From the Los Angeles Times:
A lawsuit aimed at forcing Taco Bell to stop calling the meat it serves beef has been withdrawn. The suit, filed in January in federal court in California, alleged that what Taco Bell calls “seasoned beef” does not meet federal requirements to be labeled beef.It turns out that Taco Bell’s “seasoned beef” is eighty-eight percent beef. And the “Isolated Oat Product”? It’s for moisture. Of course!
There’s now a free Moleskine app for the iPad and iPhone, offering the choice of a plain, ruled, or squared page. To my mind, the design involves the same analog-to-digital mistake that Apple’s Notes app makes. Lines or squares are useful when one writes by hand. On a screen, they’re superfluous. As is Notes’s left margin: one can’t write in it. But to each, their own.
My favorite iPad writing app is Simplenote. Even its name is simple: note the absence of a capital in the middle. Nice.
[Yes, singular they.]
The Central Intelligence Agency today declassified the United States Government’s six oldest classified documents, dating from 1917 and 1918. These documents, which describe secret writing techniques and are housed at the National Archives, are believed to be the only remaining classified documents from the World War I era. Documents describing secret writing fall under the CIA’s purview to declassify.The documents contain recipes for invisible ink and directions for opening sealed letters without detection. No sign of the documents at the CIA website, but they’re available from The Maddow Blog at MSNBC. I could’ve used them in my espionage-filled boyhood.
“These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them,” CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said. “When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people.”
Signage: “Reserved for Visiting Guests.”
Better: “Reserved for Guests.” Or “Reserved for Visitors.”
Omit needless words!
[This post is no. 34 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]
Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)
Last week our son Ben participated in a hyper-present improvisation on “Shenandoah” that joined musicians in Urbana, Illinois and Melbourne, Australia. The project is the work of composer and violinist Benjamin Day Smith, who explains it in this lecture.
Babbitt’s Books in Normal, Illinois, had a reading on Friday night to mark the publication of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. There are few more appropriate settings for such an event: Wallace taught at Illinois State University in Normal from 1993 to 2002, and he was a regular customer at Babbitt’s, which he once called his favorite bookstore. The setting for the reading was fittingly modest: a table with a small lectern, a dozen or so folding chairs, and aisles filled with people sitting and standing. (They included a Peoria Journal Star reporter.) Nine people read, from “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” “Good Old Neon,” Infinite Jest, and The Pale King. The readers included three of Wallace’s ISU friends, one of his ISU students, two of my students, and me. This event offered one of the plainest and best pleasures: listening to words read aloud.
Much kudos and gratitude to Brian Simpson and Sarah Lindenbaum for their hospitality.
[The world of The Pale King is an IRS office in Peoria, Illinois. Kudos is a singular noun. Brian’s last name is not Babbitt.]
Former IRS examiner David Wallace on dullness:
To me, at least in retrospect,¹ the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like “deadly dull” or “excruciatingly dull” come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us² spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly . . . but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called “information society” is just about information. Everyone knows³ it’s about something else, way down.The Pale King is a novel in the form of “basically a nonfiction memoir” by former IRS examiner David Wallace, “with additional elements of reconstructive journalism, organizational psychology, elementary civics and tax theory, & c.” This passage is from the Author’s Foreword. The footnote numbers are 26, 27, and 28. Ellipsis in the original.
¹ (which is, after all, memoirs’ specialty)
² (whether or not we’re consciously aware of it)
³ (again, whether consciously or not)
David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (Boston: Little, Brown, 2011).
