Orange art turtle

[Click for a larger turtle.]

We noticed turtle before orange . This handy page brought me to the conclusion that this fellow is an Eastern box turtle, Terrapene carolina carolina .

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange batik art : Orange bookmark art : Orange car art : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange dress art : Orange enamel art : Orange flag art : Orange manual art : Orange mug art : Orange newspaper art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange parking art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange soda-label art : Orange stem art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange tree art : Orange Tweed art

One more reason to eat sardines

From 2014, but it’s news that should stay news: Sardines Take 400 Times Less Fuel To Catch Than Shrimp (Smithsonian ).

Thanks to Matt Thomas at Submitted for Your Perusal for alerting me to this article.

Related reading
All OCA sardines posts (Pinboard)

Recently updated

Crosswords, copied New consequences for a plagiarizing editor.

Book tour

[Photograph by passenger-seat occupant Elaine Fine. Click for a larger truck.]

So that’s how the books get to the Book Fair.

Elaine and I are perfectly matched when it comes to maturity. We were both thrilled to see a Scholastic Book Services truck this morning, and more thrilled to see the truck turn to enter a school parking lot just after this STOP sign. We did not, however, attempt to crash the Book Fair. We have our limits. (And enough books already.)

Here is a great Flickr album: Nostalgia for the Scholastic Book Club.

A related post
Scholastic madeleines

Overheard

[The television was on for “warmth.” ]

“Nothing like a good cup of tea in a crisis.”

Related reading
All OCA “overheard” posts (Pinboard)
All OCA tea posts (Pinboard)

[We are fortunate to have a local station that broadcasts out-of-copyright movies, again and again and again. This line of dialogue is from Devil Girl from Mars (dir. David MacDonald, 1954). Yes, British sci-fi.]

New directions in spam

A scam that warns of a scam:

This is Agent Ethel McGuire and we are here in Nigeria as an FBI/UNITED NATION delegate that have been delegated to investigate these fraudsters who are in the business of swindling Foreigners that came for transaction in Nigeria .

Please be informed that during our investigation,we found out that there is a total sum amount of money $12.5 million that has been assigned in your name as the beneficiary and these fraudsters are busy swindling you without any hope of receiving your fund.

These are the works of the fraud stars who needed to extort money from you in the name of this transfer.

Hard to decide whether “fraud stars” is a mistake or a pun. But watch out for the fraud stars.

The strangest thing about this e-mail is that there is indeed a former FBI Special Agent named Ethel McGuire. Keep fighting for us, Agent Emerita McGuire!

Related reading
All OCA spam posts (Pinboard)

[I always check the spam folder, which often contains real e-mail. And less often, evidence of innovation along the spamways. I’ve cut and pasted from the e-mail, keeping all its inelegancies.]

Proust at auction

Letters, photographs, manuscripts, books, the property of a great-grandniece, to be sold by Sotheby’s. Nothing yet on Sotheby’s website.

May 16: Now there’s an auction catalogue. The Proust section begins on page 98.

Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
A visit to the Kolb-Proust Archive

Cursive Quimby

In Mrs. Whaley’s third-grade classroom, the children are practicing their cursive capitals:


Beverly Cleary, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (New York: William Morrow, 1981).

Ramona must be in the clutches of the Palmer Method, whose capital Q is a piece of work. In The Palmer Method for Business Writing (1915), A. N. Palmer admits that “capital Q is simply a large figure two” — a big floppy numeral passing for a letter. Some Method!

I can’t recall a cursive Q of any sort from childhood. I do remember G and Z , which came to me in their Palmer forms, and which I could never get quite right. Especially Z .


[Capitals Q and Z from The Palmer Method for Business Writing (1915).]

Related reading
All OCA handwriting posts (Pinboard)
Dowdy-world miracle (From Fifteen )
Happy birthday, Beverly Cleary
Quimby economics
Ramona Quimby, stationery fan

*

April 2018: In the memoir A Girl from Yamhill (1988), Beverly Cleary writes about her first exposure to cursive, in the form of the the Wesco system of handwriting, which, like the Palmer Method, has a 2-shaped Q. It’s now obvious to me that Cleary is drawing on her Wesco childhood in her depiction of Ramona’s dissatisfaction with cursive writing.

The limits of grit

From a New York Times review of Angela Duckworth’s Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance :

Giving character training to the underprivileged will not level America’s increasingly Dickensian inequalities, of course, but Duckworth’s ideas about the cultivation of tenacity have clearly changed some lives for the better.

The reviewer is skeptical, and continues so. But I’d flip the sentence for a greater, more appropriate degree of skepticism:

Duckworth’s ideas about the cultivation of tenacity have clearly changed some lives for the better, of course, but giving character training to the underprivileged will not level America’s increasingly Dickensian inequalities.

Grit is a necessary — not sufficient — condition for learning. Duckworth knows that. But her work seems to inspire those who think it’s possible to “fix” education without addressing poverty. The “no excuses” attitude toward adversity too much resembles that of the Black Knight: “’Tis but a scratch.”

A related post
Learning, character, and failure

Happy Mother’s Day

[Photograph by James Leddy, July 21, 1957.]

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom and to all mothers.

[Yes, my dad dated every photograph.]