Young woman with a pencil

She's Jean Arthur, as Clarissa Saunders, in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Her pencil appears to be an Eagle Mikado. (How can one tell? By the distinctive band on the ferrule, not quite visible in this soft-focus shot.) After Pearl Harbor, the Mikado was renamed Mirado.

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"George Fox"

One must wonder about the sense of irony that might have gone into Eliot's Spitzer's choice of alias.

George Fox (Wikipedia)

Thin Air into thin air

It was safe at home — before it disappeared.

So what happened? In lieu of the presence of a poltergeist with techno-lust, I have developed a theory that I first viewed as remote, but now believe explains the fate of my Air.

Technology writer Steven Levy thinks he knows what became of his MacBook Air. Read all about it:

Gone, Without a Trace (Newsweek)

Back in January, when I read about a MacBook Air sleeve made to look like a manila envelope, the worrier in me imagined the worst.

Feature creep and the contemporary syllabus

From Paula Walsey's "The Syllabus Becomes a Repository of Legalese," in The Chronicle of Higher Education (March 14, 2008):

"[T]he syllabus gets longer and longer each time students think up something new that you wouldn't necessarily want them doing," says Susan R. Boettcher, an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.

More than a third of her nine-page syllabus for a course on the Reformation is taken up by explanations of her policies on attendance, laptop usage, and how to round grades, and her availability to write letters of recommendation.

Her detailed policy on scholastic dishonesty includes a clause stating that "the rules of academic honesty also apply to extra credit." It was an addition that she made after a judicial board overturned her recommendation that a student fail her course for plagiarizing an extra-credit paper. Her syllabus had not explicitly stated that students could fail for cheating on extra-credit projects.

I'm both impressed and horrified by the nerve of the student who challenged Professor Boettcher's decision. As I point out when I teach the Inferno, plagiarists would likely end up in the tenth bolgia of the eight circle of Dante's hell, reserved for falsifiers (alchemists, counterfeiters, perjurers, impersonators), those who tamper with the integrity of things, words, and persons.

No link: most items in the Chronicle are available only to subscribers. But here's Wikipedia's article on creeping featurism.

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In search of lost sound

Milk bottles, steam engines, typewriters: these and other sounds of the past are available from Marnix Koolhaas' Library of Vanished Sounds (aka the Museum of Lost Sounds).

Larry David on the red phone

["The Lefty Call," Curb Your Enthusiasm (2007).]

Larry David has strong feelings about who should be answering the red phone:

On the Red Phone (Huffington Post)

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Aqua Velva

From a television commercial:

"Through the years, many things pass from father to son, like Aqua Velva After Shave."

En mi casa, it's not Aqua Velva that has passed from father to son; it's a beard. Across generations, we heed the anonymous wisdom of these words (from 1879!):

Those who shave do well; but those who do not do better. If nature intended for men to shave, she would not have been so lavish in providing them with beards, and it is best for men not to shave at all, for nothing adds to the beauty of man so much as a full flowing beard.

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Do-over

I'm amused to find do-over as a recurring term in discussion of the Florida and Michigan Democratic primaries. From House Democratic leader Dan Gelber, a sentence that could have come from The Onion: "I think we have to do a do-over."

Do-over is likely to be familiar to any veteran of schoolyard games. That at least is the context in which I'm familiar with the term: the world of odds and evens and two out of three and choosing up sides. Any matter of reasonable or unreasonable dispute could be decided by a do-over: whether the ball was out of bounds, whether the dribbler was traveling, whether the runner was over the goal line when tagged. I must have said and heard do-over hundreds of times as a kid, in a number of variations:

"That's a do-over!"

"We gotta do that over!"

"No way! Do-over!"

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn't contain do-over — yet.

Inept political metaphor of the day

From Joe Klein, writing for Time:

On the Friday before her resurrection, Hillary Clinton seemed exhausted, played out.

Yes, resurrection can mean "resurgence, revivial"; it need not refer to the dead rising. But the paragraph in which this sentence appears describes the "funereal" mood on a Clinton campaign plane, which strongly suggests the primary meaning of resurrection, whatever the writer's intent. So the metaphor fails: if the mood is "funereal" and there's a resurrection to come, you're dead, not "exhausted, played out."

But worse: for a thinking reader, theist or non-theist, there's something grotesque in the very idea of a sentence about the Friday before a politician's resurrection.

As the sign said, THINK.

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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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