Salinger due-date slip at auction

A library due-date slip with J.D. Salinger’s signature is at auction. At least it’s smaller than a toilet (and you probably have one of those already).

Telephone exchange names on screen: Naked City

[Barney Sonners (Robert Duvall) walks from the bar where he works, before robbers and cops show up. “Torment Him Much and Hold Him Long.” Naked City. November 7, 1962. Click for a larger view.]

The Social Security Death Index lists just one Bernard R. Jankoff, 1913–1994. Items in the New York Times have some of the facts of his life. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1935. In 1938 he completed a law degree from Columbia Law School and passed the bar. He married Edith Ragovin (d. 1998) in 1940. They had three children. Mr. Jankoff’s name appears in a number of Times items as representing parties in real-estate transactions. I hope that the Jankoffs’ descendants know about this fleeting moment of television fame.

Update, 10:42 a.m.: I e-mailed family members, and now they do.

[MUrray Hill 7–3933.]

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Murder, My Sweet : Naked City : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Panhandling and handshakes

Dan Ariely’s account of experiments in panhandling reminded me of the following passage in Infinite Jest (from one of my favorite sections in the novel). Barry Loach’s spiritually despondent brother is in danger of leaving the seminary. That would leave Barry to fulfill his mother’s wish that one of her children enter religious life. But Barry’s dream is to be an athletic trainer. What can he do to restore his brother’s faith in humanity?

After a few suggestions and rejections of bets too way-out even for Barry Loach’s desperation, the brothers finally settle on a, like, experimental challenge. The spiritually despondent brother basically challenges Barry Loach to not shower or change clothes for a while and make himself look homeless and disreputable and louse-ridden and clearly in need of basic human charity, and to stand out in front of the Park Street T-station on the edge of the Boston Common, right alongside the rest of the downtown community’s lumpen dregs, who all usually stood there outside the T-station stemming change, and for Barry Loach to hold out his unclean hand and instead of stemming change simply ask passersby to touch him. Just to touch him. Viz. extend some basic human warmth and contact. And this Barry does. And does. Days go by.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

Ariely found that passers-by were surprisingly willing to shake a panhandler’s hand. In Wallace’s novel, Loach makes plenty of money, but it’s only saintly Mario Incandenza — with no one “to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted” — who’s willing to shake Barry Loach’s outstretched, fuliginous hand.

Reader, has a panhandler ever offered to shake your hand? What did you do? I’d answer too, but it’s never happened to me. I can’t imagine that the handshake-offer is a technique in wide use.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts

[Fuliginous: sooty. A Wallace word.]

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.