Tracy Flick speaks

Yes, from Alexander Payne's 1999 movie Election. Flick is the driven high-schooler who wants to be student-body president. The election is supposed to be hers:

"None of this would have happened if Mr. McAllister hadn't meddled the way he did. He should have just accepted things as they are instead of trying to interfere with destiny. You see, you can't interfere with destiny. That's why it's destiny. And if you try to interfere, the same thing's going to happen anyway, and you'll just suffer."

Life imitates art?

Seersucker mystery

In the frozen-food section of our favorite Asian grocery store, I noticed a package bearing an unfamiliar name: salted seersucker. The package displayed a plate full of bright-green cylinders, a little like stuffed grape leaves — just a little.

I jotted down the name to look up, but neither Google nor the Oxford English Dictionary has given me a clue as to what salted seersucker might be.

I can though report that the word seersucker derives from the Hindi śīr-śakkar and the Urdu shīrshakar, meaning "milk and sugar." (Thanks, Merriam-Webster.) Wikipedia suggests that seersucker might be a matter of the resemblance of the "smooth and rough stripes" of seersucker fabric to "the smooth surface of milk and bumpy texture of sugar."

Salted seersucker, anyone?

[Update, June 23, 2008: The mystery is solved.]

Dowdy cup and saucer

Elaine and Rachel spotted this cup and saucer in World Market today and decided to get them for me. Thank you, ladies!

The cup is filled with dowdy coffee — Maxwell House.

All "dowdy world" posts (via Pinboard)

Harmony guitars and Juno

Juno MacGuff checks out a Gibson Les Paul. Then someone asks her what she plays: "I rock a Harmony."

Harmony, the People's Guitar!

If you too began musical life on a Harmony, you'll find lots to remember at the unofficial Harmony Database. (I started out with an H1215 and an H162.)

Juno by the way is well worth seeing. The best lines in the movie though are not arch and knowing but plainly felt: "I wanted everything to be perfect. Not shitty and broken like everyone else's family."

Change the Margins

Change the Margins is an online effort to conserve resources by encouraging people to print with narrower margins. The goal: .75″ on all sides. One study that Change the Margins cites claims that changing to .75″ margins (it's not clear from what: 1″? 1.25″?) results in a 4.75% reduction in paper use.

I like various paper-saving strategies: I routinely save a page or more on my syllabi by switching to landscape view and putting text in three columns (which not only saves paper but also makes it easy to find things). And I always like tinkering with fonts and margins to make text fit. Why have a few runover lines if you can make everything fit on one page?

If you're using Microsoft Word, changing the default margin settings is a good way to start saving paper. (No 1.25″ margins, ever!) Change the Margins explains.

Jack Paar and Oscar Levant

As seen and heard on PBS's Pioneers of Television:

"What do you do for exercise?" "I stumble, and then I fall into a coma."

Oscar Levant on Jack Paar (YouTube)

A pocket notebook in The Palm Beach Story

[Written and directed by Preston Sturges, 1942.]

John D. Hackensacker III (Rudy Vallee) is buying clothes for Geraldine "Gerry" Jeffers (Claudette Colbert). Why? Because Gerry has no clothes, because she left her suitcase, or so she says, in the Ale and Quail Club's car, which was uncoupled from the rest of the train after the club's members shot up the lounge car. What John D. doesn't know is that there was no suitcase in the Ale and Quail Club's car. Gerry had to abandon her suitcase in a confrontation with her husband Tom (Joel McCrea) as she boarded a taxi to Penn Station so as to get on a train to Palm Beach and get a divorce.

But all that aside: John D. Hackensacker III is keeping track of his purchases in a pocket notebook.



More notebooks on screen
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Moleskine sighting (in Extras)
Notebook sighting in Pickpocket
Pocket notebook sighting (in Diary of a Country Priest)
Pocket notebook sightings in Rififi
Red-headed woman with reporter's notebook

Three words

"Yes, we can!"

Overheard

Someone dispensing advice by phone:

"It's always better to make it look like it's business-related."

All "Overheard" posts (via Pinboard)

Illinoism

The American Heritage Dictionary offers this regional note:

When need is used as the main verb, it can be followed by a present participle, as in The car needs washing, or by to be plus a past participle, as in The car needs to be washed. However, in some areas of the United States, especially western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, many speakers omit to be and use just the past participle form, as in The car needs washed. This use of need with past participles is slightly more common in the British Isles, being particularly prevalent in Scotland.

This use is also prevalent in downstate-Illinois speech. The sentence above, from an ad in the local newspaper, has the first "need + past participle" I've seen in print.

A related post
Need worked