Pork bellies

[Zippy, January 18, 2019.]

What are pork bellies? Goodness me, don't you know what pork bellies are? You hear about them on the . . . on the commodity report, isn’t it?

Or you used to. Though I could swear that the radio still brings news of pork bellies. I will have to listen more closely.

Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)

[Questions asked with apologies to Gabriel Conroy’s galoshes.]

A thinking-about-a-MacBook tip

I bought a MacBook Air last week, and I’m very happy with it. But for a long time I hesitated, because I couldn’t get past the keyboard. How was I supposed to type on this thing? And then I realized that typing with any accuracy and ease on my MacBook Pro is just as difficult if I’m reaching down to the keyboard from a standing position.

My tip, for anyone thinking about a MacBook: ask if you can try the machine of your choice while sitting. (It might be easier to manage that in a college bookstore than in an Apple Store.) After I sat down to type, I needed only a minute or two to decide that I could be happy with the new keyboard.

My MacBook Pro (2011) is far from shabby, but the screen and speed of the new Air are far superior. And I can type on the keyboard! Look: see?

“Traditional blogs,” past and future

David Heinemeier Hansson, one of the makers of Basecamp, writing about his company’s decision to leave Medium:

Writing for us is not a business, in any direct sense of the word. We write because we have something to say, not to make money off page views, advertisements, or subscriptions. . . .

Traditional blogs might have swung out of favor, as we all discovered the benefits of social media and aggregating platforms, but we think they’re about to swing back in style, as we all discover the real costs and problems brought by such centralization.

Blogging requires a belief in the possible value of one’s observations, questions, drawings, photographs, whatever, and the willingness to invest time in making them available to others. And the rewards are more often intrinsic than ex-. So let’s see.

[Via Michael Tsai.]

Cash and a glove

I’m not sure why this Wall Street Journal article isn’t behind a paywall. But since it’s not:

In early 2015, a man who runs a small technology company showed up at Trump Tower to collect $50,000 for having helped Michael Cohen, then Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, try to rig online polls in his boss’s favor before the presidential campaign.

In his Trump Organization office, Mr. Cohen surprised the man, John Gauger, by giving him a blue Walmart bag containing between $12,000 and $13,000 in cash and, randomly, a boxing glove that Mr. Cohen said had been worn by a Brazilian mixed-martial arts fighter, Mr. Gauger said.

John Gauger is the chief information officer at Liberty University, the school founded by Jerry Falwell as Lynchburg Baptist College, now run by Jerry Falwell Jr. Or chief “information” officer.

*

9:17 a.m.: Well, now the article is behind a paywall. Here’s the Washington Post story.

Heat and knowledge

Inversely proportional. In “Slawkenbergius’s Tale,” a group of disputing clerics are launched “into the gulph of school-divinity”:


Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 4 (1761).

Also from Sterne
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating : Yorick, soulful : Digressions : Uncle Toby and the fly

Uncle Toby and the fly

Uncle Toby Shandy, Tristram says, had “scarce a heart to retaliate upon a fly.” A ten-year-old Tristram sees this scene:


Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 2.12 (1759).

Though Tristram gives some credit to “the study of the Literae humaniores, at the university,” he tells us that he believes he owes half of his philanthropy “to that one accidental impression” made upon him by his uncle.

Also from Sterne
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating : Yorick, soulful : Digressions

[The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (1997) dates not hurt a fly to the early 1800s. Does Uncle Toby lurk quietly in the idiom’s backstory?]

WWLS

As I look at the photograph, I try to imagine: what would Lincoln say? Not about the food but about the huckster showing it off.

Recently updated

Words of the year Now with Me Too.

Digressions

Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman 1.22 (1759).

Other Sterne posts
Letters for all occasions : Yorick, distracted : Yorick, translating : Yorick, soulful

The Value of the Dictionary

 
Frank V. Powell, The Value of the Dictionary (Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam, 1928). 3 1/4″ × 5 7/8″. Click for larger views.

My son Ben spotted this thirty-three-page pamphlet in a basket of teacherly ephemera at an antiques mall. He knew I’d love it. Thank you, Ben.

Frank V. Powell must have had great faith in his reader’s ability to make rapid progress. On page three:

Repeat the alphabet. Now look at the pages of your dictionary and see if the words in it are arranged A, B, C, D, E, F, etc., or, as we say alphabetically. Can you tell why the words are arranged in this way?

And on page four: drills to help the reader “avoid mumbling the alphabet” when looking up words. “What letter comes immediately after G? After M? After P?”

But by page fourteen: “Names of common diacritical marks.” And they follow: dot, macron, breve, and so on.

And by page thirty: “Thus, duc is a Latin root meaning ‘to lead.’” Slow down, sir.

Who was Frank V. Powell? A snippet in Google Books gave me the answer. From John Goadby Gregory’s Southwestern Wisconsin: A History of Old Crawford County (1932):

Devoting his efforts to the acquirement and dissemination of useful knowledge, Frank V. Powell has served as superintendent of schools at Platteville since 1917 and has materially further the progress of education in this part [and here the snippet ends].

Look again at the pamphlet’s back cover: might Mr. Powell be the wise superintendent?

Here’s a larger sample of Powell’s prose:



Related reading
All OCA dictionary posts (Pinboard)