An on-screen desk

At Submitted for Your Perusal, Matt Thomas writes about the on-screen representation of “what is often referred to as knowledge work”: Zoe’s Desk.

For Valentine's Day

“Seventy years later I’m still in a daze”: cdza presents Our Wedding Song, four couples and their songs. Take a tissue or two.

[My daughter Rachel deems this “the PERFECT video for Valentine’s day.”]

From Naked City

O dialogue of television past:

“All he does when he gets home is drink beer and look at Old Rabbit Ears — that’s what I call his portable TV.”

That’s from the Naked City episode “Go Fight City Hall,” first aired October 31, 1962.

Forty episodes from the series (though not this one) are now available in a ten-DVD set. Amazon has it for $24.99.

Other Naked City posts
Poetry and Naked City
A telephone exchange name: GRamercy
MUrray Hill
Another MUrray Hill
TWilight? TWinbrook? TWinoaks? TWining?

Suing in academia

A former graduate student is suing the school where she received a C+ in a class. The damages asked: $1.3 million. And here’s more.

In other news, the Edwin Mellen Press and its founder are suing a blogging librarian and the university that employs him. The damages asked: $4.55 million. This news is sure to endear the Edwin Mellen Press to university librarians everywhere.

Thanks, Sara, for the C+ story.

Downton Abbey stuff

Elaine and I watched Episode 6 of you-know-what last night and noticed three little flurries of stuff:

Lady Edith Crawley: “Oh, just family stuff — an errand for my grandmother.”

Lady Mary Crawley: “Nothing. Women’s stuff.”

Matthew Crawley: “Nonsense, you had stuff to see to.”

Stuff is an old, old noun. But the three young Crawleys are using the word in a new way. The Oxford English Dictionary has it:

Used loosely to denote any collection of things about which one is not able or willing to particularize . . . ; material, matter, business. colloq.

The young Crawleys are a colloquial avant-garde. The OED’s first citation for this use of stuff is from 1922, from an American source, Radio News:

Take a look at S. M. Brown, Chief on the Mauretania, “doing his stuff” in the saloon.

I can’t imagine that the influx of stuff in this episode is just coincidence: it’s one sign among many that the world is changing.

A related post
Word of the evening: hobbledehoy

[Other signs of change in this episode: new techniques in land-management, new roles for women, and jazz.]

How to succeed in college without really trying

More specifically, how to get a perfect score on a final examination without taking it (Inside Higher Ed).

I’ll say what no one commenting on the article has said: the organizers should be ashamed of themselves, as should those who went along.

*

Here’s a later post that explains why these students should not have received 100s.

Truman Capote?

In this scene from Mad Dog Coll (dir. Burt Balaban, 1961), who’s that walking down the hallway? Is it Truman Capote?





[Click each image for a larger view.]

Well, is it? Several IMDb readers also have wondered about the identity of this passerby. Jerry Orbach, John Davis Chandler, and Neil Nephew look like they’re wondering too.

A related post
John Davis Chandler and Steve Buscemi

Eberhard Faber’s Diamond Star

At Contrapuntalism, Sean penetrates the mystery of Eberhard Faber’s Diamond Star logo: Just what does the Diamond Star logo mean?

I too have wondered about that Diamond Star.

DFW Kenyon discrepancies

And while I’m thinking about David Foster Wallace’s commencement address:

There are at least three significant discrepancies between the audio and print versions of the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address. The second sentence of this passage, present in Audible’s audio version, is missing from the print version:

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in . . . the head. They shoot the terrible master. [Ellipsis in the original.]

And the second sentence of this passage, present in the print version, is missing from the audio:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head.

The absence of the “terrible master” sentence has been widely understood as an attempt to moderate the tone of a passage that seems to point to Wallace’s suicide. But there is a less conspiracy-minded explanation: Wallace’s publisher used the written text of the address, which would seem to mean that the missing-from-print sentence was an impromptu addition. The missing-from-audio sentence would seem then an impromptu deletion from the written text.

A third discrepancy: some of the details of the end-of-day trip to the supermarket are missing from the audio version. At Kenyon, Wallace skipped this print passage:

and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by

and replaced it with

et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)

[The print version: This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, 2009). A handful of words per page, to make a 144-page book. I can’t imagine that Wallace would have been happy about that.]

DFW, Kenyon, and the Internet

Elizabeth Lopatto explains how David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College commencement address became an Internet sensation: Everlasting Speech.

You can still find a transcription of the speech online — here, for instance.

Related reading
All David Foster Wallace posts (Pinboard)