Infinite Winter

A group reading-project, starting January 31: Infinite Winter, reading David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest in thirteen weeks. The schedule has both page numbers and Kindle locations.

Thirteen weeks, a semester’s time, is about right. Some of those weeks will be more difficult than others. (I know.)

A twentieth-anniversary edition of Infinite Jest will appear on February 23.

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Tube Benders

Here is a fine 99% Invisible episode about neon: “Tube Benders.” Neon in daylight is “a / great pleasure.”

Fordite

Rocks, sort of, from car factories: Fordite, aka Detroit agate.

Thanks, Rachel!

Summit Diner redux

 
[Zippy. March 13, 2015; January 1, 2016.]

Yes, 2016 doesn’t feel different from 2015, though the motel and street are differently colored. I would imagine that many artists reuse their work now and then (if not often). But this past Friday’s strip is the first Zippy in which I’ve spotted old art. I doubt I’d have noticed if I hadn’t made a post about the March 13 strip.

When I checked the Zippy archive, I realized that not just these panels but the two strips themselves are, save for their dialogue, identical. Same balloons, different words. Yes, 2016 doesn’t feel very different from 2015. Very meta, Bill Griffith!

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Teaching ancient Greek

“Sisyphus would sympathize with my condition. Every year I begin rolling my stone up a four-month-long hill, my hopes high. Every year I end up far closer to the bottom than the top”: James Romm, a classics professor, writes about teaching ancient Greek.

U.S.P.S., +1

“Something I take for granted now just didn’t occur to me: There were standardized rates, and you could just slap a stamp on your letter, drop it in a mailbox, and it would go to its destination.” Zeynep Tufekci writes about the wonders of the U.S.P.S.: “Why the Post Office Makes America Great.”

John Bradbury (1953–2015)

John Bradbury was the drummer for the Specials. I loved that group. For instance. Also for instance.

Tom Jones’s sense of purpose

Tom Jones, Sir Tom Jones, on having underwear thrown at him on stage: “That’s not why I was there. I was there to sing.” From an interview with Charlie Rose, November 27, 2015, rebroadcast last night.

Word of the day: frammis

[Nancy panel, June 2, 1951. From Random Acts of Nancy, January 2, 2016.]

Ernie Bushmiller is said to have said that he drew his comic strip for “the gum chewers”: I doubt that he was aiming to send anyone to the dictionary with this bit of dialogue. In 2016, though, frammis might require a gloss. The Merriam-Websters (Second , Third , Collegiate ) are no help, but the Oxford English Dictionary comes through:

frammis, n .

U.S. colloq. (freq. humorous ).

1. With capital initial. As a generic surname, esp. in comic strips or in an invented company name.

2. Nonsense, jargon; commotion, confusion. Also as a count noun.

3. Esp. in imitations of jargon or technical vocabulary: a thing which the speaker cannot or does not name, a thingy. Cf. gismo n ., thingummy n .

The Dictionary’s earliest instance of frammis (as a surname) dates to 1940. The other senses of the word soon follow (1946, 1948). Sense 3 has some especially choice quotations. From 1948: “Mitynice is the only marmalade that gives you that special, seal-tested, bottled-in frammis.” From 1978: “The frammis on my graffle plate isn’t working and I’ll have to take it apart and clean it.”

In this Nancy panel, FRammis works as an exchange-name version of 555. Of course, a clever gum chewer could have tried dialing 376-649. Or more cleverly, 372-6649.

See also: franistan.

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[The complete strip appears in Nancy Loves Sluggo: Dailies, 1949–1951 (2014), the third volume in Fantagraphics’s Nancy series. This panel comes first. In the second panel, Nancy runs from the telephone. In the third, she shouts from around a corner: “Hello Gracie — how is your mumps?” And whence frammis ? The OED : “Origin uncertain. Perhaps a humorous use of the surname Frammis , attested earlier in the 20th cent.”]

Domestic comedy

Caught on tape:

“This is a close-up of our real family life: having boring stuff doing.”

That’s our son Ben — at four or five? — as he roamed the house with a Fisher-Price tape recorder, interviewing and reporting. He and Rachel made countless cassette recordings: music, newscasts, skits, streams of consciousness. The energy of it all! We were listening earlier this week.

Since early August, I’ve kept my dad’s last word — “Thanks” — in the space below this blog’s title, as what Blogger calls “blog description.” With the turn of the year, I’m going to begin varying the description again, starting with a few of these words from Ben back in tykehood.

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