Orange tree art

[Photograph by Michael Leddy.]

Elaine and I have been photographing our Red Sunset maple over the past few days. Its leaves turned all at once. On Saturday, we saw the orange tones you see here. Today there’s much more red. Last year, storms and wind removed this tree’s leaves almost all at once. If that happens this year, we’ll have a keepsake. Which I realize is not keeping with the transience of fall’s beauty but what the heck.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

John Lennon on love

“Love means having to say you’re sorry every five minutes”: John Lennon, on The Dick Cavett Show (September 11, 1971).

Other Cavett Show posts
John Huston on James Agee
Marlon Brando on acting
Orson Welles, language maven

[For anyone who doesn’t get the joke: Wikipedia explains.]

Allan Block (1923–2013)

Allan Block was a sandal maker and fiddler whose Greenwich Village shop, Allan Block Sandals, became a center for old-timey music in New York. The New York Times has an obituary.

You can catch a glimpse of the sandal shop in this post on West Fourth Street’s role in an episode of Naked City. The shop’s location, 171 West Fourth Street, is now a tobacco and smoking accessories store. Elaine and I walked past it in May.

Art by Javier Pérez

[Javier Pérez, Trompclip.]

Elaine pointed me to the art of Javier Pérez. Beautiful and punny.

SEIU on campus

My friend Sara pointed me to news of the growing number of adjunct faculty joining Service Employees International Union:

Bill Shimer, a part-time lecturer in management and organizational development at Northeastern University in Boston, said he never imagined being part of the union movement. But he has been rallying colleagues to support an upcoming vote on whether to form a union.

“It’s not that people want to unionize, but we really don’t see any other way. There’s nowhere to turn and nobody is looking out for us,” said Shimer, who teaches five classes at Northeastern and two at another local university.

The university has responded by hiring a prominent law firm used by many corporations to discourage union organizing.

I am always surprised when a teacher finds the prospect of a union distasteful. I am saddened and not surprised when management university adminstrators feel the same way.

Thanks, Sara.

Ph.D.’s outside academia

The New York Times has an article on Ph.D.’s outside academia: The Repurposed Ph.D. What goes unaddressed: whether a doctorate is truly necessary for the kinds of work the article describes.

[Why Ph.D.’s ? The apostrophe is “traditionally used with abbreviations containing capital letters and periods” to form a plural (Garner’s Modern American Usage ).]

A drawer of the past

[Henry, November 2, 2013.]

I like the refrigerator, but I especially like the drawer — not just the suggestion of dovetail joints but the way the drawer drops when opened. No drawer slides in this comic strip world.

Related reading
All Henry posts (Pinboard)

[Why “the suggestion of dovetail joints”? Because there are no trapezoids. These joints hold together a two-dimensional drawer, so the extra strength of the traditional dovetail is not needed.]

Macintosh Plus emulator

James Friend’s Mac Plus emulator takes me back my first experience with a Mac: 1984, in a Boston computer store. The Mac seemed then to be a pleasant (and expensive) toy. Elaine and I ended up buying a Panasonic Senior Partner and an Olympia daisy-wheel printer. We were no visionaries. These machines would not work together, and we returned them both for a full refund (thanks to a friendly musician-salesman). Our next computer was an Apple //c. Many years (and Windows) later, our fambly is nothing but Macs.

The Mac Plus appeared in January 1986.

[Found via Daring Fireball.]

New Jersey gets a star

I’ve been waiting to post an updated Flag of Equal Marriage with a star for New Jersey. I’ve checked the flag’s site, counted, and waited: fifteen states, still only fourteen stars. And then I looked more carefully at the list, which has fourteen not fifteen states (including New Jersey) and Washington, D.C.: fourteen stars.

Note to self: do not skim lists.

A related post
The flag of equal marriage

[New Jersey: represent.]

“In the end, we can’t [?] lose”

From a New York Times article on the fate of the humanities in higher education:

Some professors flinch when they hear colleagues talking about the need to prepare students for jobs.

“I think that’s conceding too quickly,” said Mark Edmundson, an English professor at the University of Virginia. “We’re not a feeder for law school; our job is to help students learn to question.”

His university had 394 English majors last year, down from 501 when he arrived in 1984, but Professor Edmundson said he does not fret about the future. “In the end, we can’t lose,” he said. “We have William Shakespeare.”

I respect Mark Edmundson’s work, as these three posts should make clear. But two observations:

To speak of the purpose of college without regard for what might follow is to speak from a lofty position indeed. If students are to learn to question, they might begin by questioning the investment of time and money that college requires. What does that investment amount to? What does it mean to graduate with tens of thousands in debt and few prospects?

I’m not nearly as confident as Edmundson that those who have Shakespeare cannot lose. Classics departments, after all, had Homer.