Creative counting

From CNN:

Clinton has recently been claiming a lead over Obama in the popular vote, a debatable claim, especially because the Democratic National Committee doesn't count the votes of Florida and Michigan, which Clinton does. . . . Clinton's campaign also excludes the caucus states in their popular vote count.

Too bad the Clinton approach wasn't available when I was an undergrad. I could've used it to improve my GPA:

1. Exclude any history course from the spring semester of freshman year.

2. Exclude all courses in biology, mathematics, and physics.

3. 4.0!

Looking at Lincoln

Visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum yesterday, I wasn't wowed by the lifelike figures standing about (John Wilkes Booth outside the White House!). I wasn't wowed by the sound effects (e.g., snoring in the Lincoln cabin) or the Ivesian blur of choral music, orchestral music, and (live) guitar and dulcimer. The Scholarship meets Showmanship™ philosophy of the so-called "Experience Museum" leaves me cold. The experience I want in a museum is that of being able to look at things without distraction. Dowdy me.

What I best liked in the museum: Looking at the back inside cover of one of Lincoln's law books, filled with pencil jottings. Looking at a sequence of photographs that show how Lincoln aged through the Civil War. And in a temporary exhibit about presidential campaigns, looking at a television camera used in a 1960 Kennedy-Nixon debate. It was a CBS camera, surprisingly small, with a broken plastic 2 on its front. I wonder if it might be the camera on the right in this photograph (no. 1 is on the left).

And check your spelling

Seen on a daytrip yesterday, the two faces of a church signboard:

 LIVE YOUR LIFE AS IF SOMEONE
IS WRITING A BOOK ABOUT YOU

    AUTOGRAPH YOUR WORK
         WITH EXCELLANCE

Classic Arts Showcase

From the website:

Launched in 1994, Classic Arts Showcase is a free cable television program designed to bring the classic arts experience to the largest audience possible by providing video clips of the arts in hopes that we may tempt you, the viewer, to go out and feast from the buffet of arts available in your community. The spectrum of classic arts disciplines aired on Classic Arts Showcase includes video samplings of animation, architectural art, ballet, chamber and choral music, dance, folk art, museum art, musical theater, opera, orchestral, recital, solo instrumental. solo vocal, and theatrical performances, as well as classic film and archival documentaries.

Classic Arts Showcase is available at no cost to any cable provider willing to provide a channel. If you're lucky to live in a community in which CAS is available, you know what a wonderful service it is. If it's not available, a small number of people might be able to persuade a local provider. Here in "downstate Illinois," Elaine and I switched cable providers when one company dropped the service and another picked it up. (Take that, Mediacom.)

What I like best about Classic Arts Showcase is the chance to see and hear performers who are new to me. YouTube is great, but Classic Arts Showcase introduces me to people I wouldn't know to look for — Ruth Etting and Josef Schmidt, for instance.

Classic Arts Showcase is the work of businessman and philanthropist Lloyd Rigler (1915–2003), who with his business partner Lawrence Deutsch (1920–1977) did all sorts of good for the cause of culture.

[If you're looking for the names of the pieces played during CAS station breaks, they're here: Classic Arts Showcase background music.]

Phishing

[Click for larger version.]

Yahoo's spam filters are letting just a few of these e-mails through. I hope that human readers are not as easily fooled. This pitch strongly resembles one that I received last month. Two new details that amuse me here: "either one" (of three!) and "We demand." And "Internet Banking Holder," whatever it might mean, is a phrase that it seems only phishers use.

I'm not easily fooled, but I'm easily entertained.

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower"

From the June 2008 issue of The Atlantic, an essay by Professor X:

Sending everyone under the sun to college is a noble initiative. Academia is all for it, naturally. Industry is all for it; some companies even help with tuition costs. Government is all for it; the truly needy have lots of opportunities for financial aid. The media applauds it — try to imagine someone speaking out against the idea. To oppose such a scheme of inclusion would be positively churlish. But one piece of the puzzle hasn’t been figured into the equation, to use the sort of phrase I encounter in the papers submitted by my English 101 students. The zeitgeist of academic possibility is a great inverted pyramid, and its rather sharp point is poking, uncomfortably, a spot just about midway between my shoulder blades.

For I, who teach these low-level, must-pass, no-multiple-choice-test classes, am the one who ultimately delivers the news to those unfit for college: that they lack the most-basic skills and have no sense of the volume of work required; that they are in some cases barely literate; that they are so bereft of schemata, so dispossessed of contexts in which to place newly acquired knowledge, that every bit of information simply raises more questions. They are not ready for high school, some of them, much less for college.

I am the man who has to lower the hammer.

This essay is required reading for anyone thinking about American education. And it's available online:

"In the Basement of the Ivory Tower" (The Atlantic)

Psychedelic textbook

Yes, it's a textbook, John Martin Rich's Education and Human Values (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1968), complete with what I've decided to call a booksale bindi (that yellow dot). The designer is uncredited.

From the back cover:

Through this text, students of education are encouraged to think seriously and reflectively about the critical value conflicts confronting American education today. The underlying theme of the book is the development of fully functioning self-actualizing characteristics among prospective educators. The author's aim is to stimulate the reader to become more morally autonomous.

As you might guess from the description, Abraham Maslow looms large in this book, with eleven page references in the index — more than Aristotle, Dostoyevsky, Freud, Plato, and Thoreau combined.

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.]

All "How to improve writing" posts (via Pinboard)

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.

Related post
Old phone ringtone