Advice from Sydney Smith

At Letters of Note, the cleric Sydney Smith writes to a friend with advice for overcoming “low spirits.” It is poignant reading.

I should like to have known Sydney Smith and shared a cup of tea or coffee with him.

Marco Arment on RSS

Marco Arment on RSS and and the end of Google Reader:

RSS represents the antithesis of this new world: it’s completely open, decentralized, and owned by nobody, just like the web itself. . . .

That world formed the web’s foundations — without that world to build on, Google, Facebook, and Twitter couldn’t exist. But they’ve now grown so large that everything from that web-native world is now a threat to them, and they want to shut it down. “Sunset” it. “Clean it up.” “Retire” it. Get it out of the way so they can get even bigger and build even bigger proprietary barriers to anyone trying to claim their territory.

Well, fuck them, and fuck that.

[RSS is what creates a website’s feed.]

Go Read, a Google Reader alternative

I’m not sure where I read about this one, but I’m glad that I did: Go Read. Its creator Matt Jibson describes it as “fast, snappy, and clean.” I like that he uses a serial comma in that description. I like Go Read. It has no “features” to speak of — just a bright, minimal layout. (Much nicer than The Old Reader.) And from what I’ve seen, Go Read, unlike Feedly, places images where they belong.

Go Read isn’t perfect: it lacks search (“will take some time”); post chronology is sometimes off; and post titles (to my eye) are much too large. All of which is to say that it’s not Google Reader. How could it be? It’s one guy.

Jibson’s plans include “non-annoying ads,” removable with a small fee. I think that I’ll be paying that fee in the near future.

*

July 3: In iOS, Go Read shows only unread posts. And it misses posts that The Old Reader picks up. Sigh.

*

July 3: Yes, it’s a work in progress, whose developer is on the ball, on the case, responsive to user inquiries, and working to get things right. I have high hopes for Go Read.

Misadventures in feedworld
Feedly it ain’t
Feedly v. Feedly

[I’m done with Feedly.]

Drudge Report reportage

The Drudge Report is making merry with an offhand, joking comment that Michelle Obama made in an interview with NPR’s Cokie Roberts. Drudge links to this article, which quotes Mrs. Obama on life in the White House: “‘There are some prison elements to it,’ she joked. ‘But it’s a really nice prison.’”

See? It’s a joke.

The context, as given in the above article: “Roberts noted that Martha Washington, the first First Lady, also described living in the role as akin to being a state prisoner.” So the current First Lady wasn’t complaining: she was offering mild agreement, followed by a reminder that to live in the White House is to enjoy great privilege.

Louisa Adams, wife of John Quincy Adams, seems to have agree with Martha Washington, calling the White House “that dull and stately prison in which the sounds of mirth are seldom heard.” Harry Truman wrote of the White House that “This great white jail is a hell of a place in which to be alone.” There is nothing new about occupants of the White House thinking of the building as a prison — and with far greater seriousness than Mrs. Obama’s comment allows. You’d never know any of that from the Drudge Report, whose sole purpose is to suggest (as Drudge headlines often do) that Michelle Obama is an unhappy and ungrateful camper, or perhaps an Angry Black Woman.

[I still marvel that I got to meet Barack and Michelle Obama, back in 2004.]

Pocket notebook sighting

[Alice Reed’s address book. I wish she’d written out the exchange names. Click for a larger view.]

The Woman in the Window (dir. Fritz Lang, 1944) stars Edward G. Robinson as Richard Wanley, a mild-mannered assistant professor of psychology. Feeling solidity and stodginess setting in (“Life ends at forty?” a fellow clubman wonders), Wanley steps beyond the limits of his routine and finds himself in suddenly desperate circumstances. Yes, that step involves a woman, the beautiful artist’s model Alice Reed (Joan Bennett). The Woman in the Window resonates with two other great 1944 films: Laura (dir. Otto Preminger) and Double Indemnity (dir. Billy Wilder). As in Laura, a man is captivated by a painting of a beautiful woman. As in Double Indemnity, a killer tracks a murder investigation as it tracks him. But Robinson, who played the ace investigator Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity, here takes the Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) role, not the pursuer but the pursued.

A twist in the film’s plot, which I won’t reveal here, suggests to me that The Woman in the Window is very much about “the movies” — about the kinds of things people say and do in the world on screen.

Here, for Matt Thomas, is a shot of Professor Wanley in his study, writing a letter to his wife.


[Click for a larger view.]

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Cat People : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Extras : Journal d’un curé de campagne : The House on 92nd Street : The Lodger : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : The Palm Beach Story : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Quai des Orfèvres : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : The Sopranos : Spellbound : State Fair : T-Men : Union Station

Dark Punctuation

“What the punctuational physicists at Cerne Abbas did was to shoot colons directly through the midpoint of the space between two words. Exactly as predicted, this not only split the colon into two semi-colons, but caused the words to collapse into one another”: Dark Punctuation revealed.

[Psst: It’s semicolon not semi-colon. I added the hyphen for years before discovering my mistake.]

Feedly improvement via a userscript

Feedly to Google Reader is a userscript that significantly improves Feedly by making it look more like Google Reader. The script’s greatest accomplishment, from my point of view: it stops Feedly from pushing images off to the right. The results aren’t perfect, but they’re a lot better than what Feedly now offers.

As I’ve figured out from some browsing today, the problem with Feedly’s image-handling is that it floats images to the right. One user reports that Feedly changes float:left to float:right, which would explain some of the problems I’ve seen in my posts.

Thanks to CaspianRoach for sharing this script.

Related posts
Feedly it ain’t
Feedly v. Feedly

Penguin Random House

The merger of Penguin and Random House into Penguin Random House is done. I have no idea what that bodes for books, but I think Penguin House would have made a better name. Or Random Penguin, better still. It turns out that the Internets agree.

[What do you call it when someone else has already thought your thought? Anticipatory plagiarism.]

A poem for RZ

I just thought of it:

I wrote this poem in 2005 while teaching a poetry class in which the students wrote poems addressed to friends. The emphasis was on being private in public, writing in a way that would make sense to the poem’s recipient but might seem cryptic to others. Now the poem seems cryptic to me. The only frame of reference I can remember for it: snow. Snow was general all over the northeast and midwest.

Rob Zseleczky (1957–2013)

Zippy and The Little King

[“Slices of Life,” Zippy, June 29, 2013.]

Today’s Zippy pays homage to Otto Soglow’s The Little King. I recognized His Majesty at once. But I didn’t know that he began his reign in the pages of The New Yorker.

Related reading
Cartoon Monarch: Otto Soglow and the Little King (The Comics Journal)
Otto Soglow and The Little King (Austin Kleon)
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)