Epistolary Fritzi

“The secret to having a penpal is to avoid getting bogged down with responding to every small comment they make in their letter. If you do, you’ll just spend the whole letter recapping what they sent you”: in Olivia Jaimes’s Nancy, Aunt Fritzi reads a letter and replies.

Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)

Crusts and chest hair

Do parents still tell a boy child that eating the crusts will put hair on his chest? According to The Family Circus , they do.

I like the way the Circus is stuck in an unyielding past. Brown paper bags! Cameras on straps! Landlines! Crusts and chest hair!

[Brown paper bags: The kind that you hold in front of you with two hands, not the fancy kind with paper handles. Ideally, there’s a head of celery sticking out from the top of the bag.]

Beatles now!

“Now and Then” is playing on BBC Radio 2.

And it’s now at YouTube.

I’m disappointed: they dropped the middle section of the song (“I don’t wanna lose you”), its most distinctive part, with unusual chord changes, and the part that, to my ears, makes the shift to the closing section (“Now and then”) so poignant.

[The chords in the middle section, which I worked out at the piano: F♯min Emaj7 F♯min Emaj7 G♯min D E C B. And then comes the shift to G: "Now and then.“]

Words of the year

From the American Dialect Society, enshittification , as used by Cory Doctorow: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification.”

From the Australian National Dictionary Centre, Matilda : “After their mega semi-final run at the Women’s Fifa World Cup, the soaring popularity of the Australian women’s football team has led to the choice.”

From the Cambridge Dictionary, hallucinate : “When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information.” (An aside: Elaine is a world-famous pianist; I have won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize.)

From the Collins Dictionary, AI : “Considered to be the next great technological revolution, AI has seen rapid development and has been much talked about in 2023.”

From Dictionary.com, hallucinate : “Using lexicography and data science, choose a single word that best represents, at this moment, AI’s many profound ramifications for the future of language and life.”

Also from Dictionary.com, a “vibe of the year,” eras : “It’s about more than just Taylor. (But yes, also Taylor.)” (Is it clickbait yet?)

From Macquarie Dictionary, cozzie livs, a play on cost of living: “What could be a more Australian approach to a major social and economic problem than to treat it with a bit of humour and informality?”

From Merriam-Webster, authentic: “the term for something we’re thinking about, writing about, aspiring to, and judging more than ever.”

From Oxford Languages, rizz : “Pertaining to someone’s ability to attract another person through style, charm, or attractiveness, this term is from the middle part of the word ‘charisma,’ which is an unusual word formation pattern.”

I’ll add to this post as more words arrive.

“What is internet, anyway?”

Internet Artifacts, from 1977 to 2007. The question above, from 1994, is from Bryant Gumbel, who was also wondering what the @  sign meant.

A last Beatles song

You know there’s a last new Beatles song coming this Thursday, yes? I’ve been looking forward to it since June. The song is “Now and Then,” known from a demo piano-voice recording that John Lennon made circa 1979. A New York Times article tells the story of how the Beatles version has come about.

I’ll repeat what I wrote in June: I think John’s piano-vocal demo is a beautifully sad song. I hope that feeling isn’t lost under too many layers of production as the demo gets turned into a record.

I was just a kid when the Beatles came on the scene. Suddenly the world seemed brighter, more exciting, full of possibility. I am not making this up. In this dark time, I feel something of that feeling now. And I’ve ordered two copies of the single.

A short documentary is to appear today on the Beatles’ YouTube channel. A music video will follow this Friday. More info at the Beatles’ website.

*

Here’s the short documentary: Now and Then — The Last Beatles Song.

Related reading
All OCA Beatles posts (Pinboard)

Gloria Grahame at TCM

At TCM, Tuesdays this November are for Gloria Grahame.

Halloween tally

Six trick-or-treaters. We had nine last year. Fourteen Milky Way Fun Size bars dispensed, twenty-two left over. We began with three bars per kid but dropped to two, thinking we might run out. No such luck.

PBS at WVU

On tonight’s PBS NewsHour, a segment about eliminating programs and faculty positions at West Virginia University.

According to NewsHour correspondent Hari Sreenivasan, thirty-two majors and 169 faculty positions are being eliminated. According to university president E. Gordon Gee, it’s seventy faculty positions. The other faculty cuts, he says, are “due to retirements and a variety of other things.” I would guess that at least some faculty who haven’t gone elsewhere have chosen to retire rather than be fired.

Sreenivasan spoke with Jonah Katz, an associate professor (i.e., tenured) in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, & Linguistics. Katz and his department are being eliminated:

“I think the level of reputational damage that the university is going to take will not be survivable. I don’t think that this will be a viable research university in five to ten years. And it essentially means that there’s no real tenure here anymore. And so nobody is going to come teach here unless they have absolutely no other choice.”

Related posts
College completion : Dickinson State, firing : Emporia State, firing : WVU cuts

“Fried or boiled?”

The housekeeper has a question for the ladies:

Katherine Mansfield, “The Daughters of the Late Colonel” (1921).

Related reading
All OCA Mansfield posts (Pinboard)