Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, October 22, 2012 and May 24, 2009.]

Earlier this year, Dot was playing a left-handed five-string cello.

Sometimes I think the many hands at Hi-Lo Amalgamated just want me to make blog posts about them.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

George McGovern (1922–2012)

Words that are ever relevant:

“No man should advocate a course in private that he’s ashamed to admit in public.”

George McGovern, speaking in La Crosse, Wisconsin, July 31, 1971.

McGovern died on Sunday at the age of ninety.

[Source: Christopher Lydon, “M’Govern Seeks Wisconsin Votes,” New York Times, August 2, 1971.]

Dropbox, anyone?

From the website:

Dropbox is a free service that lets you bring all your photos, docs, and videos anywhere. This means that any file you save to your Dropbox will automatically save to all your computers, phones and even the Dropbox website.

Dropbox works with Linux, Mac, Windows, and mobile devices. It’s wonderfully useful for accessing your stuff and for sharing items (if you like) with others. The cloud makes flash drives seem so early-twenty-first-century.

If you’d like to try Dropbox, here is a referral link that will give you and me each an extra 500 MB of free storage.

TextWrangler replacement icon

[TextWrangler icon, left. Replacement, right.]

I am a happy user of the Mac text-editor TextWrangler. It’s my favorite writing app, and I like everything about it but its icon. For about five minutes last night, the most important thing for me to do was to find a replacement. And I did. Seth Lilly has created a beautiful one.

It’s easy to convert Seth’s .png file into an icon set with the free version of Img2icns. To replace TextWrangler’s icon:

1. Download Seth’s 512 x 512 .png image. Rename the file TextWranglerApplication.png.

2. Open Img2icns and create an .icns file from the .png file. (The app will show you how.) The new file will be named TextWranglerApplication.icns.

3. Go to the Applications folder and right-click on TextWrangler.

4. Choose Show Package Contents/Contents/Resources.

5. Find the file TextWranglerApplication.icns and rename it. For instance: TextWranglerApplication.old.icns.

6. Drag your new .icns file to Resources.

Related post
A better Notational Velocity icon
TextWrangler gutter removal

Spellings of the future

Here’s one, a misspelling so strange that it must in fact be a spelling of the future, traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our language’s evolution. Aww, as in “I stood in aww.”

What spellings of the future have you noticed?

Related posts
No job too small
Taco Bell’s Canon

National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba

National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba
Enrique Pérez Mesa, music director
Guido López-Gavilán, guest conductor
Ignacio “Nachito” Herrera, piano

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
University of Illinois, Urbana
October 18, 2012

Elaine and I had the good fortune to hear the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba last night, in the second performance of their first United States tour. The word that first came to my mind to describe the orchestra’s sound: metropolitan. The strings and winds were refined, urbane; the brass, bright and sharp. I felt that I was listening to a sound from the mid-twentieth century, nothing soupy or splashy about it.¹

The program: George Gershwin’s Cuban Overture and Rhapsody in Blue, Guido Lopéz-Gavilán’s Guagancó, and Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4. The highlight for me was the Rhapsody: pianist “Nachito” Herrera made this piece as new and exciting as it must have sounded in 1924. (He and the orchestra took a few liberties, which I won’t reveal here.) Added delights: two national anthems (you can guess which ones) and three encore pieces.

Last night’s performance was one of the most memorable orchestral concerts I’ve heard. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen more good will between musicians and an audience. If the National Symphony Orchestra of Cuba comes your way: go.

¹ Could it just be that my head is filled with images of mid-twentieth cars still moving through the streets of twenty-first-century Havana? No, I don’t think so.

[“Nachito” Herrera has a website. This page has the tour dates.]

Word of the day: sketchy

President Obama last night:

“Now, Governor Romney was a very successful investor. If somebody came to you, Governor, with a plan that said, ‘Here, I want to spend $7 or $8 trillion, and then we’re going to pay for it, but we can’t tell you until maybe after the election how we’re going to do it,’ you wouldn’t take such a sketchy deal and neither should you, the American people, because the math doesn’t add up.”

A clear, concise pair of definitions of sketchy from Urban Dictionary: “iffy,” “questionable.” A more elaborate effort from the same site:

creepy, iffy, fairly unsafe, an air of uncertainty, not kosher, and just generally something or someone that you don’t want to be associated with (or really do want to be associated with, depending on who you are . . .)

I’ve almost never used the word sketchy to mean anything but “giving only a slight or rough outline of the main features, facts, or circumstances without going into details” (Oxford English Dictionary). Indeed, if I use the word when talking with a student about, say, an underdeveloped idea in an essay, I make it a point to distinguish my use from current slang. So I am amused to realize that last night I immediately understood sketchy to mean “iffy” and “questionable,” even though the word could have been taken to mean only that the deal was lacking in detail. It is lacking in detail, but it’s also sketchy.

Young Narcissus

[Henry, October 17, 2012.]

One can never have too many gum machines on the streets of one’s comic strip.

Live-blogging the debate

Barack Obama just characterized Mitt Romney’s mysterious tax-proposal as “a sketchy deal.” Too true. I am delighted to hear sketchy in its slang sense in a presidential debate.

[The post-title is mock-serious. I’m offering one observation, not a running commentary.]

Mitt Trail arrives for the debate

[Mark Trail, October 16, 2012. Click for a larger view.]

As dedicated Mark Trail readers know, facial hair is the mark of a villain. Long sideburns and a mustache are dead giveaways. (Guns are another clue.) The man in red must be a rogue town-haller who insists on doing things his way. Things do not look good for Mitt Trail in tonight’s debate.

As dedicated Orange Crate Art readers know, I have long suspected that D-list comic-strip hero Mark Trail and Mitt Romney are the same (two-dimensional) person. If you need more proof: more Mitt Trail posts.