The Incredible Head

The Incredible Head is a showerhead that promises "invigorating shower force," even with low pressure. It's also advertised as good for "Navy showers." (More on those in a minute.)

I bought an Incredible Head yesterday ($4.99), and it's a hit with showerers of all ages. It produces tremendous water pressure, so much so that it's necessary to turn the water way down from its usual setting. The Head has a button that shuts the water down a trickle — a good way to save even more water while shampooing. The manufacturer's claim that the Head can reduce water and energy costs by as much as 70% seems pretty plausible.

About Navy showers: turning off the water while showering is, as I guessed, the idea. Strangely enough, Lifehacker has a feature on this very topic today:

Conserve water and save money with the Navy shower (Lifehacker)

Proust and Renoir

Julia left a comment (on this post) mentioning an exhibit of Renoir landscapes at the National Gallery of Canada. Renoir landscapes are Proust territory, in a passage about the ways in which great art changes our perception of reality:

Today people of taste tell us that Renoir is a great eighteenth-century painter. But when they say this they forget Time, and that it took a great deal of time, even in the middle of the nineteenth century, for Renoir to be hailed as a great artist. To gain this sort of recognition, an original painter or an original writer follows the path of the occultist. His painting or his prose acts upon us like a course of treatment that is not always agreeable. When it is over, the practitioner says to us, "Now look." And at this point the world (which was not created once and for all, but as often as an original artist is born) appears utterly different from the one we knew, but perfectly clear. Women pass in the street, different from those we used to see, because they are Renoirs, the same Renoirs we once refused to see as women. The carriages are also Renoirs, and the water, and the sky: we want to go for a walk in a forest like the one that, when we first saw it, was anything but a forest — more like a tapestry, for instance, with innumerable shades of color but lacking precisely the colors appropriate to forests. Such is the new and perishable universe that has just been created. It will last until the next geological catastrophe unleashed by a new painter or writer with an original view of the world.

The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 323-24

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How to improve writing (no. 14 in a series)

As we lunched in a chic bistro (i.e., Subway), Elaine brought these sentences to my attention. From a package of Subway apple slices:

I see at least three problems:

Subject-verb disagreement: medley, are. But changing the verb won't help, as it makes no sense to say that the medley is picked.

The phrase "packaged into" is cumbersome: the slices are packaged in a bag.

There's a general air of overkill. As far as I can tell, all apples are harvested by hand — difficult, painful work. An apple's "best flavor" could probably be had without the addition of vitamin C as a preservative. A "specially designed bag" is a bag, which you already know about if you've bought this item. An "apple crunch" is the only crunch an apple can have.

A possible improvement, preserving some of the flavor of the original:

A medley of sweet red and tart green apples, picked at the peak of ripeness. The slices are cleaned and packaged to lock in their juicy crunch.

I'd prefer to eliminate the second sentence, but I suspect that it's meant to reassure someone, somewhere, that this product is fit to eat.

This post is no. 14 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

(Thanks, Elaine!)

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July 10, 1871

Bon anniversaire, M. Proust.

MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia

The Telephone Archive has numerous images of exchange-name-bearing number cards (so that's what they're called):

      The Number Card Archive

And Sonja Shield's Brooklyn Ramblings has two posts with photographs of Brooklyn storefronts still displaying exchange names. Hint: Try a Google search for an exchange name dear to you. Searching for GEdney, the Brooklyn exchange name of my childhood (gedney exchange name), brought me to Brooklyn Ramblings:

Mid-Century Telephone Numbers
Operator, get me PEnnsylvania 6-5000

That's a Brooklyn number card above. And as a Brooklyn native, I must note that in the Honeymooners episode "The Baby Sitter," Ralph and Alice Kramden's Brooklyn phone number is BEnsonhurst 0-7741.

Related posts
Telephone exchange names
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Tenuously related post
Ralph Kramden on Christmas

Proust: "like talking to an octopus"

Frail from birth, living with asthma, Proust had ample reason to meditate upon illness and the body:

It is illness that makes us recognize that we do not live in isolation but are chained to a being from a different realm, worlds apart from us, with no knowledge of us, and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Were we to meet a brigand on the road, we might manage to make him conscious of his own personal interest, if not of our plight. But to ask pity of our body is like talking to an octopus, for which our words can have no more meaning than the sound of the sea, and with which we should be terrified to find ourselves condemned to live.

The Guermantes Way, translated by Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002), 291-92

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Overheard

"Soy sauce, like vibrato, covers a multitude of sins."

Related reading
The Power of Vibrato (Musical Assumptions)
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My favorite line from Ratatouille

Even rats and figments of the imagination know despair:

"We are in a cage in a car trunk, awaiting a future in frozen food products."

There are many wonderful things in Ratatouille, including a genuinely touching moment that evokes Proust's idea of involuntary memory.

Ratatouille (Official website)

Telephone exchange names

[Hello, Boing Boing readers!]

Hearing Mike Hammer's telephone number reminds me:

If you'd like to replace the dull first two digits of your telephone number with an authentic and evocative exchange name, Robert Crowe at the Telephone EXchange Name Project has reproduced a 1955 Bell Telephone Company list of approved names. Says the TENP: "If you do not have a historically accurate exchange name to use for your current telephone number, you should choose one from this list." I'm set to go with FIrestone 5-, authentic, evocative, also alliterative.

I still remember MUrray Hill 7-7500 from the commercials for Gimbels Custom Reupholstery that ran on New York's WPIX-TV on weekday mornings. Cartoons and the Little Rascals at 7:00 a.m., and they were trying to get people to think about reupholstering furniture?

Recommended Exchange Names (The Telephone EXchange Name Project)
Gimbels (Wikipedia)

Related posts
MOre TElephone EXchange NAme NOstalgia
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[The original link to the EXchange Name Project is defunct.]

Mike Hammer's answering machine

"This is CRestview 5-4124. Mister Hammer, whom you are calling, is not available at present. If you wish to leave a record of your call, please state your message at the sound of the tone."

Kiss Me Deadly (1955, directed by Robert Aldrich) is terrific: sometimes brutal, often surprising, beautifully filmed. A Christina Rossetti poem, foreign cars, Cloris Leachman, Paul Stewart (Raymond the butler in Citizen Kane), the use of popcorn as a weapon, someone singing "M'appari," allusions (Cerberus, Lot's wife, Medusa, Pandora), a walk through a modern-art gallery, and Mike Hammer's answering machine:



[Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer]

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