Beagle Bros disk-care warnings

Founded by Bert Kersey in 1980, Beagles Bros created sophisticated and incredibly useful software for the Apple II. A distinctive sense of humor marked Beagle advertising and packaging — old clip-art, fictional staff (Al Gorithm, Flo Chart), and short BASIC programs that yielded strange, entertaining phenomena when you typed them in. Even the company’s name was surreptitiously funny. Why no period after Bros? No room.

Beagle Bros showed tremendous generosity to and trust in its customers, shipping software with bonus utility programs, stickers, and no copy-protection. I still remember calling Beagle in 1986 with a question about its new program MacroWorks (an AppleWorks add-on). “Would you like to talk to Randy?” asked the person on the other end. So I talked with Randy Brandt, the program’s creator. MacroWorks was my great encouragement, early on, to tinker and tweak, computer-wise.

While thinking about Beagle Bros yesterday, I realized that I probably still had some Beagle disk sleeves among my old Apple //c disks. Here’s a scan of the disk-care warnings from the back of the sleeve. Heed them well.



Related reading
The Beagle Bros Online Museum (“Being a tribute to the coolest software company of the 80s”)
Beagle Bros Software Repository (with ads, catalogues, posters)
Beagle Bros (Wikipedia)

Today’s Hi and Lois

In today’s Hi and Lois, camp counselors say goodbye:

“We may never see each other again.”

“Yeah.”

“Have a nice life.”

“You too.”

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.

[I’m trying smart quotes — “ ” — in this post. If you see anything strange, punctuation-wise, please let me know. Thanks.]

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Blurry blue line

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'":

As Officers Face Heated Words, Their Tactics Vary (New York Times)

For R.L.

Word and music by Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Meyer, arranged here for four voices.

"How to e-mail a professor" in print

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?

Dorm evolution

From Time: The Evolution of the College Dorm.

"[N]o respect without knowledge"

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 in Double Indemnity

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.

Firefox 3.5.1 : )

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 Right to Quiet Society

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.

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.

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.

Elaine recently wrote about the background music — or was it foreground music? — in a nearby bookstore. Or, as she would prefer, book store.