Grecian coffee urn

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy.]

Coffee is truth, truth coffee!

My daughter snapped this photograph during a wonderful family lunch at Papa George, a great new Greek-American restaurant in Champaign, Illinois.

(Thanks, Rachel!)

Post-college first dates

From an interview with sociologist Kathleen A. Bogle, author of Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (2008):

[T]he transition to the post-college dating scene was not necessarily an easy one. Many of the 20-something-year-old men and women I spoke with were confused over how to act in certain scenarios after college, not knowing if they were on a date or just "hanging out and hooking up." Some of the people I interviewed had never been on a formal date until after college, so figuring out the rules for the "new" system was a big adjustment for them.

Read the rest: The Sociology of "Hooking Up" (Inside Higher Ed)

P.S. 131, 44th Street, Brooklyn

This item, from the series "New York's changing scene" (New York Daily News Sunday Magazine, March 4, 1979), has traveled with me for years. I clipped this column (with permission) on a Sunday visit to my grandparents' house in Brooklyn. I'd have never seen it otherwise: we were a Times family.

My mother went to P.S. 131 in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and I had her first-grade teacher, Mrs. Frazier, in the 1962-1963 school year. That span of time no longer seems amazing to me: there's nothing remarkable about teaching at the same school for twenty-odd years. But that my teacher was already teaching during the Depression: that's difficult to take in, and it makes me wonder when Mrs. Frazier's first-grade teacher began teaching.

I clipped this column not only for its school. Before my parents fled the city for New Jersey, we lived in the first-floor apartment of the rowhouse right next to P.S. 131: 1143 44th Street. A cranky landlady lived upstairs. My grandparents (my mother's parents) lived down the block. Oh memory!¹

Other P.S. 131 posts
P.S. 131
Some have gone and some remain

P.S. 131 class photographs
1962–1963 1963–1964 1964–1965 1965–1966 1966–1967

Related reading
P.S. 131 today (Insideschools.org)

¹ Repeated three times, the poignant phrase Louis Armstrong adds to his vocal in a 1931 recording of "Star Dust."

How to improve writing (no. 18 in a series)

A "blow out clearance"? A "sales event"? Dig the hyperbole and redundancy of this Wal-Mart sign:

  BLOW OUT
   APPAREL
CLEARANCE
     SALES
    EVENT

I wonder whether the sign's portrait-orientation led the author to pile up words to fill the space. Better:

   APPAREL
CLEARANCE
     SALE

Plain old clothing would be a better choice of course, but I'll stick by the dowdy word apparel, which no one outside of retail seems to use. (When did you last go apparel shopping?)

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

Yes, we can

Barack Obama, a few minutes ago:

When I hear that we'll never overcome the racial divide in our politics, I think about that Republican woman who used to work for Strom Thurmond, who's now devoted to educating inner-city children and who went out onto the streets of South Carolina and knocked on doors for this campaign. Don't tell me we can't change.

WriteRoom

[Click to enlarge and read.]

Smultron (by Peter Borg)
TextWrangler (Bare Bones Software)
WriteRoom (Hog Bay Software)

Related posts
Blockwriter
Dark Room
Jedi Concentrate
My version of Amish computing
Word 2007

Garry Wills on "plural presidency"

One problem with the George W. Bush administration is that it has brought a kind of plural presidency in through the back door. Vice President Dick Cheney has run his own executive department, with its own intelligence and military operations, not open to scrutiny, as he hides behind the putative president. . . .

And at a time when we should be trying to return to the single-executive system the Constitution prescribes, it does not seem to be a good idea to put another co-president in the White House.

Read the rest:

Two Presidents Are Worse Than One (New York Times)

Saturday night syndrome

Before there was Saturday Night Fever, there was Saturday night syndrome. Eric Partridge's New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English (2005) gives four meanings, all originating in the United States:

1 tachycardiac fibrillation

2 prolonged local pressure on a limb with resulting prolonged ischemia (inadequate blood supply)

3 the stress and fear suffered by preachers who wait until Saturday night to write their Sunday sermon

4 the tendency of a restaurant kitchen to fail to live up to its highest potential on the busiest night of the week, Saturday night

A usage example from the painter Larry Rivers' autobiography describes no. 1 as the result of "all-night dancing, carousing, and strenuous sexual activity." I remember reading somewhere, years ago, that smoking is also a factor. No. 2 results from passing out with an arm or leg hanging over a chair or the edge of a bed. The OED defines no. 2 as Saturday night palsy and Saturday night paralysis (while making no mention of Saturday night syndrome).

I foresee no Saturday night syndromes in my Saturday night, which I will probably spend reading Madame Bovary while Elaine is at an orchestra rehearsal.

$$$ = Macs

I love working on my MacBook. I love its simplicity and complexity — the greatest operating system around if you want a computer that "just works," but an endless array of nuances and shortcuts and tricks if you want to delve. (I like to delve.)

I realized how Mac-centric I've become when I heard the news about the proposed "stimulus package" in the works for American taxpayers. ("Stimulus pacakage": what an odd, vaguely indecent term for free money.) I immediately thought of the dollar amounts in terms of Macs:

$600 = a Mac mini!

$1200 = a MacBook! (And a copy of iWork '08.)

I wonder how many other Mac users are thinking about these numbers in these ways.

"It's time to turn the page."

This 1940 slogan seems oddly relevant now.