Verizon Wireless refunds

The New York Times reports that Verizon Wireless will be paying up to $90 million in refunds to customers who have mistakenly pressed the infamous $1.99 key.

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Verizon’s $1.99 typos
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Verizon data charges

Eric Schmidt on the future

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, on the future:

“We don’t need you to type at all, because we know where you are, with your permission. We know where you’ve been, with your permission. We can more or less guess what you’re thinking about. Now is that over the line? Is that right over the line? Is that right over the line?”

This model seems to confuse the unpredictable play of idea and association and memory (what I would call thinking) with a crude stimulus-response model, in which restaurants mean eat and stores mean shop. I begin to wonder: what sorts of humanities courses did Schmidt take in college? Someone who’s read Emily Dickinson or James Joyce or Frank O’Hara would have more complex ways to think about what it means to think.

Oh, and yes, it’s over the line.

(via Daring Fireball)

Van Dyke Parks in Brooklyn

From his stage patter: “Be kind to one another. Or I’ll kill ya!”

Van Dyke Parks Threatens Violence At The Bell House (Village Voice)

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Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)

Giant scissors, giant pencil

[“Movie stagehands pushing a 400-pound pair of gigantic scissors on a dollie next to two men carrying a 21-ft. pencil, just some of the props that created the illusion of a dwindling hero for the movie The Incredible Shrinking Man at Universal Studios.” Photograph by Allan Grant, September 1956, Hollywood, California. Via the Life photo archive.]

Pete Seeger’s Sunday routine

It includes breakfast:

“I usually have a pickup breakfast. I could have cereal and milk, fruit. Sometimes I simply finish up whatever leftover is in the ice box. You can tell my age; I still use the words ‘ice box.’”

Letters to Answer, and Logs to Split (New York Times)

Clifford B. Hicks (1920–2010)

Word comes from North Carolina that the writer Clifford Hicks has died. Clifford Hicks wrote sixteen children’s books, one of which, Alvin’s Secret Code, was the most important book of my childhood, the book that taught me to love reading, and re-reading, again, and again. I’ve written elsewhere on this blog about rediscovering Alvin’s Secret Code in adulthood and writing a fan letter to its author. I still have Mr. Hicks’s reply, framed, hanging on a wall about ten feet from where I’m typing. That letter is the only piece of correspondence I have ever framed.

Last year came the announcement of a new novel, Alvin Fernald’s Incredible Buried Treasure. That Clifford Hicks had one more Alvin novel in him — at the age of eighty-nine — was a piece of great good fortune for his readers. My children gave me the book as a gift. (Thank you, Rachel and Ben.) The chance to write about a new Alvin book in adulthood was another gift, and a modest way to honor the gift that Clifford Hicks’s work (via the Boro Park Public Library) gave me. Thank you, Mr. Hicks.

Van Dyke Parks in The Honeymooners

Here and there I’ve read that Van Dyke Parks played the role of Tommy Manicotti in the television series The Honeymooners. He doesn’t appear in the “classic thirty-nine,” the episodes shown through years of reruns on New York’s WPIX-TV. And there’s no Honeymooners credit for him at the IMDb. But VDP does appear, as I just discovered, in at least one of the “lost episodes,” “The Hero” (February 19, 1955). He was all of twelve. The episode is at YouTube in five parts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So yes, Van Dyke Parks is Tommy Manicotti. Correction: Tommy Borden. See below.

*



January 3, 2018: The episode is back, at Dailymotion. Gone again. I’m glad I took a screenshot to guard against future disappearances.

*

May 12, 2023: Thanks to the reader who shared the correct name in the comments. Van Dyke’s character is named Tommy Borden. The episode is back at YouTube. You can hear the teacher refer to Tommy Borden at 14:34.

No, it’s gone again.

Joe Mantell (1915–2010)

[Ernest Borgnine and Joe Mantell in Marty (dir. Delbert Mann, 1955).]

“Whaddaya you feel like doin’ tonight?””

Joe Mantell was from Brooklyn, Greenpernt. The New York Times has an obituary. Ernest Borgnine, ninety-three, is now the only surviving member of the cast of Marty.

A related post
Happy birthday, Mr. Piletti (Marty after Marty)

Tony Curtis (1925–2010)

[In drag as Shell Oil Junior in Some Like It Hot (dir. Billy Wilder, 1959).]

Tony Curtis, Hollywood Leading Man, Dies at 85 (New York Times)

Carlo Rotella on laptops in the classroom

Carlo Rotella doesn’t allow laptops in his classroom:

Your money buys you the opportunity to pay attention to the other people on campus and to have them pay attention to you — close, sustained, active, fully engaged attention, undistracted by beeps, chimes, tweets, klaxons, ring tones, ads, explosions, continuous news feeds, or other mind-jamming noise. You qualify for admission, you pay your money, and you get four years — maybe the last four years you’ll ever get — to really attend to the ideas of other human beings, thousands of years’ worth of them, including the authors of the texts on the syllabus and the people in the room with you.

You can spend the rest of your life surfing the web, emailing, texting. You’ve got one shot at college.

Read it all:

Tuition lost on the techno-dependent (Boston Globe)