Watch-band calendar

A message from the dowdy world arrived in our mailbox: a Myles Kimball catalogue. I was immediately drawn to its watch-band calendar. Because how else will you plan ahead? From the catalogue description:

Always have a calendar handy. Oval brushed-metal watchband calendars wrap easily around your watchband. Reversible: gold-tone on one side, silver-tone on the other, so watchband calendar plates will match most watches. 12 plates in a handy storage pouch. 5/8" x 1 1/2". Fit bands 5/8" to 1" wide.

Not just twelve plates and two tones, but also a handy storage pouch. I daresay that this item out-dowdies anything sold by the Vermont Country Store.

Desk, Kafkaesque

In Karl Rossmann’s room is “an American writing desk of the very finest sort”:


Franz Kafka, Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared), trans. from the German by Michael Hoffman (New York: New Directions, 2002).

Another Kafka post
Cabbing with Kafka

“It’s getting kind of crowded in here”

As the head count at Trump Tower rises, I am reminded of a great moment in film.


[A Night at the Opera (dir. Sam Wood, 1935).]

Another modest proposal

About that job listing: Rosemary Feal, executive director of the Modern Language Association, calls it “pure exploitation.” What she proposes: “Double the salary and limit the working hours to 25 per week or pay pro rata for the additional hours necessary to do the job.”

I have another proposal: ban departments that engage in such exploitation from listing jobs (any jobs) in the MLA Job Information List and from interviewing at the MLA convention. If the MLA can establish an Academic Workforce Data Center, and if The Chronicle of Higher Education can establish a salary database, it is certainly possible to make use of such data (and other data) in the interest of, as they say, best practices.

The person who now holds the position advertised in the now-infamous listing has significant accomplishments: a research fellowship, a teaching award, eight articles published or to appear, a book to appear. Perhaps he’s moving on to better things. But academia is not.

A related post
Modest proposals to improve academia

[The now-infamous listing does not appear in the JIL.]

A job listing

A job listing from the University of Illinois-Chicago. Further commentary and response here. It feels like the future, and not just for Illinois.

Thanks to Diane Schirf for passing on the news.

A farewell to arm

[Hi and Lois, July 18, 2017. Click for a larger view.]

Forget that Irma looks a lot like Hi. Other women in the strip have looked a lot like Hi. It’s Irma’s arm I see, or what’s missing of it.

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Crusty diction

Donald Trump today described John McCain as “a crusty voice in Washington.” And just today Charles Blow was writing about Trump’s diction.

Photobucket fail

[Uh-oh.]

In the late aughts, I began to upload images to Photobucket for use on Orange Crate Art. I recall some sort of problem back then with images uploaded directly to Blogger. When Blogger began working properly again, I forgot all about Photobucket — until yesterday, when I noticed the above image taking the place of a photograph in an old post. And thus I learned about recent doings at Photobucket. Long story short: in late June, Photobucket changed its terms of service. This change came without warning to the service’s users. Third-party hosting (or “3rd Party Hosting,” as Photobucket calls it) now requires that a user sign up for a plan that costs $399.99 a year. In other words, if you’ve uploaded images to Photobucket, embedded them elsewhere, and want the images to keep showing up where they’ve always showed up, it’ll cost you — a lot.

Or it won’t. Yesterday afternoon I spent a couple of hours uploading missing images to Blogger, sixty-odd images in all. Some of the posts that lost their images are still (surprisingly) popular. No matter: things should be right, even if a post never gets read again. When I was done, I deleted my Photobucket account. Good riddance. But if I’d made greater use of Photobucket, I’d really be in the soup now. Just look at what Twitter has to say about #photobucket.

On top of the preposterous “$399.99,” the meter in that placeholder picture is an extra dab of stupid. Have my sixty-odd images really exceeded some measurable limit for “3rd Party Hosting Usage”? Only if the limit for usage is any.

[From the Photobucket website: “Photobucket defines 3rd party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website. For example, using the <img> tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, auction listing, blog, etc. is definitively 3rd party hosting.” “Definitively”? Who writes this stuff?]

Disable autoplay videos in Safari

Here’s what works for me:

In Terminal (with Safari closed), type (as one line)

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 1

Open Safari, go to the Debug menu, and choose Video Needs User Action. That prevents the endlessly proliferating videos on news sites and elsewhere from playing on their own. The only downside: it’s now necessary to click twice to play a video.

If you would like to hide the Debug menu: quit Safari, and in Terminal, type (as one line)

defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeInternalDebugMenu 0

I found this fix (along with what might be less satisfactory Safari fixes) in a post at Kirk McElhearn’s Kirkville. The post also has (much easier) fixes to disable autoplay in Chrome, Firefox, and Opera.

[Note: the Terminal commands include a space after com.apple.Safari. High Sierra, the forthcoming version of macOS, is said to make it much easier to disable autoplay in Safari.]

Martin Landau (1928–2017)

The New York Times obituary describes him as

the tall, intense, sometimes mischievously sinister actor best known for his role in the television series Mission: Impossible and his Oscar-winning portrayal of Bela Lugosi in the film Ed Wood.

Also best known, I’d say, for his portrayal of Leonard in North by Northwest. Don’t leave out Leonard.