Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)

[Van Dyke Parks’s card.]

Back from Schubas Tavern, Chicago, where I heard Clare and the Reasons and Van Dyke Parks tonight, or last night. It is very late. Or is it early? A full report will follow soon. (Here it is.)

[VDP’s e-mail address is prominently displayed on his website. No breach of confidentiality here.]

Personal Post Office Scale

The Personal Post Office Scale (aka the MP 4000) is a beautifully dowdy appliance that lets the layperson emulate both Lady Justice and postal worker. Attach the alligator clip to the item to be mailed, hold the scale aloft by its ring, wait for the pointer to steady, and you’re done. The scale weighs up to four ounces of postal matter and comes with an impressive-looking, fold-out “up-to-date rate card” and vinyl case. Only $4.75 plus shipping from Metal Products Engineering, Inc. The case reminds me of the “I.D. wallets” of my espionage-filled youth. (Secret agents always carry I.D., right?)

My only connection to Metal Products Engineering is that of a happy customer.

[Photograph from the PPOS page.]

A tenuously related post
A P.S. 131 class picture, 1966–1967 (with what appears to be an “I.D. wallet”)

Door supervision in the news

Ian Fox, chairman of the UK organization National Doorwatch, has written to the Oxford English Dictionary asking that the “demeaning and inappropriate” word bouncer be replaced by door supervisor. Says Fox, “The term is anachronistic, inappropriate and downright offensive to the new, modern, highly regulated profession of door supervision.” An OED representative replies: “We are not linguistic policemen and our concern is simply the completeness of the historical record. If hardly anyone uses ‘bouncer’ we’ll consider marking it as rare — but that’s not the case at the moment.”

Cf. David Foster Wallace’s 1999 essay “Authority and American Usage” on what Wallace calls the “central fallacy” of “Politically Correct English”: the idea “that a society’s mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes.”

The It Gets Better Project

Dan Savage’s It Gets Better Project: short videos by everyday people telling LGBT youth that life gets better after high school.

If you work with young people, pass on the link.

(Via The Daily Dish)

Adventures in cheating

Dan Ariely and Aline Grüneisen wanted to see what would happen if they ordered papers on cheating from four essay mills. A sample of what they got:

If the large allowance of study undertook on scholar betraying is any suggestion of academia and professors’ powerful yearn to decrease scholar betraying, it appeared expected these mind-set would component into the creation of their school room guidelines.

Even better: the papers that they received revealed substantial plagiarism. Read more:

Plagiarism and essay mills (Dan Ariely)

Related reading
All plagiarism posts

Van Dyke Parks on touring

Van Dyke Parks on touring at the age of sixty-seven (with Clare and the Reasons):

“The die is cast. I tell my kids, ‘There may be snow on the roof but a fire rages within.’ And then they say, ‘Oh, Dad.’”

Van Dyke Parks: Shifting out of park(s) (WCPO)

Related posts
Clare and the Reasons and Van Dyke Parks
“[J]ust like a good flu shot” (Van Dyke Parks on touring)

Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (Oxford University Press, 2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org.

A factoid (named as such) that came with yesterday’s tip (about that and this):

Garner was traumatized in grade school when a student teacher lecturing on contractions insisted that despite Garner’s protestations, “shan’t” is not a word.

Word of the day: boss-A

Listening last night to the beautiful 1964 recording Getz/Gilberto (Stan/João), I thought of a way to account for the compound adjective boss-A, one of the stranger bits of slang from my Brooklyn childhood.¹ Boss is a now-dated adjective of high praise: if, say, a bicycle or walkie-talkie was boss, it was cool, great.² If something was boss-A, it was really, really, really cool.

Last night it occurred to me: could the bossa nova craze of the early 1960s explain the boss of my childhood? Bossa nova = cool = boss? And could boss-A be a bizarre corruption of bossa?

Boss-A more likely had something to do with letter grades, but in the absence of evidence, I prefer to blame it on the bossa nova.

¹ Boss-A is my invented spelling. The a is long. Stress both syllables.

²The absence of these meanings from the Oxford English Dictionary surprises me. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate traces the adjective —“excellent, first-rate” — to 1836.

Don’t ask, don’t tell Don’t discriminate

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Uruguay: twenty-five countries that allow gay men and women to serve openly in their militaries.

The source for this list: Gays in Foreign Militaries 2010: A Global Primer (Palm Center, University of California, Santa Barbara). Among the conclusions in this primer (a PDF download):

Research has uniformly shown that transitions to policies of equal treatment without regard to sexual orientation have been highly successful and have had no negative impact on morale, recruitment, retention, readiness or overall combat effectiveness. No consulted expert anywhere in the world concluded that lifting the ban on openly gay service caused an overall decline in the military. . . .

Evidence suggests that lifting bans on openly gay service contributed to improving the command climate in foreign militaries, including increased focus on behavior and mission rather than identity and difference, greater respect for rules and policies that reflect the modern military, a decrease in harassment, retention of critical personnel, and enhanced respect for privacy.

For any reader wondering about context:

Move to End “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Stalls in Senate (New York Times)

Streaming music, 1910

[New York Times, May 31, 1910.]

In Wilmington, Delaware, a century ago, the Tel-musici Company was streaming recorded music by telephone:

From a central station at the telephone company’s building the music is transmitted over the regular telephone wires and “voiced” at the subscriber’s end through the customary horn.

The try-out in Wilmington has shown that there is an ever-growing demand for music among telephone subscribers. The music room at the exchange is a large chamber, around the sides of which is a switchboard. The room is equipped with a great number of phonographs and all of the phonograph records are on file.

When a subscriber wants music he calls the exchange and asks for this room. He tells the girl in charge what selection he wishes to hear, making his choice from a catalogue which is supplied by the company. Then the subscriber affixes the horn to the telephone receiver, the music operator puts the desired record on a phonograph which is plugged into the subscriber’s line, and starts the machine. At the conclusion of the music the connection is automatically cut off.

Arrangements may be made for an evening’s entertainment this way, the programme being made up in advance and submitted to the company by telephone, with orders to begin at a given time. Should two or more subscribers simultaneously want the same piece this can be done simply by connecting both lines to the same phonograph.

In Wilmington the company asks music subscribers to guaranteee $18 a year, the charge for records being from 3 cents for the regular records to 7 for those by the great operatic stars.

From “Music By Telephone. Experiment Has Proved Successful In Wilmington — May Be Tried Here,” New York Times, May 31, 1910.

For more information on the Tel-musici Company (unidentified by name in the Times article): “Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines,” Telephony: The American Telephone Journal, 18.25 (1909). Here are two photographs from Telephony, a partial view of the Wilmington Music Room (with phonographs lining the wall) and a home installation.


[Click for larger views.]

Elaine, could that be our Beckwith piano?