From The Waste Books

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) was a professor of experimental physics and a keeper of Sudelbücher, “waste books” filled with observations and opinions. Here are three non-consecutive entries:

I forget most of what I have read, just as I do most of what I have eaten, but I know that both contribute no less to the conservation of my mind and my body on that account.

*

Just as there are polysyllabic words that say very little, so there are also monosyllabic words of infinite meaning.

*

Nothing makes one old so quickly as the ever-present thought that one is growing older . . .

From The Waste Books. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review Books, 2000). Originally published as Aphorisms (1990).

One could do worse than be a reader of New York Review Books books.

A related post
From The Waste Books

Madeline Kahn’s notebook

Bill Madison’s story about Madeline Kahn’s notebook rivals André Gregory’s story about browsing in a surrealist magazine. As Bill says: uncanny.

The New Yorker endorses Obama

The editors of the New Yorker have endorsed Barack Obama. An excerpt:

The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney — a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity. A two-term Obama Administration will leave an enduringly positive imprint on political life. It will bolster the ideal of good governance and a social vision that tempers individualism with a concern for community. Every Presidential election involves a contest over the idea of America. Obama’s America — one that progresses, however falteringly, toward social justice, tolerance, and equality — represents the future that this country deserves.

Watching last night’s debate (or most of it — I had to miss the first twenty minutes) confirmed for me that Mitt Romney is the political version of Infinite Jest’s Orin Incandenza, the pick-up artist who says, “Tell me what sort of man you prefer, and then I’ll affect the demeanor of that man.” I am hoping that American voters won’t get fooled.

[Notice the New Yorker umlaut dieresis: reëlection.]

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.