A Big Lots tea find

If you like tea, go to Big Lots once in a while: these stores can be the source of wondrous bargains in good tea. Today, in the International Flavors section of the store, Typhoo tea, eighty bags for $4. Amazon’s lowest price: $9.12.

It’s a good idea with any Big Lots purchase to check the expiration date. Assume nothing.

More adventures in Big Lots
Attention, Big Lots shoppers
Serendipitous searching at Big Lots

[We bought five boxes, good through 2014.]

Coming Monday

Coming Monday: a neologism contest, sponsored by my friend Stefan Hagemann. Sharpen your thinking caps.

Crocodile

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

I found this baby crocodile (eight-and-a-half-inches long) in some stray debris after a nearby supermarket was torn down. Can someone tell me what this metal piece really is?

*

July 23, 2012: The mystery of this object has been solved, at least to my satisfaction: it is a handle from an electrical disconnect box. Throwing the handle shuts off power (or turns it back on). Seeing this object correctly requires a new perspective.

A bolt runs through the hole at the top.

A padlock’s shackle fits through the crocodile’s eye. The padlock 1) prevents nitwits from throwing the handle and shutting off power and 2) prevents nitwits from turning power on when someone has shut it off.

The crocodile should be wearing a plastic or rubber sheath over its mouth to prevent electrocution. I assume that the sheath was lost when this object joined the scrap heap.

When our plumber Rick Veach was here to fix a problem with our kitchen pipes, I asked him about this object, and he gave me his best guess: a disconnect-box handle. He suggested several possible manufacturers — Cooper Crouse-Hinds, Cutler-Hammer, and Square D, so I checked their websites, with no luck. At Rick’s suggestion, I also tried a nearby electrical supply company, where the clerk had never seen such an object. But he took me into the (awesome) warehouse and pulled a couple of disconnect boxes from their cardboard boxes. The clerk and I could see the family resemblance right away. A Google search for disconnect box will give you the general idea.

Rick Veach is both smart and wise. I often remind myself of something he once said when contending with our plumbing: “A problem is just a challenge that hasn’t been overcome.”

A related post
Mystery challenge (another strange object)

DNA font

Holy double helix, Batman! A font made of DNA.

Plagiarism in high places

From a June 2009 post: “Plagiarism seems to be governed by a sliding scale, with consequences lessening as the wrongdoer’s status rises.”

May I introduce Arnaud de Borchgrave?

Jacques Barzun on gadgets and education

I find in these observations a prescient defense of offline education:

It is idle to talk about what could be done by gadgets — gramophone disks or sound films. We know just what they can do: they aid teaching by bringing to the classroom irreplaceable subject matter or illustrations of it. The disk brings the music class a whole symphony; the film can bring Chinese agriculture to students in Texas; it could even be used more widely than it is to demonstrate delicate scientific techniques. But this will not replace the teacher — even though through false economy it might here and there displace him. In theory, the printed book should have technologically annihilated the teacher, for the original “lecture” was a reading from a costly manuscript to students who could not afford it. Well, why is it so hard to learn by oneself from a book? Cardinal Newman, himself a great teacher, gives part of the answer: “No book can convey the special spirit and delicate peculiarities of its subject with that rapidity and certainty which attend on the sympathy of mind with mind, through the eyes, the look, the accent, and the manner, in casual expressions thrown off at the moment, and the unstudied turns of familiar conversation.”

Jacques Barzun, Teacher in America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).

As Barzun goes on to say, “Teaching is not a process; it is a developing emotional situation,” mind to mind, face to face.

Related posts
Offline, real-presence education
Talk to the face

Perry Mason and Gilbert and Sullivan

I like the last few minutes of Perry Mason episodes, in which we find Mason (Raymond Burr), Della Street (Barbara Hale), and Paul Drake (William Hopper) gathered in at least somewhat lighter circumstances, enjoying a cup of coffee or a cigarette or a meal, sometimes by themselves (three musketeers), sometimes with a client or persons connected to the case. These are minutes in which, it seems, anything goes, including poetry and song. I caught Mason and Drake quoting Keats some time ago. Today, in “The Case of the Skeleton’s Closet” (first aired May 2, 1963), it was Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore.

MASON (to man connected to the case)
    Things are seldom what they seem, Dave.

DRAKE (excited)
    Hey, I know how that one ends!
    “Things are seldom what they seem,
    Skim milk masquerades as cream.”
    How’s that?

STREET (slyly)
You’re right, Perry. Things are seldom what they seem.

DRAKE (says nothing, looks embarrassed)

These exchanges assume that at least many viewers will get the reference (which is left unexplained). Television wasn’t always so dumb. See also Naked City.

Tendered buttons

From an argument against attaching Like, Retweet, and +1 buttons to online content:

In a medium full of advertisement and self-promotion, every unnecessary pixel of noise and “click-me!”-begging should be avoided if it can be.

Oliver Reichenstein, Sweep the Sleaze (iA, via Daring Fireball)

Note the deft hyphenation: “‘click-me!’-begging.” I like that. But I have never liked buttons and have never added them to Orange Crate Art posts. To my eyes, buttons are a distraction. Rather than click, I prefer to leave comments, send links to relevant family members, friends, and associates, and write about items of interest here. As I just have.

[Yes, the post title is an unnecessary Gertrude Stein pun.]

Maira Kalman on her daily routine

The artist Maira Kalman, asked whether she has a daily routine:

Avoiding work is the way to focus my mind. There’s a lot of walking in the morning, and coffee, and reading the obituaries. And by that time, I’m probably ready to start working. And also a deadline is a really good thing. A deadline is probably the biggest inspiration to get going — more than anything else.

Maira Kalman: The Pursuit of Happiness (The 99 Percent)

Virginia Woolf on second-hand books

We are walking through the wintry streets of London:

But here, none too soon, are the second-hand book-shops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets. The very sight of the bookseller’s wife with her foot on the fender, sitting beside a good coal fire, screened from the door, is sobering and cheerful. She is never reading, or only the newspaper; her talk, when it leaves bookselling, which it does so gladly, is about hats; she likes a hat to be practical, she says, as well as pretty. Oh no, they don’t live at the shop; they live in Brixton; she must have a bit of green to look at. In summer a jar of flowers grown in her own garden is stood on the top of some dusty pile to enliven the shop. Books are everywhere; and always the same sense of adventure fills us. Second-hand books are wild books, homeless books; they have come together in vast flocks of variegated feather, and have a charm which the domesticated volumes of the library lack. Besides, in this random miscellaneous company we may rub against some complete stranger who will, with luck, turn into the best friend we have in the world. There is always a hope, as we reach down some grayish-white book from an upper shelf, directed by its air of shabbiness and desertion, of meeting here with a man who set out on horseback over a hundred years ago to explore the woollen market in the Midlands and Wales; an unknown traveller, who stayed at inns, drank his pint, noted pretty girls and serious customs, wrote it all down stiffly, laboriously for sheer love of it (the book was published at his own expense); was infinitely prosy, busy, and matter-of-fact, and so let flow in without his knowing it the very scent of hollyhocks and the hay together with such a portrait of himself as gives him forever a seat in the warm corner of the mind’s inglenook. One may buy him for eighteen pence now. He is marked three and sixpence, but the bookseller’s wife, seeing how shabby the covers are and how long the book has stood there since it was bought at some sale of a gentleman’s library in Suffolk, will let it go at that.

Viriginia Woolf, “Street Haunting: A London Adventure” (1930)

[The pencil-minded may want to know that this essay begins: “No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil.” The pretext for the journey is the purchase of a pencil.]