Librarians at work

I was in a public library yesterday, sitting at a table not far from a bank of public computers. A patron, perhaps in her thirties, called a librarian over to help with filling in and printing a form. The librarian guided her: “You need the hyphen — that’s next to the zero.” “Let’s try double-clicking. Try again, faster. It’s really touchy.”

Another patron, perhaps in his twenties, asked questions of a second librarian: “What’s a browser?” “What do I do about cookies?” The librarian said that she usually used Firefox. And she assured this patron that on a public computer, his browsing history would be deleted when he closed the browser.

I thought of something Ira Glass says in a recent episode of This American Life: “One librarian told me that in her job, you really get in touch with just how many people really do not know how to use computers at all.” And I thought about the patience and kindness with which these librarians were solving problems and answering questions. Faulting the mouse — “It’s really touchy” — was an especially deft touch.

[“Digital native”: a notion that presupposes a significant degree of privilege. It’s not a matter of age alone.]

Beer and puns

Last call: If you missed Stephen Colbert’s beer-soaked pun spree last night, it’s at YouTube.

Statue vs. wall

“A crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul”: sounds laughable coming from a man who seems to have neither.

Best line, from Charles Schumer: “The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a thirty-foot wall.”

I counted thirty-nine of those odd sniffs in Donald Trump’s address. What are the thirty-nine sniffs? And what causes them? A crisis of the nose?

[Context: a presidential address and a Democratic response.]

A notebook sighting in Boston

[Walk East on Beacon! (dir. Alfred Werker, 1952). Click for a larger view.]

A list of Soviet agents: “Sleepers. Zed means ‘has not attended any Party function for the past three years.’ Double zed is ‘afraid to refuse.’” One of these names will later be crossed off the list.

Walk East on Beacon! is a terrific film in the semi-documentary manner, filmed on location in Boston and produced by Louis de Rochemont, who gave us The House on 92nd Street, which teems with Dixon Ticonderogas. Yes, there are many ways to watch movies. Walk East on Beacon! is available at YouTube.

More notebook sightings
Angels with Dirty Faces : Ball of Fire : Cat People : City Girl : Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne : Dead End : Dragnet : Extras : Eyes in the Night : Foreign Correspondent : Fury : Homicide : The Honeymooners : The House on 92nd Street : Journal d’un curé de campagne : Kid Glove Killer : The Last Laugh : Le Million : The Lodger : Ministry of Fear : Mr. Holmes : Murder at the Vanities : Murder by Contract : Murder, Inc. : The Mystery of the Wax Museum : Naked City : The Naked Edge : The Palm Beach Story : Perry Mason : Pickpocket : Pickup on South Street : Pushover : Quai des Orfèvres : The Racket : Railroaded! : Red-Headed Woman : Rififi : La roue : Route 66 : The Sopranos : Spellbound : Stage Fright : State Fair : A Stranger in Town : Time Table : T-Men : 20th Century Women : Union Station : Where the Sidewalk Ends : The Woman in the Window

Dunning-Kruger on the rise

The Washington Post reports on the Dunning-Kruger effect:

During the election and in the months after the presidential inauguration, interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect surged. Google searches for “dunning kruger” peaked in May 2017, according to Google Trends, and has remained high since then. Attention spent on the Dunning-Kruger Effect Wikipedia entry has skyrocketed since late 2015.

I learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect in 2010 from a David Pescovitz post to Boing Boing. D-K helped me understand so much about the perspectives of students with serious writing deficits. In October 2016 I came up with the name Dunning K. Trump.

I don’t know what it means that an article about the Dunning-Kruger effect has an error in subject-verb agreement. Did you catch it in the excerpt?

Related reading
All OCA Dunning-Kruger posts

NYRB covers

From the Los Angeles Times: Aida Ylanan analyzes the covers of 500 New York Review Books Classics: “Cover to Cover: The Colors of NYRB Classics.” 500! I have thirty-one of them, I think.

[One could do worse than be a reader of NYRB Classics.]

Writing and money

“Writing has never been a lucrative career choice, but a recent study by the Authors Guild, a professional organization for book writers, shows that it may not even be a livable one anymore”: from a New York Times article about whether it pays to be a writer.

And here I have to invoke what the poet Alice Notley says about writing: “‘non-careerist’ . . . is not the same as not professional.”

“One of the last places”

Annie Spence, librarian: “It's one of the last places you can go that you don't have to buy or believe in anything to come in. You can just come, and we'll help you, no matter what your question is.” From “The Room of Requirement,” a This American Life episode about libraries, including the Brautigan Library.

The origins of “the” wall

From a Forbes article on the origins of “the” (non-existent) wall:

“Inside Trump’s circle, the power of illegal immigration to manipulate popular sentiment was readily apparent, and his advisers brainstormed methods for keeping their attention-addled boss on message,” writes Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Nationalist Uprising. “They needed a trick, a mnemonic device. In the summer of 2014, they found one that clicked.”

Joshua Green had good access to Trump insiders, including Sam Nunberg, who worked with Stone. “Roger Stone and I came up with the idea of ‘the Wall,’ and we talked to Steve [Bannon] about it,” according to Nunberg. “It was to make sure he [Trump] talked about immigration.”

The concept of the Wall did not click right away with the candidate. “Initially, Trump seemed indifferent to the idea,” writes Green. “But in January 2015, he tried it out at the Iowa Freedom Summit, a presidential cattle call put on by David Bossie’s group, Citizens United. ‘One of his pledges was, ‘I will build a Wall,’ and the place just went nuts,’ said Nunberg. Warming to the concept, Trump waited a beat and then added a flourish that brought down the house. ‘Nobody,’ he said, ‘builds like Trump.’”

How remarkable that a cheap gimmick created by amoral, irresponsible advisers for an amoral, irresponsible, unthoughtful, easily manipulated candidate should grow to have such enormous costs, becoming an impediment to the very functioning of government. This kind of stuff belongs in a movie, not in reality.

[Cheap gimmick, but not, strictly speaking, a bright shiny object. A precast concrete wall would be neither bright nor shiny. I suppose that “steel slats” could be bright and shiny.]

No shampoo, no shirt

I was late getting to campus, so my daughter Rachel was giving me a ride. Thanks, kiddo!

Walking to the car, I felt my hair flapping in the wind. A long greasy flap. I had forgotten to shampoo. Oh well — I could get away with it for a day.

Once inside the car, I realized that I had forgotten to put on a shirt. But at least I was wearing a T-shirt, white. Crew neck, fortunately. Oh well — I could get away with that too for a day.

Once outside the car, I realized that I had a stain on the front of the shirt. Egg yolk. Oh well. I stood in a field with Rachel and a bunch of people unknown to me, talking.

[This is the fourteenth teaching-related dream I’ve had since retiring. Not one has gone well. The others: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13.]