Robert McNamara's lessons

The Wikipedia article on Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003) has capable summaries:

Eleven life lessons from The Fog of War
Eleven lessons from the Vietnam War
Ten additional lessons

The Fog of War is perhaps the most compelling documentary I've seen. And yes, history repeated itself, with Donald Rumsfeld starring as Robert S. McNamara.

Ex-Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara Dies at 93 (New York Times)

Fineline erasers

[If you’re visiting from the Carnival of Pen, Pencil, and Paper, welcome! Please feel free to look around. You can find all stationery-related posts via Pinboard.]



[1 11/16" x 7/16".]

This tiny metal vessel for Sheaffer erasers is a delight to the eye. Or my eye (or eyes). The design — from the 1940s? 1950s? — seems to prefigure the bold and cheery goofiness of the best Pop Art. I like the tipsy cursive and the bumpy ride that one must take to take in the main idea: "3 Fineline ERASERS." I like the idea of three erasers selling for nineteen cents. I like the inscrutable "T," which sits like a mystery planet at the edge of the Fineline solar system. And I like thinking of the "3" as residing on a dark distant planet whose form is indistinguishable from deep blue space.

I found this item (holding two not three erasers) some years ago in a now-defunct stationery store. I made up the rest.

[This post is the fifth in an occasional series, "From the Museum of Supplies." The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family's word, for all manner of stationery items.]

Also from the Museum of Supplies
Dennison's Gummed Labels No. 27
A Mad Men sort of man, sort of
Mongol No. 2 3/8
Real Thin Leads
Rite-Rite Long Leads

Webster's Third New International

"Permissive," "subversive," "a very great calamity": the 1961 publication of Webster's Third New International (Unabridged) caused a stir. Read all about it:

David Skinner, Ain't That the Truth: Webster's Third: The Most Controversial Dictionary in the English Language (Humanities)

I've had a Webster's Third since 1986 (thank you, Elaine). A fourth edition is now underway.

"No idea what to do"

A 1993 high-school graduate:

"I was told, growing up, that I could do whatever I wanted, and I fully believed I could. And therefore I had no idea what to do."

Chris Colin, What Really Happened to the Class of '93: Start-ups, Dropouts, and Other Navigations Through an Untidy Decade (New York: Broadway Books, 2004), 56, quoted in Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Free Press, 2006), 226.

Amazon is down

I checked with Down for everyone or just me?

July 4, 1939

["A Fourth of July celebration, St. Helena Island, S.C." Photograph by Marion Post Wolcott (1910–1990). Click for a larger view.]

Look carefully and you'll see two Texaco stars below the forty-eight stars of the American flag.

The Library of Congress has made this photograph available via Flickr.

Related reading
Marion Post Wolcott (Wikipedia)
The Photography of Marion Post Wolcott (University of Virginia)
Saint Helena Island (South Carolina) (Wikipedia)

Smooth jazz

The Weather Channel is no longer playing smooth jazz.

Something's coming

With a click, with a shock,
Phone’ll jingle, door’ll knock,
Open the latch!

It's difficult to see how a midterm resignation creates a good foundation for a presidential campaign. And if resignation is meant to create that foundation, why announce it on the Friday before a national holiday? Politicians wait for Fridays to announce what they would prefer be ignored.

I suspect that something's coming, some deep complication, personal or political. Perhaps not in the form of a phone call at 6:00 a.m., as with my ex-governor, the inimitable Rod Blagojevich. But somehow, some day, somewhere in Alaska.

{With apologies to Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim.]

Update, July 7, 2009: Elaine thinks that the ex-governor-to-be wants to chair the Republican National Committee.

QuoteURLText

QuoteURLText is a handy Firefox extension by Jay Palat that copies online text to the clipboard with page title, URL, and date. The extension's formatting options allow the user to arrange any or all of these elements to taste.

I find QuoteURLText's formatting options helpful in working with online material that I want to quote. I have QuoteURLText configured like so:

Let's say that I wanted to quote Jonathan Rauch's recent observation about blogging and introversion. Here's what QuoteURLText would yield:

There's still some cleaning up to do to get the title right, but using QuoteURLText is much simpler than copying and pasting the quotation, copying and pasting the URL, and copying and pasting the page title in three separate steps. (Or is it six?)

Three — no, six cheers for QuoteURLText. I hope that it will soon be working with Firefox 3.5.

Firefox 3.5 : (

I just installed and removed Firefox 3.5 from my Mac — ten minutes or so with this new version had me in a sea of troubles. When starting up, no home page appeared. Not even the familiar "Congratulations! You have updated to . . ." appeared. Trying to customize the toolbar caused the browser to freeze up. The master password I use to manage passwords would no long work. I could not install a theme (GrApple Luscious) from a non-Mozilla site. And several crucial extensions were incompatible. (One of which I was just planning to write about.) Granted, non-working extensions aren't Mozilla's fault, but over weeks or months, the absence of those extensions would compromise 3.5's usefulness to me. It's extensions that keep me using Firefox and not Safari.

Going back to 3.0.11 on a Mac was easy: I found a Mozilla page with older versions of Firefox for download. I moved 3.5 from Applications to the Trash and installed 3.0.11. My bookmarks and extensions (all parts of my Profile) stayed safe and sound in a Library folder. I did though back up the bookmarks and inventory the extensions before uninstalling.

I'm just one user speaking, but my advice would be to wait a while before trying Firefox 3.5. Then again, you might be having a great time with 3.5 already. Wish I were there.

A related post
Firefox 3.5.1 : )