“The only variable”

“The only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns”: “What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings?” (The New York Times).

See also: Call My Congress.

Editing his balloons

One more bit about Ernie Bushmiller’s care with words:

According to his associate James Carlsson, Bushmiller would line up each week’s worth of unfinished Nancy strips on his studio wall and scrutinize every line of dialogue. Harry Haenigsen noted that “Ernie said when he wrote his captions, he wrote them as if he were writing telegrams,” which are charged by the word. “He eliminated anything — any word that, to him, was not necessary to express his ideas. He was very careful about how he edited his balloons.”

Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden, How to Read “Nancy”: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels (Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2017).

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Bushmiller, Strunk, and Wilde

Valentine’s Day

[“Heart (ib) from string of amulets.” From an Egyptian tomb, c. 1070–945 BCE. Carnelian. 1/2″ × 5/16″. Metropolitan Museum of Art. From the online collection.]

Happy Valentine’s Day to all.

[More about the heart, or ib, and amulets here.]

The Foot Clinic sign

Los Angeles’s Foot Clinic sign (happy foot/sad foot) comes to life in a music video by YACHT: “Hard World.”

In 2011 I had the chance to see and photograph the Foot Clinic sign, which I first met in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King.

Resentment

Alas, this essay is behind the paywall: “How Academe Breeds Resentment” (The Chronicle of Higher Education). Change a few words, and what Douglas Dowland says could apply to any workplace:

Resentment is essentially the feeling of being wronged by someone with more power than you. In academe, such feelings come with the job: associate professors can feel resentful toward full professors; small departments toward larger; a newcomer to a discipline at a teaching-intensive institution toward a well-regarded scholar at a research-intensive institution. Every striation of academe spurs resentment: the hierarchies of administration, the nebulous work of committees, the new hire whose salary may be higher than yours. Surrounding each step in academic life — graduation, employment, publication, promotion — is a labyrinth that draws out our vulnerability and makes us feel powerless. And with this powerlessness comes the idea that power is something others have — perhaps the tenured, or those in administration. Someone benefits from your hard work — and that person is not you. Thus academe plants the seeds of our resentment. . . .

It may resemble thinking, but resentment ultimately has little intelligence. And it never comes with a solution. It just keeps going and going, broadening the scope of its toxicity and finding new circumstances to blame for some perceived wrong.

Yep. I learned long ago not to live by making comparisons. It’s better to laugh.

See also this advice: “Grin broadly at the water cooler, and go home to where you live.”

[A clarification: Sexual harassment or racial discrimination or inequities of all sorts aren’t matters to laugh off. Not at all. But the constant comparison-making that academic life seems to encourage (who got what) guarantees unhappiness. There will always be someone with a better job offer or a more prestigious place of publication. And there will always be far smaller occasions for resentment: how someone voted on a proposal, who got what course, and so on. There’s no end to making comparisons.]

Bastard file

I just used such a file to make a door accommodate a new knob. But why is it called a bastard file?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines bastard file as “a file intermediate between the coarse and fine ‘cuts.’” The dictionary notes that as early as 1418 the word bastard was applied to things “of abnormal shape or irregular (esp. unusually large) size”: swords and guns at first, followed by ships, files, type and printed titles, and script. The dictionary’s first citation for bastard file, from Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises; or, The doctrine of Handy-Works (1678):

The Bastard-Tooth’d File is to take out of your work the deep cuts … the Rough File made: the Fine Tooth’d file is to take out the cuts . . . the Bastard file made.

The bastard file appears then to be that other file, not this one, not that one, neither rough nor fine.

A more fanciful explanation of bastard file appears on a British tool company’s website:

In heraldry, coats of arms belonging to people born outside of wedlock (also known as bastards) bore a device known as the “barre sinister,” a diagonal stripe that ran from the top right of the crest to the bottom left.

This is the same direction that the teeth of a single cut file run in.

That bastard was first applied to things with no resemblance to the barre sinister makes this explanation, to my mind, unlikely. Another fanciful explanation, which brings in a fellow with an unfortunate surname:

The name is a misnomer in that the file was invented by an Englishman named Barsted. When English workers came to the United States and requested a Barsted file, Americans thought this was the English pronunciation for “bastard.”

Richard Pohanish, Glossary of Metalworking Terms (New York: Industrial Press, 2003).

That’s a good story. But it seems impossible to find any trace of Mr. Barsted outside the story of the bastard file. And if bastard was applied to irregular things as early as 1418, this explanation won’t work.

But the bastard file worked, and we now have a door that accommodates its knob.

“Impostor Syndrome”

[“Impostor Syndrome,” xkcd, February 12, 2018.]

The mouseover text: “It’s actually worst in people who study the Dunning–Kruger effect. We tried to organize a conference on it, but the only people who would agree to give the keynote were random undergrads.”

;;;;;;;;

From the Department of Wait, What: Do you remember the 2017 court case in which the absence of an Oxford comma (or serial comma) was crucial? The section of the Maine law at issue in that case has been amended in an unusually ungainly way: by the addition not of one comma but of eight semicolons.

Before:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment or distribution of:

(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

After:

The canning; processing; preserving; freezing; drying; marketing; storing; packing for shipment; or distributing of:

(1) Agricultural produce;
(2) Meat and fish products; and
(3) Perishable foods.

What I would consider a real improvement:

The canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, packing for shipment, or distributing of:

(1) agricultural produce,
(2) meat or fish products, or
(3) perishable foods.

Replacing the semicolons is common (or comma) sense. Replacing and with or forestalls the persnickety argument that the provision (which governs overtime pay) applies to work with meat and fish products or to work with all three categories of foodstuffs. The legislature did get something right in changing distribution to distributing: the new word lines up with the other gerunds.

Paper jams

Vicki Warner, an engineer at Xerox: “Printers are essentially paper torture chambers.” In the latest The New Yorker, Joshua Rothman learns “Why Paper Jams Persist.”

From the Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Frank Longo, is a tough one. Much trickery along the way, and some sheer difficulty. What was the name of J. Edgar Hoover’s fourth successor? Not a name that one can easily derive from crosses, not without already knowing the name.

I especially like the clues for 18-Across and 59-Across, each ten letters: “It won’t click beyond a circle” and “Tall twin, say.” No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Finishing the Saturday Stumper once again feels like cause for minor self-congratulation.