Roger Ebert (1942–2013)

From Life Itself: A Memoir (2012), quoted in the Chicago Sun-Times obituary:

I believe that if, at the end, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.

Roger Ebert was a son of east-central Illinois. Champaign’s fifteenth Ebertfest takes place later this month.

A better Life Photo Archive search

Arjan den Boer has created a better tool to search Google’s Life Photo Archive: Better search for LIFE Photo Archive. I just tried it out:

A search for duke ellington : LPA: 34 results; Arjan’s search: 156 results.

A search for post office : LPA page: 38 results. Arjan’s search: 218 results.

A search for typewriter : LPA: 45 results; Arjan: 158 results.

Arjan’s search not only yields far more results; it presents those results in a legible uniform size, twenty to a page.

The Life Photo Archive is a wonderful place to get lost. It’s now easier than ever to get lost and stay there. Thanks for sharing your work, Arjan.

*

March 12, 2014: As Arjan wrote in a comment, Google has a new way to search Life photos. Thanks for the memories, Arjan.

The New York Times on Walmart

Breaking news! Walmart offers a crummy shopping experience, with empty shelves and awful produce.

[This is breaking news?]

7 Little Words

7 Little Words — that’s its icon to the left — is a lovely little diversion, challenging enough to provide at least slight difficulty here and there, easy enough to solve in a minute or two. (You can make things more difficult by removing the number-of-letters hint for each word.) The daily puzzle is free online or as a mobile app. Extra puzzles for the mobile app are fifty for 99¢. Clues in the for-sale puzzles offer flashes of crossword-style wit. “Nice chap, perhaps”: FRENCHMAN.

Buehner’s Office Supply

“A window into a world where analog was king”: Buehner’s Office Supply, in Cleveland, Ohio (via Coudal.) They even have Robinson Reminder refills for sale.

The photographs of Buehner’s remind me of the now-defunct office-supply stores where I found many of the items in my imaginary Museum of Supplies. How come I never took a picture?

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.”]