Google navigation bar

[Two versions of the new bar.]

I noticed Google’s new navigation bar in a Gmail account yesterday and spent ten minutes or so figuring out that it’s a feature, not a bug. Softpedia explains the change, which is as yet unannounced on the Official Gmail Blog and the Official Google Blog.

There are at least two problems with this bar. One is that it makes signing out of an account slightly tedious: it’s now necessary to open a drop-down menu (not shown above) to do so. A second problem — to me, the more important one — is aesthetic. While some Gmail themes show a bar that harmonizes with its surroundings, other themes and user-made color schemes now show a grey bar with blue text, looking like a page element from a crudely made website. “Hideous,” as one post to the Google Help Forum called it. And the thin blue line, which shows which Google service is in use, looks like a mistake, a little stretch of pixels gone wrong.

Softpedia says that the new bar may be a prelude to a “social networking ‘layer’” in Google. Yipes.

[Ain’t it awful?]

Time-management in college

Bob is an undergraduate (3.5 GPA) at a Midwestern public university:

I hate classes with a lot of reading that is tested on. Any class where a teacher is just gonna give us notes and a worksheet or something like that is better. Something that I can study and just learn from in five [minutes] I’ll usually do pretty good in. Whereas, if I’m expected to read, you know, a hundred-and-fifty-page book and then write a three-page essay on it, you know, on a test let’s say, I’ll probably do worse on that test because I probably wouldn’t have read the book. Maybe ask the kids, what’s in this book? And I can draw my own conclusions, but I rarely actually do reading assignments or stuff like that, which is a mistake, I’m sure, but it saves me a lot of time.

Mary Grigbsy, College Life through the Eyes of Students (State University of New York Press, 2009). Quoted in Richard Arum and Josip Roksa, Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Coming soon: more about Academically Adrift.

The Grammar Gang

“We believe proper grammar is sexy. We will show no mercy”: at Pepperdine University, the Grammar Gang is correcting mistakes.

Infinite Jest, novelty

Keith Freer and Ortho (“The Darkness”) Stice are students at the Enfield Tennis Academy:

Freer’s from inland Maryland, originally, his family’s riches nouveaux, a family Amway business that hit big in the B.S. ’90s with his now-deceased father’s invention of a Pet-Rockish novelty that was ubiquitous in stockings for two straight pre-millennial Xmases — the so-called Phoneless Cord. Stice dimly recalls his old man getting a Phoneless Cord in his stocking, ostentatiously packaged, on Ortho’s first recallable Xmas, back in Partridge KS, the old man cocking an eyebrow and The Bride laughing and slapping her big knee. Nobody now much even gets the remembered gag, though, so few things needing cords anymore. But Freer’s old man had invested his windfall shrewdly.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

“[T]he B.S. ’90s”: Before Subsidization. In post-millennial Subsidized Time, years are named for corporate sponsors: Year of the Whopper, Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, &c.

Some Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : “Night-noises” : Romance : Sadness : Telephony : Television

Borders files for bankruptcy

The Wall Street Journal reports that Borders Group Inc. has filed for bankruptcy. Here’s the list of store closings. It’s on four pages, so seeking the fate of a particular store is a bit excruciating. My Borders, I’m surprised to see, lives, for now. But the wall seems to be covered with handwriting. From the
New York Times:

One potentially major concern is whether Borders will still receive shipments from publishers. A spokesman for the Ingram Book Group, one of the country’s biggest book distributors, said on Wednesday that the company is no longer shipping books to Borders.

Garner’s Usage Tip of the Day

Re: process:

The phrase “in the process of” never adds anything to the sentence in which it appears. You can safely omit it and thereby tighten your sentence — e.g.:

“I have on my desk a little manuscript from the fourteenth century written by an unknown author, which I am in the process of [delete ‘in the process of’] editing.” Donald J. Lloyd, “Our National Mania for Correctness,” in A Linguistics Reader 57, 58 (Graham Wilson ed., 1967).

“Appropriately for a community that was in the process of [delete ‘in the process of’] acquiring the sophistication of golf and drugs, this was not a case of a mean little robbery gone wrong but a thoroughly contemporary killing.” Owen Harris, "A Long Time Between Murders," Am. Scholar, Winter 2001, at 71, 79.

The singular of “process” is pronounced /PRAH-ses/ in American English, /PROH-ses/ in British English. But what about the plural? Is it /PRAH-ses-iz/ (/PROH-/ in British English) or /PRAH-suh-seez/? The first, preferably: the second is an affectation because the word is English, not Greek.

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. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site: Modern American Usage is, to my mind, a model of clarity and good sense (though I like to type out numbers up to ninety-nine).

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, February 16, 2010. Click for a larger view.]

They’ve sold off the furniture, but they’re keeping the art. Yes, it’s Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Any guess as to what’s on the other wall?

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts

IBEW logo

[From Wikipedia.]

Slywy’s discovery of a pencil with an IBEW clip prompted me to write this post, which I’ve been meaning to do since December. I love the IBEW logo. It leaves me feeling like I’m in the wrong union. What makes the logo great for me is the jacket-clad arm. A bare arm would be a predictable design element here — brute strength and all that. It’s the juxtaposition of crackling electricity and proper attire that gets me. No doubt there’s a handkerchief, neatly folded, in the clencher’s breast pocket.

Related reading
International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (Wikipedia)
Look for the Union Label: A Celebration of Union Logos and Emblems (Labor Archives and Research Center at San Francisco State University)

Domestic comedy

“Now that it’s warmer, it feels colder.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

Van Dyke Parks at Daytrotter

From Daytrotter, five performances by Van Dyke Parks with Clare and the Reasons, recorded in Asheville, North Carolina, October 2010. The performances are killer, and the download is free and legit.

From the same tour
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (1)
Van Dyke Parks in Chicago (2)
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons, on the radio
Van Dyke Parks and Clare and the Reasons, on the radio again