Stepping in it

Talking with Rolling Stone, Barack Obama used a bad word with reference to “the other guy,” one Mitt Romney:

“You know, kids have good instincts,” Obama offered. “They look at the other guy and say, ‘Well, that’s a bullshitter, I can tell.’”

Here’s a passage that I posted without comment in August, from a philosopher’s consideration of bullshit:

When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).

Romney’s willingness to say anything, take any position, to suit his purpose makes him, in my eyes, a bullshitter. I can tell. Score a hit for Obama.

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“I remember”

I remember “wine and cheese.”

*

The artist and writer Joe Brainard (1942–1994) gave the world a deceptively simple writing prompt: “I remember,” two words to begin a sentence or a paragraph. The above “I remember” dropped into my head yesterday morning, apropos of nothing. About “wine and cheese”: when I was in college, it seemed that every on-campus event promised, as added attractions, wine and cheese. Impossible now. But what a grown-up way for young adults to learn how to enjoy alcohol: a little food, a little wine, some conversation.

Do you remember “wine and cheese”? If not, what do you remember? You’re welcome to leave an “I remember” or two or three or more in the form of a comment. Why not?

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[Also: Joe Brainard loved Nancy.]

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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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