The Clabber Girl Museum

The Clabber Girl Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, is a delight for anyone interested in American material culture. Clabber Girl: as in baking powder, a product of Hulman & Company, which began as a grocery wholesaler in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1893 Hulman Building houses the museum, whose contents are, well, varied: advertising signage, a hansom cab, a massive generator wheel, old telephones, pneumatic tubes for interoffice memos, a 1912 Burroughs adding machine, a Remington manual typewriter, ledgers, a walk-in safe, WWII ration books, S&H Green Stamps, a Western Union clock (“Official Time,” it says), and recreations of a Victorian parlor and a 1940s kitchen. Now-defunct Hulman brands stand in boxed and canned majesty on shelves and in vitrines: Dauntless Butter Beans, Farmers Pride Chopped Turnip Greens, Presto Cleanser. My favorite thing: a program from a 1937 Clabber Girl Baking Powder Salesmen’s Dinner Dance. The vegetables of course were canned.

Elaine and I made a second discovery this weekend: driving home, we took an exit we’d never taken and ended up on the charming Lost Bearings Road.

[Clabber: “milk that has naturally clotted on souring” (New Oxford American Dictionary). It was mixed with potash to make a leaven. Clabber Girl Double Acting Baking Powder contains cornstarch, sodium bicarbonate, anhydrous sodium aluminum sulfate and monocalcium phosphate.]

Infinite Jest dream

In a dream: my students and I were sitting and talking about how to write David Foster Wallace’s novel. And someone said, “Why don’t you try some broken ones, and a mercury-chilling motif?”

One dream-source: a phrase from late in the novel that’s been running in my head, “people broken into pieces and trying to join.” Another: the blizzard of the novel’s final sections.

This is the second Infinite Jest dream I’ve had while teaching the novel. In the first, I was walking on North Harvard Street in Allston, on my way to Harvard Square. I used to take that walk often — it was quicker than taking the T and easier than finding a space to park. In my dream, it looked like rain, and I had no umbrella, but I wasn’t concerned, because I knew my wife Elaine could drive from Illinois and pick me up.

Other Infinite Jest posts
Attention : Description : Loveliness : Mike Huckabee : “Night-noises” : Novelty : Romance : Sadness : ❍ : Steve Jobs : Telephony : Television

How to improve writing (no. 35)

My son Ben sent me something in need of improvement, from a New York Times article about sauropods:

Nothing in the dinosaur world was quite like the sauropods. They were huge, some unbelievably gigantic, the biggest animals ever to lumber across the land, consuming everything in sight. Their necks were much longer than a giraffe’s, their tails just about as long and their bodies like an elephant’s, only much more so.

As Ben asks, “What does it mean to have a body like an elephant’s, ‘only much more so’?“

More so can provide a nice comic effect. Imagine Ralph Kramden speaking to Alice: “You’re exactly like your mother, Alice, just like her — only more so!” But in the sauropod sentence, the phrase makes no sense: a sauropod can resemble an elephant to the extent that it does, not more so. My guess is that “much more so” here means “much larger.”

[This post is no. 35 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. Thanks, Ben!]

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All How to improve writing posts (via Pinboard)

The corrupted-file trick

Two recent searches that led to Orange Crate Art: how to fake emailing a paper to your professor and turning in paper late corrupt file trick. Sigh.

Attention, students: Don’t try it. Your teachers are likely aware of this trick. Even if they’re not, a file that refuses to open is your problem, not theirs. When getting such a file, few if any teachers will feel anything other than the feeling that they’re being had. When they figure out what you’ve done, you are likely to be in even deeper trouble for having engaged in academic misconduct.

Attention, teachers: When you get a file that won’t open, it’s likely that you’re dealing a student who didn’t take the advice I just offered. Open the file with a text-editor. Do you see a paper or other project amid the encoding? If not, you’re being had.

The lunatic fringe again

As my wife Elaine remembered and confirmed last night, “lunatic fringe” first referred to hair. She remembered what Ma says in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie (1941):

“And I can’t think that a lunatic fringe is the most becoming way to do your hair. It makes any girl’s ears appear larger to comb the hair up back of them and to have that mat of bangs above the forehead.”

Fred Shapiro explains it all:

In the Yale Book of Quotations, I gave the standard sourcing for this political/social expression:

[Of an international exhibition of modern art:] The lunatic fringe was fully in evidence, especially in the rooms devoted to the Cubists and Futurists, or Near-Impressionists.

Theodore Roosevelt, Outlook, March 29, 1913

More recently, I searched for lunatic fringe in historical databases. To my surprise, I found many uses from before 1913 — all in a very different sense from Roosevelt’s. Here are a few:

“The girls!” exclaimed Miss Lizzie, lifting her eyebrows till they met the “lunatic fringe” of hair which straggled uncurled down her forehead.

Oliver Optic’s Magazine, February 1874

“LUNATIC Fringe” is the name given to the fashion of cropping the hair and letting the ends hang down over the forehead.

Wheeling Daily Register, July 24, 1875

The “lunatic fringe” is still the mode in New York hair-dressing.

Chicago Inter Ocean, May 24, 1876

It appears, then, that Teddy Roosevelt was playing on an existing phrase. His usage was a metaphorical extension of an expression previously applied to bangs — evidently, bangs that were considered outré. Fringe is still used in Britain for bangs, but the usage has been abandoned for so long in the United States that lexicographers were completely unaware of the coiffure-related prehistory of lunatic fringe.

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the phrase to another 1913 Roosevelt sentence: “There is apt to be a lunatic fringe among the votaries of any forward movement.” Or backward.

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Lunatic fringe

Lunatic fringe

That hair. “Lunatic fringe,” said Elaine, and she said I should post it here. See also these posts. Thanks, Elaine.

Taco Bell lawsuit

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!

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Moleskine app

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.]

Secret writing, 1917–1918

[“How to open sealed letter without detection.” Click for a larger view.]

From an April 19 CIA press release:

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.

“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.”

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.

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Invisible ink cigarette card

Used typewriter ribbon

[“Used typewriter ribbon being sealed in locked cabinet, during Academy Award voting.” Hollywood, California, 1972. Photograph by Bill Eppridge. From the Life Photo Archive.]

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Price Waterhouse (Wikipedia)