“Oh God! How beautiful!”

In the aftermath of my cataract surgery, my friend Stefan Hagemann pointed me to Annie Dillard’s essay “Seeing” (1974). In it Dillard recounts several case histories from Marius von Senden’s Space and Sight: The Perception of Space and Shape in the Congenitally Blind Before and After Operation (1960), a study of people who were able to see for the first time after the removal of congenital cataracts.

Von Senden found that for many newly sighted people, the world is difficult, even oppressive. But others, Dillard says, “speak well of the world, and teach us how dull our own vision is.” She writes about one such person:

Another patient, a twenty-two-year-old girl, was dazzled by the world's brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘Oh God! How beautiful!’”

Von Senden’s book was published in 1932 as Ranm und Gestaltauffassung bei Operierten Blindgeborenen and nearly lost. An article in Psychology Today tells the story of its survival. The English translation, by Peter Heath, was published in 1960 and is available at archive.org.

Thanks, Stefan.

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Cataract and cataracts : How to answer a question (A guest post by Stefan Hagemann)

Third Birds

In The New Yorker, Nathan Heller writes about attention and the Order of the Third Bird. The Order is

supposedly a secret international fellowship, going back centuries, of artists, authors, booksellers, professors, and avant-gardists. Participants in the Order would converge, flash-mob style, at museums, stare intensely at a work of art for half an hour, and vanish, their twee-seeming feat of attention complete.

Forty years ago, the philosopher Richard Wollheim spoke of looking at a painting for two hours or more as a lone spectator. No flash-mob needed.

[“Going back centuries?” The Order sounds like the subject of an exhibit in the Museum of Jurassic Technology.]

When publications collide

From the April 30 installment of the NPR feature Trump’s Trials:

“The jury saw text messages between [Keith] Davidson and leadership at American Media, Inc., which published the National Esquire.”

[Perhaps a result of a reference earlier in the broadcast to Esquire Deposition Solutions.]

Mystery actor

[Click for a larger view.]

Ideas? Anyone? Leave your guesses in the comments. I’ll drop a hint if one is needed.

*

No need: the answer is now in the comments.

More mystery actors (Collect them all)
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The Record Collector, for sale

Los Angeles’s oldest record store, The Record Collector, is for sale: $4,995,000 for the building, the store’s half millon LPs not included.

Our fambly visited The Record Collector in 2016. My assessment, written then: “One curmudgeonly owner, one assistant, many, many LPs.” I bought two (Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson, Don Cherry and Steve Lacy), which the owner appeared to price out of his head.

You can read other customers’ reviews at Yelp.

Nihilism in disguise

Post by @aaron.rupar

View on Threads

I think he’s right. When I see a local “progressives” group use the hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily and post a picture of a pitchman holding a Ukrainian flag with the caption “Look how easily it absorbs your money!” I know that we’re in dangerous times.

[The picture with the flag, by the way, comes from Turning Point Action. There’s your horseshoe.]

TypeIt4Me

I just began using TypeIt4Me, “the original text expander for Mac,” and recommend it with enthusiasm. Though I’m not especially tech-oriented, I've been making shortcuts since the days of the Apple //c and MacroWorks. On Macs, I used TextExpander for many years, until costly updates and a subscription model prompted me to switch to aText. Alas, the interface of the newer aText for Sonoma didn’t appeal to me at all, so I went looking for an alternative.

Typeit4Me is fast, good-looking, and intuitive. It’s plainly great. The app’s testimonial page has words of praise from all sorts of Mac users, including Steve Wozniak. The app is free to try, $19.99 to buy (no subscription). My only connection is that of a happy user.

One example of what TypeIt4Me does for me: if I type a comma followed by newsday, I get

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper, by

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note:

My favorite in this puzzle:

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Adding links to Pinboard

The best ways I know to add a link to Pinboard:

~ A bookmarklet by Jay Sitter. If you don’t use a bookmarks bar (I don’t), you can be sneaky and a create a bookmark for any page and change its name and URL. Or you can create a text-expansion shortcut to drop in the long line of JavaScript.

~ A Safari extension by Kristof Adriaenssens, bookmarker for pinboard.

If you’re me, it’s good to have both. I use the bookmarklet to inventory Orange Crate Art posts. I use the extension with a second account to save links for future reference.

I was going to recommend Mathias Lindholm’s free app Simplepin for iOS, but I just discovered that it’s been sunsetted and is no longer available in the App Store. Oh well.

Recently updated

Fred’s Ping Pong Now with sports betting.

Pharm-speak

From a commercial for Gardasil 9, one in an endless stream of pharmaceutical commercials on MSNBC: “Fainting can also happen.”

Translation: “You might faint.”