Friday, March 12, 2010

The iPad and college, continued

“I’ll come with you. I want to win an iPad”: the Better Business Bureau discovers the “iPad button.”

March 21, 2010: Apple is offering iPad ten-packs to educational institutions.

A related post
The iPad and college students

1 COMMENTS

A sample line from the bottom of a Blogger post:



One (no pun intended) sees this sort of disagreement often online: “There are 1 additional comments on this thread,” &c. It would be so easy for Blogger to fix its problem:



I‘ve written to Blogger Support with this suggestion.

Update: there‘s a solution, as you can see below. Thank you, Philippe Chappuis!

Thursday, March 11, 2010

“ALL HUMAN KNOWLEDGE”

[Munsey‘s Magazine, January 1915. Via Google Books.]

The top third of the page seems to be selling the secret wisdom of the ancients, not a dictionary. But no, it‘s a dictionary: see the thumb notches?

What also strikes me in the advertisement: the dictionary‘s role in self-education about current events. Note: it‘s 1915.

“War-words” sounds like something from Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Five sentences on the ship

The Google search five sentences on the ship brought someone to my post on five sentences from Bleak House. But I will try to oblige:

The poor cook he caught the fits and threw away all my grits. And then he took and he ate up all of my corn. Let me go home. Why don’t they let me go home? This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.
[With apologies to the Sloop John B.]

Related posts
Five sentences about clothes
5 sentences about life on the moon
Five sentences for smoking

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Overheard

In the supermarket:

“He’s an eye doctor. If he were a proctologist, it would be different.”

Related reading
All “Overheard” posts
If I were, if I was

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

The iPad and dolphins

Perhaps the iPad is just fine if you’re using it on the bus or at the office, but I have to wonder if Steve Jobs’ geniuses ever once stopped to think about what might happen, for example, if an aquatic mammal wanted to use his tablet while frolicking in a gentle ocean cove.

Do The New Tablets Own Up To The Hype? (The Onion)
A related post
The iPad and college students

A Salinger sentence

A soldier’s sweetheart sends letters:

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.

J.D. Salinger, “For Esmé — with Love and Squalor,” in Nine Stories (1953)
Related posts
A Salinger catalogue
Another Salinger catalogue
“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

David Foster Wallace’s dictionary

Abulia, benthos, cete, distichous: words circled in David Foster Wallace’s dictionary, part of the David Foster Wallace Archive at UT-Austin.

Monday, March 8, 2010

Word of the day: lave

From Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day:

The Word of the Day for March 8 is:

lave \LAYV\ verb
1 a : wash, bathe b : to flow along or against
2 : pour
I learned lave years ago while reading Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). I still think of the novel whenever I see the word (as this post would seem to demonstrate). The word doesn’t appear in the novel, but it’s handy in what narrator Charles Kinbote calls “so-called word golf,” as it lets one make “hate-love in three”: hate, late, lave, love.

Other Pale Fire golf games: “lass-male in four,” “live-dead in five (with ‘lend’ in the middle).”

Edward Tufte, presidential appointment

Edward Tufte says:

I will be serving on the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel. This Panel advises The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, whose job is to track and explain $787 billion in recovery stimulus funds. . . . I’m doing this because I like accountability and transparency, and I believe in public service. And it is the complete opposite of everything else I do. Maybe I’ll learn something.
Read more:

Edward Tufte Presidential Appointment (Ask E.T.)