Arf, arf, arf

The New York Times reports that two of Barbra Streisand’s three dogs are clones of a fourth now-dead Streisand dog. For those keeping score, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett are clones of the late Samantha.

[The threat level to reality is high. Reality is turning into a David Foster Wallace novel.]

“Welcome to the Internet”

[“EarthLink will connect you at up to 56Kbps.” Click for a larger disc.]

I moved a printer and made a discovery. Look at the RAM requirement for Earthlink’s dial-up app: 32, 64, or 128MB. (The Mac I’m typing on has 8GB RAM.) And the operating systems: remember Windows ME, the Millennium Edition? Worst Windows ever. (Shudder.)

This disc has a 2002 copyright date. EarthLink is still in business in 2018, and still offering dial-up service. But it’s time to let this disc go, no?

Link Maker, a Safari extension

I have long searched for a Safari extension that can create a link with a title or selected text from a webpage — something like the now-antique Firefox extensions CopyURL+ and QuoteURLText. The Mac App Store has nothing. But I finally found a useful extension: Link Maker by Chee@CMONOS.

Link Maker offers a vast array of choices for creating links. I configured the extension to create links in just two ways: with a page title or with selected text. If, for instance, I’m writing a blog post and want to link to Lindy West’s New York Times piece “What the White House Knew About Rob Porter,” I can point to the link, right-click, and choose HTML. If I’m reading the essay, I can right-click anywhere, choose HTML, and create a link. If I want to link to text from West’s essay, say, to the phrase “a promised return to some midcentury mirage of American ‘greatness,’” I can highlight that text, right-click, and choose HTML + text. I have added the quotation marks in these links by hand, but it would be just as easy to have Link Maker create links with quotation marks already in place. The menu choices HTML and HTML + text are mine: one could change those names to Link and Link with text, or to anything else.

Link Maker isn’t as efficient as I’d like: it’s still necessary to copy the link it creates to the clipboard before pasting elsewhere. (The old Firefox extensions sent stuff to the clipboard automatically. I’m not sure Safari allows that.) Still, Link Maker makes the work of creating links much less tedious. I’ll probably use my old standby aText. But I like knowing that there’s an extension that can more or less do what I was looking for. Thank you, Chee@CMONOS, for sharing your good work.

[After writing this post, I decided not to multiply entities without necessity. In other words, I’m still using aText to make links. But a link-making Safari extension is so difficult to find that I still wanted to give Link Maker some attention here.]

Pencils in the news

The Guardian reports that increasing number of English schoolchildren are unable to hold a pencil properly. The reason: too much technology. Sally Payne, pediatric occupational therapist:

“It’s easier to give a child an iPad than encouraging them to do muscle-building play such as building blocks, cutting and sticking, or pulling toys and ropes. Because of this, they’re not developing the underlying foundation skills they need to grip and hold a pencil.”

Related reading
All OCA pencil posts (Pinboard)

From Beware of Pity

Anton Hofmiller has realized something, or thinks so:


Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity, trans. Phyllis and Trevor Blewitt (New York: New York Review Books, 2006).

Elaine and I are beginning Zweig’s only finished novel, the last of his fiction left to us to read.

Related reading
All OCA Stefan Zweig posts (Pinboard)

Flagston floor plan

[No doubt by Dik Browne. Click for a larger floor plan.]

Behold an undated floor plan for Hi and Lois Flagston’s house. I love the thoroughness with which the artist has imagined his characters’ world: the stairs between the dining room and kitchen must lead to the basement. And notice how small the television set is, next to what must be the fireplace.

The plan appears in Brian Walker’sThe Best of “Hi and Lois” by Mort Walker and Dik Browne (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2005).

Related reading
All OCA Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

Flowers knows best

In the Father Knows Best episode “Kathy’s Big Chance” (November 13, 1957), Jim Anderson (Robert Young) tells daughter Kathy (Lauren Chapin) what she needs to do to write a better essay:

“You should do more reading. Make a lot of notes. Organize your material. And then start writing.”

Jim and Kathy seem well on their way to working out Betty Sue Flowers’s four-part model for a writer’s work: madman, architect, carpenter, judge.

Another struggling writer who could benefit from this model: Sally Brown. In today’s Peanuts, she begins writing a report on “The Ocean”:

The ocean is full of water. “Ha!” You may say. “What else?” That’s a good question.

Then a pause. And then: “Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down on these reports.”

Real-world writers of all ages can also benefit from the Flowers model, whose memorable metaphors make clear that writing well requires many different kinds of work. Granularity and all that. You can’t just sit down with an ocean full of water.

Once I discovered the Flowers model (via Bryan Garner), I shared it with all my classes in my final five years of teaching. I liked to extend the metaphors: start building a house without a blueprint and you’ll be left trying to figure out what to do about bathrooms; start thinking about knobs for the kitchen cabinets when you’re looking at a vacant lot and you’ll never get anywhere.

Betty Sue Flowers knows best.

Other posts about this surprisingly good television series
“Betty’s Graduation” : “Margaret Disowns Her Family” : “A Woman in the House”

[Hulu has all six seasons of Father Knows Best.]

The OED, a “moving document”

In The Guardian, Andrew Dickson reports on the Oxford English Dictionary in the Internet age, as the dictionary attempts “to be ever so slightly more complete today than it was yesterday or the day before.” Will a third edition ever appear?

The dictionary team now prefer to refer to [the OED] as a “moving document.” Words are only added; they are never deleted. When I suggested to [chief editor] Michael Proffitt that it resembled a proud but leaky Victorian warship whose crew were trying to keep out the leaks and simultaneously keep it on course, he looked phlegmatic. “I used to say it was like painting the Forth Bridge, never-ending. But then they stopped — a new kind of paint, I think.” He paused. “Now it’s just us.”

[Painting the Forth Bridge: a colloquial expression.]

At the poetry tournament

Indeed, it was a tournament, not a slam. The contestants were seated at tables. Someone was interviewing Martha Raye. Frank O’Hara walked around taking photographs. “It’s America,” he said. “There are prizes.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[A source, as Elaine figured out: an episode of Father Knows Best in which Kathy enters an essay contest and gets to meet Greer Garson. Another: a reference to Frank O’Hara in an article about Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird.]

NPR, sheesh

The “Democratic memo” didn’t drop. The House Intelligence Committee released it.

Movies and records drop. But as Elaine said at breakfast, “This isn’t show business.”

Things that should drop: hints, balloons, a line, the other shoe. Pins, as long as you can hear them. The mic, though I hate that spelling. I’m out.

Related reading
All OCA sheesh posts (Pinboard)
Ambiguous drop (Dropping a threat)