Stapler contest continues

The contest that began yesterday continues. What did one stapler say to the other? Fill in the blank and win a Swingline “Tot 50” stapler and 1,000 miniature staples. Enter today.

Followers

Blogger tells me that I have 390 “followers.” I think that this label is deeply weird, even if it is everywhere in so-called social media. To my mind, the word “follower” suggests an obedient devotee awaiting the instructions of a master. I don’t think though that anyone who reads Orange Crate Art is awaiting my instructions. But just in case you are: send me two million dollars at once, in small bills. Thank you.

There is another kind of follower on the Internets: the major-league blogger who posts — with nothing added and often with no acknowledgement of sources — the same items other major-league bloggers have posted earlier the same day. It’s no fun reading in an echo chamber, or a recycling bin.

A passage from The Elements of Style, near the end of E. B. White’s chapter “An Approach to Style,” offers still-timely advice:

Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living.

Today’s Trend Machine is beyond anything White could have imagined: we even speak of what’s “trending.” To write, though, is not to sniff for what’s popular but to keep one’s nose to the ground — and to follow wherever it leads.

“Tot 50” “gag line” contest

[Boys’ Life, September 1967.]

I like the idea of a world in which staplers were pitched — to boys no less — as desirable goods. “No bigger than a pack of gum! But staples like it’s super-charged!” And the boy in me replies, unironically: “Man, that is way cool.”

I think that the time has come to revive the contest that this advertisement announced. So I invite you, reader, to submit your best “gag line.” What did the stapler in the photo say? I will choose one winner. The prize: a red Swingline “Tot 50” and 1,000 miniature staples, c. 2003, still in a blister pack. (Newer Tots use regular staples.) This prize is much better than a measly dollar, yes? Your stapler won’t have quotation marks around its name, and it won’t look exactly like the ones pictured here, and it won’t be from Long Island City – but what can I say? It’s 2012, and I’m doing the best that I can.

The deadline for submitting an entry: Saturday, December 8, 6:00 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. (That’s noon Central Standard Time.) Leave your entry in the form of a comment. No purchase necessary. One entry per person. I’ll announce the winner on Monday, December 10. Play, please.

[Entries are now closed.]

*

December 10: I have enjoyed reading all these reader-supplied lines. I like the literal-mindedness (plntxt), the puns (Elaine, HairlipDog, Sean), the sense of the stapler as diligent worker (E. and Mark), the one-liners that call out for rim shots (HairlipDog and mwschmeer), the Shakespeare allusion (Sean again), the anatomical detail (Stefan), and the chance to think about what staplers themselves might find funny (Sara). As these entries accumulated, I began to regret creating a contest with only one stapler as a prize.

But one is what I have, and I am sending it to Geo-B. His entry: “You know how to staple, don’t you, Steve? You just put your hand together and click!” For me, the unexpected appearance of Lauren Bacall and the altogether novel suggestion of a do-it-yourself stapler make this entry the winner. Click.

Thanks to everyone who participated.

Related posts
Staple! (my really old “Tot 50”)
Swingline “Tot 50” (a 1956 advertisement)
Woody Allen’s staplers (including a “Tot 50”)

Mark Trail makeover

[Mark Trail, November 21, 2012. Click for a larger view.]


[Mark Trail, modified by me. Click for a larger view.]

It is a truth universally acknowledged (in the universe of Mark Trail, that is) that a single (or married) man in possession of facial hair must be a bad guy. Bad guys are marked, again and again, by cavemanly beards, curling mustaches, and sideburns that never left the 1970s. But look at the difference a makeover makes.

Related reading
All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)

[I modified the original strip using the Mac app Seashore.]

Domestic comedy

“Did he just say ‘the menschy way’?”

“Yes, he said ‘the menschy way.’”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Listening to NPR’s Fresh Air, in mild disbelief.]

Vermont Country $tore

We just received yet another catalogue from the Vermont Country Store, a company we must have ordered from many moons ago. Having noticed that a recent VCS catalogue offered replica Blackwing pencils for $3.90 each, and having now noticed what appears to be a very high VCS price for a pencil sharpener, I decided to check the sharpener and three more random VCS items against Amazon’s prices:

Boston X-Acto Model KS Pencil Sharpener
VCS $29.95 : Amazon list $18.40 : Amazon $9.39

Caswell-Massey Almond Oil
VCS $24.95 : Amazon $20.00

Gumby and Pokey
VCS $16.95 : Amazon list $12.95 : Amazon $10.95

Swing-A-Way Can Opener
VCS 15.95 : Amazon list $11.99 : Amazon $9.98

Bag Balm Ointment
VCS $10.95 : Amazon $7.99

VCS total: $98.75 + $16.95 shipping = $115.70
Amazon total: $58.31 + $12.66 shipping = $70.97

Amazon comes out 38% cheaper.

There may be some mystical (or semi-mystical) cachet that accompanies items from the Vermont Country Store, but realists are better off ordering elsewhere.

Alfred and Guinevere

“What I like about a ship,” Alfred said, “is they have free movies, free food, free games and free soap.”

“So do hotels,” Guinevere said.

“Hotels don’t either have free movies. And they can’t float."

“They can’t sink, either.”

Alfred and Guinevere Gates, brother and sister, seven and eleven, are the children of a fractured and struggling family. The siblings are given to fantasy, insults, lies, speculation, threats, and witty repartee. James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere (1958) is a charming, inconclusive novel told entirely through dialogue, diary entries, and letters. it’s available once again from New York Review Books.

More James Schuyler posts
Mildred Bailey, the stars, and us
The poem “December”
Willa Cather and James Schuyler

Hey?

In Bloomberg Businessweek, an article on the Obama campaign’s e-mail strategy:

“The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people. . . . ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.”

All I can say is that it’s a good thing I wasn’t directing the campaign’s e-mail effort.

Related posts, from the 2008 campaign
Campaign e-mail etiquette
Campaign e-mails (again)
Obama e-mail improvement

Chinese typewriters and predictive text

Worth reading: Chinese typewriter anticipated predictive text, finds Stanford historian (Stanford University). I’m not persuaded that what’s involved here is any more predictive than a typesetter’s practice of keeping common letters closer at hand, but the idea of a typewriter set up to produce with greater ease the “ready-made phrases” (as George Orwell would call them) of political ideology is eerily fascinating.

OED wars

From an article in the Guardian: “An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.”

Jesse Sheidlower, the OED ’s editor-at-large, responds: “This claim is completely bogus.”