Dylan, Cooder, Parks

From the History Channel’s The People Speak, Bob Dylan, Ry Cooder, and Van Dyke Parks performing a Woody Guthrie song:

“Do Re Mi” (YouTube)

Aunt Maud’s clippings

Commentator Charles Kinbote notes several items in poet John Shade’s Aunt Maud’s room:

Among these was a scrapbook in which over a period of years (1937–1949) Aunt Maud had been pasting clippings of an involuntarily ludicrous or grotesque nature. John Shade allowed me one day to memorandum the first and the last of the series; they happened to intercommunicate most pleasingly, I thought. Both stemmed from the same family magazine Life, so justly famed for its pudibundity in regard to the mysteries of the male sex; hence one can well imagine how startled or titillated those families were. The first comes from the issue of May 10, 1937, p. 67, and advertises the Talon Trouser Fastener (a rather grasping and painful name, by the way). It shows a young gent radiating virility among several ecstatic lady-friends, and the inscription reads: You’ll be amazed that the fly of your trousers could be so dramatically improved. The second comes from the issue of March 28, 1949, p. 126, and advertises Hanes Fig Leaf Brief. It shows a modern Eve worshipfully peeping from behind a potted tree of knowledge at a leering young Adam in rather ordinary but clean underwear, with the front of his advertised brief conspicuously and compactly shaded, and the inscription reads: Nothing beats a fig leaf.

I think there must exist a special subversive group of pseudo-cupids — plump hairless little devils whom Satan commissions to make disgusting mischief in sacrosanct places.

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)

Used to be a reader went to the periodical stacks in a library to find those advertisements (as I did, last century). But now they may be had via Google Books.





Aunt Maud’s room also holds a clipping of the newspaper headline “Red Sox Beat Yanks 5–4 On Chapman’s Homer.” Yes, Chapman’s Homer.

Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a critical edition of a poem, is one of my favorite novels.

[Pudibundity: bashfulness; prudery.]

Library book returned after fifty-four years

Frank Lancellotti has returned the New Spanish-English and English-Spanish Dictionary to the Jersey City Free Public Library. He borrowed the book as a college student fifty-four years ago — on another patron’s card.

Man returns Jersey City library book 54 years late (Star-Ledger)

A related post
Reading and not reading in Jersey City (Another dictionary gone missing)

Minuteur

My son Ben’s thoughts about structuring study time and my curiosity about the Pomodoro Technique prompted me to look closely today at Philippe Galmel’s Minuteur, a timer and stopwatch application for the Mac. Minuteur seems especially well suited for trying out the Pomodoro Technique, as the application allows the user to chain alarms in a sequence. Thus someone serving a long stretch at the computer could set up alarms for several Pomodoros: twenty-five minutes, four minutes, twenty-five, four, and so on.

Another nice feature: Minuteur can display time (remaining or accumulating) in the menu bar, as a bar, counter, or ruler. Want to check your stuff (as we say in my house) and spend just ten minutes online without beginning to drift? That timer ticking away (silently or with a tick-tock effect) can help.


[Tick, tick, tick: Minuteur in the menu bar.]

Minuteur is free to try for twenty-one days. The cost of a license: €5.90. My only connection to the application is that of a happy user.

Minuteur (Developer’s website)

More finals advice

My son Ben passes on two suggestions:

First, I found this great free Timer application for the Mac. You can use it as a stopwatch, to countdown, or as an alarm clock. For instance, I can set it to run for forty minutes; when that time is up, the application starts up my iTunes visual screensaver and I know it’s time to take a break. I do the same thing to time my break. Here’s the link: Apimac Timer.

The second tip is a little alteration of your 45/15 rule about studying. I’ve found it’s fun to increase the amount of time you’re studying and reduce the amount of time you’re taking a break each time. So for instance, one of my first sequences ran like this: 50 minutes studying, 6 minute break. The next one was 55 minutes studying, 4 minutes taking a break. It’s a way to increase your productivity in a gradual way, and it’s very easy to do with the Timer application.

Thanks, Ben!

A recent post at TUAW will lead the curious reader to a variety of Mac (and Windows) timers.

A related post
45/15

For finals week

How to do horribly on a final exam
How to do well on a final exam

[Nancy panel by Ernie Bushmiller. Found while playing Five-Card Nancy.]

Harvard in Allston

Harvard University in the news:

Harvard announced Thursday that it would indefinitely suspend construction on a high-tech science complex in the Allston neighborhood of Boston because of money problems.

“The altered financial landscape of the university, and of the wider world, necessitates a shift away from rapid development in Allston,” Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard’s president, wrote in a letter released Thursday. . . .

In her letter, Dr. Faust said Harvard would step up efforts to revitalize Allston, a gritty neighborhood wedged between the Charles River and the Massachusetts Turnpike, even as it delayed the science center.

Correction: only part of Allston is wedged between the Charles and the Mass Pike. But all of Allston is gritty. I am happy to have spent three years in that famous ZIP code, 02134.

A related post
Its and it’s (Harvard, Allston, mistakes)

Walt Mossberg reviews the Nook

His conclusion: “It's not fully baked yet.”

Is Mossberg referencing Benjamin Braddock’s conversation with his father in The Graduate? (“Ben, this whole idea sounds pretty half-baked.” “No, it’s not. It's completely baked.”) Or is this metaphor (completely baked, fully baked, as opposed to half-baked) now just part of everyday language?

A Review of the Nook E-Reader (Wall Street Journal)

David Pogue reviews the Nook

His conclusion: Barnes & Noble has a “bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis.”

Not Yet the Season for a Nook (New York Times)

Buster Cooper

“It was almost like a marriage, really — you understand what I’m saying? It was always there.”

Trombonist Buster Cooper, on the closing of St. Petersburg’s Garden Restaurant, where he has played for fifteen years. Cooper, who spent most of the 1960s with Duke Ellington, is now eighty, and one of the last Ellingtonians. As the clip accompanying the article makes clear, he still sounds great.

Jazz legend Buster Cooper's Garden gig nearing an end in St. Petersburg (St. Petersburg Times)