Thelonious Monk

Years ago, years and years and years ago, my children would occasionally spend a morning on campus with me on days off from school. On one such occasion, my son Ben labeled a poster of Thelonious Monk in my office. And now I remember having labeled my dad’s LPs with little slips of paper bearing the names of musicians: Miles Davis, Erroll Garner, Stuff Smith.

I especially like the homemade o s on this faded Post-it Note. I would guess that Ben was five or six when he wrote them — and the rest of the letters.

Other Monk posts
T. MONK’S ADVICE (1960) : Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane : Thelonious Monk in Weehawken : Thelonious Monk, off-balance : Thelonious Monk plays Duke Ellington

[How did Ben know the proper spelling? The poster says, in large letters, “Thelonious Monk.”]

Its/it’s Lynne Truss

From a Yorkshire Post article about Lynne Truss, who wrote Eats, Shoots & Leaves (2003):

A 244-page tour through the rules of punctuation, there was no diverting illustrations and not even a whiff of celebrity. And yet when it was released in 2003, it became one of that year’s biggest hits with many bookshops unable to feed the demand. For it’s author Lynne Truss, it also meant being dragged kicking and screaming into the limelight.

I thought at first that this article was a spoof, a count-the-errors exercise. But no. How many errors do you see?

Eats, Shoots & Leaves, by the way, is a highly unreliable guide to punctuation. From Bryan Garner’s withering review of the book:

Why do the experts uniformly disparage a punctuation book that appeals so much to the popular mind? The thing is that many people think they’re sticklers when they’re not. And Lynne Truss happens to be one of them. She’s taken a leaf from Karl Marx in proclaiming that her rallying cry is “Sticklers of the world, unite!” That’s exactly what they’re doing, but not quite in the way she intended. The true sticklers of the world are uniting against Lynne Truss.

A related post
Garner, Menand, and Truss

In flight from excellence

The word of the day is excellence :

1. the state of being superior and without equal 2. something many people and companies say they expect/offer/won’t accept anything but, that is revealed as being really cheap currency when you live on planet earth and observe the people who actually work at companies — like Brad, who still doesn’t know how to transfer a call even though he’s been an administrative assistant for two years; or Linda, who assaults her coworkers with visible grandma panty lines every day of the week; or Nick, the charming department head who manages up like a champ while things rot from the inside out 3. a laughable hyperbole encouraged by consultants, gurus, and guest speakers 4. in reality, the thing people should stop shooting for, because making things just kind of okay would be really good start. Enough with the excellence and perfection, all right?

These definitions are from Lois Beckwith’s The Dictionary of Corporate Bullshit (New York: Broadway Books, 2006). I’ve omitted the boldface for several cross-referenced terms. I had to look up one: manage up , placing the needs of one’s superior above all else.

It no longer surprises me that the vocabulary sets of academia and corporate life should be so difficult to distinguish.

[Lois Beckwith is a pen name of Mimi O’Connor.]

A Naked City Dickinson

[Salome Jens as Ellen Annis. “Goodbye Mama, Hello Auntie Maud,” Naked City, June 20, 1962.]

The pulled-back hair, the little tie: this recluse’s appearance owes something to the famous daguerreotype, don’t you think?

This episode has a great over-the-top bit of dialogue. Ellen’s Auntie Maud (Irene Dailey) speaks to chauffeur Harry Brind (James Coburn):

“How dare you . . . make advances to my niece? A chauffeur, with the smell of garage about you, with grease under your nails. How dare you? How dare you?”

Auntie Maud then lunges at him with a clawlike hand.

Related reading
Naked poetry City (Adam Flint recites ED)
All OCA Naked City posts (Pinboard)

The Princess telephone

“Soft, curvy, and biomorphic,” and designed by Henry Dreyfuss: the Princess telephone, Cooper-Hewitt’s Object of the Day a few days back.

Other Dreyfuss objects at Cooper-Hewitt
The Honeywell Round
The model 500
The Polaroid Swinger

Other OCA posts with Henry Dreyfuss
Henry Dreyfuss on survival forms
Why are barns painted red?

A text for the day

James Joyce:

the more carrots you chop, the more turnips you slit, the more murphies you peel, the more onions you cry over, the more bullbeef you butch, the more mutton you crackerhack, the more potherbs you pound, the fiercer the fire and the longer your spoon and the harder you gruel with more grease to your elbow the merrier fumes your new Irish stew.

Finnegans Wake (1939)

A merry Saint Patrick’s Day to all.

[Leddy is an Irish name.]

Feedly, ugh

Last year I documented my dissatisfaction with the RSS reader Feedly: Feedly pushes images to the right and flips left-to-right sequences of images, resulting in ugly, incoherent, and potentially misleading posts. (Think of what flipping might do to a set of how-to illustrations.) Feedly is what prompted me to add a sentence to the footer for the OCA feed: “Your reader may not display this post as its writer intended.”

On July 2, 2013, I followed the service’s online instructions to delete my account. I received no reply but thought I was done. But this past week, I received an e-mail:

You are receiving this email because you sent us a request via email (to delete@feedly.com) to permanently delete your feedly account.

It is now possible to delete your account yourself via a button in feedly.

This new option was implemented yesterday as part of our “Fix it March” initiative. You will find all the details on how to delete your account at:

http://blog.feedly.com/2014/03/07/fix-it-march-4-delete-your-account/

I was surprised to see that my account was still active — with images in posts still pushed to the right. You can guess how long I hesitated before deleting.

For a long time now, I’ve been a happy user of The Old [and steadily improving] Reader. It doesn’t do everything (I would like to be able to mark individual posts as read without opening them), but it doesn’t do things up with which I cannot put.

Eight months without deleting an account! Ugh.

[I added proper quotation marks to the text of Feedly’s e-mail. Couldn’t help myself.]

“Types of Editors”

[“Types of Editors,” xkcd, no. 1341. Click for a larger view.]

I think enough about text editors to like this xkcd a lot.

OS X’s Dictation service adds another element to a text editor: WYSITUTWYS: What you see is totally unrelated to what you said.

Totally related posts
Boogie-woogie
Der・ri・da

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day Weekend

[As seen in Newton Highlands, Massachusetts.]

Poor Saint Patrick. Poor his Day. In Illinois college towns of my acquaintance, Saint Patrick's Day has become Unofficial Saint Patrick’s Day, or Unofficial (the word is now a noun). It’s a pre-seventeenth Saturday, a barowner’s creation to make the money lost when the seventeenth falls, as it often does, during spring break. For too many students, Unofficial is a day set aside for drinking, all-day drinking. The day is preceded by tweets apologizing to one's liver, and tweets resolving not to remember a thing. And it’s followed by tweets announcing that Unofficial was epic, and tweets asking why there has to be “school” on Monday. It saddens me that such an obvious ploy finds so many willing participants, and that those participants think there’s something brave and rebellious and subversive about getting drunk.

And now there's the oxymoronic Saint Patrick’s Day Weekend, to make the money lost when the seventeenth falls, as it does this year, on a Monday.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day Weekend.

Two-tone Papermates

[Life, December 12, 1955. Click for a larger view.]

For Pete’s sake: they’re ballpoint pens. Calm down, people, and reattach your heads to the appropriate bodies.

I think of “two-tone” as a phrasal adjective followed by a car. Two-tone cars looked spiffy, at least in my faint childhood remembering. These “tu-tone” pens, not so much. They remind me of the cheap ballpoints dispensed by auto-repair shops and insurance agents. Contrast Parker Jotters of the same era: they still look like great.

The young man on my right — calm down, young man. Young man, I don’t want to have to repeat myself.