Bill Clinton is scheduled to visit Pembroke, North Carolina, today:
Charles Locklear dined on fried chicken and cabbage as he talked about former President Clinton's visit. He said it will be a good thing for the town.Pembroke buzzes about Bill's visit (Fayetteville Observer)
"This will kind of put us on the map like back in the '50s when we had the Ku Klux Klan shoot out. We might be back on the front page again," he said.
Though I have watched no more than a few chance minutes of American Idol (and a couple of Sanjaya Malakar clips on YouTube), I find it strangely exciting to learn that an American Idol contestant has read Orange Crate Art. He is Michael Johns, who went in search of the meaning of "in your wheelhouse," as used by American Idol judge Randy Jackson. On his Idol blog, Johns writes
I found another blogger who says that Wheelhouse is a metaphor for a "hitter's power zone, among other things."I am that blogger, in a post on James Carville's metaphors:
As I just learned, wheelhouse is (among other things) a metaphor for "a hitter's power zone."I'm impressed that Michael Johns is looking up idioms in his free time. Would I also be impressed by his singing?
From a New York Times interview with designer Brian Collins on typography and the Obama campaign: To the Letter Born.
"Put the word 'change' in Comic Sans and the idea feels lightweight and silly. Place it in Times Roman and it feels self-important. In Gotham, it feels just right. Inspiring, not threatening. In the end, typography makes a real difference when it delivers words and ideas that are relevant to people. And for many, that seems to be the case here."
Words of wisdom, sort of:
There are no missing objects. Only unsystematic searchers.Findologist Professor Solomon has made his How to Find Lost Objects available as a free .pdf.
My friend Stefan Hagemann sends news of a missing apostrophe, missing from a statue honoring Chicago Cub Ernie Banks. The exhortation on the statue's base — "LETS PLAY TWO" — comes from Banks' catchphrase: "It's a beautiful day for a ballgame. Let's play two."
Sculptor Lou Cella: "I'm the sculptor; I'm not a writer. I just read it the way I heard it in my head."
Cella's added an apostrophe, in the right place too.
(Thanks, Stefan!)
Related posts
A semicolon in the news
Spelling in the news (Eistein, Michaelangelo, and Shakespere)
There's a curious story in Inside Higher Ed today about Laurence Thomas, a philosophy professor at Syracuse University who ends class and walks out if he sees a student texting. He recently followed one such exit with an e-mail to administrators and his students, expressing his frustration with the lack of respect his students give him. And then he said something more: "he noted that the student who sent the text message is Cuban, and that last year, two Latino students had started to play tic-tac-toe during his class."
But Professor Thomas is no cranky, backwards white guy:
While Thomas noted that white students are also rude, he expressed frustration that — especially as a minority scholar himself — he would be treated in this way. "One might have thought that for all the talk about racism and the good of social equality, non-white students would be particularly committed to respecting a black professor," Thomas wrote.In his e-mail, Thomas went on to describe himself as a believer "in principles of right and wrong that transcend every race/ethnicity and sexual identity."
What with all the overtures to the (so-called) working-class voter in Pennsylvania, the conversation on MSNBC's Hardball this afternoon turned to boilermakers. None of the four assembled talking heads seemed to know exactly what a boilermaker is.
From Merriam-Webster Online: "whiskey with a beer chaser." That's the only boilermaker I've ever heard of (or drank).
From the Oxford English Dictionary: "a shot of whisky followed immediately by (or occas. combined with) a glass of beer." Combined with? Yes.
And then there's Wikipedia, whose boilermaker entry is a headache-making catalogue of variations.
I just remembered that one of the great scenes in On the Waterfront (1954, dir. Elia Kazan) includes boilermakers. Here, courtesy of YouTube, are Marlon Brando (Terry Malloy) and Eva Marie Saint (Edie Doyle), with "two Glockenheimers and two for chasers": "Dink."
Related post
A boilermaker, sort of, in the news
New technology from Google:
The core technology that powers gDay™ is MATE™ (Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation).Read more: gDay™ with MATE™ (Google)
Using MATE’s™ machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques developed in Google’s Sydney offices, we can construct elements of the future.
Whoso would be a G-Man must be a pencil user, as Emerson might have put it.¹ The pencil is the FBI's writing instrument of choice in The House on 92nd Street (1945, directed by Henry Hathaway), a movie whose interiors seem to have been furnished by a pencil fanatic. Pencils are the tools of counter-espionage in this movie: we see glassfuls in various work areas, and again and again we see the Dixon Ticonderoga, always the Dixon Ticonderoga, in government hands. (The ferrule, with its three dark bands, is the giveaway.)
I have no idea whether The House on 92nd Street is accurate in its depiction of pencil-wielding FBI agents. But the depiction is plausible. Unlike a fountain pen, a pencil is ready to write without priming. It has no cap to unscrew and keep track of. It cannot skip or clog or leak. It remains available for sporadic notetaking without drying out. Its lifespan is always visible: one will never be surprised by unexpectedly running out of ink (or, as with a mechanical pencil, out of lead). If a point breaks, it can be resharpened, or another pencil can substitute. The plainness of the wooden pencil — just doing my unglamorous job, ma'am — seems to fit the G-Man ethos.²
"Well, I guess that's all": a G-Man posing as a Civil Defense worker pockets his Ticonderoga.
Distinguished physicist Dr. Arthur C. Appleton (John McKee) uses a Dixon Ticonderoga to do some calculations concerning Process 97.
Inspector George A. Briggs (Lloyd Nolan) is Inspector Dixon Ticonderoga himself. He never uses his desk sets (yes, he has more than one, as we'll see), just pencils. Note the ferrule of the pencil in his hand.
Dixon Ticonderoga noir! Five more pencils wait on the notepad. Great phone and film projector too.
Two desk sets, two rocking blotters (!), and two pencils, one Dixon Ticonderoga and one anonymous. Inspector Briggs holds a page with some of the details of Process 97, which seems to be the secret process for making a snowman.
¹ From "Self-Reliance": "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist."
² The ballpoint pen wasn't for sale in the United States until October 1945, after the movie's release.
Related posts
The dowdy world on film
Film noir pencils
Musical-comedy pencils
Pocket notebook sighting: The House on 92nd Street
Q and A
The real Mr. T (A Dixon Ticonderoga spokespencil)
Young woman with a pencil
And at Pencil Revolution, a photo-essay on some old Castell 9000s: Serious pencils indeed.
