New glasses

New glasses, so a new photograph in the sidebar. Thank you, Elaine. (For the photograph, I mean.) I think the glasses look rather spiffy. As does the Ethnic Music Festival poster in the background. I found that poster in 1979, in the vicinity of Columbia University. The festival date had passed, so the poster became mine. Only years later, as a full-fledged grown-up, did I get it framed.

I followed, more or less, the convoluted procedure in this post to create a new Profile. (Google does not make things easy.) One difference: it’s no longer necessary to get a screenshot of a photograph with a border added; a border for some reason now shows up automatically.

Is my beard really that white? Only in photographs.

[A question for Google: when you look at a Blogger Profile page and click on View Full Size, why is the resulting photograph smaller than the one on the Profile page?]

Opportunity knocks

From The Big Bluff (dir. W. Lee Wilder, 1955). A schemer speaks:

“An opportunity like this knocks only once — and I know when to open the door.”

Like, uhh, when there’s a knock?

[W. Lee Wilder: Billy’s brother, but you’d never know it from this movie.]

Making by hand

Rosemary Hill, art historian:

To make objects by hand in an industrial society, to work slowly and uneconomically against the grain, is to offer, however inadvertently, a critique of that society.

From “Explorations of a Third Space,” Times Literary Supplement, April 23, 1999. Quoted in Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000).

I’d like to think of objects very broadly, so as to include, say, a garden, or a handwritten letter.

Stornography

The New York Times reports on the television-news practice of standing in a storm to report on it. I think we need a word to describe this commodification of horrific weather into televised spectacle. My suggestion: stornography. Or storn, for short.

I still remember (1990s?) an unfortunately hilarious CBS Evening News broadcast with Dan Rather standing in a storm somewhere, hanging on to a lamppost or street sign and trying to talk as the wind blew rain into his face. I didn’t know though that, as the Times reports, Rather originated this kind of reporting in 1961.

*

September 14: The word may be catching on.

A de Kooning, stolen and recovered

“It’s hard to believe that they were that — I don’t know what the word for it is”: a retired schoolteacher and his son may have stolen a Willem de Kooning painting from an Arizona museum. The details make the story sound like something for the Coen brothers.

WTC

[From a depiction of the Manhattan skyline on a Chock full o’Nuts coffee can, c. 2003. The World Trade Center was removed from the Chock full o’Nuts label in 2004. We have an empty can with the old label sitting atop a file cabinet in our house.]

“Very, very insensitive”

Scott Pruitt, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, thinks that it’s inappropriate to talk about climate change right now. It’s “very, very insensitive,” he says.

The same kind of response follows a mass shooting: it’s not the time to talk about gun-ownership rights. And another shooting follows.

Related posts
Too early again : December 14, 2012

[“Right now”: Irma.]

Bill McKibben in Alaska

At The New Yorker, Bill McKibben explains: “I Went All the Way to the Alaskan Wilderness to Escape Donald Trump, But You Don’t Have To.” McKibben acknowledges that while in Alaska’s Brooks Range he still thought about Trump, but without reacting, because “he wasn’t there to break into my thoughts, or my Twitter timeline, at every turn.” McKibben’s astonishing conclusion: “It’s probably not necessary to get quite so far back into the woods; any place without Internet will do.” And also without newspapers? Radio? Television?

I offered Bill McKibben free advice about technology and distraction in 2008. I’ll offer some more advice now: Stay off Twitter. Or check it just a couple of times a day. Or block certain users. Managing one’s attention can begin at home. Self-reliance and all that.

[The title of McKibben’s piece bespeaks such condescension, such privilege. Titles aren’t always the work of the writer: was someone at The New Yorker having a little fun at the McKibben’s expense? My alternative title: “I Went All the Way to the Alaskan Wilderness to Escape Donald Trump, But You Can’t Afford To.”]

WSJ Puzzle

The Wall Street Journal claims to offer “America’s most elegant, adventurous and addictive crosswords and other word games.” I’m not sure that’s so, but the crosswords at WSJ Puzzle are excellent: challenging and clever, not corny, not contrived. And free. I especially like the wit that turns up in non-theme clues for ordinary words. In today’s puzzle by Roger and Kathy Wienberg, for instance, 71-Across, five letters: “Tell tale item.” No spoilers: the answer is in the comments.

[“Not corny, not contrived”: I find The New York Times crossword too often corny or contrived or both.]

A 1957 Mongol advertisement

[Life, April 1, 1957. Click for a larger view.]

One year earlier, an Eberhard Faber advertisement touted the Mongol as writing 2,162 words for one cent. In that ad Mongols were priced at fifteen cents for two. So one Mongol equalled 2,162 × 7.5, or 16,215 words. Now it’s 1957, and a Mongol writes fifteen more words, but the price per word is higher: only 1,623 words for one cent.

The number that really commands my attention in this ad: 88. As in: “88 per cent of America’s writing is done with a woodcased pencil.” The importance of being analog.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)