Kirk Douglas (1916–2020)

[Kirk Douglas as Ulysses, in Ulysses (dir. Mario Camerini, 1954). Image via Wikipedia. Click for a larger view.]

Kirk Douglas has died at the age of 103. The New York Times has an obituary.

Unplugged

A clue in today’s Los Angeles Times crossword, by MaryEllen Uthlaut, made me realize something about myself.

The clue was “Concert gear.” Before seeing the number of letters in the answer, I immediately thought TUXES. The correct answer, just four letters: AMPS. My first thought brought me face to face with my concert-going habits. These days TUXES are far more likely than AMPS.

[The link goes to the LAT puzzle as offered by The Washington Post — a much friendlier design.]

Reaching Q

Thought as an alphabet of progress. Mr. Ramsay, metaphysician, has reached Q:


Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927).

Much later in the novel: “But now, he felt, it didn’t matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it — if not he, then another.”

Also from this novel
“A scrubbed kitchen table”

The Elements of Penguins

The BBC reports that “new research suggests” penguin speech follows rules of human language:

The animals follow two main laws – that more frequently used words are briefer (Zipf’s law of brevity), and longer words are composed of extra but briefer syllables (Menzerath-Altmann law). Scientists say this is the first instance of these laws observed outside primates, suggesting an ecological pressure of brevity and efficiency in animal vocalisations.

Omit needless sounds!

Related reading
All OCA Elements of Style posts (Pinboard)

[I know, of course, that the laws in play here describe the workings of language. They have nothing to do with William Strunk Jr.’s “Omit needless words,” which stresses concision in the sentence. I’m just having fun.]

George Steiner (1929–2020)

The (astonishingly erudite) literary critic George Steiner has died at the age of ninety. From the New York Times obituary:

“I’d love to be remembered as a good teacher of reading,” he told The Paris Review in 1994. Characteristically, he had a specific, lofty notion of reading as a moral calling. It should, he added, “commit us to a vision, should engage our humanity, should make us less capable of passing by.”

A related post
George Steiner on reading

Brian and Al in the news

Thank you, Brian Wilson and Al Jardine:

Beach Boys founding members Brian Wilson and Al Jardine alerted fans Monday that they have no part in an appearance later this week by a version of the group fronted by cofounder Mike Love at a trophy-hunting convention where Donald Trump Jr. will be the keynote speaker.

Love’s touring edition of the Beach Boys, for which he holds the legal rights to the name, also includes longtime band member Bruce Johnston. They are slated to play Wednesday, Feb. 5, at the Safari Club International Convention in Reno, where hunting enthusiasts can arrange trips to hunt exotic animals. Trump Jr. and his brother, Eric, are longtime trophy-hunting supporters.

“This organization supports trophy hunting, which both Al and I are emphatically opposed to,” Wilson tweeted on Monday. “There’s nothing we can do personally to stop the show, so please join us in signing the petition” protesting the private event at Change.org.

Here’s the petition, which won’t change a thing but will at least register public disapproval of Mike Love and company.

Related reading
All OCA Beach Boys and Brian Wilson posts (Pinboard)

Iowa as metaphor

Frank Bruni asks, “Is Iowa a metaphor?” He offers this one after spending the past week in the state:

I’d never seen voters so twisted into knots. I’d never seen pundits so perplexed by the tea leaves in front of them and so hesitant to play fortuneteller. I’d never been so stymied for insight, so barren of instinct. This wasn’t a political contest; it was a kidney stone.

And by late Tuesday morning, it still hadn’t passed.

What I wonder about right now is “the mobile app” used with last night’s caucuses. Is it for Android? iOS? Both? Is the app’s security certain? (I doubt it.) Should an election require the use of Apple or Google products for results to be reported?

And should any state, much less a state with a population estimated as 90.7% white, play a singular role in shaping presidential elections? My awkward metaphor for the Iowa primary process, what with its pancake breakfasts and coin tosses: a Norman Rockwell painting with delusions of grandeur.

*

5:45 p.m.: from a New York Times article about the app, its creator, Shadow Inc., and Shadow’s backer Acronym:

Regardless of how it got the job, Shadow was put into a race that engineers at the most well-resourced tech giants, like Google, said could not be won. There was simply not enough time to build the app, test it widely to work out major bugs and then train its users.

Shadow was also handicapped by its own lack of coding know-how, according to people familiar with the company. Few of its employees had worked on major tech projects, and many of its engineers were relatively inexperienced.

Two people who work for Acronym, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to risk their jobs, acknowledged that the app had problems. It was so rushed, they said, that there was no time to get it approved by the Apple store. Had it been, it might have proved far easier for users to install.

Instead, the app had to be downloaded by bypassing a phone’s security settings, a complicated process for anyone unfamiliar with the intricacies of mobile operating systems, and especially hard for many of the older, less tech-savvy caucus chairs in Iowa.

The app also had to be installed using two-factor authentication and PIN passcodes. The information was included on worksheets given to volunteers at the Iowa precincts tallying the votes, but it added another layer of complication that appeared to hinder people.

Insane.

“A scrubbed kitchen table”

William Bankes thinks that Mr. Ramsay, metaphysician, depends too much upon people’s praise. Lily Briscoe encourages Bankes to be more generous: “‘Oh, but,’ said Lily, ‘think of his work!’”


Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927).

Goodnight commas

The title of Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon is without a vocative comma. Now that our household has a new copy of the book (where’s the old one?), I can attest that the text, too, is comma-free. And nearly punctation-free: just one em-dash and two pairs of quotation marks, for the quiet old lady’s hushes.

Goodnight stars

Goodnight air

Goodnight commas everywhere

Some boulders

George Bodmer pointed me to New Zealand’s Moeraki Boulders. Granted, there are more than three. But they are some — “remarkable, striking” — boulders.


[“A cluster of highly spherical boulders.” New Zealand. 2006. Photograph from Wikipedia. Click for larger boulders.]

“Some rocks” is an abiding preoccupation of these pages.

Thanks, George.