Brookline Booksmith

From a June 2009 post:

Brookline Booksmith is a great bookstore, even better now that a nearby Barnes and Noble is gone. It is exciting to walk into a bookstore on a Tuesday night and find it crowded with paying customers. The moral of the story: if you have a great (or good) bookstore, don’t use it as a library or as a source of information for Amazon purchases. Buy books.

The Boston Globe reports that Booksmith’s future is “up in the air” — not because of poor sales but because seventy-eight-year-old owner Marshall Smith is planning to step away from the book business. Read more:

What’s the story with independent bookstores? (Boston Globe)

Jay Bennett (1912–2009)

I recently learned that the writer Jay Bennett died last year at the age of ninety-six. He was the author of the novel Deathman, Do Not Follow Me (1968), a book that I read and reread endlessly when I was twelve or thirteen.

In 2003 I happened to think of the novel, found a copy in a library, and found that many details and bits of dialogue — a description of a girl putting on her glasses to read in class, a conversation about Bob Dylan — were still lodged in my memory. I soon bought my own copy of Deathman, an ex-library copy. (An ex-library copy is to my mind the best way to read a book from one’s youth.) I wrote Mr. Bennett a letter and received, via his son, a reply. I felt as though I had paid a longstanding debt.

Wikipedia has a detailed article about Jay Bennett.

A related post
Out of the past (On going back to the books of one’s youth)

“Sort of gimmicky”

“I apologize, but it seems sort of gimmicky”: Robert Paterson, CIO of Molloy College, on collegiate iPad giveaways. Read more:

Should colleges start giving Apple’s iPad to students? (USA Today)

A related post
The iPad and college students

“REUSE THIS CARTON!”

To your left, a P.S.A. from the cardboard envelope that held two orange “Cuspid Cleaners” from the Draplin Design Co. This P.S.A. is but one element that makes shopping with Draplin a value-added experience. Also in the envelope: two stickers and two signed, numbered copies of a “Guide to Fang Hygiene,” brown type on turquoise card stock, uglily beautiful, like the word uglily itself.

Draplin Design Co. and Field Notes Brand seem to hit some deep ancestral idea of guy stuff — Ace combs, key rings, nail clippers, pencils, pocket notebooks, that kind of stuff. “Mixing memory and desire,” as the poet says, for sure.

Further browsing
Draplin Design Co.
Field Notes Brand

“Why I won’t buy an iPad”

Cory Doctorow: “The real issue isn’t the capabilities of the piece of plastic you unwrap today, but the technical and social infrastructure that accompanies it.”

Why I won’t buy an iPad (Boing Boing)

Watching the Cross Bronx Expressway

Harriet Moore lives next to the Cross Bronx Expressway:

For Mrs. Moore, the highway offers unexpected Proustian moments. As a White Rose truck drove past, she remembered seeing grocery store shelves filled with White Rose products when she was a girl. “We don’t shop anywhere where they carry White Rose anymore,” she said, a note of wistfulness in her voice.

Read more:

On Bronx Stoops, a Highway Traffic Entertains (New York Times)

You can watch the Cross Bronx Expressway (probably without Proustian moments) via a New York City Department of Transportation traffic camera.

Orange soda art

[Life, June 8, 1953.]

Nesbitt’s Crate Art?

Related reading
Nesbitt’s Orange Memorabilia Page

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange
Orange art, no crate
Orange crate art
Orange crate art (Brown)
Orange flag art
Orange notebook art
Orange timer art
Orange toothbrush art

“iPads for EVERYONE!”

Not a joke, but it sorta kinda feels like one: in Fall 2010, Seton Hill University (Greensburg, Pennsylvania) will give an iPad to every full-time student. Doing so will require roughly 2,100 iPads.

iPads for EVERYONE! (Seton Hill University)

Update, April 21, 2010: This plan might not be working out so well.

Related posts
The iPad and college students
An iPad per semester
More on the iPad and college
Steve Wozniak on the iPad and college

Gmail outage

At 6:01 am Pacific Time, during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter “a” for a subset of users.

Today’s vowel outage (The Official Gmail Blog)

I can’t imagine that this problem will last more than a day.

Google changes its name

“We didn’t reach this decision lightly.” Eric Schmidt explains:

A different kind of company name (The Official Google Blog)