“Th’ reassuring timbre of Mary Louise Kelly, th’ velvety tones of Steve Inskeep, th’ friendly chatter of Ari Shapiro, th’ lilting warmth of Audie Cornish”: Griffy and Zippy listen to NPR.
Related reading
All OCA Zippy posts (Pinboard)
Thursday, February 1, 2024
Griffy, Zippy, and NPR
A speech balloon on the move
[Nancy, February 1, 2024. Click for a larger view.]
In today’s (new) Nancy , one balloon is about to pop another.
Related reading
All OCA Nancy posts (Pinboard)
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Word of the day: ekphrasis
The word of the day at Anu Garg’s A.Word.A.Day is ekphrasis: “A description of or commentary on a work of visual art.”
I’ll borrow Merriam-Webster’s etymology:
borrowed from New Latin ecphrasis, borrowed from Greek ékphrasis “description,” from ekphrad-, stem of ekphrázein “to tell over, recount, describe” (from ek- EC- + phrázein “to point out, show, tell, explain,” of uncertain origin) + -sis -SIS .I recall sitting in an NEH seminar and being told that if one wanted to befuddle colleagues, all that was necessary was to speak the word ekphrasis. Well, maybe. I’m not so sure. At any rate, the idea of ekphrasis is hardly obscure. Think of Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Or Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Or back to the beginning: Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield, which you might want to seek out on your own (Iliad 18).
Related posts
Art into words : Erasmus ekphrasis : Robert Walser, Looking at Pictures
“Tin yars in Versales, Mazura”
Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).
This novel, which began with overtones of Dickens and Proust, shifts to a Jamesian (Henry) manner with many touches of Austenesque satire.
Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga : “Flatteringly, like the dentist”
Melinda Wilson (1946–2024)
The New York Times obituary describes her as the person “who rescued her future husband, the Beach Boys co-founder Brian Wilson, from psychological ruin when they were dating in the 1980s.”
Says Brian, on Instagram: “She was my savior.”
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
Kranmar’s Vision Pro
[Jackie Gleason as Ralph Kramden, in The Honeymooners episode “The Man from Space,” first aired December 31, 1955. Click for a larger view.]
From the maker of Kranmar’s Delicious Mystery Appetizer comes an AR device for the rest of us:
[Click for a larger view.]
A related post
In there and out here
[Bus icons created by Freepik — Flaticon.]
In there and out here
“It’s an iPad for your face”: from Nilay Patel’s skeptical review of Apple’s Vision Pro (The Verge ).
I hadn’t planned on posting anything about the Vision Pro, but one sentence in Patel’s review prompted this post: “This is the best anyone has ever made in there look, and it’s still not nearly as good as out here.”
Readers of Steven Millhauser’s Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer (1996) will recall the novel’s ending, when Martin Dressler leaves his in there, the fever-dream of the Grand Cosmo, “a new concept in living,” for the world outside it. From the final paragraph:
Out here will always be better than in there.
Related reading
All OCA Steven Millhauser posts (Pinboard)
A kidhood mondegreen
A song popped into my head, I looked it up, and I found that I’d been hearing it wrong from kidhood.
The song: “In the Middle, in the Middle, in the Middle,” by Vic Mizzy. New Yorkers of a certain age will remember it from PSAs during kids’s TV programming. Here’s the song, as sung by Mizzy’s daughter Patty Keeler. (I’m unable to find the PSA itself.) There was another PSA with an instrumental version of the song. And there’s a more recent version of the song by They Might Be Giants, with Robin Goldwasser singing.
My mondegreen: “Keep your eyes to look out, keep your ears to hear.”
But the song says, “Teach your eyes to look out, teach your ears to hear.”
And a more minor mondegreen:
Me: “And wait, and wait, until you see the light turn green.”
The song: “And wait, and wait, until you’ve seen the light turn green.”
Well, I’m glad I got that straightened out.
Floppies in the news
Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (notice, no serial comma) is abandoning its use of the floppy disk. From Japan Today :
The push to end the use of floppy disks within government agencies stems, of course, from two major problems. The first is that a physical media requirement reduces the ability to submit and share data online, hampering operational efficiency and complicating the process of revising or updating the information. Second, it’s extremely difficult to even find floppy disks for sale anymore, as they’ve essentially disappeared from the consumer market.“Essentially disappeared”? Tell that to Tom Persky, whose floppydisk.com is still selling 3.5″, 5.25″, and 8″ disks. Here, from Euronews, is a look at Perksy and his business. And from Wired, an explanation of “Why the Floppy Disk Just Won’t Die.”
A related post
Utnapishtim’s word-processor (An 8″ Displaywriter disk)
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