The Honeywell Round

Henry Dreyfuss designed the Honeywell thermostat known as the Round, a Cooper-Hewitt Object of the Day :

Dreyfuss modernized the appearance of Honeywell’s thermostats in the 1930s; among the first was the Chronotherm, which incorporated a “digital” clock into its display. Dreyfuss was frustrated, however, that rectangular thermostats never seemed to hang squarely on the wall. Work began on a round thermostat in 1940.

I have a Honeywell Round (c. 1959) on my desk for occasional use as a paperweight. It’s not the most effective paperweight (porcelain faucet-handles and flat rocks work much better), but gosh, is it beautiful. And while we’re on the subject of repurposing: my desk is really a kitchen table that I use as a desk.

A related post
Five desks

[From the Cooper-Hewitt website: “Due to the federal government shutdown, Cooper-Hewitt’s administrative offices and the National Design Library are closed; but all off-site events, including programs at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Center in Harlem, National Design Week, and Design in the Classroom, will continue as scheduled.”]

Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations

In two recent posts, Daughter Number Three looks at laughably bad hyphens (or hyp- hens) and unhelpful postal abbreviations.

Reading the first post reminds me of manual-typewriter days, when one had to decide whether or how to hyphenate at the end of a line. Secretaries and typists often used a little dictionary for that purpose: no definitions, just spelling and syllabification. Reading the second post makes me think that the old postal abbreviations (Calif., Mass., N. Y.) weren’t bad at all.

As I just discovered, USPS has a handy PDF with the history of postal abbreviations. It surprises me to see that the two-letter versions have been around since 1963.

Man-child’s best friend

[Beetle Bailey, October 13, 2013.]

Today’s Beetle Bailey is so troubling that I put it out of my mind early this morning and remembered it only now. It might be less troubling if the pillow were speaking.

A few other troubling Beetle Bailey posts
Bathrooms : Ketchup : Razors : Toilet bowls

Local weather

From the local newscast: “Nothing but sunshine . . . for the next few minutes. The sun is setting.” Nice save, meteorologist.

Recently updated

Dots Now more fiendishly addictive.

A $64,000 question

In an article on student debt in the Fall 2013 issue of the American Federation of Teachers publication On Campus, a sidebar describes the situation of a University of Illinois-Chicago lecturer in English who is not sure that he can afford to continue teaching. He makes $30,000 a year, owns no car, and cannot buy a house. He is paying off the loans that financed his graduate work at UI-C. His loans total $64,000.

It is sad to say, but I’ll say it: Borrowing $64,000 to finance graduate work in the humanities is folly. Borrowing any amount of money to finance graduate work in the humanities is folly. And anyone who encourages a student to take out loans to finance graduate work in the humanities is dangerously out of touch with the economic realities of academic labor.

In case you’re wondering: the On Campus article, which focuses on rising college costs, decreased need-based aid, and for-profit schools, says none of these things.

[Interesting numbers: the UI-C English website lists thirty-two non-emeritus professors, forty-seven lecturers, and seventy-eight doctoral students.]

Family Circus homophone catastrophe

[The Family Circus, October 11, 2013.]

Pros:

1. The old-school thermometer.

2. The scene in the window.

Cons:

1. Billy’s first your .

2. Billy’s second your .

I suppose it’s possible that Billy is spelling cute. (Aww.) He does though get to and too right. I think it’s likely that the yours are a grown-up’s mistakes.

[I know that cute isn’t an abverb. But see here.]

Write Space

[Click for a larger view.]

Write Space: “a customizable full-screen text-editor that lives in your web-browser. It is designed to minimize the distractions that come between you and your writing.”

Write Space is a free extension for Chrome, comparable in its look and feel to the OS X app WriteRoom. Pin a Write Space tab to the tab bar, and there’s always a place for dropping text and URLs while browsing.

Thank you, Haydn Trowell, for this beautiful and useful extension.

A related post
Browser notepad

Writerly realia

“You can’t very well tell a donor, ‘The library is not interested in T. S. Eliot’s Panama hat or Charles Dickens’s walking stick.’” That was Peter Accardo of Harvard’s Houghton Library, quoted for a slidehow of items that belonged to writers: The things they carried.

The library-science term for such stuff: realia, “three-dimensional objects from real life . . . that do not easily fit into the orderly categories of printed material.” I trust that reproducing a tiny bit of realia here — the point of a pencil that belonged to E. E. Cummings — counts as fair use.

Certain readers, take note: Cummings’s pencil says “Half the pressure, twice the speed.” Five of the fifteen photographs in the slideshow are pencil-centric.

[Pencil point from a photograph by Stephanie Mitchell.]

Gray, Ra, Wilkerson

Larry Gray presents Chicago Connection
Larry Gray, bass and cello
Avreeayl Ra, percussion, wind tube, Native
    American flute
Edward Wilkerson, clarinet, alto clarinet, tenor
    saxophone, didgeridoo

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts
University of Illinois, Urbana
October 9, 2013

Elaine and I heard Larry Gray this summer and were happy for the chance to hear him again, this time leading a trio with longtime members of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. The trio played a seven-part suite by Gray (untitled except for one movement, “Memory Mirror Waltz”) and an unrelated (also untitled) piece. The suite’s themes ranged from stately to funky, each giving way to collective and individual improvisation. So many textures in this music: Gray’s doublestops, false harmonics, and thrumming; Ra’s dusted cymbals and pitched drums; Wilkerson’s plaintive clarinet tone and husky tenor. (I thought of the clarinet and tenor of the Ellington orchestra’s Jimmy Hamilton.) The most unexpected texture: cello and didgeridoo supporting the cries and murmurs of a wooden flute.

It was a pleasure to hear this music in a hall with great acoustics. It was also a pleasure to see and hear musicians taking obvious delight in performance: Gray and Wilkerson springing slightly into the air now and then, Ra laughing quietly at the end of one movement. Whitney Balliett famously described jazz as “the sound of surprise.” I love that kind of surprise.

More on the musicians
Larry Gray : Avreeayl Ra : Edward Wilkerson