Joseph Stack’s website?

Joseph Stack, the man who flew a plane into a building in Austin, Texas, today, appears to have been the owner of the website Embedded Art.


[From a “whois” domain-name lookup.]

Embedded Art offered firmware and software development.

[The website has been taken down. Stack’s statement is available at The Smoking Gun.]

“Proffessional Centre”

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

A piece of local signage, with what must be two British spellings. Yipes.

Other posts on signage and misspellings
“Collage”
Debri
“Iceburg Lettuce”
No job too small

“The Essay Writing Song”

One morning last week, I somehow imagined Fred Rogers singing to college students:

The Essay Writing Song

Work hard on your essay, so it will be good.
Work hard on your essay, for it’s understood
That writing in college takes plenty of time.
Work hard on your essay, and things will be fine.

[Johnny Costa plays a half-chorus piano solo while Mister Rogers feeds the fish.]

For writing an essay takes plenty of time.
Work hard on your essay, for your sake and mine.

Thanks, Mister Rogers.

Other Mister Rogers posts
Blaming Mister Rogers
Going backward
Lady Elaine’s can

The iPad and college students

I got around to watching Apple’s iPad demo yesterday, and it confirmed the thought that had already been running around my brain: the iPad is meant for college students.

Consider the name. For a student who already owns an iPod, the name alone makes the new device sound like a logical next step.

Consider the timing. Coming in late March (Wi-Fi) and April (3G), the iPad looks like a perfect high-school graduation present.

Consider the price. For a family sending a daughter or son to college, the iPad is an attractive alternative to a low-end Windows laptop (and half the price of a MacBook). If the iPad carries an educational discount, it becomes an even more appealing purchase. As e-textbooks become more common, the iPad makes a Kindle superfluous. And an absence of heavy-duty programs poses no problem: a student who needs Excel or Word can always find it (and a printer) in a college computer lab. (Then again, Microsoft could develop an iPad version of Office.)

Consider, finally, posture. As I’ve toyed with the idea of buying an iPad, I’ve been vexed by the question of how I might use the dang thing. I’ve imagined sitting, ankle on knee, with my legs falling asleep. I’ve imagined sitting on tiptoes, so to speak, legs slightly lifted to keep the machine from sliding off my lap. And then it hit me: the iPad is perfect for the posture I see every day in college hallways: sitting on the floor, back to wall, legs extended or pulled up into an inverted V.

And sure enough, the iPad demo shows a sweatshirted, denim-panted male stretched on a sofa, his legs pulled up into an inverted V. He reappears in a chair, his legs pulled up again (propped against a convenient table, I suppose).

The market that the iPad is to conquer: college students. That’s my hunch. (Now let’s see if I’m right.)

One thing that puzzles me: Apple’s demo says that the iPad offers the best browsing, e-mail, movie, and photo experiences. Shouldn’t the iPad function as a gateway drug, leading the user to a (more expensive) Mac? I suspect that anyone who’s charmed by the iPad’s elegance and decides to get a Mac will not be worried by the contradiction. Reality distortion field and all that.

[If you watch the video, look closely at 2:23–2:43. See how little those legs move? The iPad in practice will probably be a shakier proposition.]

Related posts
The iPad and college, continued
iPad news
More on the iPad and college
“Sort of gimmicky”
Steve Wozniak on the iPad and college

Love, “born into every human being”

Once upon a time, human beings were of three kinds: male, female, and androgynous. They had four hands, four legs, and two faces on a single head on a single neck. Zeus split each of these human beings in two, and so each half longed for its other. Aristophanes explains it all in Plato’s Symposium:

“This, then, is the source of our desire to love each other. Love is born into every human being: it calls back the halves of our original nature together; it tries to make one out of two and heal the wound of human nature. . . .

“[W]e used to be complete wholes in our original nature, and now ‘love’ is the name for our pursuit of wholeness, for our desire to be complete.”

Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

[Translation by Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff (Hackett, 1989).]

Lawrence Wright on writing tools

Lawrence Wright is a New Yorker staff writer and author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11. He likes index cards (4 x 6), legal pads, and a fountain pen:

I know it seems like an affectation, and it often stains your fingers, and I sometimes have made the mistake of carrying it in my pocket on an airplane and have had it leak all over my shirt. But if you take a lot of notes — and I may spend ten hours in a day constantly writing as fast as I can — you will pay for it. A fountain pen diminishes the physical toll. A rollerball pen would probably do as well. The point is to eliminate as much friction as possible. Of course, you also have to carry ink. It’s messy and old fashioned, like smoking a pipe, but it is still the best way to write for long periods of time.

Author says basics are best (The Press-Enterprise)
Secrets of the Writer’s Craft, Lawrence Wright at University of California, Riverside, February 11, 2010 (PDF download via The Press-Enterprise)

Domestic comedy

While on the road, or a road:

“We usually don’t drive on this road at 12:07. At 12:07 we’re usually firmly ensconced in lunch.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Jeremy Wagstaff on ensconced

Another Salinger catalogue

The Glass family’s living room:

The room was not impressively large, even by Manhattan apartment-house standards, but its accumulated furnishings might have lent a snug appearance to a banquet hall in Valhalla. There was a Steinway grand piano (invariably kept open), three radios (a 1927 Freshman, a 1932 Stromberg-Carlson, and a 1941 R.C.A.), a twenty-one-inch-screen television set, four table-model phonographs (including a 1920 Victrola, with its speaker still mounted intact, topside), cigarette and magazine tables galore, a regulation-size ping-pong table (mercifully collapsed and stored behind the piano), four comfortable chairs, eight uncomfortable chairs, a twelve-gallon tropical-fish tank (filled to capacity, in every sense of the word, and illuminated by two forty-watt bulbs), a love seat, the couch Franny was occupying, two empty bird cages, a cherrywood writing table, and an assortment of floor lamps, table lamps, and “bridge” lamps that sprang up all over the congested inscape like sumac. A cordon of waist-high bookcases lined three walls, their shelves cram-jammed and literally sagging with books — children’s books, textbooks, second-hand books, Book Club books, plus an even more heterogeneous overflow from less communal “annexes” of the apartment. (“Dracula” now stood next to “Elementary Pali,” “The Boy Allies at the Somme” stood next to “Bolts of Melody,” “The Scarab Murder Case” and “The Idiot” were together, “Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase” lay on top of “Fear and Trembling.”)

J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (1961)

[Bolts of Melody: New Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Mabel Loomis Todd and Millicent Todd Bingham (1945). The Scarab Murder Case: a Philo Vance mystery by S.S. Van Dine (1929). Clair W. Hayes’s The Boy Allies on the Somme (1917) may be found at Google Books. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, the pseudonymous Carolyn Keene, Søren Kierkegaard, and Bram Stoker are the other writers whose works appear in the parenthetical catalogue.]

A related post
A Salinger catalogue

2010: the year of Van Dyke Parks?

Suddenly — as my son Ben would’ve put it, telling a story at the age of five or six — suddenly, Van Dyke Parks seems to be everywhere, taking to the road. From an article in yesterday’s newspaper:

“My motto is, ‘I’ve suffered like hell for my music. Now it’s your turn.’”

May 2010 suddenly be the year of Van Dyke Parks. Read more:

Van Dyke Parks: Reasons To “Smile” (Palo Alto Mercury News)

Stopette

[Life, July 10, 1950. Via Google Books.]

Everything you need to know about Stopette. And a clip from What’s My Line? with Stopette’s inventor, Dr. Jules Montenier. And a television commercial. And that is all. Poof.

Stopette is an item in this J.D. Salinger catalogue. Other items in the catalogue: Argyrol, Musterole, Sal Hepatica.