November 11, 1921

[“Cities Observe Day from East to West: San Francisco, at Telephone, Hears President Deliver Arlington Address.” New York Times, November 12, 1921.]

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Ajax on my mind

Watch Joe Paterno address the students gathered outside his house last night. He advises them to get a good night’s sleep and to study, and adds one more thing: “We are Penn State,” with a fist in the air. As George Vecsey writes of Paterno in the New York Times, “he still doesn’t get it.”

The disgraceful events at Penn State have me thinking about Sophocles’ Ajax, a play I taught last week. As the play begins, Ajax, the great representative of old-school warrior values, is doing the unspeakable. Furious that Odysseus and not he has been given Achilles’ armor, he sets out to murder Agamemnon, Menelaus, and Odysseus. But Athena deludes him, and he ends up torturing and killing animals, thinking they’re the Greek leaders. Then he comes to his senses, and his pain grows infinitely greater. His wife Tecmessa describes his reaction to what he has done:

And when he saw the carnage under his roof,
He grasped his head and screamed,
Crashing down onto the bloody wreckage,
Then just sitting in the slaughter, fists clenched,
His nails tearing into his hair.

Ajax, as we would say, gets it, and chooses to fall on his sword. Paterno might at least acknowledge some measure of shame and sorrow for his silence.

[Source: Sophocles, Four Tragedies. Trans. Peter Meineck and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007). The Ajax translation is by Meineck.]

Bil Keane (1922–2011)

“As a child, he drew on his bedroom walls”: Bil Keane, Creator of The Family Circus, Dies at 89 (New York Times).

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.

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An old Life never dies

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