, how would you start?

Waiter: I would start with cocktails.

Baron: Mm hmm. Very good. Excellent.

[The Baron sees his lady arriving in a gondola.]

Baron: It must be the most marvelous supper. We may not eat it, but it must be marvelous.

Waiter: Yes, Baron.

Baron: And waiter?

Waiter: Yes, Baron?

Baron: You see that moon?

Waiter: Yes, Baron.

Baron: I want to see that moon in the champagne.

Waiter: Yes, Baron. [He writes on a pad.] "Moon . . . in . . . champagne."

Baron: I want to see, um --

Waiter: Yes, Baron. [The waiter writes some more on the pad.]

Baron: And as for you, waiter.

Waiter: Yes, Baron?

Baron: I don't want to see you at all.

Waiter: No, Baron.

[The waiter picks up a leaf from the balcony ledge and offers it to the Baron.]

Waiter: Oh, I beg your pardon.

Baron: Hmm? Thank you.

Just some of the elements that make this brief scene especially brilliant: the surreal tedium, which anticipates Dragnet ("And waiter?" "Yes, Baron?" "You see that moon?" "Yes, Baron."), the waiter's dutiful note-taking, the vaguely suggestive "I want to see, um" (the movie predates the strictures of the Production Code, as other scenes make clear), the final "No, Baron," and the bit with the leaf (which took me three viewings to figure out). As we soon find out, the Baron is no baron. And the Countess is no countess. I'll leave the rest of the story for you, reader, to discover.

Trouble in Paradise is available on DVD from The Criterion Collection. The disc contains, among other extras, an introduction in which Peter Bogdanovich talks about the film. I'll give him the last word:

You think to yourself, "This was made in 1932 for general audiences." What happened? When was America that sophisticated? When was the world that sophisticated, and how could we have gone so far in the other direction?