From today’s Google homepage. Pocket squirrel: +1.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Pocket notebook sighting
[Dana Andrews and notebook.]
State Fair (dir. Walter Lang, 1945) is corny, goofy, and — I cannot tell a lie — delightful. With six Rodgers and Hammerstein songs, three love stories (two human, one porcine), and two judgings (mincemeat and pickles), there’s something for each member of the family to enjoy.
Another delight: seeing Dana Andrews in the role of the Iowa newspaperman Pat Gilbert. For me, Andrews will always be Mark McPherson, the detective who falls in love with a painting in Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), and Fred Derry, the bombardier haunted by the horrors of war in William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Pat Gilbert is no McPherson or Derry: he seems to be a regular guy who rides the rides and joins in on “It’s a Grand Night for Singing.” But since he’s played by Dana Andrews, I can’t help thinking that Gilbert is in truth a tormented soul working hard to pass for well-adjusted. Thus a value-added viewing experience. Intertextuality FTW.
The little six-ring notebook seen above used to be everywhere. I can’t remember the last time I saw one being used in real life.
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 : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : T-Men : Union Station
Sunday, October 28, 2012
Friday, October 26, 2012
Period Exclamation point
The Obama campaign slogan now has an exclamation point: Forward!
And yes, the word forward — followed by a period or an exclamation point, either one — makes a sentence. It’s an instance of the hortatory subjunctive.
I still prefer the understated seriousness of the period.
A face on my floor
[Diameter: 1.5 inches.]
I spotted this guy a couple of days ago on my office floor. He is old, or older. “Young fella,” he calls me, as in “Hey there, young fella.” His name? “Name o’ Mac.”
Smoking is not permitted in the building, but that doesn’t stop Mac: smoke drifts at all times from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. A tiny Camel, as you might guess. The smoke makes him squint, and cough.
Busy, busier
At the Atlantic, James Fallows interviews David Allen:
Q. How will we handle “busyness” in the future? Better, because of technology? Worse, because of overload? Both?Read it all:
A. I think the degree and depth of the “busy trap,” where you’re always distracted and trying to catch up, is going to increase, because more people will be affected by it.
Things on your mind need to be externalized — captured in some system that you trust. You capture things that are potentially meaningful; you clarify what those things mean to you; and you need maps of all that, so you can see it from a larger perspective.
Busy and Busier (short version)
David Allen on How to Fix Your Life (long version)
date:yesterday
A handy Mac tip from David Sparks at MacSparky: typing date:yesterday in Spotlight produces list of all apps and files that you accessed the day before. I can see date:yesterday being useful as a quick way to get back to some part of the day’s work.
My discoveries:
If you’ve cleared your browser’s cache, the browser doesn’t show up among apps used.
If you use Dropbox with more than one Mac, files you’ve worked with one computer will show up on another.
Typing date:today works too.
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Jacques Barzun (1907–2012)
From the New York Times:
Jacques Barzun, the distinguished historian, essayist, cultural gadfly and educator who helped establish the modern discipline of cultural history and came to see the West as sliding toward decadence, died Thursday night in San Antonio, where he lived. He was 104.Barzun’s pronouncements on present-day culture leave me cold, but I find his writing on education engaging, persuasive, and often eerily prescient.
All Barzun posts
Jacques Barzun on gadgets and education
Jacques Barzun on multiple-choice
Jacques Barzun, teacher
Rooms, radios, hurdles
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.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.
Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
A related post
Mitt Incandenza
“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?
Related posts
Beans Spasms returns
Good advice on looking at art
I remember Sgt. Pepper
I remember Thanksgiving
[Also: Joe Brainard loved Nancy.]
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