Hummingbird neighbors

[Photograph by Seth. Click for a larger, cuter view.]

My daughter Rachel needs no nest cam: she has neighbors right outside her window.

Thanks for the pitchers, Rachel and Seth!

William Maxwell on sentences

From his 1982 Paris Review interview:

That’s what I try to do — write sentences that won’t be like sand castles. I’ve gotten to the point where I seem to recognize a good sentence when I’ve written it on the typewriter. Often it’s surrounded by junk. So I’m extremely careful. If a good sentence occurs in an otherwise boring paragraph, I cut it out, rubber-cement it to a sheet of typewriter paper, and put it in a folder. It’s just like catching a fish in a creek. I pull out a sentence and slip a line through the gills and put it on a chain and am very careful not to mislay it. Sometimes I try that sentence in ten different places until finally it finds the place where it will stay — where the surrounding sentences attach themselves to it and it becomes part of them. In the end what I write is almost entirely made up of those sentences, which is why what I write now is so short. They come one by one, and sometimes in dubious company.

I’ve just begun reading Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow. No dubious company to be found.

Thank you, Senator Kirk

Mark Kirk, Republican senator from Illinois, supports equal marriage:

When I climbed the Capitol steps in January, I promised myself that I would return to the Senate with an open mind and greater respect for others.

Same-sex couples should have the right to civil marriage. Our time on this Earth is limited, I know that better than most. Life comes down to who you love and who loves you back — government has no place in the middle.

I’d say that the times, they are a-, &c., but I think that the times have already changed, and people are now catching up.

Two related posts
The flag of equal marriage
Logic and marriage

[Notice: “to who you love,” not whom. Another way in which the times have already changed.]

TextWrangler v. pencil

“The pencil has been consigned to the dustbin of history”: ouch. That’s from the release notes for TextWrangler 4.5. I know: it’s an icon, as seen here, not the pencil. But still, ouch.

I like pencils. I like TextWrangler too.

Salinger letter for sale

For sale at eBay, a 1966 J. D. Salinger letter from Bermuda. A sample:

The beginning of the week I got back from a three weeks progress to: Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Fransisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, Chicago, and New York. I made a lot of friends for the Company.

Related reading
All Salinger posts (Pinboard)

[The seller describes the letter as “re Politics & Vietnam.” Salinger mentions those topics in passing, yes, and that in itself is noteworthy, but they are hardly what the letter is “about.”]

Higher Education PSA

[Read from left to right, and click on any image for a larger view. Notice “N.Y. 36”: the world before ZIP codes.]

I don’t know how often such PSAs aired. I do know that the beautifully executed PSA that provides these images aired on December 12, 1962, after the Naked City episode “King Stanislaus and the Knights of the Round Stable.”

The exhortation to “Give to the college of your choice” has been superseded, I’d say, by the bumper-sticker proclamation “My daughter/son and my money go to                 .” I’ve never understood what tone of voice goes with that sticker: rueful? snarky? proud?

And while I’m asking questions: Can someone tell me what’s happening in the fourth image?

[Yes, Stable. ]

Tasty signature

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Tastykake Cupkakes in Illinois? I had to buy a box. And thus I saw the similarity between the kake’s scrawl/scroll and the much derided signature of United States Treasury Secretary Jack Lew. And then, having taken some photographs and schemed a post, I discovered that back in January, the Internets had noticed the similarity between a Hostess product and Lew’s signature.

Richard Posner, in The Little Book of Plagiarism (2007):

[O]ld ideas are constantly being rediscovered by people unaware that the ideas had been discovered already. . . . A rediscoverer or independent discoverer is not a copier, hence not a plagiarist.

One could even argue that it is the earlier discovery of the similarity that counts as plagiarism — an instance of what Winston Churchill called anticipatory plagiarism.


[Jack Lew’s signature.]

Related reading
All plagiarism posts (Pinboard)
Fauxstess cupcakes

Richard Griffiths (1947–2013)

From the New York Times :

Richard Griffiths, the rotund British actor whose stage career reached a pinnacle with his Tony-winning performance as an idealistic but tormented pedagogue in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys and who achieved popular fame in the movies as Harry Potter’s mean-spirited Uncle Vernon Dursley, died on Thursday in Coventry, England.

Griffiths played Mr. Hector in both the play and the film. The scene in which Hector talks about Thomas Hardy’s poem “Drummer Hodge” is still the best moment of poetry-in-film I know.

Trap streets

“A secret symbol of an analog past”: Trap streets: The crafty trick mapmakers use to fight plagiarism (The Week).

The Shoemaker

The Shoemaker is a short film by Dustin Cohen about ninety-year-old Frank Catalfumo and F & C Shoe Rebuilding (2810 Harway Avenue, Brooklyn, New York). Notice the several cameos by Bernhard’s cat and the brief exchange about shoe booths. There’s also a photo gallery.

Related reading
Shoe repairmen are the new typewriter repairmen

[The shoe-repair shop of my Brooklyn childhood, at 4602 New Utrecht Avenue, has been replaced by a delicatessen.]