A Yosemite bug Fixed in 10.10.3.
Works in some places, not others. Still broken.
Monday, May 4, 2015
A joke in the traditional manner
Why did the ophthalmologist and his wife split up?
No spoilers. The punchline is in the comments.
More jokes in the traditional manner
The Autobahn : Elementary school : A Golden Retriever : How did Bela Lugosi know what to expect? : How did Samuel Clemens do all his long-distance traveling? : What did the plumber do when embarrassed? : What happens when a senior citizen visits a podiatrist? : Which member of the orchestra was best at handling money? : Why did the doctor spend his time helping injured squirrels? : Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies? : Why was Santa Claus wandering the East Side of Manhattan?
[“In the traditional manner”: by or à la my dad. He must take credit for all but the squirrel-doctor and Santa Claus.]
For finals takers
The yin and the yang of it: “How to do horribly on a final exam” and “How to do well on a final exam.” Which post did Nancy read?
Best wishes to all exam takers and givers.
[Three finals to go.]
Sunday, May 3, 2015
You should absolutely expect him to deliver those buzzwords
Lucy Kellaway examines a sentence from Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: “Twitter chief’s six common crimes against the dictionary” (Financial Times). Here is the sentence:
As we iterate on the logged out experience and curate topics, events, moments that unfold on the platform, you should absolutely expect us to deliver those experiences across the total audience and that includes logged in users and users in syndication.All the money in the world can’t make a good sentence.
Kellaway also appears in these pages in a post about paper: “Paper, +1.”
Domestic comedy
“You know, if you grow up with one version of something, any other version is going to strike you as ersatz.”
“Even if it’s the original. Put that on your blog.”
We were talking about the television series Lassie. The Lassie of my childhood is the Timmy-Ruth-Paul version. I’ve never really cottoned to the Jeff-Ellen-Gramps version, which came first. Indeed, without Jeff-Ellen-Gramps, there’d be no Timmy-Ruth-Paul: Timmy came on the scene as a runaway orphan hiding in the Jeff-Ellen-Gramps barn. Ruth and Paul bought the farm from Ellen and adopted the runaway. COZI TV is running four hours of Lassie this afternoon, two hours of which are Timmy-Ruth-Paul.
Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)
All OCA Lassie posts (Just a handful)
[Did you know that before there was June Lockhart, there was Cloris Leachman? She was a tightly wound Ruth Martin, something like the Phyllis Lindstrom of just-outside-Calverton.]
Saturday, May 2, 2015
More adventures in sardines
Related reading
All OCA sardine posts (Pinboard)
[“Hot jalapeño” is redundant, no? Perhaps it’s to protect the company from complaints. But “real oak-wood ovens”: as opposed to pretend ovens? Image from King Oscar. Thank you, Your Majesty.]
Friday, May 1, 2015
Walking on clouds with Nancy
[Nancy, June 30, 1949. Click for a larger view.]
I, too, am walking on clouds today, giddy and more than slightly in a trance. After thirty years of teaching, I’m retiring. All semester long, I’ve been feeling like Bunny Colvin: “Five months to my thirty.” And then four, three, two, one — and none. Three final examinations next week, and I’m done.
Last things:
The final scene of Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights (1931), which ended a look at films that owe something to Homer’s Odyssey. Tramp returning, intuitive understanding: it’s the Odyssey.
The streamside scene from the Father Knows Best episode “Betty’s Graduation,” in a class that began with Gilgamesh. There is no permanence.
In an American lit class, the end of chapter 6 of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin. I am leaving academic life in very different circumstances from those of poor Timofey Pnin. What moves me most in these pages (which I read aloud): after a cracking sound, Pnin’s aquamarine glass bowl, a gift from his not-son Victor, lies not broken at the bottom of his kitchen sink. It’s a goblet that broke. The bowl still has its integrity, as Pnin has his.
I’ll have more to say about teaching and not teaching. But not now, not yet.
A secret message to friends
Thank you, Kathy and John David, for a wonderful time last night. In the internal combustion engine of life, you two are mighty pistons. Vroom, vroom!
Joseph Mitchell, scissors, paper clips
Joseph Mitchell’s labor of writing:
And labor it truly was, as can be readily seen from the few draft examples Mitchell left behind. Seated at the sturdy Underwood typewriter that he would use his entire New Yorker career, Mitchell would patiently cast and recast sentences, sometimes dozens of times, changing just a word or two with each iteration until an entire paragraph came together and seemed right. He would move through his drafting of the story in this slow, painstaking fashion, at certain points (in that pre-computer era) using a scissors to cut these passages apart, sometimes sentence by sentence, and physically rearranging them to get a better feel for the narrative rhythm. In so doing he often used paper clips to hold the sentence strips together, and these constructions would come to resemble a long, flexible washboard or a kind of primitive girdle. All this fussing was exceedingly time-consuming, even for a magazine writer, which helped establish Mitchell’s growing reputation for deliberation.I haven’t started to read this book, really: I’ve only dipped in. A biography whose index includes the entry “paper clips used by” is a biography I’m going to like.
Thomas Kunkel, Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of “The New Yorker” (New York: Random House, 2015).
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