Some winter rocks

The Google Doodle for the Northern Hemisphere’s first day of winter: some rocks, some shivering snow-capped rocks. Not, strictly speaking, “some rocks” — that is, three rocks — but some rocks. Or “some” rocks.

Thanks, Martha, for bringing these rocks to my attention.

[“Some rocks”: a motif in Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy, and in these pages.]

“This Week in Hate”

At The New York Times, a fourth installment of “This Week in Hate.”

A Brooklyn bar menu

Why not make your own?

See also: “Adjective Foods.”

[Make here means “to generate by clicking.”]

Blue-light special

Not long ago I noticed pumpkins and squash bathed in an eerie orange light. Well, they had an orange light shining on them. There was no bathing, and nothing eerie. It was just the produce section.

Now I’ve noticed what The Crow mentioned seeing: blue light in the produce section.



And here’s why:


[Turnips, radishes, rutabagas, parsley, kohlrabi, rhubarb, and leeks with a blue light shining on them. Why do some vegetables lack separate plural forms?]

Reaching for a book

Eliot Weinberger, quoted in a New Yorker piece about his writing: “‘When I hear the word “Trump,”’ he said, ‘I reach for a book.’”

What books are you reaching for? Me: Stefan Zweig’s Collected Stories (trans. Anthea Bell), Bryan A. Garner’s The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation, Harry R. Warfel’s Who Killed Grammar? And Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, which leads back to current events.

M-W Word of the Year

Not fascism, which was never a contender. Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year is surreal.

Long overdue

The New York Times reports that a copy of Gone with the Wind has been returned to the library, fifty-seven years late.

Related posts
A real-life Bookman : Spanish-English dictionary returned to library after fifty-four years

A 2017 calendar

Free for the downloading: a 2017 calendar, by me, in Gill Sans, three months per page, rather dowdy in appearance. I’ve kept the traditional black and dark red (licorice and cayenne, as Apple would have it) and added hints of green (clover) and orange (tangerine). Right-click the link above to download a copy.

And for anyone who’d like to try Dropbox (where I’ve stashed a copy of the calendar for downloading), here’s a referral link, which gets you (and me) 500 MB extra storage. But you don’t need Dropbox to get the calendar.

Not from The Onion

[The New York Times, December 19, 2016.]

I suppose that a genuine Onion headline would have Stallone agreeing to chair the National Endowment for the Arts.

In other news, the Times introduced an error in subject-verb agreement in reporting this story:

[Trump] later said that an education in critical thinking, reading, writing and math are “the keys to economic success,” but he added that “a holistic education that includes literature and the arts is just as critical to creating good citizens.”

In the Washington Post article that the Times is quoting, Trump (or whoever wrote his responses) got the subject and verb right:

Critical thinking skills, the ability to read, write and do basic math are still the keys to economic success.

It’s possible to read the Times sentence as making “an education in critical thinking” the first item in a series, followed by “reading, writing and math,” but I think that’s a stretch. “An education in [four things]” is the sensible way to read the sentence.

Back in our lead story: the Times also reports that Stallone thinks “he would be more effective in helping military veterans.”

Man, oh man

From a November New York Times book review:

Man has sped up his own response times. It now takes us only 10-15 years to get used to the sort of technological changes that we used to absorb in a couple of generations.

But the response time of that sentence isn’t anything like adequate. “Man has sped up”: that language stands out as painfully dated. The Times’s Manual of Style and Usage has cautioned against the language of man since 1999 (and perhaps earlier):

Expressions built on man or mankind strike many readers as a slight to the role of women through history. In a few cases, those expressions may result unavoidably from idiom or a literary allusion. But the writer and editor should weigh the graceful alternatives: humanity, perhaps, or human race or people.

I like humankind, which always takes me back to T. S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton: “Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

Scott Pelley of the CBS Evening News has the man problem too. And yes, in 2016 it’s a problem.

[How did “Man has sped up” get past an editor?]