The shortometer

The shortometer: "a device used by commercial bakers for testing the shortening power of various fats in dough" (Webster's Third New International).

The above images come from a home economics textbook, a booksale leftover, Ruth Griswold's The Experimental Study of Foods (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962). Griswold describes the shortometer as a device to test "the breaking strength of pastry, cookies, and crackers." The device in Figure 16-5 is a commercial product. Figure 16-6 shows a do-it-yourself device made with a postal scale. Griswold explains: "In either instrument, the pastry or other wafer is put across two horizontal bars, the single upper bar is brought down by means of a motor until it breaks the wafer, and the force is recorded with a maximum registering hand." Imagine, going to work to smash graham crackers.

My brief acquaintance with shortometers has cleared up a line from The Honeymooners episode "Alice and the Blonde" (1956) that always puzzled me. Ed Norton to Bert Wedemeyer: "I do like a short cookie, Bert, and you do make 'em short." The Third New International explains it all: "easily broken, crumbling readily (as from shortening content)."

Note the name Kroger in the caption for 16-5. The Kroger Co. is still going strong, not crumbling readily.

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Grad-school-ruled notebook

After decades of only offering ruled notebook paper suitable for college-level education and below, school-supply giant Mead introduced its new grad-school-ruled notebook Monday, which features lines twice as narrow as college-ruled paper.

Mead Releases New Grad-School-Ruled Notebook (The Onion)

(Thanks, Ben!)

Hillary Clinton's roots

April 2007:

At a recent gathering of donors, [Mark] Penn said, he asked the group: "Who here knows where Hillary is from?"

"Not one, really, guessed that it was in the Chicago suburbs," Penn said. "They really didn't know. They drew a blank. So, a lot of people always say to me, well, they know everything about Hillary. It's not true. There's really a lot to tell."

April 2008:

Hillary Clinton's campaign hit the airwaves in Pennsylvania with five new ads Tuesday, including spots that feature two of the state's most high-profile Democrats — Gov. Ed Rendell and Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter — and one that plays up her roots in the state.

Messy desk

Thought and work are unpredictable, varying, and ambiguous. They're messy. Why shouldn't your desk be messy too?

Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder (New York: Back Bay Books, 2007), 32

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Spam names

In the spam folder recently: Horace Fish, Madge Herring, Jewell Mayo, and Ham, just Ham.

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France debates le point-virgule

Not a belated April Fool's joke:

In the red corner, desiring nothing less than the consignment of the semicolon to the dustbin of grammatical history, are a pair of treacherous French writers and (of course) those perfidious Anglo-Saxons, for whose short, punchy, uncomplicated sentences, it is widely rumoured, the rare subtlety and infinite elegance of a good semicolon are surplus to requirements. . . .

In the blue corner are an array of linguistic patriots who cite Hugo, Flaubert, De Maupassant, Proust and Voltaire as examples of illustrious French writers whose respective oeuvres would be but pale shadows of themselves without the essential point-virgule, and who argue that — in the words of one contributor to a splendidly passionate blog on the topic hosted recently by the leftwing weekly Le Nouvel Observateur — "the beauty of the semicolon, and its glory, lies in the support lent by this particular punctuation mark to the expression of a complex thought."

Read all about it: The end of the line? (Guardian)

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Lucky numbers

Perhaps there's a shortage at the fortune-cookie factory. In Jewish tradition, the number 18 is lucky: the letters of חי (chai, "living") add up to 18. It's not unusual for a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah gift to be a multiple of 18 — e.g., $36: a double chai. But as Wallace Shawn says in My Dinner with André, "the cookie is in no position to know about that." Related reading Chai (Wikipedia)

Going on break

An e-mail from my friend Sara got me thinking of words from my retail past, when I would "go on break." I went on break at two discount department stores in New Jersey, Valley Fair (in Little Ferry) and Two Guys (in Hackensack), where I worked during college as a housewares stock-clerk. (To this day, I refer to an aisle of kitchen tools as "the gadget aisle.")

It was always "go on," never "take a." That's how I started smoking — on break, as there was nothing else to do, and everyone smoked, sitting in the store's snack bar with a Coke or a styrofoam cup of miserable coffee. The older ladies carried cigarette purses. The younger employees would usually have Marlboros in the box. I, going my way, had Pall Malls. I remember a co-worker demonstrating how to make a cigarette pack smoke, by pulling down the cellophane wrapper, burning a hole in the bottom, letting the open space fill with smoke, and pushing the pack in and out of the wrapper to puff smoke through the hole.

I remember just one Two Guys co-worker who spoke of "break" as her own: not "I'm going on break" but "I'm taking my break." We found her one Saturday in the garbage can aisle, hiding in a plastic garbage can, where, it seemed, she had been taking her break for several hours.

Sometimes all of Housewares would go on break together (a team-building activity, of course), and then we'd hear "Someone from Housewares to Aisle 12 for customer assistance" on the loudspeaker. And once, during the lunacy of Dollar Days (four rolls of Reynolds Wrap for a dollar!), we barricaded ourselves, along with our department manager, in our stockroom, where we ate Chinese take-out and let the customers figure things out for themselves. Our feast was interrupted by Mr. Miller, one of three store managers, who banged on the door, demanded access, and lectured us on our sorry ways. And then: "What've you got? You got anything good? Let me have an egg roll." Mr. Miller ate with us and went away mollified. He was by far the most decent of our store managers.

There are still few everyday realities sadder to me than a discount department store at closing time:

"Attention shoppers, that old clock on the wall tells us that another fine day has come to an end. We here at Valley Fair appreciate your business and hope to see you again soon. Until then, have a safe trip home, and good night."

Bad simile of the day

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.

"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.

Pembroke buzzes about Bill's visit (Fayetteville Observer)

American Idol and Orange Crate Art

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?

American Idol viewers, please add your observations.