Chrome for iOS

Google’s Chrome browser is now available for iOS. On my first-generation iPad, Chrome is fast, very fast. The browser is minimalist in design, which is good, and minimalist in options, which is not so good. There is, for instance, no way to remove the microphone icon from the address-and-search bar (the first-generation iPad has no microphone). And there is, of course, no way to add an ad-blocking extension or any other extension.

My iOS browser of choice is iCab Mobile, which blocks ads (if you so choose) with filters. Browsing is slower than with Chrome, but having fewer distractions means a lot to me when I’m reading online. For now, I’m sticking with iCab Mobile.



Given Apple-Google hostilities, I have to wonder: is listing Chrome under Utilities someone’s idea of a joke?

[Re: “Address-and-search bar”: I can’t bring myself to use the Google term omnibox.]

Robinson Reminders in print

[New Yorker, March 18, 1944.]

“Jot it down — Do it — Tear it out — Live notes only!” It’s like Getting Things Done with perforations. Note the clever names for the other products: Billminders and Miss Gadabout. Miss Gadabout!

Google Books has dingy-looking scans of Robinson Reminder advertisements from as early as 1915. The slogan — “Live notes only,” minus the exclamation point — was already in place. That slogan does seem to go with early-twentieth-century notions of efficiency. Clear the decks: history is bunk, right?

Here, from 1921, sharpened, straightened, and neatened up, is the patent for the Robinson Reminder:



If you cannot get enough of the Robinson Reminder, A Continuous Lean has a post with some fine photographs.

Previously on Orange Crate Art
Pocket notebook sighting (a Robinson Reminder in the movies)

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.]