Ska desktop

Ska, a desktop wallpaper for Mac by Jon-Paul Lunney, available from Simple Desktops. This wallpaper takes me back to 1979 or so.

I stick to Mac’s plain Aqua Blue, but Simple Desktops is a great resource. Thomas A. Watson describes his site as useful to anyone looking for “something that isn’t a beautiful photograph but also isn’t a gradient and drop shadowed mess with a little lens flare and some annoying copyright information in the corner.”

For context: 2 Tone Collection.

The greatest student e-mail ever sent?

I would like to first express my respect for you and every other teacher that has placed their energy into educating me and my peers, as we all know that teachers are often the unappreciated foundation of our future. However, I must express a slight amount of disrespect, as I do not agree with your perception of my paper one bit.

The mild opening of what Chauncey DeVega calls the greatest student e-mail ever sent.

A related post
How to e-mail a professor

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!

“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.]

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Five sentences for smoking

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

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)

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A Salinger catalogue
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“[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.