Of prongs and pillars

Once you begin reading and listening for inept political metaphor, it's everywhere. From a Wolf Blitzer blog post:

For years, Republicans have stressed a three-pronged platform in trying to win votes.

What would a three-pronged — or even one- or two-pronged — platform look like? Something designed by Dalí, I suppose.

Three sentences later, the prongs turn into pillars. If you want a good old dying metaphor, you need planks.

Come on, Wolf. As the IBM sign said, THINK, at least a little bit.

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It's difficult not to suspect an element of parody in New York Times writer Patrick Healy's article on last night's primaries. Watch the metaphors change from sentence to sentence — and within sentences! George Orwell's comment on dying metaphors (which Stefan Hagemann cited in relation to the so-called "kitchen sink" strategy) is again apposite:

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday night not only shook off the vapors of impending defeat, but also showed that — in spite of his delegate lead — Senator Barack Obama was still losing to her in the big states.

Those two states were the battlegrounds where Mr. Obama was going to bury the last opponent to his history-making nomination, finally delivering on his message of hope while dashing the hopes of a Clinton presidential dynasty.

Yet then the excited, divided American electorate weighed in once more, throwing Mrs. Clinton the sort of political lifeline that New Hampshire did in early January after her third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses.

For Mrs. Clinton, the battle ahead is not so much against Mr. Obama as it is against a Democratic Party establishment that had once been ready to coalesce behind her but has been drifting toward Mr. Obama. The party wants a standard-bearer now to wage the war against the newly minted leader of the Republicans, Senator John McCain, who enjoys a head start with every day that the Democrats lack a nominee of their own.

The vapors: Hillary Clinton as 19th-century lady.

Battlegrounds: war.

Burying the last opponent: evidently a war metaphor, but one doesn't bury the enemy dead in wartime. Hit job might be a better metaphor here — killing one's enemy and burying the body.

Finally delivering, while dashing dynastic hopes: a courier service that also delivers violent blows to abstractions. Note that this courier service makes deliveries to battlegrounds.

Weighing in: boxing.

Lifeline: a rescue at sea (after a third-place finish).

Coalescing, drifting: matter in primordial space?

Standard-bearer: war (but a military leader wouldn't be bearing the standard).

Newly minted: coinage.

A head start: it's a race.

Yes, it's still a race after all.

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El Pico key ring

Reading Design Observer's occasional excerpts from Taking Things Seriously: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance prompts me to write about this now-broken key ring. My friend Aldo Carrasco gave it to me in the 1980s in recognition of my taste for Cuban coffee. My guess is that the key ring was a giveaway for bodega and supermarket customers. I would like to think that the unintended Warholian overtones were not lost on us, but they were. El Pico was just a joke between friends.

Over many years, I kept this key ring in a box with various objects — foreign coins, pencils, a miniature Mona Lisa from an old professor's office. At some point in the late 20th century (how I love saying that), I decided that I would stop saving the key ring and simply use it, in memory of Aldo, who had died in 1986.

Yesterday, when I reached to open the front door and leave the house, my keys fell to the floor and I found myself holding nothing more than a coffee can: the plastic that tethered ring to can had split. I can't imagine a repair that would be more than temporary, and I can imagine keys falling in less forgiving circumstances. So my keys are still on the key ring my friend gave me, but El Pico now sits on my desk.

Related post
Letters from Aldo

Mac user experience

From Humanized, a blog post by Atul Varma on what it's like to plug a USB keyboard and USB mouse into a Windows machine and a Mac. Here's Windows:

Each wizard required 3 clicks to get through. I had to go through 8 wizards in all, so that's a grand total of twenty-four clicks required to unplug my keyboard and mouse from one side of my computer and plug them into the other side. I'm not actually installing brand-new hardware here.

Now the Mac:

The first time I had to plug this keyboard and mouse into my Mac, I was floored. In the best-case scenario, I expected it to think for a second or two and then give me a reasonably unintrusive message informing me that I could use my USB mouse and keyboard. That would have been pretty humane.

But it did one better.

The Mac didn't tell me anything, because my mouse and keyboard just worked the moment I plugged them in. When you plug in a power cable or a pair of headphones into a computer, you don't get some kind of confirmation message from your operating system, because it's obviously supposed to just work — why should plugging in a USB keyboard and mouse be any different?

I'm planning to read these paragraphs aloud the next time I'm waiting (and waiting, and waiting) for a classroom Windows computer to detect my USB flash drive and tell me that it's ready to use.

Moleskine datebook icons

I'm on my second page-a-day Moleskine datebook and only recently noticed a change in the 2008 edition: the addition of two small icons on the bottom two lines of each page, useful to anyone tracking the weather.

Like the small hour marks running down the first thirteen lines of each page (from 8 to 20), these icons are handy if you need them, and unobtrusive enough to ignore if you prefer. That's good design.

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Pocket address-book sighting

[Murvyn Vye (Captain Dan Tiger) and Thelma Ritter (Moe).]

"Look, what do you want from me, Tiger? Do I personally raise the price on hamburger and pork and beans and frankfurters? Is it my fault that the cost of living is going up? These are the prices as of this morning."

Moe's referring to the prices for the names of the various criminals in her address-book. As of this morning, the price of a "cannon" (pickpocket) is $50.

Pickup on South Street (1953, directed by Sam Fuller) has four great performances (Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, and Richard Kiley), three great fight scenes (in an apartment, a men's room, and a subway station), two great pickpocketings, and one address-book. The movie is available, beautifully restored, from The Criterion Collection.

More sightings
Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne
Moleskine sighting (in Extras)
Notebook sighting in Pickpocket
A pocket notebook in The Palm Beach Story
Pocket notebook sighting (in Diary of a Country Priest)
Pocket notebook sightings in Rififi
Red-headed woman with reporter's notebook

The brain on jazz

Researchers have been studying at the brains of jazz musicians:

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions . . . .

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

Read all about it:

This Is Your Brain on Jazz (Johns Hopkins Medicine press release)
Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation (PLoS ONE)

Related reading
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(Thanks, Elaine!)

Victoria's Secret "too sexy"

Not from The Onion:

Victoria's Secret likes to ask in its marketing, "What is sexy?" Now the lingerie chain is trying to figure out, "What's too sexy?"

The chief executive of the brand known for its provocative televised fashion shows and alluring stores made an admission yesterday. In her mind, the brand has become "too sexy" — or at least the wrong kind of sexy.

"We have so much gotten off our heritage," CEO Sharen Jester Turney said in a conference call with analysts.

Read the rest: Apparently, You Can Be Too Sexy (Wall Street Journal)

More "Not from The Onion" posts
Jesús Malverde
Outsider outsider artist
Reality trumps The Onion
Reality trumps satire
Reality trumps satire (again)
University of Wisconsin sues over W

Mildred Bailey, the stars, and us

Trombonology at Relative Esoterica has a wonderful post on the singer Mildred Bailey, born 105 years ago this past Wednesday. This post made me think of James Schuyler's poem "Let's All Hear It for Mildred Bailey!" It begins

The men's can at Café Society Uptown
was need I say it? Upstairs
and as I headed for the stairs I
stumbled slightly
not about to fall
and Mildred Bailey
swept by in a nifty outfit:
off-brown velvet
cut in a simple suit-effect
studded with brass nail heads
(her hair dressed with stark simplicity)
"Take it easy, Sonny," she
advised me and passed on to the supper club
(surely no supper was
served at Café you-know-which?)
A star spoke to me
in person! No one
less than Mildred Bailey!

I love the dowdy diction of this passage: the vulgar can next to the swank Café, the nifty outfit, the dressed hair, and of course, Sonny. You can read the poem here. I've taken the lines above from Schuyler's 1993 Collected Poems, where the punctuation differs slightly.

Schuyler's poem made me think of the various close encounters that my dad had when doing construction work in New York City and environs. He once met Doro Merande, who asked "What are you men building?" And he once said hello to Groucho Marx, who moved his eyebrows in response. I need to get a list. Until then, let's all hear it for Mildred Bailey, Doro Merande, Groucho Marx, and those wonderful people out there in the dark — i.e., us.

A related post
A poem for the day (by James Schuyler)

Related reading
Mildred Bailey (Wikipedia)
Mildred Bailey (MySpace, with four songs)

Leap Year card by Roy Doty

[Found at Boing Boing. Click to enlarge. ]

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