Lorem ipsum Idol

My daughter Rachel says, “I took this picture of our TV during the American Idol penultimate episode tonight (a commercial for their website). I paused the TV on the frame so I could snap a photo. You are welcome to blog it, if it is content you’d like!”

Thanks, Rachel!

Related reading
Lorem Ipsum

Duck-rabbit

In Philosophical Investigations (1953), Ludwig Wittgenstein takes up the figure of the duck-rabbit to discuss questions of perception and “seeing as.”

Sitting at my kitchen table yesterday afternoon, I saw this chip-clip as a duck-rabbit.

City for Conquest (and sardines)

[Peggy Nash (Ann Sheridan) and Danny Kelly (James Cagney). Peggy: “Boy, was it crowded tonight on the subway. Talk about sardines. They got it easy. At least they’re floatin’ in olive oil.”]

Watching City for Conquest (dir. Anatole Litvak, 1940), I wondered how its contents were ever packed into a 104-minute can. This movie has everything: a scene of the principals’ childhoods in old New York (à la Angels with Dirty Faces), boxing, ballroom dancing, composing, brotherly love, jitterbugs, a swank party, a gangland murder, a symphony at Carnegie Hall, an “Old Timer” (a shabby Everyman-observer), and sardines. And four montages — of New York, Coney Island, dancing, and boxing. Danny Kelly (aka Young Samson) is a reluctant fighter, a former Golden Gloves champ who returns to the ring to help pay his composer-brother Eddie’s tuition. Peggy Nash is a dancer whose rise to success with partner Murray Burns (Anthony Quinn) pulls her away from the city and Danny. Yes, that Anthony Quinn, who turns out to have been a good dancer. (Sheridan’s a good dancer too. That Cagney barely dances in the film must have amused moviegoers.) Another unexpected element: Elia Kazan as crime boss “Googi,” who at the swank party introduces Eddie as “a composer of real class.” Yes, that Elia Kazan.

“Menu”

A downstate-Illinois buffet menu. “Cat Fish”: tuna?

Cambridge Classics misspelling

The Telegraph reports that the Cambridge University Classics Department “is facing embarrassment after misspelling a quote from Aristotle on the doors of a new £1.3 million extension”:

Academics chose the line “all men by nature desiring to know” but spelt the word “phusei,” “by nature,” with an English S rather than the Greek letter sigma. . . .

Professor of Classics Mary Beard, 55, a member of the department, expressed her dissatisfaction in a blog posting about the 5,500sq ft extension which was completed in March.

“Even the gods have shown their disapproval in their own inimitable way,” she wrote.

A related post
“Collage” (Another Cambridge misspelling)

Gummies for grown-ups

Infantilization alert: One A Day VitaCraves Complete Adult Multivitamin Gummies. “Available in both fruit and sour fruit flavors!”

I’m reminded of the V8 commercial targeting people who “don’t always like the taste of vegetables.” Grown-ups, eat your spinach!

Hank Jones and the New York Times

New York Times reporters Corey Kilgannon and Andy Newman accompanied a landlord as he bashed a hole in a door. Behind the door, the room in which pianist Hank Jones lived (when not on the road) in the last year and a half of his life.

This shoddy — and perhaps illegal — invasion of privacy has yielded a maudlin, uninformed piece of reportage: A Jazzman’s Final Refuge. If you read it, read too the comments, in which Jones’s manager, family members, and fellow musicians offer their comments on Corey Kilgannon, Andy Newman, and Hank Jones’s life and art.

A related post
Hank Jones (1918–2010)

How to pronounce “Zooey”

Aaron Cohen poses the question. J.D. Salinger’s literary agency has already answered: “zoh-ee.” I will continue to think that “zoo-ee” makes better sense.

Three Franny and Zooey posts
A Salinger catalogue
Another Salinger catalogue
“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

How to pack

A New York Times slideshow: flight attendant Heather Poole shows how to pack.

Google!

Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde: Google today celebrates a thirty-year anniversary. Go to Google and see.

Now if only they could fix FeedBurner.

[May 25, 2010: FeedBurner has been fixed, and the game is here.]