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Wheeldex This dowdy-world object has turned up in a comic strip.

Bob Conant on bookselling

From an interview with Bob Conant, co-owner of St. Mark’s Bookshop:

“Amazon is a villain. What they’re attempting to do is put bookstores out of business — and publishers. What’s interesting to me is the backlash starting to develop. People realize if they want books to continue, they have to support bookstores, and they have to support publishers.”

Spellings of the future

[As seen in print.]

In a 2009 post about “the new literacy,” I wrote that I was beginning to see misspellings that I could never have imagined: and for an, pros for prose. As I later figured out, such misspellings are/our in fact spellings of the future, traveling backward in time to give us a foretaste of our — or are ? — language’s evolution. Our for are is one I’ve seen twice recently.

Other spellings of the future
Aww : Bard-wired fence : Now : Self-confidance : Where

Then and now

[Then.]

That’s my wife, Elaine Fine, standing outside the Boston Children’s Museum in 1984. It was probably spring. We were being very arty with the black-and-white. Elaine and I were married on September 30, 1984. Holy wedlock, Batman! Or in our case, unholy, secular wedlock, courtesy of a justice of the peace. Thirty years: the best thirty years of our lives.

This past Saturday, after we visited a sewing-machine store and art-supply store in a faded mall, we stood in front of a mirror and took a picture to send to our children. I didn’t realize that the result would be a mirror image of the 1984 photograph.


[Now.]

Elaine has posted a drawing that I made before our wedding.

Happy Anniversary, Elaine!

[May marriage soon be for all partners.]

A thought about absence(s)

Monday is the new Friday.

A related post
Slackerism’s first cousin

Slackerism’s first cousin

[“‘Illegitmate absenteeism is a first cousin to slackerism’: Admiral Emory S. Land, U.S.N. Chairman U.S. Maritime Commission. Farrel-Birmingham Company, Inc., Ansonia, Conn., Derby, Conn., Buffalo, N.Y.” No date.]

I found this World War II-era poster in a collection of war posters in the University of Minnesota’s UMedia Archive. I suspect that Admiral Land’s declaration will amuse many who teach.

Emory S. Land is now also a ship.

Domestic comedy

“You’re like between a fugue state and frenzy.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[To the reader who tweeted a link to my blog: thanks for your interest, but I’m not quoting Van Dyke Parks in this post. Domestic-comedy posts are a matter of my wife Elaine, our children Rachel and Ben, and me. It’s all in the fambly. This one is me speaking.]

Demon bat-pepper

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger, more terrifying view.]

Green peppers? More like demon bat-peppers. This one is the scariest I’ve faced.

A related post
Peppers and eggs

“Some Steinways”

At Contrapuntalism, Sean spots einege Steinways, “some Steinways.”

Word of the day: palaver

Merriam Webster’s Word of the Day is palaver. When I see that word, I think of James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” in which it’s spoken by Lily, the caretaker’s daughter:

The girl glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness:

— The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you.

Other words, other works of lit
Apoplexy, avatar, bandbox, heifer, sanguine, sempiternal : Artificer : Ineluctable : Iridescent : Magnifico : Opusculum