Country, country, or country

Some localites have expressed unhappiness with the variety of musical entertainment offered at summer events. What displeases them is not a lack of variety; rather, they feel that there is too much variety, too many different kinds of music filling the air and ears. One letter to the newspaper suggests that event organizers allow the public to vote on entertainment: “For example three choices of country music.”

Good grief. Even Bob’s Country Bunker (in The Blues Brothers) has both kinds of music, country and western. I have nothing against either. I’m just amused by this localite’s idea of choice.

And I love the word localite, which I picked up from Stephen Calt’s biographies of Skip James and Charlie Patton. I’m happy to get to use it in this post.

Hannah Montana Linux

Q : how did you make such a great OS ;

A : I Thought what would attract young users to Linux and i used that idea and i lot of reading and work ;

Not a joke, though it could be mistaken for one: Hannah Montana Linux. Download and install at your own risk!

Radio Shack renaming

Matthew Shaer comments on Radio Shack’s (ill-advised, I’d say) decision to rename itself The Shack:

“Outhouse,” apparently, was taken. And so was “shanty.”

In other news, Pizza Hut may change its name to The Hut. (No joke.)

“Tests,” “tears”

This morning I made a biennial visit to the eye doctor, where I read the following line, the smallest print on the handheld reading sample:



Reading with my right eye, I aced it. But with my left, it came out like so:



But it makes sense, no? — what with those drops about to be dropped in.

A related post
Signage, misread

“About three lines”? Wrong.

Dance critic Mary Brennan on The Royal Ballet of Flanders’ The Return of Ulysses:

Its choreographer, Christian Spuck, comments wryly that in Homer, which is the inspiration for his clever, witty modern ballet, the faithful Penelope only rates about three lines in the entire Odyssey.

“About three lines”? Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Penelope appears in ten of the poem’s twenty-four episodes (and is quoted by the soul of a dead suitor in one more). Like her husband, she is a figure of tremendous resourcefulness and metis [craftiness, cunning, trickery]. She has, after all, resisted for many years the patriarchal imperative that she remarry, puting off her suitors by weaving and unweaving a burial shroud for Odysseus’s father Laertes. Penelope’s colloquy with Odysseus in book 19 is for many readers the poem’s greatest moment, a dazzling and poignant episode-long display of these partners’ homophrosunê [likemindedess]. And in the ancient world, Penelope almost had the last word: some commentators thought 23.287 the fitting end of the poem. It’s Penelope who speaks to Odysseus that line and the one preceding it:

“If the gods are going to grant you a happy old age,
There is hope your troubles will someday be over.”

[Translation by Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000).]

None of these matters have been lost on contemporary classicists, who have devoted considerable attention to Penelope’s role in Homer’s poem. Only someone sans real familiarity with the Odyssey could make the claim that “Penelope only rates about three lines” — or think such a claim wry. Homer’s poem is a far more complicated matter than smug 21st-century assumptions about antiquity and gender might allow.

And speaking of the 21st century, here is a sample of the production’s official description:

Poseidon wears flippers, goggles and a giant tutu while the goddess Athena becomes a tour guide equipped with a megaphone. And as the music of [Henry] Purcell blends effortlessly into Doris Day, tightly choreographed corps-de-ballet becomes revue-style dancing.

Odysseus, help!

Related reading
All Homer posts (via Pinboard)

Tolls and M&M’s

“Soon I had acquired a whole constituency of regular customers”: Fred Kimmerly recounts what happened when, as a toll collector on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway, he began giving out M&M’s.

Mysteries of the tollbooth

In a comment last month, I wrote that the streetside green boxes where United States Postal Service stores mail are “mysterious in the way that, say, a tollbooth’s interior is mysterious — most people haven’t seen what’s in there.”

I did some searching yesterday, and I stand by my analogy, having failed to find a single photograph revealing a tollbooth’s interior. The Life Photo Archive comes close — but the man talking on the telephone in this photograph is a chief, not a toll collector, and the photograph doesn’t reveal the booth’s contents, at least not to my satisfaction.

The mysteries here are ultra mundane, I know. But still I wondered: What’s the floor like? Is there a pad to ease standing? A step on which to rest one leg? In what sort of chair do sitting toll collectors sit? Is there heat? A clock? What keeps the booth from filling with exhaust fumes? And where, while I’m at it, where do the ducks go when the lagoon in Central Park freezes?

Via Google Book Search, I found answers to some of these questions on page 35 of Albert E. Schaufler's Toll Plaza Design (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997). Three excerpts:

Booths typically are framed with a plate/rolled steel, stainless steel, or aluminum exterior and interior skin. Most walls are insulated. Most booths are equipped with electric under-the-counter heaters or hot water units. Air conditioning units are distributed equally between booth-mounted units and central systems. . . . Of 21 facilities that reported use of positive ventilation systems (systems that provide pressurized air to a booth to prevent contaminated air from being drawn into the booth), 15 draw fresh air from a remote location. . . .

The booth floor usually consists of concrete poured after the booth is installed in the toll island, covered by a rubber mat to cushion the hard surface, serve as a static protector, and reduce dampness. . . .

In some instances, unusual fixtures or furnishings can be found in booths such as chairs, portable TVs, toilets, sinks, and refrigerators. These booths are generally single-attendant facilities with no utility building. Such a booth, therefore, is sized and equipped to be a “toll house” rather than a toll booth.

I hope that you found yourself uttering the occasional ah or huh while reading these excerpts. Electric under-the-counter heaters: ah. Toilets: huh.

As you may already suspect, Toll Plaza Design does not provide a photograph of a tollbooth interior, much less a photograph of “unusual fixtures or furnishings.” No — all that the book offers is Figure 20, "Typical single-ended toll booth (for collection in one direction of travel)":



[Click for a larger view.]

The veil remains unparted.

Irritating

On the New York Times’ online front page:

A man with a fake bomb hidden in a bag tried to board a flight at La Guardia Airport’s central terminal, crippling operations for hours and irritating vacationers.

Irritating? Other participles seem more apt. But take a look at Merriam-Webster’s discussion of irritate and related words.

Mark Trail channels Dante

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

I should read Mark Trail more often.

A related post
When comics collide

Blogger search broken

See the search box at the top left? It’s now broken, at least for many Blogger blogs. Results are often spotty and sometimes non-existent. The problem has become a known issue.

Until the problem’s fixed, you can search a Blogger blog by doing a Google site search, like so:

site:mleddy.blogspot.com keyword keyword

You can search for individual words or for phrases in quotation marks, as with any Google search.