At last

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

It’s a sentence full of uneasiness — lots of padding (“At a certain point,” “I’ve just concluded,” “it is important,” “to go ahead and affirm”) and unnecessary qualifications (“for me personally,” “for me”). But look at the last ten words: “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” I am happy to see President Obama on the right side of history, at last.

Three great strip-mall restaurants

One of Tyler Cowen’s six rules for dining out: “Get out of the city and into the strip mall.” In that spirit, I want to recommend three strip-mall restaurants that offer great food for vegans, vegetarians, and ominvores alike. If ever you’re in the appropriate strip mall:

Cedars Mediterranean Kitchen, 1206 E. 53rd Street, Chicago. I can recommend the hummus, stuffed grape leaves, red-lentil soup, eggplant stew, and seafood kebab.

Golden Harbor Chinese Restaurant, 505 S. Neil Street, Champaign, Illinois. Two menus: one American and one Chinese, the latter also available in English translation. The Chinese-menu dishes are drier and tend to showcase one ingredient. The Chinese-menu shrimp with garlic, for instance, has bamboo, water chestnuts, and red pepper but no broccoli, carrots, pea pods, or brown sauce. One revelation: the Chinese-menu hot and sour soup, which is lighter and hotter than the American version, and teeming with egg, pork, scallions, and tofu. It might be a meal in itself. The Chinese-menu dishes and round tables with Lazy Susans make the Golden Harbor ideal for large groups.

Istanbul Café, 1450 W. 86th Street, Indianapolis. I can recommend the appetizer sampler (babaganoush, dolma, fried eggplant in tomato sauce, ezme, hummus, tabouli), stuffed cabbage rolls, shish kebab, and Turkish coffee. The Turkish coffee is especially nice if you have a long drive home from Indianapolis.

If you know a great strip-mall restaurant, please, share it in the comments.

[I played Tyler Cowen at a chess tournament in Passaic, New Jersey, almost forty years ago. He should have won, but I managed to eke out a draw. You’ll have to take my word for it.]

A Blogger reprieve

Yesterday the Blogger dashboard still warned of a “new look” arriving in April. Today the announcement has changed:

An optimistic reading of this new message: Google knows that the new interface has many problems and is working to fix them. Yet the company still encourages users to Upgrade Now.

No Thanks. A half-baked cake is no upgrade over a fully baked cake. I will be sticking with fully baked until the new cake is done.

Related posts
Blogger, a mess
Blogger interface on the iPad
The new Blogger interface, unliked

[My choice for the biggest problem with the new Blogger interface: it is impossible to edit existing posts with an iPad. A blank screen is all that results.]

Maurice Sendak (1928–2012)

[Illustration from Ruth Krauss’s A Hole Is to Dig (1952).]

Maurice Sendak, Children’s Author, Dies at 83
(New York Times)

William H. Chace on plagiarism in college

“The arguments protecting or even championing plagiarism fall before the palpable evidence of originality, modest and grand, ephemeral and enduring, as it has existed in writing everywhere”: William H. Chace, writing about plagiarism in college. Read it all:

A Question of Honor (The American Scholar)

Contrapuntalism

“This is a general-interest weblog, so long as you are generally interested in music, music theory, wood-cased pencils, philology, and related topics.” And, I’d add, beautiful photography. It’s by the creator of Blackwing Pages, and it’s called Contrapuntalism.

Indy serendipity

The unexpected highlight of a day in Indianapolis: talking and singing (“Mairzy Doats”) with a guide at the Indiana Historical Society. What a guy. He radiated good humor and warmth.

Only after the fact did we learn that we had met Hal Fryar, Harlow Hickenlooper of Indianapolis children’s television. Hal hosted the city’s Three Stooges Show. As a native Brooklynite, I’d put it this way: Harlow Hickenlooper : Indianapolis :: Officer Joe Bolton : New York City. Both men appeared in the 1965 Three Stooges film The Outlaws Is Coming.

Why did we visit the Indiana Historical Society? We were walking along the city’s canal, and the building was there. The best adventures are unplanned, no?

Kurt Vonnegut, Manager

I took this photograph at the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Indianapolis. I like the letterhead, and yes, I was happy to see the telephone exchange name.

Kurt Vonnegut managed one of the first Saab dealerships in the United States. He wrote about the Saab in a 2004 essay: Have I Got a Car for You! And here, from 2009, is an article on the dealership’s uncertain history.

But also across time

A series of events:

In 2006, I wrote a post about a piece of ephemera I found at a flea market, an invitation to a 1927 Chicago dance.

In 2012, I found online a 1925 newspaper photograph of the orchestra providing the music for that dance, A. Pellegrino and His Original Alabama Syncopators. I made a post with the photograph and a transcription of the caption, which included the names of the group’s seven musicians.

This past Friday and Saturday, I heard from trombonist Pasquale Venuso’s son Pat Jr. and Pat’s daughter Michelle. I was hoping when I transcribed that caption that someone searching for a relative’s name might find it there. Michelle did, and got in touch. Pat Jr. and I exchanged e-mails too. (He writes a beautiful e-mail.)

In 2007, when Orange Crate Art turned three, I wrote this:

The deepest and most unpredictable rewards of keeping this blog have come in the form of comments and e-mails. The responses to posts about my friend Aldo Carrasco and my professor Jim Doyle have shown me the ways in which the Internet can bring people together, not only across space but also across time.

It’s still true.

E-mail in the air

U.S. Army and UC Irvine researchers have found that not checking e-mail at work reduces stress and yields greater productivity:

E-mail “vacations” decrease stress (UC Irvine)
Taking E-Mail Vacations Can Reduce Stress (New York Times)
The Latest “Ordinary Thing That Will Probably Kill You”? E-mail (The Atlantic, via The Subliminal Mr. Dunn)

Wendy McNaughton’s flow chart may be helpful here: Should I check e-mail?

Speaking to the Times, Irvine professor of informatics Gloria Mark suggests that organizations rethink their use of e-mail, sending “once or twice a day, rather than continually,” so that employees not feel compelled to check the in-box again and again and again. I am amused by the possibility of the in-box turning into a good old-fashioned mailbox, with a regularly scheduled delivery.

*

And at The Atlantic Wire, Rebecca Greenfield calls for an end to exclamation points in e-mail. I’ll stick by what I wrote in a 2011 post: “sparing use of the exclamation point in work-related e-mail can be a good thing.”

What I noticed immediately in Greenfield’s piece: she’s using HTML-formatted e-mail. To my mind, that’s worse than a dozen exclamation points. Plain text, please. Plain text is better. The Stanford Linear Accelerator Center wants you to use plain-text e-mail.

[I’ve added a hyphen to an unhyphenated e-mail in the Irvine and Atlantic headlines. The word email looks silly to me, especially when capitalized. I can’t do much about the hype in the Atlantic headline though.]