This television commercial for the ASUS T102 has a statement that I find terribly sad: “Technology is the only thing that really entertains us.” It’s spoken by one of the “Hulford quads,” quadruplet girls, eight-graders. We see them using Windows 10 in a windowless room, sitting at a table that resembles those one might see in a Microsoft Store (which resemble those one might see in an Apple Store).
I know that those words were written for one of the girls to say. The commercial itself appears to belie the claim: photographs show the girls sledding and hiking and looking out on a lake or ocean; in the windowless room, they dance. Or perhaps those activities are merely weak substitutes for what technology alone can provide. Poor quads.
From an Atlantic piece, “Has the Internet Killed Curly Quotes?”:
Paul Ford, a writer and programmer known for his thoughts about how code affects culture, notes that even on a mobile device “the energy to type a curly quote feels prohibitive. You have to hold down the quote. The effort of typing one on a regular keyboard [also] can be prohibitive.” Some software automatically swaps in the “smart” quote, but doesn’t always get the right curl (decades should always be ’90s, but autoformat software often drops in ‘90s). For wonks, you can find cheatsheets for explicit shortcuts on desktop machines, like Shift-Option-] for a curly apostrophe on the Mac, but it requires additional effort and memorization.Oh, the arduousness. To my mind it’s a simple matter to make a curly quotation mark using an iPhone: the effort of “holding down” is only metaphorical when touching a finger to a glass screen. And the effort on a keyboard is hardly “prohibitive.” Shift-Option-] (or ⇧-⌥-], to be fancy about it) and other key combinations become second nature with a little practice. Typing Option-[ and Shift-Option-[ in sequence gives a pair of smart quotation marks — “” — that you can fill as you please. “Make something up,” he suggested.
The fifth installment of the New York Times feature “This Week in Hate”: “The Scope of Hate in 2016.” You can find all installments here.
[From James Sowerby‘s British Mineralogy: or coloured figures intended to elucidate the mineralogy of Great Britain (London: 1804). Made available through the British Library’s Flickr account. Click for a larger view.]
Related reading
More “some rocks” posts : More “some rocks” from the British Library
Our title, Speak Truth to Power, taken from a charge given to Eighteenth Century Friends, suggests the effort that is made to speak from the deepest insight of the Quaker faith, as this faith is understood by those who prepared this study. We speak to power in three senses:The Yellow Springs motto seems to alter the meaning of to: here, it indicates not direction (speaking to power) but contact or proximity (welding truth to power). And it’s all semantic nonsense, as one cannot craft one abstraction (or one anything) to another. One more strike against the vogue verb craft.
• To those who hold high places in our national life and bear the terrible responsibility of making decisions for war or peace.
• To the American people who are the final reservoir of power in this country and whose values and expectations set the limits for those who exercise authority.
• To the idea of Power itself, and its impact on Twentieth Century life.
[Chinatown (dir. Roman Polanski, 1974). Click for a larger view.]
“Isn’t that your number?” a cop asks. But which one? The exchanges, clockwise: OX, OL, MA, CR. Let’s say OXford, OLympia, MAdison, CRestview. I’ve chosen those names from AT&T/Bell’s Notes on Nationwide Dialing, 1955. Why not choose an EXchange name for your number? It’s arrière-garde fun!
More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Armored Car Robbery : Baby Face : Blast of Silence : The Blue Dahlia : Boardwalk Empire : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dick Tracy’s Deception : Dream House : East Side, West Side : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Modern Marvels : Murder by Contract : Murder, My Sweet : My Week with Marilyn : Naked City (1) : Naked City (2) : Naked City (3) : Naked City (4) : Naked City (5) : Naked City (6) : Naked City (7) : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Railroaded! : Side Street : Sweet Smell of Success : Tension : This Gun for Hire
Stefan Zweig, “The Star Above the Forest.” 1904. The Collected Stories of Stefan Zweig. Trans. Anthea Bell (London: Pushkin Press, 2013).
I love these Zweig stories, which turn stock elements of fiction into the stuff of small masterpieces: a castle, footsteps on a gravel path, a distant forest, a weeping governess, a letter left on a breakfast table, an old painter, a waiter in a grand hotel.
Other Zweig posts
Destiny, out of one’s hands : Erasmus ekphrasis : Fanaticism and reason : Happy people, poor psychologists : Little world : “The safest shelter” : School v. city : “A tremendous desire for order” : Urban pastoral, with stationery : Zweig’s last address book
[Plunder Road (dir. Hubert Cornfield, 1957).]
Yes, that phone is about to ring. Click for a larger view and you can see the Interoffice Telephone Directory.
Plunder Road is one of our household’s YouTube finds.
