Memorial Day

One hundred years ago. From “Taft Coming Here for Memorial Day; Parade of Regulars, Guardsmen and War Veterans Will Pass in Review Before Him,” New York Times, May 29, 1910.

Selling salt

The New York Times has a long article by Michael Moss on the food industry and salt. A sample:

When health advocates first petitioned the federal government to regulate salt in 1978, food companies sponsored research aimed at casting doubt on the link between salt and hypertension. Two decades later, when federal officials tried to cut the salt in products labeled “healthy,” companies argued that foods already low in sugar and fat would not sell with less salt.

Now, the industry is blaming consumers for resisting efforts to reduce salt in all foods, pointing to, as Kellogg put it in a letter to a federal nutrition advisory committee, “the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for salt.”

See? It’s our fault. It’s as if cigarette companies were to blame smokers for the virtually intractable nature of the appetite for nicotine. But an intractable appetite needn’t be forever. Once one gets some distance from processed foods, Cheez-Its and Wheat-Thins and all the rest taste too dang salty. Homemade pita chips are much better (cheaper too).

And did you know that Alton Brown is shilling for salt? “It’s the finest compound to ever grace our palates,” says he. Yes, and more doctors smoke Camels.

“[T]he social value of reading”

Verlyn Klinkenborg:

The entire impulse behind Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks assumes that you cannot read a book unless you own it first — and only you can read it unless you want to pass on your device.

That goes against the social value of reading, the collective knowledge and collaborative discourse that comes from access to shared libraries. That is not a good thing for readers, authors, publishers or our culture.

Read more:

Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader (New York Times)

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No Kindle for me

Van Dyke Parks in Barcelona

Good news from Music Clip of the Day: Van Dyke Parks can be heard tomorrow on WFMU-FM, performing at Barcelona’s Primavera Sound Festival. “Tune in” (online) at at 7:25 PM (EDT) tomorrow night.

Thanks, Richard!

[May 29, 2010: Van Dyke Parks on fire! His set sounded like the performance of a lifetime: songs from Jump!, the unreleased “Black Gold” (yes, oil and catastrophe), “Orange Crate Art,” Louis Moreau Gottschalk’s “Danza,” “The All Golden,” and “Wings of a Dove.” I think that I was hearing violin and cello with VDP’s piano and voice. WFMU plans to archive all Primavera performances for streaming.]

Manhattan expanding

In Annie Hall (dir. Woody Allen, 1977), young Alvy Singer is worried that the universe is expanding. He’s so worried that he’s stoppped doing his homework. His mother rebukes him: “What has the universe got to do with it? You’re here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!” And a doctor reassures him: “It won’t be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy.”

Brooklyn is not expanding. But Manhattan is, at least on paper. And Staten Island is shrinking. Look. See?

New York Subway System Is Getting a New Map (New York Times)
An Overhaul of an Underground Icon (New York Times)

Infinite Jest, telephony

“Video telephony” v. “good old voice-only telephoning”:

It turned out that there was something terribly stressful about visual telephone interfaces that hadn’t been stressful at all about voice‐only interfaces. Videophone consumers seemed suddenly to realize that they’d been subject to an insidious but wholly marvelous delusion about conventional voice‐only telephony. They’d never noticed it before, the delusion — it’s like it was so emotionally complex that it could be countenanced only in the context of its loss. Good old traditional audio‐only phone conversations allowed you to presume that the person on the other end was paying complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay anything even close to complete attention to her. A traditional aural‐only conversation — utilizing a hand‐held phone whose earpiece contained only 6 little pinholes but whose mouthpiece (rather significantly, it later seemed) contained (6²) or 36 little pinholes — let you enter a kind of highway-hypnotic semi‐attentive fugue: while conversing, you could look around the room, doodle, fine‐groom, peel tiny bits of dead skin away from your cuticles, compose phone‐pad haiku, stir things on the stove; you could even carry on a whole separate additional sign‐language‐and‐exaggerated‐facial‐expression type of conversation with people right there in the room with you, all while seeming to be right there attending closely to the voice on the phone. And yet — and this was the retrospectively marvelous part — even as you were dividing your attention between the phone call and all sorts of other idle little fuguelike activities, you were somehow never haunted by the suspicion that the person on the other end’s attention might be similarly divided.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Fugue goes back to the Latin fuga, flight: “a disturbed state of consciousness in which the one affected seems to perform acts in full awareness but upon recovery cannot recollect the acts performed” (Merriam-Webster OnLine). If you can find a phone with a traditional handset, you’ll find, yes, six and thirty-six holes.

The Hatoyama shirt

As Cory Doctorow would say: just look at this awesome plaid shirt. Just look at it. It’s the Hatoyama shirt, honoring the Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama.

And if you’re wondering whether plaid really is warmer than other fabrics: yes, it is.

Beginning with A

Dictionaries make slow progress. Planning for the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1857; the last volume appeared in 1928. Slower still:

The Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute began work on a Sanskrit-to-English dictionary in 1948. The Royal Irish Academy began work on a historical dictionary of the Irish language, Foclóir na Nua-Ghaeilge [Dictionary of Modern Irish], in 1976. Neither project has made it through A (or in Sanskrit, अ).

Read more:

60 years later, Sanskrit dictionary stuck (Indian Express)
34 years compiling an Irish dictionary (The Irish Times)

Contract riders

The Smoking Gun has collected contract riders for 258 musical performers past and present. The fascinating bits of course are the stipulations for dressing rooms and food and drink. Beyoncé: “Rose Scented candles.” Paul McCartney: “Please provide some weeping eucalyptus.” Luciano Pavarotti: “big salt box for cooking.” Snoop Dogg: “A Sony Playstation is very important.”

My favorite (so far) is Frank Sinatra’s rider, which includes Campbell’s Chicken and Rice Soup, Tootsie Rolls, and vodka: “Absolute [sic] or Stoli.”

Common threads? Nobody likes Styrofoam. Everybody likes ice.

Brava, Ms. Schechtman

The New York Times has a wonderful crossword today on the subject of GRADEINFLATION (aka “56-Across”). The constructor, Anna Shechtman, is a sophomore at Swarthmore College, majoring in English and minoring in art history and interpretation theory. From an interview at the Times’ Crossword Blog:

Constructors, especially young constructors, are mostly male. Any thoughts on why?

Considering my school and my minor, I suppose I should say something about the phallocentrism of language and the Symbolic Order. Either way, it’s a shame and a trend that I am proud to challenge.

The themed answers in this puzzle change Bs to As. For instance, 29-Across, “Monk’s karate blows?”: LAMACHOPS. Smart, funny stuff.

[No spoilers here. Highlight the empty spaces to read. If you do the Times puzzle in syndication, you’ll need to wait until July 7 for this one.]

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Grade inflation in the NYT crossword