Thumb-notches and a ghost

There's something going on wrong (as we say in the blues) in today's Hi and Lois. Or lots of things: the shifting blackboard, the shrinking eraser, the swelling blackboard sill, the creeping W on Hi's jacket (or is that an upside-down M?), and the metamorphosing teacher. And in the second panel, on the far right: a ghost!

But it's good to see that the dictionary's three thumb-notches are where they ought to be. Perhaps this dictionary is a Teacher's Edition, made for use, not display.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Diane Arbus meets the Platters

Watching The Girl Can't Help It (dir. Frank Tashlin, 1956), I thought of an exchange from Ghost World (dir. Terry Zwigoff, 2001). Rebecca Doppelganger and Enid Coleslaw are attending a high-school graduation party:

Rebecca: This is so bad it's almost good.

Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.

Those two descriptions cover most of the ninety-seven minutes of The Girl Can't Help It. But there are several minutes in the film that are plainly good — among them, those of a beautiful lip-synced performance by the Platters. As the group pretends to sings "You'll Never Know," there are two brief crowd shots of Diane Arbus-like strangeness:




[Click for larger views.]

These shots were no doubt meant for laughs. In my house, we screamed, "went back" (can't say rewind anymore), hit Pause, and screamed again. Aiee!

Here's a portfolio of Arbus' photographs (browse at your risk).

Another Word of the Year

The editors of Webster's New World College Dictionary have announced their Word of the Year, overshare: "to divulge excessive personal information, as in a blog or broadcast interview, prompting reactions ranging from alarmed discomfort to approval."

My suggestion for the word of the year? Change. What's yours?

Related post
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

Autosave for Mac

Two new freeware programs add "autosave" to Mac:

EverSave (Mac OS X 10.5.5 or later)
SaveCircle (Mac OS X 10.4 or later)

I can't vouch for EverSave, but SaveCircle works as advertised.

Autosave is one feature of Microsoft Office that I miss in Apple's iWork. It's great to have — at last — a reliable autosave add-on.

[The English localization for SaveCircle seems a bit wobbly. To edit, control-click or right-click on the application, choose Show Package Contents/Contents/Resources/en.lproj folder, and open Localizable.strings in a text-editor.]

The Simpsons and Apple

The Simpsons razz Apple:

"Oh, such beautiful packaging! I never thought a company could be my soulmate."

[Update: the above link no longer works. Search YouTube for apple or mapple and simpsons and you might be able to find another fugitive appearance. Look for the 6:49 version.]

Orange train art

I like this sort of downhome surrealism, which I found while looking for photographs of locations from Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt.

I'm not a postcard collector, so I can't comment on CardCow's selection and prices. But I'm impressed that CardCow allows today's Internet user to send, from the company's website, links to any of its postcards (along with personalized messages). That seems like a smart way to build good will and keep the casual visitor coming back.

So what are you waiting for? Amaze your friends and loved ones! Send them links to old postcards today!

CardCow.com ("Vintage Postcards and Collectibles")

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year

It's bailout. Runners-up: vet, socialism, maverick, bipartisan, trepidation, precipice, rogue, misogyny, turmoil.

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year 2008

Related post
Another Word of the Year

Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac

The 2009 edition of the Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac is available as a free .pdf download from Mark Hurst, consumer-experience consultant and creator of Good Experience. As Hurst acknowledges, it's a strange time to be making recommendations about spending money, but as he adds, "any purchases we do make today should be as well-informed as possible." Hurst's guide offers single recommendations in various categories, along with some unusual and useful lifehacks. (All telephone users should read "How to leave a telephone message.") The Guide is a document whose clarity of content and design inspires readerly confidence. See for yourself:

Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac

Thanksgiving at Sing Sing, 1908

Roaming the New York Times archive on Thanksgiving last year, I found a 1907 report on Thanksgiving at Sing Sing. The Times was back in 1908:

"Minstrels in Sing Sing. Prisoners Provide Entertainment for Themselves — Get a Good Dinner," New York Times, November 27, 1908

My family's having black bean croquettes, sweet potatoes, twice-baked potatoes with garlic and spinach, wild rice and mushroom stuffing, roasted Brussels sprouts, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, and Beaujolais nouveau. But no cigars.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

And to readers from India: please know that people everywhere grieve the barbarous violence in Mumbai.

Related post
Thanksgiving at Sing Sing

Books as calendars (Proust)

There are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without living them, those I spent with a favourite book. Everything which, it seemed, filled them for others, but which I pushed aside as a vulgar impediment to a heavenly pleasure: the game for which a friend came to fetch me at the most interesting passage, the troublesome bee or shaft of sunlight which forced me to look up from the page or to change my position, the provisions for tea which I had been made to bring and which I had left beside me on the seat, untouched, while, above my head, the sun was declining in strength in the blue sky, the dinner for which I had had to return home and during which my one thought was to go upstairs straight away afterwards, and finish the rest of the chapter: reading should have prevented me from seeing all this as anything except importunity, but, on the contrary, so sweet is the memory it engraved in me (and so much more precious in my present estimation than what I then read so lovingly) that if still, today, I chance to leaf through these books from the past, it is simply as the only calendars I have preserved of those bygone days, and in the hope of finding reflected in their pages the houses and ponds which no longer exist.

Marcel Proust, "Days of Reading," in Days of Reading, translated by John Sturrock (London: Penguin, 2008), 49.

Days of Reading, from the third series of Penguin's Great Ideas paperbacks, reprints five short pieces from Against Saint-Beuve and Other Essays (London: Penguin, 1988), now out of print.

Related posts
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
Out of the past
Sem Co-op snags Penguins