It got a single sentence in the Associated Press coverage of the latest rallies. But it deserves greater attention. In Bozeman, Montana, November 3, an American president spoke of the beauty of barbed wire at the U.S.–Mexico border:
“And I noticed all that beautiful barbed wire going up today. Barbed wire, used properly, can be a beautiful sight.”Sadism as entertainment. Go to The Washington Post and watch and listen for yourself. I’d say God help us, but God doesn’t vote. So vote.
“How are we going to get the word out?”
“Well, this is the twenty-first century . . . I think I’ll be blogging!”
[From a 2008 Hallmark movie, a lucky catch while flipping channels. Blogging is so early-twenty-first-century.]
[Huh?]
Try as I might, I cannot figure out how to remove search suggestions from Safari on an iPhone XR. Suggestions appear above the keyboard when I tap the address bar after reading a webpage. They appear regardless of my choice of search engine (DuckDuckGo or Google). They appear with some webpages, not all. The suggestions in the screenshot result from an article about a clock master. Side by side, the words pendulum and escapement make me think of the vocabulary work that might have accompanied a middle-school reading assigment.
In iOS Settings, I have disabled every search option for Safari and Siri that I can find, and still, these suggestions appear. They appear even with predictive text disabled. My iPhone 6, also running iOS 12.01, doesn’t show these suggestions, or any suggestions.
Does anyone know how to make these Safari suggestions go away?
[The Internets suggest that a handful of people have asked the same question. A discussion thread at Apple shows the problem, unresolved, since iOS 11. The solution, for now, would seem to be a different browser.]
““It’s a dying art — there are fewer people around today who know what to do with these things”: Marvin Schneider, clock master to New York City.
[Standard time returns at 2:00 a.m. Sunday.]
Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Erik Agard, looked impossible to me. After fifteen minutes or so, I had a grand total of six answers filled in before a plausible answer to 4-Down, eight letters, “Soy protein, in some recipes,” popped into my head. And that answer opened up the puzzle.
Four clues that I especially liked, all with ten-letter answers: 1-Down, “Blood-chilling locales.” 2-Down, “Workplaces with score keepers.” 28-Down, “Line between pants.” 29-Down, “American family structure.”
And one more: 11-Down, six letters, “__ Four (Monkees nickname).”
No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.
I just rediscovered this passage in an eleven-year-old e-mail to Andrew Sullivan. The subject was postmodernism and long sentences. Why did I never think of posting the passage here? Oh — now I have.
Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, trans. Mark Treharne (New York: Penguin, 2002).
A highlight of my OCA life: back in his blogging days, Andrew once made a post with a link to a post of mine. (I had sent him the link.) It was astonishing to see the number of visits to that post rise.
Related reading
All OCA Proust posts (Pinboard)
[Not all long sentences are deserving of a reader’s struggle. Proust’s are.]
[Zits, November 2, 2018. Click for a larger view.]
Kinda, sorta, and so on: in linguistics they’re called hedges. They can be used to manipulate pragmatic halos, I think. Yes, that was a hedge, of a joking sort.
Jeremy’s enjoyed-ish marks a new direction in hedged assertions, IMHO.
A board game by the poet Kenneth Koch, The End of the Evening.
Related reading
All OCA Kenneth Koch posts (Pinboard)
Much taken with Jason Lutes’s graphic novel Jar of Fools (2003), I bought the first volume of Lutes’s trilogy Berlin when it appeared in 2004. I put it on a shelf, thinking I’d wait for the other volumes. Years passed. I’d check Amazon every so often. The second volume of Berlin appeared in 2008. In 2009 I found out, bought a copy, and put it on a shelf. Years passed. And now the third volume has appeared. It’s time to read Berlin. I’m five chapters into the first volume, with the other two stacked on the floor. And it’s lucky that I waited: reading Stefan Zweig over the last two years has given me a much better sense of Weimar Germany than I would have had in 2004. And having read Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, I can see right away that novel’s influence on Lutes’s storytelling (montage, quick shifts in perspective).
積ん読 [tsundoku]: “the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books.”
[All three volumes of Berlin are also now available as a single hardcover volume.]
Franz Kafka, Letter to the Father, trans. Ernst Kaiser and Eithne Wilkins (New York: Schocken Books, 1966).
Related reading
All OCA Kafka posts (Pinboard)
