Fred Steiner (1923–2011)

Fred Steiner, who wrote the theme music for Perry Mason (and much else) has died.

The Perry Mason theme sent my brother and me into a frenzy in early childhood. The four-note phrases became a lyric: “The mum - my PRAYERS! The mum - my PRAYERS!” (Repeat until delirious.) The theme’s title, as I just learned, is “Park Avenue Beat,” which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with mummies.

(Via Sounds & Fury via Musical Assumptions.)

Kozol on jargon

Jonathan Kozol on educational jargon:

One of the most annoying consequences of this trend, as you’ve observed, is a peculiar tendency to use a polysyllabic synonym for almost any plain and ordinary word: “implement” for do, “initiate” for start, “utilize” for use, “identify” for name, ”articulate” for state, “replicate” for copy, “evaluate” for judge, “quantify” for count, “strategize” for plan, “facilitate” for help, “restructure” or “reconstitute” for change. The toss-in use of adjectives like “positive” and “meaningful” (instead of, simply, “good” or “real”) in front of nouns like “outcome” or “collaboration” is another common way of trying to pump extra air into a wilted and deflated intellectual ballon.

Letters to a Young Teacher (New York: Crown, 2007)

We should talk about these observations in small grou — I mean, in breakout sessions.

Related posts
How to improve writing (no. 5) (on facilitator)
How to improve writing (no. 11) (on implement)

Rod Blagojevich found guilty

In the Dog-Bites-Man Department: an Illinois politician has been found guilty on corruption charges.

If you’re wondering, here’s how to pronounce his last name.

A couple of related posts
Blagojevich and “Ulysses”
Rod Blagojevich, maker of metaphors

[Elaine and I are proud not to have voted for him, twice.]

Moore Metalhed Maptacks

[Click for a larger view.]

Google wants to know: “Did you mean: metal head map tacks.“ No, I did not. I meant metalhed maptacks, about which Google could find nothing.

I bought this box of Moore Metalhed Maptacks in a late-20th-century stationery store, the kind of store where products sit on the shelves for years, lost in thought, not making a peep. I think of these tacks as having missed their true calling: as markers on a wall-size map charting the progress of a police dragnet. “His only chance now is to head south on Ninth. So we’ll cut him off right … here.” [Tack goes into map.]

Moore is a venerable name in tacks and push-pins: Edwin Moore (1874–1916) founded the Moore Push-Pin Company in 1900. Moore Push-Pin continues in business today, with a website offering a brief account of the company’s history and details of current products. I am especially taken with the Thin-Pin, which might be described as a push-pin that comes close to existing in just two dimensions.

I tried several times to pose these Metalhed Maptacks in a plausible way. They finally surprised me by coming to rest in these cuneiform-like formations.

[This post is the eleventh in an occasional series, “From the Museum of Supplies.” The museum is imaginary. The supplies are real. Supplies is my word, and has become my family’s word, for all manner of stationery items. Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

Also from the Museum of Supplies
Dennison’s Gummed Labels No. 27
Eagle Turquoise display case
Eagle Verithin display case
Fineline erasers
Illinois Central Railroad Pencil
A Mad Men sort of man, sort of
Mongol No. 2 3/8
Real Thin Leads
Rite-Rite Long Leads
Stanley carpenter’s rule

Domestic comedy

“It’s not a hunting camp; it’s a gathering camp.”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts (via Pinboard)

New York and equal marriage

The Flag of Equal Marriage needs updating. Hooray for New York and New Yorkers. Hooray for the twenty-nine Democratic and four Republican legislators who voted for the Marriage Equality Act. And hooray for the Democratic governor who signed it.

This detail from a New York Times article is telling:

With his position still undeclared, Senator Mark J. Grisanti, a Republican from Buffalo who had sought office promising to oppose same-sex marriage, told his colleagues he had agonized for months before concluding he had been wrong.

“I apologize to those who feel offended,” Mr. Grisanti said, adding, “I cannot deny a person, a human being, a taxpayer, a worker, the people of my district and across this state, the State of New York, and those people who make this the great state that it is the same rights that I have with my wife.”

[The flag will be updated when the law goes into effect: July 24, 2011. I’ve corrected the Times quotation: “to those,” not “for those.”]

Peter Falk (1927–2011)

Peter Falk, in A Woman Under the Influence (dir. John Cassavetes, 1974), a great film of marriage and madness. Elaine and I watched it last night. Falk and Gena Rowlands give amazing performances. In my ideal republic, they and Cassavetes would have won Academy Awards for this film.

Peter Falk dies at 83 (Los Angeles Times)

Clouzot, Les Diaboliques

[“Don’t be devils! Don’t ruin the interest your friends could take in this film. Don’t tell them what you have seen. On their behalf, thank you.”]

One more from Henri-Georges Clouzot: the 1955 film Les Diaboliques [The Devils], starring Simone Signoret, Véra Clouzot, and Paul Meurisse, with a wonderful turn by Charles Vanel as a retired detective who, like Dickens’s Inspector Bucket, seems to have been a model for television’s Lieutenant Columbo. I won’t tell you anything more about what I have seen, except to say that Les Diaboliques is suspenseful and frightening and a masterpiece. It’s not for the fainthearted. The film is available (with its alternative title Diabolique), beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection.

That concludes this week’s Clouzot spree. Reader, I hope there’s a film here that you’d like to watch, or watch again.

2:03 p.m.: Sad news: Peter Falk, who played Lieutenant Columbo, died yesterday in Beverly Hills.

Clouzot x 4
Le Corbeau
Le mystère Picasso (Elaine’s post)
Quai des Orfèvres
Le salaire de la peur

Another college prez plagiarizing

Another college president in the news:

Dr. Danny Lovett, president of Tennessee Temple University and co-pastor of Highland Park Baptist Church, admitted today [June 22] that he plagiarized sections of another pastor’s work, an action sources say led to his recent resignation [as president].

In his book Jesus Is Awesome, Lovett plagiarized the work of one Buddy Murphrey. Says Lovett, “I didn’t know copyright laws at the time, and I should have checked more thoroughly.“ Murphrey says that when he contacted Lovett about the plagiarism, Lovett explained that he was “under the impression that [Murphrey] had passed away or that [the book] was no longer in print when he used it.” That’s some reasoning.

Lovett was born in 1953. Jesus Is Awesome was published in 2003. You’d think that Lovett would have figured out by then a very simple rule (just four words!) regarding other people’s stuff.

More presidential doings
What plagiarism looks like (Jacksonville State University)
Another college president plagiarizing (Malone University)
“Local Norms” and “‘organic’ attribution” (Southern Illinois University Carbondale)

[Lovett’s book is said to be “used as a textbook” at TTU. Perhaps the only thing more unseemly than requiring that students buy your own book is requiring that they buy the school president’s book.]

Blue, Bloop, screwed

Jay Maisel, whose photograph of Miles Davis appears on the cover of the 1959 recording Kind of Blue, threatened to sue Andy Baio, the maker of Kind of Bloop (an 8-bit version of Kind of Blue), whose cover is a pixelated version of Maisel’s photograph. Maisel’s attorneys asked for “statutory damages up to $150,000 for each infringement at the jury’s discretion and reasonable attorneys fees or actual damages and all profits attributed to the unlicensed use of his photograph, and $25,000 for Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations.” Baio settled out of court for $32,500.

In a post on the matter, Kind of Screwed, Baio makes a compelling case that his use of the cover photograph falls under “fair use.” (Maisel’s conduct, I would suggest, falls under “heartless.”) Baio also wonders what he might use for new cover art. I’d suggest the muted post horn of Thomas Pynchon’s novel The Crying of Lot 49. The image might suggest here both Miles Davis’s trumpet and the ways in which copyright law can wrongfully inhibit creative efforts.

[Image via Wikipedia.]