Critical-thinking skills at Penn State

“I think the point people are trying to make is the media is responsible for Joe Pa going down,” said a freshman, Mike Clark, 18, adding that he believed that Mr. Paterno had met his legal and moral responsibilities by telling university authorities about an accusation that Mr. Sandusky assaulted a boy in a university shower in 2002.

*

“We got rowdy, and we got maced,” Jeff Heim, 19, said rubbing his red, teary eyes. “But make no mistake, the board started this riot by firing our coach. They tarnished a legend.”

*

Four girls in heels danced on the roof of a parked sport utility vehicle and dented it when they fell after a group of men shook the vehicle. A few, like Justin Muir, 20, a junior studying hotel and restaurant management, threw rolls of toilet paper into the trees.

“It’s not fair,“ Mr. Muir said hurling a white ribbon. “The board is an embarrassment to our school and a disservice to the student population.”

*

Some students noted the irony that they had come out to oppose what they saw as a disgraceful end to Mr. Paterno’s distinguished career as a football coach, and then added to the ignobility of the episode by starting an unruly protest.

Greg Becker, 19, a freshman studying computer science, said he felt he had to vent his feelings anyway.

“This definitely looks bad for our school,” he said sprinting away from a cloud of pepper spray. “I’m sure Joe Pa wouldn’t want this, but this is just an uproar now, we’re finding a way to express our anger.”

*

Paul Howard, 24, an aerospace engineering student, jeered the police.

“Of course we’re going to riot,” he said. “What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?”

Penn State Students Clash With Police in Unrest After Announcement (New York Times)

TextWrangler gutter removal

To permanently remove the left-side gutter from the Mac app TextWrangler, open the Terminal and type the following:

defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Editor:Gutter -bool false

And to get the gutter back:

defaults write com.barebones.textwrangler Editor:Gutter -bool true

The gutter is useful for text folding, but if you use TextWrangler for plain old writing, the gutter might seem like clutter.

TextWrangler is great, and it’s free. It’s my favorite writing app.

[Solution found at TextWrangler Talk. Thanks, adiener.]

An old Life never dies

Back-date magazine dealer Sidney Friedman:

My brother Ben and I run maybe the busiest back-date magazine store in the world. It’s on Sixth Avenue in New York City. We have customers in here fourteen hours a day and we’re famous enough to get mail just addressed: “Old Magazines, near 42nd St.”

A few yards away is the big New York Public Library. You find something in an old magazine there. Can you clip it out? You’d go to jail! Copying takes time. Photostats cost money and don’t come in color. So hundreds of people cross the street and buy from us.

[“Life file . . .” Life, December 14, 1953. Click for a larger view.]

This back-date magazine store sounds like a 1953 Internet.

Yesterday’s Henry led me to this page from Life. Sidney Friedman was right: an old Life never dies. December 14, 1953 lives on at Google Books.

Bravo, Ohio

“Republican-backed limits on collective bargaining for 360,000 public employees in Ohio were squashed by voters through a resounding defeat of Issue 2.”

Issue 2 fails (Columbus Dispatch)

Welcome, 10,006th subscriber

FeedBurner now shows 10,006 Orange Crate Art subscribers, almost all in iGoogle or Google Reader. I’ve been watching the counter creep toward 10,000 for a while now.

Who are you all? Aside from the free pizza, what do you like about Orange Crate Art? Please, click on through sometime and say hello.

SIUC on strike

“This is what I have worked for. In our time of need our students have stood up for us”: Jyotsna Kapur, associate professor in cinema and photography, at a student rally in support of striking faculty at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. You can follow the story online at Occupy SIUC and SIUC Unions United.

The SIUC administration’s thesaurus seems to be opened to intransigent:

uncompromising, inflexible, unbending, unyielding, diehard, unshakable, unwavering, resolute, rigid, unaccommodating, uncooperative, stubborn, obstinate, obdurate, pigheaded, single-minded, iron-willed, stiff-necked.

I think the administration needs to find a different word.

[Adjectives courtesy of the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.]

Henry, an anachronism

[Henry, November 8, 2011.]

When did you last see a bookstore selling back-date magazines?

Henry is a wonderful anachronism. I think I must be the last person reading.

Related posts
Betty Boop with Henry
Henry mystery
Henry’s repeated gesture
An old Life never dies

[Henry solves his magazine problem by going to a doctor’s office.]

Naming Apple

The two Steves, in the beginning:

Now that they had decided to start a business, they needed a name. Jobs had gone for another visit to the All One Farm, where he had been pruning the Gravenstein apple trees, and Wozniak picked him up at the airport. On the ride down to Los Altos, they bandied around options. They considered some typical tech words, such as Matrix, and some neologisms, such as Executek, and some straightforward boring names, like Personal Computers Inc. The deadline for deciding was the next day, when Jobs wanted to start filing the papers. Finally Jobs proposed Apple Computer. “I was on one of my fruitarian diets,” he explained. “I had just come back from the apple farm. It sounded fun, spirited, and not intimidating. Apple took the edge off the word ‘computer.’ Plus, it would get us ahead of Atari in the phone book.” He told Wozniak that if a better name did not hit them by the next afternoon, they would just stick with Apple. And they did.

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Apple Computer, Inc. is now Apple Inc., no comma. “Apple,” unlike, say, “Executek,” is a name built to last.

Also from Walter Isaacson’s biography
Steve Jobs at college (and typos)

[The All One Farm: an Oregon commune founded by Jobs’s Reed College friend Richard Friedland.]

Inara G. and Van Dyke P. in LA

Through it all Parks was as entertaining between songs as he was in the midst of them, touching upon everything from Qantas to Darwinism and referring to the concert itself as “a testament to durable goods.”

From Sean J. O’Connell’s review of Inara George and Van Dyke Parks’s November 5 performance at the Getty Center (LA Weekly Blogs).

A related post
On George and Parks’s An Invitation

The Parks mark

Van Dyke Parks, Arrangements, Volume 1.
Bananastan B3300. 2011.
Playing time: 39:28.

Arrangements, Volume 1 is the first of two compilations of Van Dyke Parks’s work as an arranger, on his own recordings and others’. (Parks has worked with many, many musicians: here’s an incomplete list.) Each of the fifteen selections here bears the Parks mark of sonic density and tonal variety, which makes for a jukebox of considerable range and sophistication: calypso (with Bonnie Raitt), funk (with Little Feat), a production number (with Ry Cooder), reggae (with a very plausible Dino Martin), straightfaced soft-rock (with Sal Valentino), and Tex-Mex (with Lowell George).

Most appealing to me are this album’s early (and until now relatively inaccessible) Parks recordings: the swirling keyboards and umpteen (I’d say nine) key changes of “Donovan’s Colours” (the 45 mono mix, released under the pseudonym George Washington Brown), the bright choiring voices of “Come to the Sunshine,” the brass-heavy fits and starts of “Out on the Rolling Sea,” an orchestral interpretation of the Bahamian guitarist Joseph Spence’s idiosyncratic style (in Spence’s signature key of D), and “Ice Capades,” a forty-four-second flurry of synthesizer high jinks created for a late-sixties Ice Capades commercial. And perhaps best of all, Parks’s version of “The Eagle and Me,” whose bassoon, oboe, and percussive clicks and rasps suggest a happily creaking and croaking menagerie. It’s a rare musician who can take up the songs of Joseph Spence and Harold Arlen and make them both sound like parts of his own soul. Onward to the next volume.

Track listings at Bananastan Records.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (via Pinboard)