The Los Angeles Times on Mitt Romney and job creation

The Los Angeles Times examines “Mitt Romney’s job creation record“:

The Republican presidential contender says he learned about expanding employment during his time heading a private equity firm. But under his leadership, Bain Capital often maximized profits in part by firing workers.

That’s no surprise to anyone who knows something of the firm’s history. My wife Elaine worked at Bain & Company (pre-Bain Capital) in the 1980s, processing other people’s words, including Mitt Romney’s. Read her take on life at Bain.

A related post
Mitt Romney at Bain

[If Romney becomes the nominee, look for Bain to become a familiar name in political discourse. I think though that it’ll be Gingrich, and that Obama v. Gingrich will resemble Clinton v. Dole. Gingrich seems well suited to play a cranky old guy.]

Random number

Above, a random number between 1 and 1,000, which I obtained from random.org, offering “true random numbers to anyone on the Internet.” Get your own random number today!

[For the record: I know that random numbers are not a joke.]

FeedBurner, broken again

Google seems to have no love for its FeedBurner service. A glance at the Feed and Web Statistics section of Google’s FeedBurner Help Group shows that for many FeedBurner users, subscriber counts have all at once dropped to zero. As I joked in a 2009 post about FeedBurner problems, the FBHG is a self-help group: there seems to be no Google presence, not even to acknowledge when there’s a problem.

The FeedBurner Status Blog — which acknowledges no current problem — lacks a FB widget to display a subscriber count. But the FeedBurner account for the Official Google Blog is now out of commission:

[Click for a larger view.]

I joked in an e-mail earlier this week that Blogger is the Cinderella of the Google Family of Products, but FeedBurner is probably more deserving of that name. Still no acknowledgement from Google that something went wrong.

8:10 p.m.: FeedBurner, or at least my FeedBurner account, is back.

[Cinderella, that is, with no prince in sight.]

Santa Monica clock

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

This clock sits atop the 1929 Bay Cities Guaranty & Loan Association building at 225 Santa Monica Boulevard. You-Are-Here, an excellent site about Los Angeles-area architecture, helped me track down the building’s name.

By the way, it’s 1:37 p.m.

Henry buys liverwurst

[Henry, December 2, 2011.]

Where else are you gonna find liverwurst in the comics? And such a good price.

Also with liverwurst
“THIS IS FUN” (1941 advertisement)

John Ashbery in Time

And eternity:

Q.: What do you think it’s going to be like to meet God?

A: Episcopals are famed for their martinis, so I imagine he will hand me one when I arrive.

10 Questions for John Ashbery (Time article)
10 Questions for John Ashbery (Time video)

Chrome v. Firefox

StatCounter reports that for the first time, Chrome has overtaken Firefox in worldwide popularity:

The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that Chrome took 25.69% of the worldwide market (up from 4.66% in November 2009) compared to Firefox’s 25.23%. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still maintains a strong lead globally with 40.63%. . . .

In the US Internet Explorer continues to perform strongly and is maintaining market share at 50.66%, up slightly from 50.24% year on year. Firefox retains second place on 20.09%, down from 26.75%. Chrome is up to 17.3% from 10.89%. Safari is on 10.76% from 10.71%.

Orange Crate Art readers dance to the beat of a different percussion section. My most recent StatCounter stats (last 500 visits):

Firefox	30%
Chrome	26.6%
Internet Explorer	19.8%
Safari	17.8%
Mobile devices	4.4%
All others	1.4%

I’ve been using Chrome on a Mac and find that I have no interest in installing Firefox. Being able to use HTML5 to play YouTube clips is one advantage of Chrome. Speed is another — the thing is just plain fast.

“Plotnik's mantra of follow-up”

The post you’re looking for is here: “Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up.”

[Some sort of Blogger strangeness at work.]

Mail chutes and phone booths

Diane Schirf has two more posts about “relics”: mail chutes and phone booths. Previously: letters and mailboxes.

“Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”

[What’s with the kerning letter-spacing?]

Poking around in a used-book store, I found a copy of Arthur Plotnik’s The Elements of Editing: A Modern Guide for Editors and Journalists (1982). The cover is worth a look, both for its once-modern, now-dated Helvetica and for the positioning of the book as a companion to The Elements of Style, also published by Macmillan. It’s not just the title or the Publishers Weekly blurb or the “From the publisher of.” The cover even looks like that of the then-current third edition of Strunk and White. (Plotnik went on to write Spunk & Bite: A Writer’s Guide to Bold, Contemporary Style.)

Much of the advice in The Elements of Editing applies beyond the world of publishing. Consider “Plotnik’s mantra of follow-up”: “NOTHING HAPPENS WHEN IT IS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN WITHOUT WELL-TIMED REMINDERS.” Too true. Some explanation:

Trust and good faith. The words mean something different in communications than in the rest of life. Editors show trust and good faith by signing and renewing contracts, not by expecting people to have infallible memories and priorities identical to their own.

New editors who understand this principle will soon develop into functionally compulsive pests. They needn’t be insufferable. After all, “routine follow-up” is generally accepted as good business practice, and a reminder can always be tactful. Editors must also learn to distinguish between those who need frequent or infrequent nudging, firm or soft nudging. They must learn the best timing for a nudge.

The Elements of Editing is a dryly funny book. I can imagine Larry David and an adversary arguing about the firmness or timing of a nudge.

[It’s called letter-spacing: see the comments for an explanation. Thanks, Daughter Number Three.]