Old phone ringtone

Prompted by George's comment on a post about the iDial, I went looking for a ringtone that sounds like a phone (i.e., an old phone).

Here's the best I found, an MP3 file that can be uploaded and saved as a ringtone: Old Telephone (54.6 KB). Now my cellphone sounds like a phone.

How to improve writing (no. 20 in a series)

From a pen catalogue:

As is true for all fine Faber-Castell chirographic instruments…

The Oxford English Dictionary has no entry for chirographic. The OED does include chirography, with the most recent example of the word's use dating from 1882. If chirographic isn't obsolete, it's certainly been a long time on the shelf.

Looking at chirographic for a bit helps to bring its parts into focus: the word is made from the Greek χειρo-, from χείρ, hand (also found in chiropractor) and -γραφικός, "written or transmitted in a (specified) way." A chirographic instrument is, simply, a writing instrument.

I'm not sure how to account for chirographic. Is the word meant to appear learned, so as to impress? Or whimsical, so as to charm? Or has the writer just gone hunting in a thesaurus? Given the context — ad copy in a catalogue for pen fans, the simpler word writing is enough. It would make the writer's meaning clear and keep the focus on those fine Faber-Castell products.

This post is no. 20 in a very occasional series, "How to improve writing," dedicated to improving stray bits of published prose.

[Definition of -graphic from Merriam-Webster Online.]

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iDial for iPhone

I don't own an iPhone. I have no plans to buy one. But if I ever do buy one, I will immediately add iDial.

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Old phone ringtone

Procrastination

Slate has a feature today on procrastination: Just Don't Do It. I like what Emily Yoffe's twelve-year-old daughter tells her mom about procrastination:

"Mom, you sit down to go to work, then you go to the bathroom, then you walk Sasha, then you say you're checking one last e-mail. You take a lot of breaks, Mom. You say you don't get any work done after I get home from school, but I'm 12, and I don't bother you anymore. Then you'll have so much work, you work 15 hours a day and you don't even come down to dinner. You've got to balance it out."

Kid's smart.

In my battle with procrastination, I've found two strategies especially helpful: working with breaks and reminding myself of how grateful my future self will be when x (whatever x might equal) is done.

A telex from Aldo

In 1984 and 1985, my friend Aldo Carrasco worked for a textile importer in New York. He was responsible for telex communication with European companies. He also used the telex machine to send messages to Elaine at work in Boston (she was friends with the telex operator) and to the two of us at home (by mail) in Brookline, Massachusetts. Above, one such message. If you look closely, you'll see that Frankie was fumbling a bit with the lyric.

A cousin of Aldo's recently asked me if I could post something from Aldo's correspondence. This telex — spontaneous, over the top, meant to delight — reminds me of how dedicated Aldo was to making the countless kind and funny gestures that sustain friendships. I can't imagine that he ever thought twice about whether to send a letter or make a call. (His phone bills were enormous.) That's what I would call the Aldine approach to friendship: do it, say it, write it. Your friends will thank you for it.

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Letters from Aldo

Happy Mother's Day

The Cartoon Bank would like to charge me $450 to reproduce this New Yorker cartoon. So please click instead.

[I've had mixed luck with Cartoon Bank URLs. If you find a cartoon unrelated to mother, you'll know that the link has expired.]

Mona Hinton (1919–2008)

My dad gave me the news on the telephone. From the Milt Hinton website:

Edmonia — Mona — Clayton Hinton, the widow of noted jazz musician and documentarian Milt Hinton (1910-2000), died on May 3, 2008, at North Shore Hospital after a long illness. She was living at the Hinton family residence on Milt Hinton Place in the Queens section of New York City.

The Hintons first met at Milt's grandmother's funeral in 1939 and were inseparable for the next 61 years. Mona traveled extensively with Milt throughout his career. She was the only spouse on the road with the Cab Calloway Orchestra in the 1940s, where, according to Milt, she was extremely helpful in finding rooms and meals for band members especially when the band worked in small towns during the Jim Crow era. During the '50s and '60s when Milt was working day and night in the New York studios, Mona kept the books and made often complicated transportation arrangements. And during the last two decades of his life, Milt and Mona got to travel to jazz festivals and clinics around the world — first class.

Elaine and I (and our very young daughter Rachel) met Milt and Mona in 1988 and 1989 at a then-yearly jazz festival in Decatur, Illinois. Mona sent Rachel (and later, Ben) a number of postcards from the road. She was, to our kids, Mrs. Hinton. We are lucky to have known her.



Mona Hinton, 1919–2008 (milthinton.com)

Hillary Clinton as Norma Desmond

[AP photo.]

She's still big (it's the primaries that got small) and, it seems, incapable of acknowledging reality.

Joe Gillis on Norma Desmond's final scene: "The dream she had clung to so desperately had enfolded her." And Norma Desmond in her final scene: "You see, this is my life. It always will be. There's nothing else."

Dialogue from Sunset Boulevard (1950, dir. Billy Wilder), screenplay by Charles Brackett, Billy Wilder, and D.M. Marshman, Jr.

A visit to the Eagle Pencil Company (1953)

After receiving a letter signed in pencil from Abraham H. Berwald, the Eagle Pencil Company's director of marketing, someone at the New Yorker wondered whether Eagle's people did all their writing in pencil. A visit to Eagle and an audience with Mr. Berwald followed. From "Flexibility," an unsigned New Yorker item (June 27, 1953):

"Do you know about the difficulties inherent in the manufacture of colored pencils?" he asked challengingly. We confessed ignorance. "Well, sir, the old-fashioned colored leads are terribly brittle," he said. "The thick ones broke right and left. The thin ones were even worse. But look at what we have now!" He seized a handful of carmine leads, unencased in protective wood, from his desk. "In bygone years, if I had dropped one of these on the floor, it would have smashed into six or seven pieces," he said. He dropped one on the floor, and it remained intact. "If I'd slammed it on the floor, it would have smashed into I don't know how many pieces," he continued. He wound up and slammed one on the floor, and it remained intact. Flushed with victory, he called to his secretary for a bunch of old-fashioned leads. She fetched them at once, and he began dropping and slamming them all over the room. We ducked as lead flew about us. "There!" cried Mr. Berwald. "What's happened is that we have made colored leads flexible. Why, look how far I can bend this one without break — Oops! Well, after all, there are limits."

"We ducked as lead flew about us": what a great sentence. Could it be the work of William Shawn? Ved Mehta's memoir of Shawn recounts jars of pencils on his desk and a mechanical pencil always on his person. Shawn wrote many unsigned "Talk of the Town" pieces, and I can imagine him braving an elevator ride to meet Mr. Berwald (in a tenth-floor office, as this piece notes).

The visit ended with a demonstration of the needle point of the Eagle Turquoise, so sharp that Mr. Berwald used it to play a 78 rpm record. The answer to the question that prompted the visit to Eagle: no, only a few old-timers kept to pencils. The Eagle Pencil Company was perhaps best known for Mikado (later Mirado), Turquoise, and Verithin pencils.

[Update, May 12, 2008: As Emily Gordon at Emdashes notes, "Flexibility" is by E.J. Kahn, Jr. Had I thought to look, I could have found that info online.]



[An Eagle Turquoise of my acquaintance, dating from the 1940s perhaps.]

Political metaphor of the day

From a Washington Post report on a Hillary Clinton appearance in Shepherdstown, West Virginia:

In the back of the crowd, a camera riser collapsed with a huge crash, sending bodies, coffee and cameras flying. "Metaphor?" a reporter asked as he picked himself off the ground? "Metaphor," confirmed another.

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