In today’s Hi and Lois, camp counselors say goodbye:
“We may never see each other again.”Pretty tough talk. Hemingwayesque even, style-wise. Chip and C.J. must be the only teenagers in the country who don’t know about Facebook.
“Yeah.”
“Have a nice life.”
“You too.”
The line of when to put on handcuffs is a personal and blurry one, varying among officers in the same city, the same precinct, even the same patrol car.In the aftermath of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. arrest, an examination of varied attitudes toward "what in police parlance is called getting 'lippy'":
My #1 hit, How to e-mail a professor, appears in the new eighth edition of Barbara Fine Clouse's The Student Writer: Editor and Critic, just published by McGraw-Hill.
Ten good questions follow my piece. I especially like this one:
Explain the reference to Maggie Simpson in paragraphs 10 and 15. Why do you think Leddy includes this reference?
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. talks with CNN.
I wonder: presented with Gates' Harvard ID and driver's license, what did the police officer who went on to arrest Gates make of these items? Was he unable to see the man in front of him as a Harvard professor standing in his own house? (I think I just answered my own questions.)
I like the following passage from Gates for its suggestion that we may come to see one another as we really are:
Ours is a late-twentieth-century world profoundly fissured by nationality, ethnicity, race, class, and gender. And the only way to transcend those divisions — to forge, for once, a civic culture that respects both differences and commonalities — is through education that seeks to comprehend the diversity of human culture. Beyond the hype and the high-flown rhetoric is a pretty homely truth: There is no tolerance without respect — and no respect without knowledge. Any human being sufficiently curious and motivated can fully possess another culture, no matter how "alien" it may appear to be.
From the Introduction to Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), xv.
Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay for Double Indemnity (1944) with director Billy Wilder. But wait: there's more. As Mark Coggins shows us, Chandler appears in the film as an extra.
I'm now a happy user of the very fast Firefox 3.5.1, having figured out that my 3.5 problems were the result of the extension Tab Mix Plus. How did I figure it out? I installed 3.5.1, started the browser in Safe Mode, with all extensions disabled, and found that all was well. I quit and restarted and, on a hunch, tried disabling Tab Mix Plus. My guess was that the problems I had encountered with 3.5 were likely caused by an extension that affected the browser's interface. Sure enough — with Tab Mix Plus disabled, everything was fine.
The download on the Mozilla page for Tab Mix Plus isn't compatible with Firefox 3.5.1. But developer Gary Reyes has posted there a link to a new version: Tab Mix Plus for Firefox 3.5.1.
As many Firefox users already know, Tab Mix Plus is an incredibly handy extension: it has close to ten million downloads. Thanks to Gary Reyes for keeping Tab Mix Plus compatible.
A related post
Firefox 3.5 : (
The Vancouver-based Right to Quiet Society opposes the use of what it calls "program audio": "canned music, radio, and television soundtrack, particularly when provided as a 'background' in places where people gather":
Program audio is particularly insidious because it encourages passivity and conformity: like so much else in our modern society, it calls on us to be consumers, mere sponges, rather than thinkers and doers with spontaneous responses.I recently learned that the waiting area at my doctor's office now features a television playing FOX News. The next time I'm there — promise — I'll ask someone in "charge" why television — much less cable news, much less the FOX brand — is a good idea for people waiting to see a doctor.
Even when program audio is pushed on us with good intentions, the underlying assumption is an insulting one: that our empty heads need to be kept filled with artificial stimuli so that we do not become insufferably bored.
