From the Waxed Paper Institute, Inc.

[Life, January 26, 1948.]

It sounds like a Bob and Ray creation, but it was real. A 1962 court ruling describes the Waxed Paper Institute as “a trade association which published reports of aggregate industry sales, prices, and product statistics for the benefit of its members.” Though the Institute seems to have vanished, waxed paper lives on, protecting freshness.

A related post
The dowdiest wrap in the kitchen

The dowdiest wrap in the kitchen

It is wax paper, for several reasons. It is a kind of paper. It is far older than aluminum foil. It may bear the quaint name Cut-Rite. And it appears in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939):

At noon the tractor driver stopped sometimes near a tenant house and opened his lunch: sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper, white bread, pickle, cheese, Spam, a piece of pie branded like an engine part.

“Wax paper,” to my mind, is dowdier than “waxed paper.” (Older too: 1844 v. 1853.) “Wax” recalls wax beans, one of the dowdiest canned vegetables — and one of the most disturbing.

Related reading
All OCA “dowdy world” posts (Pinboard)

[For most American consumers, Cut-Rite is wax paper. When I make a sandwich to go, I always use Cut-Rite and foil. And yes, that tractor driver is destroying people’s livelihoods.]

Word of the day: Velox

[“From Dingburg to Palookaville,” Zippy, February 3, 2014.]

From Photographic Memorabilia:

Kodak VELOX paper was a very slow printing paper, producing a blue-black image, suitable for contact printing only, where the negative is placed in contact with the paper to produce a print of the same size. Kodak discontinued the manufacture of Velox paper in 1968.

The Oxford English Dictionary (which includes proprietary names) has no entry for Velox.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

Jim Leddy tells it like it is

After a stretch of time in the hospital and a longer stretch in rehab (not that kind of rehab), my dad is back home. One might think “Just in time for the Super Bowl,” but my dad takes no interest in football. He is indeed his son’s father.

And my dad is a gentleman — always. So I was amused and enlightened when he described the disorder of life in rehab like so: “Have you heard people use the expression ‘fucked up’?” Yes, Dad, but I never before heard you use it. That’s the measure of a place where a request for hot tea at breakfast brought iced, day after day after day.

Welcome home, Dad, and thanks to everyone who has sent good wishes his way.

[Dialogue used with permission. And notice that my dad was quoting.]

Overheard

While reading in a café: “I don’t hate you — I just couldn’t tell you that I was upset."

And a couple of minutes later: “I don’t hate you — I just couldn’t tell you that I was upset.”

And then again.

Aha: they were running lines from a play, or from an episode of Girls, or something.

Related reading
All “overheard” posts (Pinboard)

The Doomsday rule

BrownStudies explains the Doomsday rule, a nifty way to figure out the day of the week for a given date. Such stuff holds an irresistible appeal for the ten-year-old secret agent in me. Because say you were like stuck on a desert island or something, and you didn’t have a calendar, and you needed to figure out the day of the week that something was going to happen — well, you get the idea.

Last night I challenged my spouse to test me: pick a date, any date. And yes, June 23, 2014, falls on a Monday. It’s the rule.

See also Super Minimalist Micro Calendar.

Making it work

From a New York Times interview with Elaine Stritch:

Now that you’ve been settled in Michigan for almost a year, do you find yourself missing New York?

No, I don’t miss places. I really don’t. I get up in the morning, the sun is out, I’m a happy clam. I’m not unhappy because I’m not in this bedroom or that bedroom, or this living room or that living room. I’m going to make it work wherever I go.

I like her perspective.

Three for one

The folkloric measure of college coursework: two to three hours for each hour in class. This measure does not apply in all cases: Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa recently found that an average student spends twelve hours a week studying, and that thirty-seven percent of students spend less than five. Thus it’s of more than passing interest to know that a two-for-one recommendation appears in federal guidelines for a credit hour, which state that a credit hour “reasonably approximates not less than”

(1) One hour of classroom or direct faculty instruction and a minimum of two hours of out of class student work each week for approximately fifteen weeks for one semester or trimester hour of credit, or ten to twelve weeks for one quarter hour of credit, or the equivalent amount of work over a different amount of time; or

(2) At least an equivalent amount of work as required in paragraph (1) of this definition for other academic activities as established by the institution including laboratory work, internships, practica, studio work, and other academic work leading to the award of credit hours.

Professors who don’t require students to do a reasonable amount of work conspire with their students in the creation of the vast simulacrum that I call “colledge.” Such professors make life more difficult for the rest of us.

Related reading
Program Integrity Issues; Final Rule (U.S. Department of Education)
OCA review of Academically Adrift

[The federal gummint appears to be short on hyphens, no?]

Writing and belief

As a writer, what do you believe in?

I believe in black ink, yellow legal pads, Castell 9000s, Mongols, Ticonderogas, wooden pencils in general, mechanical pencils in general, erasers in general, Pelikans, Safaris, Uni-ball Signos, the T-Ball Jotter, index cards, Post-it Notes, pocket notebooks (Field Notes, IBM Think pads, Moleskines), a larger notebook that my daughter gave me (Moleskine), PocketMods, nvALT, Simplenote, TextWrangler, WriteRoom.

But also: any available paper, any available Bic.

Humph

How like Arts & Letters Daily to take no notice of Pete Seeger’s death. (I didn’t think they would.)