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Five sentences about clothes (Carhartt!)

Semi-mysterious J.D. Salinger Boxed Set (Nothing new after all)

David Foster Wallace on voting

David Foster Wallace:

In reality, there is no such thing as not voting; you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard’s vote.

“Up, Simba: Seven Days on the Trail of an Anticandidate,” in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (New York: Little, Brown, 2007).

[In context, these sentences concern young adults and primary elections. I am taking these sentences out of context to suggest the urgency of voting in any and all elections.]

“I Can’t Find My Phone”

More fun that using a landline (assuming you have one): I Can’t Find My Phone.

(Found via Coudal)

200000

Elaine and I detoured to a country road so that we could stop safely and take a picture. Hooray for our 1996 Toyota Corolla.

A related post
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Virginia Heffernan on the telephone

Virginia Heffernan mourns the disappearing analog telephone call:

You’d endure the long brrrings with a pleasant stirring of nerves, a little stage fright. As many as 10. To give the household a chance to rally. On “Hello?” you’d identify yourself and ask after the person whose voice in your ear you, having waited, now profoundly desired. In the absence of the grammatical spasm of “This is she,” you’d learn whether your friend was “in” or “out” or somewhere in between (weird parents sometimes said “indisposed”), while your patience was casually requested (“Hold on a sec; she’s in the den”). You’d express thanks for the answerer’s good offices. More waiting. Offstage noise. Voilà. Up would come the voice.

A telephone memory of mine, c. 1969–1970: spending hours on the line with my friend Chris, trading particularly ludicrous bits of commercial art from the Yellow Pages: “Page 347!” “Page 562!”

Mmm . . . arm

[Somewhere in east-central Illinois. Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Happy Halloween.

Wooden phone booths

Long may they stand: wooden phone booths, from Ephemeral New York.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, October 29, 2010.]

“‘What?’” is right.

Has the kitchen sneaked into the living room, or is it the other way around? (’Cause that is indeed the dang living room in the first panel, and that is indeed the dang front door.)

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts
The all-in-one room

“[A] great reality test”

The late Richard T. Gill, economist and opera singer:

“Performing is a great reality test. There’s no tenure in it and the feedback is much less complicated than you get in academia. When you go out on that stage, you put your life on the line.”

[Don’t miss Elaine Fine’s comment, in the, uh, comments.]

HTTPS Everywhere

If you use Firefox and log in to websites on open wireless networks, you should install the extension HTTPS Everywhere. The extension Firesheep will help you understand why (and leave you plenty scared).

As for Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari: the Electronic Frontier Foundation, developer of HTTPS Everywhere, has nothing available, at least not yet.