Quick 50 Writing Tools

From Roy Peter Clark and The Poynter Institute: Quick 50 Writing Tools, a bare-bones presentation of the content of Clark’s book Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (2008).

Some of the advice in this PDF (“Limit self-criticism in early drafts”) might be helpful as is. Some (“Climb up and down the ladder of abstraction”) might remain cryptic without further explanation. But like they say, it’s a start. And there is, after all, a book.

[“Like they say”: for me this phrase always recalls the poet Robert Creeley. You can find it three times for instance in this Paris Review interview.]

NYPL, a series of tubes

The New York Public Library is a series of tubes, sort of (via Pete Lit).

Related reading
Series of tubes (Wikipedia)

Mac keyboard shortcuts

From Apple: a page with a gazillion keyboard shortcuts for OS X. A wonderful thing about the Mac is that you can get along very well with just a handful of these. But for those who want more, there are more.

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.