Film critic Richard Schickel, in a DVD-release commentary on Side Street (dir. Anthony Mann, 1955):
If I may just say so, I am so irritated with young people who proudly claim never to have seen a black-and-white movie. They don’t understand: art’s about limits. It’s not about limitlessness.
If you’re wondering, the search function for Google’s Life Photo Archive is broken. If you have a URL, you can get to a photo, but a search finds nothing.
Update, January 16, 2011: The archive is working again.
From the New York Times:
Capping a 17-year political struggle, the Senate on Saturday cleared the way for repealing the Pentagon’s ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military.I’m happy to see that Illinois senators Dick Durbin (D) and Mark Kirk (R) voted yea.
By a vote of 63 to 33, with six Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate acted to cut off debate on a measure that would let President Obama declare an end to the Clinton-era policy, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” which allows gay members of the armed forces to serve only if they keep their sexual orientation a secret. The vote indicated that there was easily enough support to push the measure to final passage.
Remember Adam Wheeler? Seven months after pleading not guilty, he has pleaded guilty to twenty misdemeanor and felony charges.
The stories below call attention, rightly so, to the ways in which Wheeler’s deceptions harmed others: with every opportunity he was given, every award he received, some truly worthy student — who? — lost out.
Student pleads guilty (Boston Globe)
Harvard Faker Adam Wheeler Pleads Guilty (Harvard Crimson)
At Slate, Christopher Beam writes about the Caps Lock key, gone from the new Google laptop. Pace Beam, I don’t think the absence of Caps Lock is a step toward the disappearance of capital letters — like, say, the G in Google. Caps Lock is just in an awkward spot, too easily hit when one goes for Shift or Tab. Replacing Caps Lock with a Search key, as Google has, seems to me to introduce a worse annoyance.
[To disable Caps Lock on a Mac: go to Keyboard & Mouse in System Preferences, click on Modifier Keys, and choose No Action for the Caps Lock key.]
All Things Digital reports that Yahoo will be shutting down the social-bookmarking service Delicious. I’ve used a Delicious account for several years (starting back when the service was known as del.icio.us) to create an index of sorts to Orange Crate Art.
What now? I’ve followed John Gruber’s recommendation and signed up for Pinboard. Doing so requires a small one-time fee, which rises as the number of users rises. Yesterday: $7.01. As I write, the fee has risen from $7.99 to $8.05: that means heavy traffic. Pinboard imported my Delicious links and tags with one very slight glitch: a link to a 2008 post appears near the top of the heap. And I’m still waiting for my tag cloud to take shape. Yes, heavy traffic in the wake of the news about Delicious.
Pinboard is the work of Maciej Ceglowski and del.icio.us co-founder Peter Gadjokov. I wish them well.
Update, December 18: I have a cloud.
[“I’m still waiting for my tag cloud to take shape”: what, oh what, would our ancestors make of us?]
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is quincunx:
quincunx \KWIN-kunks\ nounFor a reader of English prose, quincunx means Sir Thomas Browne, whose 1658 work The Garden of Cyrus, Or The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or Net-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, Naturally, Mystically Considered meditates on the quincunx and the number five as organizing principles of reality. A brief passage from the ending:
: an arrangement of five things in a square or rectangle with one at each corner and one in the middle
Examples:
The tables were arranged in a quincunx, with the hosting family at the center table and guests at the four corners.
“As we walked along the geometric beds — many of them planted in an ancient Roman quincunx pattern — I made notes on the beautiful crops I had never grown.” — From an article by Anne Raver in the New York Times, June 30, 2010
Did you know?
As our second example sentence suggests, today’s word has its origins in ancient Rome. To the Romans, a “quincunx” was a coin whose name comes from the Latin roots “quinque,” meaning “five,” and “uncia,” meaning “one twelfth.” The weight of the coin equaled five twelfths of a libra, a unit of weight similar to our pound. The ancients used a pattern of five dots arranged like the spots on a die as a symbol for the coin, and English speakers applied the word to arrangements similar to that distinctive five-dot mark.
But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and ’tis time to close the five ports of knowledge; We are unwilling to spin out our awaking thoughts into the phantasmes of sleep, which often continueth præcogitations; making Cables of Cobwebbes and Wildernesses of handsome Groves.[Browne glosses the “Quincunx of Heaven” as the Hyades, a group of stars “near the Horizon about midnight, at that time.”]
In August 2008, I wrote myself a note re: bookbuying:
When you learn of new non-fiction that addresses matters of culture, education, language, or technology, wait. Read a sample online or in a bookstore. Consider whether you’re willing to take on several hundred pages of the writer’s prose. Look at Amazon reviews (which are occasionally far more discerning than those found in traditional media). And ask yourself, self, the crucial question: do you need to buy this book, or can you be happy getting it from the library?Thus I borrowed Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus’s Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids — And What We Can Do About It (New York: Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010). That ungainly subtitle suggests the quality of the prose within. Here is a sample paragraph, introducing descriptions of ten colleges that Hacker and Dreifus “like”:
Frankly, in a system this vast and varied, there are good people and good schools everywhere; the trick is to find them. What follows are a few places that caught our attention. The list isn’t comprehensive, but rather focuses on a few good colleges that strike the right balance. Some of the things the schools we liked had in common: they are student-centered, rather than driven by the whims of the faculty or by administrators’ ambitions. We liked schools led by idealists, the only kind of leaders with the courage to buck the conformity that cripples most corners of contemporary higher education. We were drawn to schools that had good core values, for want of a better term, which were genuinely adhered to. Most of all, we preferred schools that actively tried to keep fees low — or free. Confined by financial limitations, their leaders could keep their eyes on what really mattered, which is always the students. At the end of the day, any school must be about putting the “higher” back into education.I see many problems here.
Kenyon is often the fallback choice when Jennifer or Jeremy fail to get fat envelopes from Dartmouth or Brown.“The list isn’t comprehensive”: unneccesarily repetitious, as the preceding sentence refers to “a few places.”
They are freed from committee chores and can keep their offices, although they may share it with a visitor during their off-semesters.
In a system this vast and varied, there are many good schools; the trick is to find them. Here we present a handful, all of them serving students, not faculty whims or administrative ambition. Idealists lead these schools, men and women courageous enough to resist the conformity that cripples much of contemporary higher education. We have chosen schools that adhere to good core values, and we give preference to schools that keep fees low — or eliminate them. Working with limited funds, focusing on students, these schools are putting the “higher” back into higher education.What about the argument of the book? Hacker and Dreifus’s survey of higher ed is largely anecdotal, in the manner of an article in Newsweek or Time. There’s one story of professorial laziness (with a student using the notes that her mother took when she was a student) that’s almost certainly apocryphal. The depiction of pampered faculty working a handful of hours per week bears no relation to academic life as it’s lived in what profs sometimes call “the trenches.” And the book’s contradictions bespeak incoherence. Faculty research is a bad idea, Hacker and Dreifus say, but they make an exception for Arizona State, which they praise as a “research powerhouse.” And while Hacker and Dreifus acknowledge both the exploitation of contingent faculty and correlations between contingent instruction and student failure, they praise a community college where, as they acknowledge, 75% of faculty are part-time, without offices or even desks. Students in the know, they say, “plan their programs around full-time professors.” That’s core values for you.
Trumpeter and flugelhornist Clark Terry turns ninety today. Happy birthday, sir! Many years ago, I interviewed Clark on my university’s FM station. It was an honor to talk with a great musician and Ellingtonian.
This Riverwalk Jazz hour is a good introduction to Clark Terry’s music. If you listen, you’ll hear Duke Ellington introduce Clark as “beyond category.” Which he is. At Clark’s website, his wife Gwen reports what he’d like for his birthday: “More birthdays.”
