What good writing looks like

You can see it in this photograph.

A related post
What Good Writing Can Accomplish (Musical Assumptions)

How to improve writing (no. 27)

The Blogger template’s sidebar phrasing — “View my complete profile” — has long bugged me. Why my? Why complete? Even Geoffrey Pullum might concede that Strunk and White’s “Omit needless words” makes sense here.

Improving this bit of writing involves editing the Blogger template: go to the Dashboard, click Layout, click Edit HTML, and check Expand Widget Templates. Now search for

It appears only once. Replace it — all of it, including “<” and “>” — with whatever words you like, like so:

Click Preview to make sure all’s well, and save.

I found this solution in a helpful post at Sam Regist’s WebBanshee.

[This post is no. 27 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

Related reading
1 COMMENTS
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

Steve Wozniak on the iPad and college

In a February 15 post on the iPad and college students, I wrote:

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). . . .

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

I think I’m going to be right. If not, at least I’m in good company. Here’s Steve Wozniak in the April 5 issue of Newsweek:

The iPad could lower the cost of acquiring computers for students. I think it’s going to be huge in the education market. Think about students going off to college. They want an Apple product, but their parents don’t want to spend that much. Now they have the ideal thing. They can go to college and someone may have a whacked-out $6,000 laptop, but the guy with the iPad will get all the attention.

Read more:

Why Steve Wozniak Wants Two iPads (Newsweek)

Bill Withers and John Hammond

I’ve been following writer and record-producer Chris Albertson’s posts at Stomp Off in C on record-producer John Hammond. (There are now one, two, three, four, five of them.) Scanning recent issues of the New Yorker this morning, I noticed this passage in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece on Bill Withers and the documentary film Still Bill:

Though the movie captures Withers criticizing the CBS A. & R. man who suggested that he cover Elvis Presley‘s “In the Ghetto,” in the eighties, his fiercest riposte to the white “blaxperts” can be found in an interview filmed for the 2005 reissue of “Just As I Am.”

“You gonna tell me the history of the blues? I am the goddam blues. Look at me. Shit. I’m from West Virginia, I’m the first man in my family not to work in the coal mines, my mother scrubbed floors on her knees for a living, and you’re going to tell me about the goddam blues because you read some book written by John Hammond? Kiss my ass.”

“CBS A. & R. man”: I’m guessing that New Yorker scruples about fact-checking require that the name be absent. But the paragraph that follows certainly implies that “In the Ghetto” was John Hammond’s idea.

Read and watch
Bill Withers (official site)
Still Bill (movie site)

Facial hair in comics

Brian Steinberg is tracking Hi Flagston’s “recession beard.”

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

Sue Shellenbarger declutters

Sue Shellenbarger tried three different approaches to decluttering:

After getting rid of 800 pounds of recycling and trash, hauling two SUV-loads of donations to Goodwill Industries, and dropping off 17 boxes of books at the public library, I am exhilarated by the newfound open space in my house, which seems bigger and more serene. . . . And I am more thoughtful about how I acquire, use and dispose of stuff.

Read more:

Testing Spring Cleaning Techniques (Wall Street Journal)

Maybe I don’t need an orange toothbrush after all.

No, wait. I do.

Orange toothbrush art

“Weird black bristles.” “Smooth orange plastic.” “Accepts all types of toothpaste.”

“Cuspid Cleaner” (Draplin Design Co.)

Johnny Maestro (1939–2010)

Johnny Maestro has died. He was the lead singer with the Crests (“Sixteen Candles”) and the Brooklyn Bridge (“The Worst That Could Happen”).

I heard Johnny Maestro and the Bridge at my high school’s prom in 1974.

“A sort of jump-seat Mona Lisa”

Buddy Glass is leaving the scene of a canceled wedding. He sits with four other people in the back of a hired car:

Mrs. Silsburn smiled a smile that was at once worldly, wan, and enigmatic — the smile, as I remember, of a sort of jump-seat Mona Lisa.

J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters (1963)

A sort of what?

In less safety-conscious times, the jump-seat was a familiar feature in cabs. Some jump-seats dropped down from the back of the front seat. Mrs. Silsburn and Buddy are sitting in jump-seats that face forward. Thus a “jump-seat Mona Lisa”: that’s what.

Related posts
A Salinger catalogue
A Salinger sentence
Another Salinger catalogue
“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”
Happiness and joy

John Foxell’s house

“No, it is not a church. No, it is not a museum”: it is a house, John Foxell’s house, the subject of an article and slideshow in the New York Times.