Write five sentences on my house

Ever since I wrote a post on a few sentences from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Google searches for five sentences (that is, for ready-made homework) have been ending up at Orange Crate Art. Write five sentences on my house is the latest such search.

Kid, if you write even one sentence on my house, I’m gonna call the cops.

Other “five sentences” posts
Bleak House : The cat : Clothes : The driver : Life : Life on the moon : The past (1) : The past (2) : The rabbit : The ship : Smoking : The telephone

“Fanciful ideas rampant”

In 1911, the Coca-Cola Company tested the effects of caffeine on sixteen users and non-users. The test-subjects kept notes:

On Feb. 22, a regular user was caffeine-free: “Felt like a ‘bone head’ all day. My head was dull more than usual.” On Feb. 25, an abstainer was dosed with four grains of caffeine (260 milligrams, the approximate equivalent of a 12-ounce cup of Starbucks coffee): “Gradual rise of spirits till 4:00. Then a period of exuberance, of good feeling. Fanciful ideas rampant.”

They’re rampant here too, though I’ve been nearly caffeine-free for nearly a year — nothing more than a very occasional cup of caf tea and a very, very occasional cup of caf coffee (helpful before watching films with subtitles).

A Century Later, Jury’s Still Out on Caffeine Limits (New York Times)

Call for papers (“Friday”)

The East-Central Illinois Cultural Studies Association Conference’s Music-as-Culture Division’s Pop Music section’s moderators have issued a call for papers on Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” Thus far there are five submissions:

“‘Friday’ and the Production of Adolescence: Ark Music Factory and the Corporate Imperative”

“Black Like ‘We’: Tropes of Alterity and Color in ‘Friday’”

“‘I don’t want this weekend to end’: Diachronicity and Paradox in ‘Friday’”

“In Search of Free Time: Agency, ‘Friday,’ Futurity, Structure”

“Notes Toward a Supreme Weekend: The Suburban Sublime in ‘Friday’”

Won’t you join in? Leave the title of your paper in a comment. Submissions are due by April 1, 2011. Hurry up!

My last thought on “Friday,” which has been stuck in my head for a week: yes, it’s hilariously, deliriously bad. But it participates in the dumb beauty of some of the greatest pop music. The difference between

Kickin’ in the front seat
Sittin’ in the back seat

and

Sittin’ in my car outside your house
’Member when you spilled Coke all over your blouse?

is a difference in degree, not in kind.

Related listening
Rebecca Black, “Friday” (YouTube)

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, March 27, 2011. Click for a larger view.]

A small surprise for the close reader: look who’s driving that tractor-trailer.

Alas, Trixie still rides just inches from the rear windshield.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)

Pocket notebook sighting: The Lodger

[Kitty Langley (Merle Oberson) and Inspector John Warwick (George Sanders): “Oh, is that the legendary notebook of Hemingway, Picasso, and Chatwin?” “Er, no, not yet.”]

The Lodger (dir. John Brahm, 1944) is a beautiful horror film, with stylish cinematography by Lucien Ballard and a brilliant performance by Laird Cregar as the lodger Mr. Slade, aka “The Ripper.”

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound

“I heart my dogs [sic] head”

A new definition for the verb heart has entered the Oxford English Dictionary: “To love; to be fond of. Originally with reference to logos using the symbol of a heart to denote the verb ‘love.’”

My favorite OED citation for the new definition comes from “About Helmet Visor Screws,” a 1984 post in the Usenet group net.cycle. The citation appears to be someone’s signature: “Joe ‘I heart my dogs [sic] head’ Weinstein.”

Numerous news items on heart state that the OED had added the symbol ♥. Not so. It’s a new definition of the verb heart that has been added, as the above quotations make clear. And yes, heart was already a verb.

Joe, wherever you are, welcome to the OED. It’s the OED that added the sic. And OED, rock on.

(Thanks, Daughter Number Three.)

Emoticons with Auto-Tune

Today is Thursday. Thinking about that song got me thinking about Auto-Tune.

New York Times subscription plans

The two most helpful items I’ve found for thinking about New York Times subscription prices:

Digital Subscription Prices Visualized (The Understatement)
A Rule of Thumb: Pricing Should Be Simple (Daring Fireball)

I spend a good deal of time reading the Times online and would be happy to pay to do so. But $5 a week to read the Times on a Mac and iPad seems absurd when a measly $3.10 Monday–Friday print subscription affords the same access. (There is of course no home-delivery in my corner of “east-central Illinois.”) That I’m even thinking twice about whether to sign up is a sign, I think, that the paper’s pricing is off.

“Trapped” (xkcd)

“But everything’s just signals in my sensory cortices! How can I be sure they correspond to an external world?!” The wonderful comic strip xkcd gets all philosophical.

Elizabeth Taylor (1932–2011)

Elizabeth Taylor’s son Michael Wilding:

Her remarkable body of work in film, her ongoing success as a businesswoman, and her brave and relentless advocacy in the fight against HIV/AIDS, all make us all incredibly proud of what she accomplished. We know, quite simply, that the world is a better place for Mom having lived in it.

Elizabeth Taylor, legendary actress, dies at 79 (Los Angeles Times)