Imaginary failed fusion restaurants (no. 3)

Poi Vey: Traditional Hawaiian and Jewish cuisine.

Imaginary failed fusion restaurants (no. 2)

'FroZen!: Soul food and macrobiotic cooking.

Imaginary failed fusion restaurants (no.1)

O'Saka's, featuring traditional Irish cuisine and sushi.

And now I'm waiting for imaginary failed fusion restaurant no. 2 to show up.

Proust on self-plagiarism

Is being oneself (or one's self) merely copying? Ah, habit:

[W]hat we call experience is only the revelation to our own eyes of one of our own character traits, which recurs naturally, and recurs all the more powerfully if we have already on some previous occasion brought it up into the clear light of consciousness, so that the spontaneous reaction which had guided us the first time becomes reinforced by all the suggestions of memory. The kind of plagiarism which is most difficult for any human individual to avoid (and even for whole nations, who persist in reproducing their faults and aggravating them in so doing) is self-plagiarism.

Marcel Proust, The Fugitive, translated by Peter Collier (London: Penguin, 2003), 403

Related post
Proust on habit and selfhood

All Proust posts (Pinboard)

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.