Beard-trimming recommendation

See that guy in the sidebar to the right? See his beard, so manly yet so kempt? Behind that beard is a trimmer: the Wahl 9906-717 Groomsman. The 9906-717 works reliably and is surprisingly inexpensive ($14.99 at Amazon). And it has one great advantage over pricier, snazzier trimmers: it runs on AA batteries. In my experience, rechargeable trimmers quickly lose their ability to hold a charge.

I’ve been using a 9906-717 for at least a couple of years, changing the batteries once or twice at the most. My only connection to Wahl is that of a happy customer.

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Minor kitchen wisdom

Turn off the burner before removing a pan or pot, always. No more wondering, three blocks from home, whether you turned off the burner.

Use scissors to round the ultra-sharp corners of cardboard-box flaps. No more nasty cuts.

Reader, do you have any minor kitchen wisdom to share?

Demythifying John Hammond

Writer and record-producer Chris Albertson has been at work demythifying John Hammond:

[M]any of John Hammond’s accomplishments were genuine and important enough to earn him the place he occupies in jazz history, which is why I found it so puzzling that he was making things up.

Discovering John Hammond: A Closer Look: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five (Stomp Off in C)

Other people too make things up: a 2005 PBS American Masters episode about John Hammond credits him with “discovering,” among others, Bessie Smith, Pete Seeger, and Robert Johnson. Oy. Hammond produced Smith’s final recordings in 1933. He signed Seeger to Columbia Records (first Columbia Seeger LP: 1961). And Robert Johnson was already dead when Hammond tried to find him for the 1938 Carnegie Hall concert “From Spirituals to Swing.”

How to behave in the supermarket

A demonstration.

Ways to help Chile

[For readers in the United States.]

Yahoo! News lists organizations responding to the disaster in Chile: Chile earthquake: How to help.

Chilean Red Cross on Twitter

The Cruz Roja Chileana [Chilean Red Cross] is on Twitter, with an English translation via Google Translate. The CRC’s homepage at this time asks for help “para las victímas del terremoto de Haití.” No information on Chile at the American Red Cross yet either.

Classical music in Great Britain

It’s been weaponized:

They’re so desperate to control youth — but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them — that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Brendan O’Neill, Weaponzing Mozart (Reason)

The Office on Hulu

My son Ben passes on the news that The Office, “the” The Office, the original U.K. Office, is now on Hulu. (Even the Christmas special.) The U.K. Office is one of our favorite family viewing experiences. Ricky Gervais and company are just brilliant.

(Thanks, Ben!)

Betty Boop with Henry

Henry speaks! In his only cartoon appearance, from 1935:

Betty Boop with Henry, the Funniest Living American (YouTube)

And yes, he sounds like Mae Questel.

Henry turns seventy-eight next month. He’s still working in the funny papers, a beautifully drawn anachronism.


[Henry, February 19, 2010.]

Someday I’d like to live in a city where the sidewalks have plank walls behind them.

Do It, Dolt

User testing at Apple Computer, June 1982:

When the software required confirmation from the user, it displayed a small dialog box that contained a question, followed by two buttons for positive or negative confirmation. The buttons were labeled Do It and Cancel. The designers observed that a few users seemed to stumble at the point the dialog was displayed and clicked Cancel when they should have clicked Do It, but it wasn’t clear what they were having trouble with.

Finally, the team noticed one user was particularly flummoxed by the dialog box and seemed to be getting a bit angry. The moderator interrupted the test and asked him what the problem was. He replied, “I’m not a dolt. Why is the software calling me a dolt?”

It turns out he wasn’t noticing the space between the “o” and the “I” in “Do It” (in the sans-serif system font we were using, a capital “I” looked very much like a lower case “l”) so he was reading “Do It” as “Dolt” and was offended.

After a bit of consideration, we switched the positive confirmation button label to “OK” — which was initially avoided because we thought it was too colloquial — and from that point on people seemed to have fewer problems.

Andy Hertzfeld, Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2005), 108–109.

A slighty different version of this story may be found at Folklore.org.