Staple!

There are many ways for students to annoy their professors: "Did I miss anything important?" (No, nothing like that happens in our class.) "Will this test affect my grade?" (No, not at all.) "What are your office hours?" (They're the first thing on the syllabus.) Most professors understand that such questions are harmless; few, if any, would give the responses I've imagined here.

An annoyance that's less understandable is the absence of a staple to hold together pages of written work. No matter how good an essay or report might be, a missing staple says a lot. Unstapled work says that the writer either doesn't know what finished work looks like or isn't willing to take the care necessary to produce it. Unstapled work says that the writer couldn't be bothered to use a stapler in a library or residence hall or ask a friend. (My son tells me of a table in his undergraduate library with ten staplers available for students' use). Unstapled work might also indicate a failure to follow directions, as many course assignments carry a reminder to staple. Worse perhaps than the absence of a staple are turned-down upper-left corners, which seem to acknowledge that there's something wrong, but that the writer can't be bothered to fix the problem properly. And worse still is the question that comes up in class when written work is due: "Do you have a stapler?"

In such circumstances, some professors become codependent, so to speak, bringing a stapler to class when writing is due. To my mind, such professors are giving their students a false picture of the workings of the larger (so-called real) world. Can you imagine submitting a report or proposal as a sheaf of loose pages? Or asking your boss for a stapler before handing over that work? If not, start now, and staple! Unless of course your professors prefer paper clips.

[I've used the Swingline Tot 50 seen above since the 20th century, when I was in college. Yes, the smaller Tot staples are still around.]

Proust on jealousy

One parenthetical insight:

(It is astonishing how jealousy, which spends its time inventing so many petty but false suppositions, lacks imagination when it comes to discovering the truth.)

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 402

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

Trick or treat? Anyone?

If the Great Pumpkin looks down on my neighborhood tonight, he will weep. In three hours of municipally-sanctioned trick-or-treating, one butterfly and one pirate, accompanied by one mom, rang the bell. I fear that trick-or-treating is a dying art.

Anyone who likes Dum Dums and Smarties (Elaine's clever candy choices) is welcome to drop by.

A poem with Halloween in it

Or Hallowe'en. Good evidence that it’s not always happy poets who make happy poems:

"I Am Cherry Alive," the Little Girl Sang

                    For Miss Kathleen Hanlon

"I am cherry alive," the little girl sang,
"Each morning I am something new:
I am apple, I am plum, I am just as excited
As the boys who made the Hallowe'en bang:
I am tree, I am cat, I am blossom too:
When I like, if I like, I can be someone new,
Someone very old, a witch in a zoo:
I can be someone else whenever I think who,
And I want to be everything sometimes too:
And the peach has a pit and I know that too,
And I put it in along with everything
To make the grown-ups laugh whenever I sing:
And I sing: It is true; It is untrue;
I know, I know, the true is untrue,
The peach has a pit, the pit has a peach:
And both may be wrong when I sing my song,
But I don't tell the grown-ups: because it is sad,
And I want them to laugh just like I do
Because they grew up and forgot what they knew
And they are sure I will forget it some day too.
They are wrong. They are wrong. When I sang my
     song, I knew, I knew!
I am red, I am gold, I am green, I am blue,
I will always be me, I will always be new!"

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), from Summer Knowledge: Selected Poems (NY: New Directions, 1967)

"Reticulating splines"

I see the cryptic status message "Reticulating splines . . ." whenever I use the wonderful online service Mozy to back up my hard drive (as I did last night). Thus Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day caught my attention this morning:

reticulate   \rih-TIK-yuh-lut\   adjective
1 : resembling a net or network; especially : having veins, fibers, or lines crossing
2 : being or involving evolutionary change dependent on genetic recombination involving diverse interbreeding populations

Reticulate is also a verb, transitive ("to divide, mark, or construct so as to form a network") and intransitive ("to become reticulated"). A spline is a curved element used in computer graphics. So what are "reticulating splines"? A programmer's joke.

Wikipedia's article on the computer-game Sim City 2000 explains:

SimCity 2000 was the first sim game to feature the semi-nonsensical phrase "Reticulating Splines," which means "to make a network of splines." [Game designer] Will Wright has stated in an interview that the game does not actually reticulate splines when generating terrain, and he just inserted the phrase because it "sounded cool."

And there are people who get it: one Mozy user gives the service "super huge geek bonus points" for "Reticulating splines."

If you need to back up your hard drive, you can't do better than Mozy, reticulating splines and all.

[All definitions from Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary.]

Elder, older, eldest, oldest

Listening to Évelyne Bloch-Dano talking about the Proust family, I noticed that she referred to Proust as an "older brother" and then excused and corrected herself: "elder brother." And there was I, a native speaker, wondering: What's the diff?

I checked my "Fowler's," H.W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern Usage (ed. Sir Ernest Gowers, 2nd ed., 1965), and found this compact explanation:

elder, -est. These forms are now almost confined to the indication of mere seniority among the members of a family; for this purpose the old- forms are not used except when the age has other than a comparative importance or when comparison is not the obvious point. Thus we say I have an elder (not older) brother in the simple sense a brother older than myself; but I have an older brother is possible in the sense a brother older than the one you know of; and Is there no older son? means Is there none more competent by age than this one? Outside this restricted use of family seniority, elder and eldest linger in a few contexts such as elders meaning persons whose age is supposed to demand the respect of the young, and as the titles of lay officers of the Presbyterian Church, the elder brethren of Trinity House, the elder hand at piquet, and elder statesman.

A check of Google Book Search reveals that the distinction between eld- and old- is preserved in the New Fowler's Modern English Usage (ed. R. W. Burchfield, 3d. edition, 1996).

Elder, older, eldest, oldest, let's call the whole thing off.

"If there are no human rights . . ."

"If there are no human rights, there is no value of a human."

Ashin Kovida, Buddhist monk, a leader of last month's protests in Burma, addressing a crowd in the Sule Pagoda in Yangon on September 19, 2007. Ashin Kovida escaped from Burma last week after dyeing his hair and donning a crucifix.

A crucifix on his neck, monk escapes Myanmar (International Herald Tribune)

Orange art, no crate

[Orange Cluster, linen postcard, a "Genuine Curteich-Chicago 'C.T. Art Colortone' Post Card," no. 5 in the series Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas]

Having our piano tuned this week meant rediscovering and removing all the items on the lid — sheet music, editions, and this postcard, which I'd long forgotten about. There's a copy for sale online with a 1946 postmark, but this card looks older, dowdier to me. Wikipedia reports that the linen postcard's heyday came to an end in 1945. The printed text on the back of the card reads: "AMERICA'S BEST GRAPEFRUIT AND ORANGES GROW IN TEXAS VALLEY — GATEWAY TO MEXICO."

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Hooking up in space

I'm not sure that the comedy in this AP article headline is inadvertent. Even I know what hooking up means.

"Please Don't Smoke"

An unusual and unusually specific Google search brought someone all the way from Indore, India, to Orange Crate Art today:

no smoking points 5 or 8 lines poem or 8 lines song on no smoking for 7 yrs old kids

The search led to the archived page for October 2005, which contains a post marking my sixteenth year sans cigarettes. That page also contains references to kids, lines, poems, points, and songs, scattered among the month's posts.

I thought it would be fun to create a song that meets this searcher's need. I wrote the words; Elaine Fine wrote the music. If you click on the images below, you'll find larger, more readable, more singable, more playable, and perhaps more persuasive sheet music.