Tone balls

Elaine and Ben and I spent the afternoon yesterday at Elderly Instruments in Lansing, Michigan. Housed in a former Odd Fellows building, Elderly is quite a store.

Downstairs, next to the repair desk, there is a curious exhibit titled “Tone Balls,” a collection of the little bundles of dust, hair, lint, and whatever that form inside guitars. The term tone ball is the work of an unidentified Elderly employee. Here, from The Fretboard Journal, is a 2006 article about tone balls, with scary-big photographs.

Elaine has already written about these things, and I see that she too found the Fretboard Journal piece. The photograph above is hers.

[Gasoline to Lansing and back: about $30. Getting your son an instrument: priceless.]

Word of the day: skeuomorph

Skeuomorph is a word that I wish I had known a few months ago, when writing a post about the Moleskine app for iOS. Skeoumorph comes from the Greek σκεῦος [vessel, implement] and μορϕή [form]. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word in two ways:

An ornament or ornamental design on an artefact resulting from the nature of the material used or the method of working it.

An object or feature copying the design of a similar artefact in another material.

It’s the second definition that’s relevant: the Moleskine app attempts to emulate paper by offering the user the non-functional choice of a plain, ruled, or squared page. To my mind, that’s an analog-to-digital mistake.

I learned skeuomorph while browsing John Siracusa’s review of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. The leather stitching and torn paper of Lion’s iCal and the sewn signatures of Lion’s Address Book are examples of skeuomorphic design. Siracusa calls them “egregious.” I’d say “ghastly.”

Wikipedia has a handy collection of examples of skeuomorphic design. Perhaps the most obvious examples: fake stitching, fake woodgrain, and the shutter click of a non-SLR digital camera.

“Mitt lille land”

My friend Norman sent links to two recordings of “Mit lille land” [My little land], a song by Norwegian musician and poet Ole Paus. The first is by Paus. The second, just days old, is by Maria Mena, and is accompanied by news footage from last Friday. Norman included a translation (not, he points out, his own):

My little country
A little place, a handful of peace
thrown out among mountain plateau and fjords

My little country
Where high mountains are planted
among houses, people and words
Where silence and dreams grow
Like an echo in barren earth

My little country
Where the sea pats mild and soft
like it’s caressing from coast to coast

My little country
Where stars glide by
and becomes landscapes when it gets lighter
while the night stands there — bleak and silent

My little country
A little place, a handful of peace
thrown out among mountain plateau and fjords

My little country
Where high mountains are planted
among houses, people and words
Where silence and dreams grow
Like an echo in barren earth

[Image from the Maria Mena video.]

In favor of penmanship

Joanna Key favors penmanship.

Garner, Menand, and Truss

Good reading: two devastating appraisals of Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation (2003), by Bryan A. Garner and Louis Menand.

Idle and curious, I looked at Truss’s book in the library a few weeks ago and found myself stopping short at the subtitle, which should read The Zero-Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. It was downhill from there.

[Sheer, strange coincidence: Garner’s Usage Tip of The Day (taken from Garner’s Modern American Usage) has just hit punctuation. Today’s tip concerns the apostrophe. You can subscribe here (bottom right). The Garner link above is now dead.]

Word of the day: earthling

The Oxford English Dictionary Word of the Day is earthling. I was surprised to learn that the word is much older than I’d thought. The meaning that I think of — “A person who lives on or comes from the earth as opposed to another planet” — first appeared in 1858, in a newspaper item about a comet. As the OED notes, this meaning later turns up mainly in science fiction. (As in, say, “Attention, earthlings!”)

But earthling has earlier meanings. In 1600, Sir William Cornwallis used the word to denote “A worldly or materialistic person.” In 1593, earthling appeared in Thomas Nashe’s Christs Teares Over Iervsalem, meaning “An inhabitant of the earth as opposed to heaven”: “Wee (of all earthlings) are Gods vtmost subiects.”

Earlier still (beyond today’s Word of the Day), earthling (that is, yrðling, yrþling, or urþling) meant “A ploughman, a cultivator of the soil.” And as yrðling, ærðling, and irdling, earthling also meant “A kind of bird (not identified).” Perhaps a bird that couldn’t fly? I wonder.

[You can subscribe the the OED Word of the Day at the dictionary’s homepage.]

Brian Wilson’s former house for sale

For sale, in St. Charles, Illinois: Brian Wilson’s former house, with nine fireplaces, six full bathrooms, five bedrooms, two half-bathrooms, and one underground recording studio. A newspaper reports that the studio is not in use: “‘It’s just space,’ said the resident who answered the door there last week.“

Wilson lived in St. Charles briefly, where he worked on the Imagination album (1998) with producer Joe Thomas. In Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys: The Complete Guide to Their Music (2004), Andrew G. Doe and John Tobler write that Wilson spent “maybe a total of three months in the house” and later sold it.

Beach Boy's former St. Charles house for sale (Daily Herald)
5N129 Dover Hill Road, St. Charles, Illinois (Caldwell Banker)

BBC on podcasts

From the BBC: Podcasts: Who still listens to them?

The answer would seem to be “Lots of people.” The point of the article is that interest in podcasts continues to grow, though Facebook and Twitter get more attention.

Me, I barely keep up with three podcasts: Joe Bussard’s Country Classics, This American Life, and To the Best of Our Knowledge. How about you?

[“Facebook and Twitter”: I find it difficult to use the term social media without wincing.]

Night Train to Munich

[Rex Harrison, Basil Radford, Naunton Wayne, in close quarters.]

How is it that Night Train to Munich (dir. Carol Reed, 1940) is so little known? It’s brilliant, in the colloquial British sense of that word — amazing, fantastic. The film moves at the speed of early Hitchcock and has a little of everything: betrayal, comedy, espionage, friendship, unconvincing model landscapes, pursuit, romance, secret messages, song, suspense, and train travel.

Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) is the clear inspiration — easy to understand, as Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder wrote both screenplays. Margaret Lockwood returns, here as a young Czech who follows her scientist-father in fleeing the Nazis to England; Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne, traveling home from a visit to Berlin, reprise their roles as Charters and Caldicott. Best of all is a plot element that owes nothing to the earlier film: a tricky triangle with Lockwood, Rex Harrison, and Paul Henreid. In the train-lavatory scene above, Harrison, impersonating a Nazi officer, gets the warning that the real Nazis are onto him.

Night Train to Munich is available, beautifully restored, from the Criterion Collection.

Six stars

The Flag of Equal Marriage gets a sixth star, as the Marriage Equality Act goes into effect in New York. New York joins Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia in granting equal marriage-rights to same-sex partners.

After Long Wait, Same-Sex Couples Marry in New York (New York Times)