Imaginary call

[This morning: “If I thought anything was incorrect or badly stated, I’d report to the FBI or law enforcement, absolutely.”]

“Hon, get my AG on the phone. And bring me a Diet Coke please. Not too much ice. Thank you. ICE: heh.”

“Hello, Bill? How are you? Thank you. Listen, I thought I should let you know — the oppo from Norway — no, the new one, the one they sent yesterday — yes, it will be helpful to us, very, very helpful. But the second paragraph, the third sentence, there’s something the Norwegians say is a dangling participle. Yes, they call that a dangling participle. Not many people know that. The Norwegians called me about it. And they’re very sorry about it. I just thought I should let you know so that you can take of it. Because it needs to be fixed, and quickly. Yes, and you’re doing it beautifully. Okay? You too. Thank you.”

[Hangs up.]

“Know the Answers”

“What kind of pencil am I using?”



“Hold on — it says right here on the supply form.”



“Yeah, here it is. ‘Mongol.’ Funny name for a pencil, eh?”

In Somewhere in the Night (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1946), Richard Benedict as “Marine Desk Sergeant” shares the screen with a Mongol. But he shouldn’t need to look at a supply form: the ferrule is the giveaway, if not the name Mongol, printed on the pencil.

The Mongol is my favorite pencil, and I’m always on the lookout.

Related reading
All OCA Mongol posts (Pinboard)

[Click any image for a larger view. And if it doesn’t go without saying, the dialogue in this post is strictly imaginary. You can find this film at YouTube.]

“Did you write a blog post TODAY?”

I like this idea, from Daniel Jalkut, creator of the blogging app MarsEdit:

Did you write a blog post TODAY? Tweet it to me within then next hour, and if it's not offensive, I will retweet it. Long live the indie/open web!

— Daniel Jalkut (@danielpunkass) May 24, 2019

I’m not on Twitter. But if you write a blog post today, send me the link in a comment, and as long as what you’ve written is not offensive, I’ll put the link in a post. Write. Write as if your blog depended on it.

B & N, “final bastion of hope”?

Nostalgia for Barnes & Noble:

Barnes & Noble and its defunct competitor Borders were, once upon a time, themselves the disruptors and destroyers, big box stores driving mom-and-pop shops out of business. Now, however, Barnes & Noble is the final bastion of hope, the tiny remnant of an industry that has traded cramped stacks delivering instant gratification for distant warehouses offering you anything your heart desires — albeit 24-48 hours later.

I think that a better bastion of hope is an independent bookstore, one in which the emphasis is on books, not toys, not games, not buy-one-get-one-free cookies. As Calvin Coolidge said, the business of a bookstore is books, or should be.

Related posts
Whither Barnes & Noble? : A as in Dante : Barnes & Noble & the future

“Full of soap, radio frequencies”

Hermine Tuzzi, also known as Ermelinda, also known as Diotima, has discovered in herself “the well-known suffering caused by that familiar malady of contemporary man known as civilization”:


Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities. 1930–1943. Trans. Sophie Wilkins (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Related reading
All OCA Robert Musil posts (Pinboard)

The limits of simile

Watching Donald Trump respond to reporters’ questions earlier today, I thought, “This is like watching a train wreck.” Except that train wrecks are over quickly and don’t lie. (“No collision.”) They’re honest about the damage they inflict.

Code Red

A downstate-Illinois meteorologist is off the air after criticizing the Sinclair Broadcasting Group’s melodramatic “Code Red Day” weather alerts.

Weather is for taking seriously. But overdramatizing it is a way of life in these parts. Anyone remember this bit? And here’s the full commercial.

Return of the Jed

[Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles, 1941).]


[The Magnificent Ambersons (dir. Orson Welles, 1942). Click either image for a larger view.]

If Jedediah “Jed” “Broadway Jed” Leland (Joseph Cotten) is the theater critic, the Indianapolis Daily Inquirer must be a Kane paper. Nicely meta to have Leland’s column appear in The Magnificent Ambersons, in which Joseph Cotten stars as automobile developer Eugene Morgan.

If you click the page of Susan Alexander reportage for a larger view, you’ll see that the Leland/Kane review and the first paragraph of “Many Plaudits” are, indeed, about Susan Alexander’s debut.

[Leland/Kane: Recall that Kane finishes writing the review after firing Leland.]

More red and blue

At Lexikaliker, Gunther has added more red and blue, in the form of a display card holding a dozen Venus Postal pencils. Here is Google Translate’s version. See also an earlier Lexikaliker post about the uses of red and blue pencils, also available in a Google Translate version.

The Old Farmer’s Almanac says that back in the day “mail was coded with red or blue for routing purposes.” And which color meant what? I wish I knew.

All this red and blue makes me think of a origin story I wrote about a pencil with an unlikely name: National’s “Fuse-Tex” Skytint 516 Red & Blue. Yes, really.

“Research has shown”

Diana Senechal raised a question at a training session for teachers of English language learners:

“There must be other factors —”

“Research has shown,” the session leader said.

“But how can it be if —”

“Research has shown.”

Before that day, I had thought of research as investigation of uncertainties; now it seemed to put an end to all questions. If research showed something, well, there was nothing you could say; you had to go along with it. “Research has shown” — the phrase struck me with its vagueness, its exaltation of research (regardless of quality), and its use as a mallet to quash discussion.

Diana Senechal, Mind Over Memes: Passive Listening, Toxic Talk, and Other Modern Language Follies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

I just got this book from the library and went straight to the chapter about “research has shown,” thinking of a friend who has long been skeptical about that mantra. In English studies, “research has shown” might preface a wildly general claim about writing instruction based on a researcher’s (i.e., a teacher’s) experiment with one semester’s classes. Research has shown: end of discussion.

A few passages from Senechal’s Republic of Noise
“A little out of date” : Buzzwords and education : Fighting distraction : Literature and reverence : “Greater seriousness”