Creative accounting

Our representative in the Illinois General Assembly, a local mogul turned statesman, is proclaiming that he has helped bring to our public university ninety percent of its state funding. Ahem.

For FY 2016, the school received thirty percent of its funding.

For FY 2017, the school has received a little more than sixty percent of its funding.

Thirty plus sixty: ninety! As Elaine observes, this logic would allow a tenant renting from our mogul to pay half the rent one month, half the next, and be all paid up.

Our rep has scheduled a public meeting to discuss university funding. The meeting takes place in a town forty miles away. But guess what? People know how to drive! It should be an interesting time.

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How to improve writing (no. 65); or, CBS, sheesh

From a CBS This Morning story about Ken Burns:

Fittingly, Burns also released his first children's book this week called Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents , featuring illustrations and “fun facts” about past American presidents. The idea began when he used to drill his daughter, Sarah, now 33 years old, on the commander-in-chiefs.

Make that commanders-in-chief . But notice too that commander-in-chiefs appears in this passage only because its writer, in an effort to avoid repeating the word presidents , has succumbed to the lure of what H. W. Fowler called “elegant variation” (which Bryan Garner has renamed “inelegant variation”). Why not rethink the entire passage? My best shot:

Fittingly, Burns also released his first children's book this week: Grover Cleveland, Again!: A Treasury of American Presidents , an illustrated book of “fun facts.” The idea for the book took shape years ago, when Burns would quiz his daughter Sarah, now 33, on the presidents.

I’ll leave all but one of my changes to speak for themselves: Burns has four daughters, so no comma after daughter .

Thanks to Sean at Contrapuntalism for alerting me to this passage.

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[Garner’s Modern English Usage points out that commanders-in-chief  is nineteen times more common than commander-in-chiefs . Of course, as The Onion reminds us, the effort to get plurals right can lead in the direction of the daffy. This post is no. 65 in a series, “How to improve writing,” dedicated to improving stray bits of public prose.]

David Foster Wallace, Pokémon Go, Trump-Pence

It feels like the Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad, or the Year of Something . In other words, it feels like we’re living in DFW Time. The Pokémon Go fad makes me recall Wallace’s idea of the “spect-op.” In the world of Infinite Jest , ninety-four percent of all entertainment is consumed at home. It’s a world of “Total freedom, privacy, choice”:

Hence the new millennium’s passion for standing live witness to things. A whole sub-rosa schedule of public spectation opportunities, “spect-ops,” the priceless chance to be part of a live crowd, watching. Thus the Gapers’ Blocks at traffic accidents, sewer-gas explosions, muggings, purse-snatchings, the occasional Empire W.D.V. with an incomplete vector splatting into North Shore suburbs and planned communities and people leaving their front doors agape in their rush to get out and mill around and spectate at the circle of impacted waste drawing sober and studious crowds, milling in rings around the impact, earnestly comparing mental notes on just what it is they all see.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996).

But now it’s a matter of standing live witness to virtual creatures on a screen.

*

The Trump-Pence logo seems like icky icing on the cake of a strange and awful week. In its hilariously crude absurdity, the logo seems to have made for the world of Infinite Jest . (I can imagine an editor: “But David, don’t you think it’s a little far-fetched?”) Trump strongly resembles the novel’s Johnny Gentle, entertainer, germaphobe, and president of the United States, “first U.S. President ever to say shit publicly,” president of “a new-era’d nation that looked out for Uno.” Of course in the novel, the border that concerns the president is the one to the United States’ north.

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A brief explanation of Subsidized Time

“Another”

Mike at brownstudy wrote last week: “I dread hearing the word ‘another.’” That’s how I feel.

Uni-ball Signo FTW

From an obituary for the cartoonist Michael Crawford, a recollection from his wife Carolita Johnson:

“When one of the doctors at the hospital was trying to assess Michael’s mental acuity she picked up some random pen and asked, ‘Mr. Crawford, what would you do with this?’” Ms. Johnson wrote. “And he replied ‘I wouldn’t do anything with that. I use a Uni-ball Signo.’”

[My favorite gel pen: the Uni-ball Signo RT.]

Van Gogh’s ear

The New York Times has a good article about Vincent van Gogh’s left ear. Unlike the Telegraph article that Arts & Letters Daily recently linked to, the Times article makes clear that there is still no consensus about just what Van Gogh did to his ear.

I must admit though that after reading 500+ pages of Van Gogh’s letters, it never occurred to me to wonder whether Van Gogh severed an ear or part of an ear. Is the second possibility really any less horrifying than the first?

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Cleary and the critics

[Endpaper. Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).]

It’s pleasure to open a library copy of a children’s book and find traces of previous readers — if only underlined words (“vocabulary words”) or passages marked off, perhaps for reading aloud. This library copy of Sister of the Bride though is exceptional:

A great book
         Yah!
            Yah!

The
    Grooviest!!
Goovrest

  Very
Groovy!

  A
Fab!
Wow!
Book

I suspect a Beatle influence in the first and last comments. Yeah, yeah, yeah!

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Roguish Gramma

Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

There’s an occasional kiss in the Cleary First Love series, but nothing else like Gramma’s comment. I imagine that it prompted any number of young readers to look up roguishly , make a puzzled face, and keep reading.

Like Lady Elaine Fairchild’s “Here it is, my lovely can”, Gramma’s comment is a naughty speck in a chaste fictional universe.

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An apple name

Yes, Mr. McIntosh, there was a Granny Smith.

Mark Trail , all too doppelgänger-y

Mark Trail meanders along its bewildering way. Mark turned up in the Rio Grande on June 22 after a long journey through caverns measureless to man. And then the strip went back in time: “Two years ago, not far from Hawaii.” An insipid couple, whom we have come to know as Darling (he) and Honey (she) are sailing to New Zealand. “We’ll be in New Zealand soon!” says Darling. (Good luck with that.) Long story short: Darling and Honey take a break to sleep away the night on a tiny island, “not far from Hawaii.” While carrying firewood from the boat to shore, Darling is bitten by what will turn out to be a red imported fire ant. I’m guessing, but a later strip shows something that looks like an ant, and it’s bright red.

  
[Mark Trail , June 28, July 1, July 2, 2016. Click for larger views.]

Back in the present, Mark is planning a vacation with Cherry, just the two of them, to Hawaii. Today, however, we’re back on the tiny island. But look: that’s not Honey in a green hat and bikini, two years back in time. It’s Abbey Powell, a real person at the USDA who appeared in a Trail story in 2015. She’s back. Follow that bird!


[Mark Trail , July 13, 2016. Click for a larger view.]

James Allen has given considerable attention to the female form of late, first with Honey and now with Abbey Powell. (Browse for yourself.) It’s a pity that Allen’s artistic imagination allows only one color for bikinis and hats: that makes things unnecessarily confusing. At least Honey and Ms. Powell have been granted different hat bands. But still: it’s all too doppelgänger-y.

Allen has assured his readers in a comment on today’s strip that Abbey is going to tell us what happened to Darling and Honey. I assume that they got in big trouble with the red imported fire ant, aka RIFA, either by bringing ashore the firewood that introduced the invasive species to the tiny island or by being bitten to death, or both.

It’s enough to make someone say “uunngghh.” Cough. Cough.

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