Refrigerator inventory

A soon-to-be-published book on material culture and American households suggests a possible correlation between the number of magnets on a refrigerator and the amount of stuff in a household.

I of course had to inventory the two available surfaces of our refrigerator. The results:



What’s startling: this number correlates exactly with the amount of stuff in our household.

Taking a refrigerator inventory might be more difficult than it would seem: so many items remain invisible, even when you’re looking right at them, or at least when I am.

Still a BFD

Supreme Court Lets Health Law Largely Stand (New York Times)

The shirt is here.

[This post marks my happiness and surprise about this ruling. If you want to debate health-care reform, please, not here.]

Recently updated

Pocket notebook sighting Sergeant Mickey Ferguson’s notebook is a Robinson Reminder. Thanks, Adair!

Kuru Toga at Staples

Elaine’s eagle eye spotted the 0.5mm Uni Kuru Toga at Staples today. That’s the news: the Kuru Toga mechanical pencil, once available in the United States only from specialty retailers such as Jet Pens, is now for sale at Staples ($5.99). All that’s missing is the dense text of the Japanese packaging.

What makes the Kuru Toga unusual (and unusually good): the lead rotates as one writes, minimizing breakage and keeping the point sharp.

Here, from Dave’s Mechanical Pencils, is a 2008 review of the Kuru Toga, with 109 comments. Pencils are serious business.

“Aggregating with attitude”?

Me, in a post this past Monday about a New York Times article about cities selling advertising space on fire trucks, police cars, and so on:

Life imitates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: in the novel’s post-millennial world of Subsidized Time, the United States government makes up for lost revenue by offering corporate bidders the naming rights for years. Most of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.

Another writer, this past Monday, beginning a post about the same Times article:

In Infinite Jest (okay, no, I haven’t actually read the whole thing, okay?), author David Foster Wallace posits a world in which the naming rights to each calendar year are for sale (inevitably, to corporations); the book’s action takes place mostly during The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U.).

The motto for the other writer’s site: “Aggregating with attitude.”

5:00 p.m.: The other writer has assured me that my post is not a source.

Parker and Barab tonight in NYC

If you’re in New York City or environs: there’s a concert tonight at Symphony Space with the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, “The American Scene.” Among the works to be performed: Songs of Perfect Propriety, words by Dorothy Parker, music by Seymour Barab.

Elaine Fine is hoping that someone who attends this performance will write about it. If you have no platform of your own from which to do so, follow this link to Elaine’s post and leave your thoughts in the form of a comment.

June 29: There’s a review in the New York Times.

[Orange Crate Art is a Seymour-and-Margie-Barab-friendly site.]

How to improve writing (no. 38)

I’ve been reading cereal boxes at breakfast since childhood. But it’s only in recent years that I’ve started to edit while eating. Consider this sentence, from a list of “simple things to feel good each day” on a box of Post Shredded Wheat:¹

Show thanks to your local neighborhood by picking up one piece of trash every day.

This sentence invites small- and large-scale rethinking. Small-scale:

Show thanks to your local neighborhood by picking up one piece of trash every day.

But there’s a larger problem: this recommendation makes little sense. If there’s lots of trash to be had, picking up one piece per day hardly seems like an expression of gratitude. If anything, the gesture seems a bit passive-aggressive. Imagine this sort of effort in a different context:

Show thanks to your local spouse by picking up one piece of clothing from the pile on the floor every day.

I think the local spouse would feel that she is being baited.

Here’s a more helpful recommendation:

Care for your neighborhood by picking up trash.

And now if you’ll excuse me, I need to remove some items from a nearby floor — books, not clothes.

¹ Yes, “simple things to do to feel good each day” makes better sense. But here too there’s a larger problem, because the list includes things to do only occasionally — babysitting a friend’s children, for instance.

[This post is no. 38 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. Post is a cereal offender when it comes to lousy writing.]

Related reading

All How to improve writing posts

Pocket notebook sighting

[Click for a larger view.]

Anthony Mann’s film Railroaded! (1947) is an Orange Crate Art two-fer, as it features both a pocket notebook and a telephone exchange name. The notebook belongs to police sergeant Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont). Dig the perforations! A pocket looseleaf-notebook plays an important role in Mann’s T-Men (1947).

If it’s difficult to make out: the word stamped into the leather of this high-class item, far left, is CARDS.

June 27: In the comments, Adair has identified this notebook as a Robinson Reminder. Here’s a picture of one that sold at Etsy.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : T-Men : Union Station

[Yes, there are all kinds of ways to watch movies.]

Telephone exchange names on screen: GLadstone

Railroaded! (dir. Anthony Mann, 1947) is a perfect B-movie: nasty, brutish, and short. The cast includes Hugh Beaumont (later of Leave It to Beaver), John Ireland (Red River), and Jane Randolph (Cat People). GLadstone was indeed a Los Angeles telephone exchange. And Anthony Mann made some modestly terrific thrillers.


[Click for a larger view.]

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 : Modern Marvels : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : This Gun for Hire

Cities and advertising

The New York Times reports on cities raising money by selling advertising space on fire trucks, police cars, rescue helicopters, and school buses. And elsewhere:

KFC became a pioneer in this kind of unconventional ad placement earlier in the downturn, when it temporarily plastered its logo on manhole covers and fire hydrants in several cities in Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee after paying to fill potholes and replace hydrants.

Life imitates David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: in the novel’s post-millennial world of Subsidized Time, the United States government makes up for lost revenue by offering corporate bidders the naming rights for years. Most of the novel takes place in the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.