From Mascots (dir. Christopher Guest, 2016). Greg Gammons Jr. (Fred Willard) is watching a pencil-and-sharpener mascot performance:
“That’s one of the last joys in life, sharpening a pencil. It’s hard to do that wrong.”Mascots is streaming at Netflix. Not the best Guest, but still a pleasure, with all the usual suspects and a special Guest appearance.
A biographical squib:
Alex Small is a tenured associate professor of physics at California State Polytechnic University at Pomona. When people are watching, he facilitates learner-centered activities for the accomplishment of learning objectives and engages in production of scholarly knowledge in interdisciplinary paradigms. When people aren’t watching, he just teaches physics and does research on biological applications of optics.Administrative types could benefit from Small’s advice.
Alex Small, “Tips for Managing Curmudgeons” (The Chronicle of Higher Education).
From Honoré de Balzac’s story “Sarrasine.” La Zambinella speaks:
“Orgies do harm to my voice.”She means, of course, wild parties — nothing more.
The Human Comedy: Selected Stories , trans. from the French by Linda Asher, Carol Cosman, and Jordan Stump (New York: New York Review Books, 2014). This story translated by Stump.
From a description of Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1523 portrait of Erasmus:
Stefan Zweig, Erasmus of Rotterdam , trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (New York: Viking, 1934).
The painting hangs in the Louvre. Wikipedia has a large, clear reproduction, much larger than this one:
[Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam .]
Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : Zweig’s last address book
A campaign spokesman, speaking of his candidate to an anchor on CNN:
“He’s not going to be a wallflower that’s going to get pushed around.”I can’t imagine what metaphor this spokesman was reaching for. But it certainly wasn’t wallflower . Perhaps he was confusing school dances, where the meek stand off to the side, and school hallways, where the meek get pushed up against the lockers.
From A Face in the Crowd (dir. Elia Kazan, 1957). Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) asks Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) a question:
“But how does it feel?”Lonesome Rhodes is a product, really, made for radio and television. He refuses to follow scripts. His people, as he describes them:
“How does what feel?”
“Saying anything that comes into your head and being able to sway people like this?”
“Yeah, I guess I can.” [Pauses .] “Yeah, I guess I can.”
“Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers, everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. . . . Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ’em.”And there’s more. A Face in the Crowd is disturbingly prophetic.
My dad was volunteering at a senior-citizens center, showing silent movies. He would “load the software,” then talk about and show a movie. And to my surprise, he was smoking: True cigarettes. I asked him if they were regular (in the blue pack), or menthol (green). He didn’t know, which surprised me, but I didn’t press it.
In August my dad dropped into a less puzzling dream. I hope I’ll see him again soon.
[In real life, my dad never touched cigarettes. His own father had begun smoking at the age of ten and went on to smoke for sixty-odd years (Camels), becoming apartment-bound with emphysema and dying of lung cancer, years after quitting. I remember the True pack as it looked in the 1970s.]
I tried my hand, or index finger, at composing a scientific paper with iOS’s autocomplete. I like the way this first sentence came out:
Atomic energy is the best thing ever to get the most Proustian and the most recent fact of the day.I lost interest though, as autocomplete began to obsess about Proustian , recent , and Wikipedia . I wouldn’t want to use Wikipedia in a scientific paper.
When Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at HIT Lab NZ, received an e-mail inviting him to submit a paper for the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics, he found himself with a problem. And a solution: “Since I have practically no knowledge of Nuclear Physics I resorted to iOS auto-complete function to help me writing the paper.”
And his abstract was accepted. Read all about it: iOS Just Got a Paper on Nuclear Physics Accepted at a Scientific Conference. A sample sentence from the abstract:
Molecular diagnostics will have been available for the rest by a single day and a good day to the rest have a wonderful time and aggravation for the rest day at home time for the two of us will have a great place for the rest to be great for you tomorrow and tomorrow after all and I am a very happy boy to the great day and I hope he is wonderful.The invitation, of course, was an instance of academic spam. Sketchy conferences and journals and invitations abound. See also the classic collaborative paper written in response to another such invitation: “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List.”
I can’t really claim to be a Cubs fan. But several people near and dear to me are. Really, really are. Go, Cubs, go!
[“Cubs Defeat Dodgers to Clinch First Pennant Since 1945” (The New York Times).]
