Happy Mother’s Day

[Photograph by James Leddy, July 21, 1957.]

I think that this photograph is from Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Yes, it’s my mom, Louise Leddy, and me, smiling at my dad. Happy Mother’s Day, Mom. And Happy Mother’s Day to all.

Goodbye, White Pages?

The New York Times reports that the White Pages may be on their way out in New York City:

When residential directories were delivered this year to the Ivy Tower, an apartment building on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, Ramon Almanzar, a concierge, kept 28 copies in case residents wanted them. Not a single occupant of the 320-unit building claimed one, Mr. Almanzar said.

“We end up throwing them away,” he said, as he greeted residents and opened a glass door. “Everyone goes online anyways.”

Customers who prefer to look up phone numbers the old-fashioned way or, like Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk, get a thrill from seeing their names in print, would still be able to have the White Pages delivered to them in book form or on compact disc.

Read more:

White Pages May Go Way of Rotary-Dialed Phone (New York Times)

Student incivility

From the Chronicle:

When it comes to being rude, disrespectful, or abusive to their professors, students appear most likely to take aim at women, the young, and the inexperienced, a new study has found. . . .

The study looked beyond the classroom, asking faculty members about their experiences with student incivility in the course of any class-related activities. The types of student incivility it covered included passive behavior, such as sleeping or texting in class; more actively disruptive behavior, such as coming to class late or talking on cellphones in the classroom; and behaviors that appeared directed at the instructor, such as open expressions of anger, impatience, or derision.

Read more:

Chief Targets of Student Incivility Are Female and Young Professors (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Domestic comedy

It was late in the evening:

“Do you realize that this is the one thing that unites the country — people going between The Golden Girls and The Nanny?”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

Betty White, “Live from New York”

Betty White hosts Saturday Night Live tomorrow night. But her Golden Girls character Rose Nylund has already hosted Saturday Night Live, sort of. Elaine and I saw a bit of this episode last night and marveled.

Five sentences for smoking

Another Google search that led to Orange Crate Art: five sentences for smoking. Got it:

The Continental Op smokes. Sam Spade smokes. Philip Marlowe smokes. Lew Archer smoked but quit.

Thank you, Lew Archer, for not smoking.

These five sentences can double as five sentences about private detectives or five sentences about characters created by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar). By The Blue Hammer (1976), Archer stopped smoking.

Doers of homework: instead of searching for five sentences, just write five sentences of your own. That’s how you learn.

Related posts
Five sentences about clothes
5 sentences about life on the moon
Five sentences from Bleak House
Five sentences on the ship

Strunk and White cat

It will HAVE a cheezburger.

[We now return to the Continental Paper Grading Co., already in progress.]

“When Seymour was twenty-one”

(When Seymour was twenty-one, a nearly full professor of English, and had already been teaching for two years, I asked him what, if anything, got him down about teaching. He said he didn’t think that anything about it got him exactly down, but there was one thing, he thought, that frightened him: reading the pencilled notations in the margins of books in the college library.)

J.D. Salinger, Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

I like “nearly full.”

Rock Odyssey

Homer for kids: Rock Odyssey.

Telemachus is sixteen years old in this retelling, which would seem to mean that the Trojan War and Odysseus’ wanderings now run for eight (not ten) years apiece — or that while Odysseus is away, Penelope — no, not that.

Poems that dont look like plagiarism

A Google search — poems that dont look like plagiarism — brought a hapless surfer to Orange Crate Art. But I can help, sort of. Here is a poem that doesn’t look like plagiarism. It looks entirely original, like no one else’s poems. That’s because I just wrote it myself, honest. Enjoy.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us?
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!