[In mock-protest, laughing.] “Stop ganging up on me!”
[In unison, sincerely.] “We’re not ganging up on you!”
Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Domestic comedy
Monday, November 22, 2010
Eagle Verithin display case
A 1953 New Yorker “Talk of the Town” item recounts a visit to Abraham H. Berwald, director of marketing for the Eagle Pencil Company, in the course of which Berwald begins to slam colored leads “all over the place,” demonstrating their flexibility and resistance to breakage. He must have been very proud. The leads must have been Verithins.
None of that went through my mind when I bought this Eagle Verithin display case, the larger and more colorful sibling of an Eagle Turquoise case also housed in the Museum of Supplies. This Verithin case, like its sibling, sat in an office-supply store that slowly gave up the ghost. I wish this case had been better cared for: the scrapes on its rainbowed corners appear to have resulted from price-stickers (for pencils, not the case) being removed and replaced. I removed seven or eight price stickers from this case — two from those corners, two from the sliding glass front, and a three- or four-layer mess from the plastic top (I added not a mark to the damage). If you’re wondering where the glass went: I removed it to eliminate reflections and make the pencil display more visible.
I left one sticker in place, a beautifully designed one at the back, from the case’s manufacturer:
The Red Circle Display Case Co. remains a mystery. The lettering seems to say “1950s.” Some of the loose pencils in this case might go back that far; others are more recent production (Berol Prismacolors, from the company that superseded Eagle).
Dig the array of colors, identified on a printed strip inside the case. This strip features a spelling error (“Tetta Cotta”), a handwritten strikeout and revision (“True Green”), an enigma (“Green” v. “True Green”?), and a reminder that pencils, like crayons, may carry traces of a culture’s unexamined assumptions (“Flesh”):
There’s little in the case that is of practical use, unless one is looking for a lifetime supply of yellow. I’m happy to see three orange pencils in this jumbled, holey spectrum.
734 White 734 ½ Light Grey 735 Canary Yellow 735½ Lemon Yellow 736 Yellow Ochre 736½ Orange Ochre 737 Orange 737½ Sea Green 738 Grass Green 738½ Light Green 739 Green 739½ Olive Green 740 Ultramarine 740½ Sky Blue 741 Indigo Blue 741½ Azure Blue 742 Violet 742½ Lavender 743 Pink 743½ Rose 744 Scarlet Red 745 Carmine Red 745½ Tetta Cotta [sic] 746 Sienna Brown 746½ Tuscan Red 747 Black 747½ Dark Grey 748 Red & Blue 750 Vermilion 751 EmeraldTrue Green752 Purple 753 Silver 754 Gold 755 Golden Brown 756 Dark Brown 757 Flesh
[This post is the tenth in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. Photographs by Michael Leddy.]
Related posts
A visit to the Eagle Pencil Company (1953)
Eagle Turquoise display case
“This is the Anatomy of an Eagle”
Also from the Museum of Supplies
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27
Fineline erasers
Illinois Central Railroad Pencil
A Mad Men sort of man, sort of
Mongol No. 2 3/8
Real Thin Leads
Rite-Rite Long Leads
Stanley carpenter’s rule
Edward Tufte auction
Edward Tufte is selling nearly 200 rare books at auction. The proceeds will go into ET Modern (his museum and gallery) and into land for display of his landscape sculpture.
Beautiful Evidence: The Library of Edward Tufte (Christie’s eCatalogue)
Saturday, November 20, 2010
Hi and Lois watch
Progress, sort of: a car seat at last, even if its occupant still rides inches from the rear windshield.
Related posts
All Hi and Lois posts
Baby’s in back
Vacationing with Hi and Lois
The New York accent
“A New York accent makes you sound ignorant”: so says a speech therapist quoted in Friday’s New York Times.
“Aah, shuddup,” says I.
A link at the Times takes you to a brief guide to New Yorkese from Almanac for New Yorkers: 1938, a 1937 publication of the Federal Writers’ Project. Better still, one can download the Almanac as a PDF. Thanks, Times.
Friday, November 19, 2010
David Foster Wallace in Newsweek
From Newsweek, a story about the David Foster Wallace archive, a sampling of materials (a childhood story with an strangely Infinite Jest-like family, annotations, notebooks, drafts), and some outtakes from Infinite Jest. Don’t miss footnote 81 (on panhandling) and Hal Incandenza’s essay on pennies. A sample:
My thesis is that pennies are most interesting, however, because their primary value is that they keep you from geting more pennies. You either get rid of your pennies or you’re forced to accumulate even more pennies for your jar. Woe betide the penniless at the point of purchase. Totals tend to be, eg., $16.01 or $1.17. “Darn it all,” says the customer, “I have no pennies.” The cashier grins, happy to get rid of some pennies.[Caution: for someone who hasn’t read Infinite Jest, there are spoilers at Newsweek.]
Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (via Pinboard)
My son the moral philosopher
In the aftermath of the Florida cheating scandal, my son Ben offers his thoughts in response to a suggestion that the way to deter cheating is to make it more difficult and thus impractical:
[W]ithout the threat of punishment or the charge that cheating is unethical, isn’t it far more practical for a student to give cheating a try, perhaps in combination with a bit of studying? After all, if students are caught — and many students are never caught — they would have the comfort of knowing that they’ll simply be required, like the students at UCF, to retake their test. And why not cheat on this second test as well?Read more:
If cheating is to be avoided only because it is impractical, it also seems we have no reason to say that an extremely adept cheater is doing anything wrong, since it is most practical for them to cheat. And when students graduate out the controlled classroom environment, there will be nothing to keep them from cheating their way through life when they know they will not be caught. . . .
[D]o students who only make an effort to learn when learning is less difficult than cheating really deserve to be at a university? If this is the best we can expect of students, what is that final diploma really worth?
Students who cheat don’t deserve to be here (Daily Illini)
[You can see, I hope, that the post title is no joke.]
Johnny Cash’s to-do list
A Johnny Cash “To Do” List (Julien’s Auctions)
(via Austin Kleon via Draplin)
Posts with lists
Blue crayon (Supplies for an imaginary camping trip)
Review: Liza Kirwin, Lists (Artists’ lists)
Whose list? (A found list)
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Pens, pencils, and weapons-building
Pens and pencils are in the news in Worcester (“Woosta”), Massachusetts:
A letter banning the possession of anything but a school-issued No. 2 yellow pencil in sixth-grade classes at North Brookfield Elementary School “went over the line,” the school superintendent [Gordon L. Noseworthy] said yesterday [November 16]. The letter that was sent home indicated teachers were dealing with a discipline problem and believed the ban would address the issue.A related post
Wendy Scott, one of two sixth-grade teachers, sent a letter home to the parents of all sixth-graders announcing that she and Susan LaFlamme were instituting a new rule barring students from carrying any writing implements on their person, in a backpack or on the school bus. . . .
The teachers’ memo explained that the change was being made because of behavior problems and indicated that any student found in possession of a pen or mechanical pencil after Nov. 15 would be “assumed” to have the implement “to build weapons,” or to have “stolen” it from the classroom art supply basket. . . .
Meanwhile, Police Chief Aram Thomasian Jr. yesterday said he was approached on Friday by parents of one student who had been suspended for having a pen that had been altered to fire a rolled up piece of paper.
“The student showed me how it worked. I’d be surprised if the spitball traveled 4 feet. And at that, I’m not even sure it had any spit on it,“ he said.
Pen is mightier than the teacher (Worcester Telegram & Gazette)
Broken pencil sharpener nets suspension
Recently updated
Five sentences about clothes (More Carhartts!)
“This is college. Everyone cheats.” (Details emerge; students blame the prof.)
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