John E. Karlin (1918–2013)

The New York Times reports that John E. Karlin, whose work helped to bring about all-digit dialing, has died:

By the postwar period, telephone exchanges that spelled pronounceable words were starting to be exhausted. All-digit dialing would create a cache of new phone numbers, but whether users could memorize the seven digits it entailed was an open question.

Mr. Karlin’s experimental research, reported in the popular press, showed that they could. As a result, PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield — the stuff of song and story — began to slip away. By the 1960s, those exchanges, along with DRexel, FLeetwood, SWinburne and scores of others just as evocative, had all but disappeared.

Here at Orange Crate Art, telephone exchange names are a minor but, it appears, permanent preoccupation. Thus this post.

Related reading
All telephone posts (Pinboard)
The Anti-Digit Dialing League
Phones Are For People (1962 pamphlet mainfesto from the Anti-Digit Dialing League, disputing the looming number shortage)

Paul Tanner (1917–2013)

From the New York Times:

Paul Tanner, a former trombonist for the Glenn Miller Ochestra who played an unlikely role in the history of rock ’n’ roll when, using a device he helped invent, he performed the famous electronic accompaniment on the Beach Boys’ signature recording “Good Vibrations,” died on Tuesday in Carlsbad, Calif.

The Beach Boys’ Mike Love called that device, the Electro-Theremin, a “woo-woo machine.” But it is better known as the Tannerin.

Correction, thanks to Andrew Hickey: Mike Love played a synthesizer, not a Tannerin.

[Mike Love at Michigan State University, October 26, 1966: “Hey man, they expect me to play this woo-woo machine.”]

Mac Dictation

OS X’s Dictation service is for me both boon and bane. It makes the work of transcribing passages from books wonderfully easy. But the ease is illusory, for improbable, unforeseeable mistakes creep in. And because I cannot anticipate my Mac’s mishearings, the products of Dictation require more careful proofreading than typed text.

Making a page to go with Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem Montage of a Dream Deferred, I tried to get Dictation to recognize boogie-woogie. Some results: boogie-boogie, boogie-looking, boogie-wiki, boogie-Woodkey, Boogie-Woody (almost a Beach Boys title), Boogie-Wookie, okay-Wookie, the de-wiki. Yes, I kept trying out of curiosity. My favorite: boogie-what.

The trick to getting it right: not speaking the hyphen. Dictation might be smarter than I thought.

A helpful page for anyone working with Dictation: Mac Basics: Dictation.

Same time, next year (plagiarism)

From Businessweek:

Sixty-three MBA applicants at Penn State and UCLA have been rejected after admissions officials discovered they had plagiarized parts of their admissions essays, a number that the schools say is likely to increase in subsequent application rounds.

In February 2011, twenty-nine applicants to Penn State’s MBA program were found to have plagiarized in their application essays. In February 2012, a dozen applicants to UCLA’s Anderson School of Management were found to have done the same.

MBA programs could do our culture and economy a favor by sharing miscreants’ names across institutions. Students who cheat when the stakes are so high have, I would say, no business getting MBAs (or any other professional degrees). Think of the disregard for integrity such students would carry into their careers.

[Re: some of the cases: I’m not persuaded that plagiarism can be excused by an appeal to differing cultural attitudes about the use of source material. There is much to suggest that assertions of such differences are part of the folklore of teaching.]

Goodbye, Muzak

I missed this one: the venerable name Muzak will give way to Mood. Thanks, Adair, for passing on the news.

In my college years, I absorbed thousands of hours of Muzak while working as a stock clerk in a Two Guys discount department store. Yes, I had the Muzak in me. What I remember of it: trombones. Every song seemed to have a trombone front and center. The programming intensified the loneliness of our shabby housewares department. Slow stuff: it fit. Peppy stuff: ah, ironic.

Listening to Muzak, late on, say, a Friday night, straightening up a badly-lit, customer-free aisle of ironing boards and clothespins and clothespin bags: no wonder I fancied myself an existentialist.

A related post
Going on break (at Two Guys)

[I hadn’t thought of that song in years.]

“Everybody's trusted friend”

[Life, April 2, 1956. Illustration by William A. Smith. Click for a larger view.]

The text, if you’d rather not squint:

He is everybody’s trusted friend . . .

Most of the time you see him coming up the walk in a blue-gray suit with a leather bag slung over his shoulder. But you may remember him also in army fatigues or navy blues, when his familiar cry of “Mail!” was the most welcome sound in all the world. And there was a time when he wore a buckskin jerkin and rode fast ponies over dangerous trails few others dared to travel.

You call him the Postman or Mailman . . . and every day he is waited for and watched for by millions of people whose hearts beat faster when they see him coming.

He is the link that unites scattered families, the bearer of precious letters from absent sons and daughters. He is a bringer of hopes and joys and Yuletide spirit. He is the eternal consolation of separated lovers.

Once the bearer of dispatches was the exclusive emissary of kings and princes and powerful lords. In America he is everybody’s ambassador . . . and everybody’s trusted friend.

He stands for something pretty big. A kind of integrity so sure and unquestioned that you take it for granted as one of the verities of life. He comes like day and night — in rain or sleet or snow — when the pavements are cold enough to numb his feet or hot enough to fry an egg. Today there are 130,000 Postmen serving our needs, and to every one of them your sealed letters are “top secret.”

Without the Postman all of us would live in a lonelier world.

Reader, do you know your mail carrier’s full name?

Related reading
All mail posts (Pinboard)

[We know our carrier’s name: how else could we write a check for him at Christmas?]

Playing post office

[“Model post office a teacher set up in the classroom for the children to learn about the mail system.” Photograph by Nina Leen. Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1948. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Related reading
All mail posts (Pinboard)
From the Life Photo Archive (a Leen photo)
Maeve Brennan, The Long-Winded Lady (and one more)

Goodbye, Saturday mail

From the New York Times:

The Postal Service is expected to announce on Wednesday morning that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages, a move the financially struggling agency said would save about $2 billion annually as it looks for ways to cut cost.

As Utnapishtim said, “There is no permanence.” This change feels to me like a very big deal, but I imagine that I will adjust in no time.

Food for thought

Michael Apted, director of the Up series, interviewed by Terry Gross:

What did surprise you about 56 Up?

Well, that people seemed happy. I mean, I thought they’d be getting depressed, worried about age, very worried about the economic climate, looking back on their lives, maybe sometimes with regret. But no, I mean, what was so interesting to me was that, you know, that a lot of them had found real kind of comfort in their families and their extended families.

I was of the belief in my life that you can’t have everything, you know, that I have pursued a career, I was ambitious, and I paid a price for it. I wasn’t as good a father or a husband as I should have been. And sometimes I thought, well, maybe that’s my way, and maybe that’s the right way. But then I saw the payoff, that people who’d put their energies into their families and their loyalties into their families, that at this age, in their mid-fifties, you know, they’ve got real pleasure and power from it.

Pleasure and power? I don’t really know what that means. Pleasure and sustenance? Yes. Gross goes on to ask whether the film’s subjects are really happy or just saying so for the camera. Sigh.

A related post
Fambly

[My transcription.]

How to improve writing (no. 41)

Here (and why not?) is the evolution of a sentence from yesterday’s post on Palomino Blackwing non-users. My first effort:

There is a reference to “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office in Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011).

That’s one ungainly sentence. Notice the long chain of prepositional phrases: to boxes, of Blackwing pencils, from White’s office, in Martha White’s introduction. The sequence from White’s office in Martha White’s introduction is especially clumsy. (It must have been a small office.) Embedding the book title’s two prepositional phrases in yet another prepositional phrase adds a final awkward touch. What I think happened here: having taken a quick look at the book, I was concerned more with getting the data in one place — the quotation, the writer’s name, the book’s part and title, the date of publication — than with writing a good sentence.

I saw right away that I needed to rethink the sequence of elements in the sentence: it’s appropriate to put what’s most important at the end, right? So here’s an improvement:

In Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011), there is a reference to “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office.

Better, yes. And notice that the three references to Whites are better distributed in the sentence. But look at “There is a reference.” It should be easy to make the sentence shorter and livelier by cutting the verb to be and the nominalization reference and adding a transitive verb in the active voice:

Martha White’s introduction to In the Words of E. B. White (2011) mentions “boxes of Blackwing pencils” from White’s office.

Much better. Notice that dropping is and a reference means fewer prepositional phrases. Minus the two of the title, the sentence drops from five to three, and from twenty-five words to twenty.

This rewriting stuff, it really works.

Related reading
All How to improve writing posts (Pinboard)

[This post is no. 41 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose. This post is the first to improve my writing. Many guides to writing suggest replacing to be (when appropriate) with a transitive verb in the active voice. The advice appears in The Elements of Style, or “Strunk and White”: “Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is or could be heard.”]