Read this post and save $119

Here is a quick and easy way to save $119: do not buy Snore Circle, a recent bit of technology meant to stop snoring. (Yes, I am the snorer.)

One problem: it’s impossible to switch sides while sleeping with the Snore Circle. Doing so will hurt.

Another problem: even if you can live with sleeping on only one side, the Snore Circle can hurt. Not at first. But after four or five hours, the area behind the ear can become impossibly uncomfortable, even painful. That’s because the Snore Circle is large enough to push the ear out from behind. I tried using the device for four nights and could not last for more than four or five hours a night. I realized how painful this device can be when I was out walking in the cold one morning and felt the ache, still there behind my ear.

One more problem: the cost of returning the Snore Circle to its Chinese manufacturer is prohibitive — about $70 in postage from downstate Illinois. (We paid only $80 for the device by singing up early.) And the company’s e-mails and responses to online comments leave me less than confident that a refund would ever be arriving anyway.

Does Snore Circle reduce snoring? In my case, yes, at least sort of. Setting the device to send a strong signal after a single snore gave me a hellish four or five hours of endlessly waking up. (That’s one way to stop snoring.) Setting the device to send a moderate signal after a ten-snore delay seemed to reduce my snoring by half (if the device’s data, sent to a phone app, is accurate). But again, that’s over only four to five hours, after which I had to remove the device from my ear.

What’s done much more to reduce my snoring, with no electronics and no aching ears: a beans72 buckwheat pillow, recently arrived.

There are so many products popping up now that claim to stop snoring. As I said to Elaine last night, “It looks like the world has fucking had it with snoring.” (And who can blame it?) But the simple stuff — a better pillow, Breathe Right strips, a white-noise machine (i.e., a fan) — might prove more helpful than higher-tech gadgetry.

[Note: beans72 makes no claim that its pillows reduce snoring. Your sleep may vary.]

“Ron Padgett”

The name ”Ron Padgett” seems to be everywhere these days, or at least in many places, and also now in this post. Padgett is the writer whose poems appear in Jim Jarmusch’s new film Paterson.

Here (from the website Ron Padgett) is an introduction to Padgett’s work: “Ron Padgett,” an essay that I wrote for World Poets (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2000), a three-volume reference work edited by Padgett. The essay is meant for students, but it’s good, I think, for all ages.

And here are three more posts that contain the name “Ron Padgett.”

First sentences

My variation on a first-sentences meme from Robert Gable’s aworks: take the first sentence from each year’s posts to make a new-year blog post. So:

“If you’re going to be this uptight and worried about it, you’re not going to be a very happy blogger.” Another adventure in cooking. My wife Elaine mentioned yesterday an observation of Leonard Bernstein’s in his lecture-series The Unanswered Question — that audiences inevitably hear tonal patterns in atonal music. My wife Elaine and I just discovered a wonderful film, Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise (1932). Small calendars for the new year, well designed and free. Poster from the Illinois WPA Art Project, artist unknown. Looking for some resolutions? If you’re stuck fumbling for a resolution or two, you might try Monina Velarde’s Resolution Generator. I’m a sucker for a good free calendar. Click for a larger view. Click for a larger view. Click for a larger view. Caught on tape: “This is a close-up of our real family life: having boring stuff doing.”

[The Resolution Generator is, alas, defunct. I remember “Drink more tea.”]

Fake New Year’s Eve 1916

[“New York Rejects a Fake New Year’s. Apathy Marks the Slim Crowds That Gather for a Cold-Storage Celebration. Hotel Men Are Dejected. With Three Days in Which to Gather a Harvest Their Returns Are Less Than on One ‘Regular’ Day.” The New York Times, January 2, 1917.]

My favorite part of that lengthy headline: “Hotel Men Are Dejected.” But still: Happy New Year.

New Year’s Eve 1916

[“1917, in on Tiptoes, Keeps the Sabbath. Hardly a Horn to Herald Glad New Year’s Arrival in the Great Cabaret Belt. Few Out to Celebrate. Upper Broadway Mostly Dark and Deserted — Churches Get the Best Crowds.” The New York Times, January 1, 1917.]

December 31, 1916, was a Sunday. John P. Mitchel, New York City’s mayor (and party pooper), refused to grant the permits that would have allowed establishments to remain open past one o’clock. So for many hotels and restaurants, the night of January 1, 1917, became New Year’s Eve. How did those establishments fare? Tune in next year to find out.

A poem for the day

Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush” appeared in the weekly newspaper The Graphic on December 28, 1900. “That I could think”: mere self-deception? But “Hope” is “the thing with feathers.”

Domestic comedy

[After deciding not to go to the fancy place to eat.]

“I’ll leave my thesaurus at home.”

Related reading
All OCA domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

Unique Original Pretzel “Splits”

I found Unique Original Pretzel “Splits,” complete with quotation marks, in the local natural-foods store. Yes, an impulse purchase. They’re great pretzels, made of unbleached wheat flour, canola oil, salt, yeast, and soda. They’re pretzels of substance.

I will offer an analogy:

ordinary pretzels : “Splits” :: cardboard box : log cabin.

The company’s website: Unique Pretzel Store.

[Snyder’s is another great Pennsylvania name in pretzels. What is it about pretzels and Pennsylvania? Is it more than mere alliteration? Yes. Wikipedia explains.]

“Technology is the only thing that really entertains us”

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.

Quotation marks and the Internet

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.

As for “additional effort and memorization”: let us recall, say, WordStar commands.

Another good cheatsheet
Straight and curly quotes (Practical Typography)