This Is Coffee!

From 1961, the Coffee Brewing Institute presents This Is Coffee! (Open Culture).

My favorite line: “Perfect coffee, sending its glow into our lives around the clock.” Never no sleeping!

Recently updated

Adventures in education A scheme to measure student engagement with “galvanic skin response” bracelets recalls an earlier Microsoft scheme to monitor employee metabolism.

Adventures in education

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding research into the use of “galvanic skin response” bracelets to measure student engagement in classrooms. Diane Ravitch explains why we should care — and worry.

2:19 p.m.: I just remembered a precedent for this scheme. In 2008 Microsoft filed a patent application for a system to monitor employee metabolism: “at least one of heart rate, galvanic skin response, EMG, brain signals, respiration rate, body temperature, movement, facial movements, facial expressions, and blood pressure.” Here is the application. A January 2008 OCA post preserves parts of a now-gone Times of London article about this venture: Microsoft, innovating.

8:55 p.m.: The Washington Post reports that the Gates Foundation has changed the online description of the bracelet project by removing a reference to the use of bracelets in evaluating teachers.

[I found the patent via this January 2008 post from Microsoft Watch.]

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, June 12, 2012.]

The joke in today’s strip would seem to be that the Flagstons have a fax machine. And they’re not ashamed to use it.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (via Pinboard)

[Perhaps salaryman Flagston and his family are making a play for Japanese readers? Fifty-nine percent of Japanese households have a fax machine.]

Neologism finale

The neologism contest that began last Monday has ended. The challenge, issued by my friend Stefan Hagemann, was to invent “a word that describes a particular kind of foolish shortcut, the kind that, often in a foreseeable way, fails to save time and may result in irritation or the feeling that one is absurd and a dimwit.” Stefan judged the seventeen entries. He writes:

I’m thrilled to announce a winner for the grand (epic, really), non-annual, neologism contest, but let me first thank Michael for generously providing a venue and for his encouraging words, without which the contest could not exist. You have a wonderful way, Michael, of helping me distinguish between that which is appropriately silly and that which is merely silly. I would of course like also to thank everyone who entered a word. Forgive the contest cliché, but I had a really tough time picking a winner, so smart and clever and laugh-out-loud funny were all of the entries. Few blogs, I suspect, have such a capable, playful, and witty audience, so to borrow a line from Tom Waits, “everyone’s a winner.”

Now on to the fun stuff: I’d like to honorably mention Geo-B’s “thwartstep.” “Shitcut,” submitted by Anonymous and Sabrebutt, also deserves honorable mention (not only because the word made me laugh the hardest but mainly for that reason). And the winning entry, which blends pun with precision and so best captures the essence of a time saving effort gone horribly wrong is, envelope please, . . . Sean’s “bypasstrophe.” Sean, I found a copy of Leonard Louis Levinson’s Webster’s Unafraid Dictionary: 5000 Gag Definitions in my town’s best used-book store, and I’d like to send it to you. If you would like to e-mail me at first initial followed by last name [at] edgewood [dot] edu with a mailing address, I’d be glad to do so. Anonymous, Saberbutt, and Geo-B, I’d like to send you each something too, so please let me know where I can send it. Thanks once more to everyone who participated and to those like me who read along and marveled at so much imagination.

I’ll echo Stefan by saying thanks to everyone who took part in this endeavor. And congratulations to the winners. I look forward to seeing these neologisms make their way in the world, slowly, with hard work — no bypasstrophes, no shitcuts, no thwartsteps.

[Winners, please note that the first initial and last name in the disguised address belong to Stefan, not to me.]

Poets’ press conference

“Citing both the ageless gloom of morning and a weary sun, its astral luminescence wrapped in arid gauze, the nation’s poets told reporters this week that doubt lingers in the frail minutes of a young dawn, adding that said doubt was a heathen doubt — a father’s doubt — untouched by faith”: from a poets’ press conference.

[It’s sad that this sort of stuff is, for many, synonymous with the words “contemporary poetry.” Here’s a nice gateway to alternatives.]

Nancy meets Stanley Kubrick

[Nancy, January 5, 1944. From Ernie Bushmiller, Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943–1945 (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2012).]

I didn’t know that Nancy Ritz did a screen test for The Shining.

Related posts
Nancy is here
No (“the greatest Nancy panel ever drawn”)

Neologism contest ends today

Word wanted. Apply within.

Recently updated

David Foster Wallace, nonplussed My friend Sara McWhorter found nonplussed, correctly used, in Infinite Jest. Thanks, Sara.

Tiny Furniture

Tiny Furniture (dir. Lena Dunham, 2010) might be the only Criterion Collection film I’ve seen that was an utter disappointment. The film’s characters are blanker than blank: alienated, inarticulate, self-obsessed, devoid of such human resources as empathy, self-awareness, and skepticism. The protagonist Aura (played by Dunham) is a new college-grad with nothing to show for her education. She makes choices that are beyond bewildering, and her mother Siri (played by Dunham’s mother Laurie Simmons) seems beyond caring. There’s very little that’s engaging here: the film’s ninety-nine minutes pass at a very slow speed. When I imagine how my college-grad children and their peers might respond to Tiny Furniture, I suspect that they too would be unimpressed and exasperated. Dunham’s work does not look to my eyes like a portrait of a generation.

I found Tiny Furniture via the New Titles list at my university library and did not know until last night that Lena Dunham is now Big, the creator of the HBO series Girls. This week’s New York Times Magazine has a short interview with Dunham, just one of many Times appearances in the last few months.

[Roger Ebert is a national treasure, but his taste in movies often baffles me. He likes Tiny Furniture, calling it “well-crafted.” Well-crafted: yipes.]