“Unflavored dulness”

Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (1877).

I can understand why Truman Capote told Willa Cather that Sarah Orne Jewett wrote “one good book,” The Country of the Pointed Firs. But Deephaven is a remarkable book: a picture of female friendship — partnership, really — in a faded fishing village.

Related reading
All OCA Sarah Orne Jewett posts

[Cather thought that The Country of the Pointed Firs was one of three American works of literature likely to have a long life. The other two: The Scarlet Letter and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.]

WARNING

[As seen on a walk. Couldn’t get any closer.]

I like seeing this sort of notice. Some people might find it intrusive. To me, it’s a sign (sorry) that humans have been here. The (syntactically awkward) text reads

UNDERGROUND CABLE
BEFORE DIGGING TRENCHING OR
PUSHING PIPE IN THIS VICINITY
CALL BEFORE YOU DIG

Dug.

Related reading
All OCA signage posts (Pinboard)

University commas

From xkcd: “The Oxford one is the most famous, but many major universities have their own comma.”

*

I was won over by the joke. But as shallnot points out in a comment on this post (and as I should have remembered), the Oxford comma takes its name from the press, not from the university.

Related reading
All OCA Oxford comma posts (Pinboard)

Noisy macOS, noisy iOS

Did you know that you can get distraction-covering noise from macOS (Ventura and above) and iOS (15 and above)?

In MacOS, go to System Settings > Accessibility > Audio > Background Sounds.

In iOS, go to Settings > Accessibility > Audio & Visual > Background Sounds.

You’ll find the same choices for each: Balanced, Bright, and Dark Noise; and Ocean, Rain, Stream, Night, and Fire. That’s a campfire — no sirens.

In macOS, you can add Background Sounds access to the Menu Bar or Control Center. Go to System Settings > Control Center > Hearing and and choose Show in Menu Bar or Show in Control Center. In iOS, adding a button to the Control Center offers similar ease.

I’ve used a variety of noisemakers on Macs. And a dozen years ago, I relied on an hour-long .mp3 of pink noise. I will quote myself from my teaching days: “Without pink noise, I’d get nothing done in my office.” Times change. The need for noise remains.

Blogosphere, alive, well

In The Guardian, John Naughton writes about blogging and the thirty-year effort of Dave Winer: “The blogosphere is alive and well and thriving. In fact it’s where much of the best writing — and thinking — of our era is to be found.”

I know I’ve “seen” Dave Winer’s blog Scripting News every now and then (via someone’s link). It’s not really my cup of Irish Breakfast (it’s a lot of tech), but it’s now in my RSS — a technology that Winer helped develop.

Voter registration deadlines

Voter registration deadlines are approaching soon. Find them at https://vote.gov/register.

“Primary rules”

From the latest installement of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, someone’s “primary rules”:

Never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.

Sounds like Donald Trump, but it’s not. Can you guess who?

NYT, finally, sort of

At The New York Times, they’re finally willing to say something, sort of: “Trump’s Speeches, Increasingly Angry and Rambling, Reignite the Question of Age.”

But as the clinical psychologists Drs. John Gartner and Harry Segal have pointed out week after week on the podcast Shrinking Trump, it’s not really, or simply, a question of age. Joe Biden’s brain, they have said, is aging. But Donald Trump’s brain, they have said, is dementing.

Jack’s Diner

[56 3rd Avenue, Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view.]

I like seeing a diner wherever there’s space for one. Yeah, it oughta fit. See also the Loring Grill, the Tiny Diner, and the Unique Diner.

At this address today: a large building. (What did you expect?)

[From the 1940 telephone directory. Click for a larger view.]

The WPA fellow at the placard looks as if he might have time-traveled in from the Nouvelle Vague. But I could be wrong.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard) ]

PAYPHONE

A pangram from the dowdy world, in yesterday’s New York Times Spelling Bee. And from June 6, 2021. Is the Spelling Bee in reruns?

A handful of pay phone posts
A Blue Dahlia pay phone : A Henry pay phone : A Naked City pay phone : A subway pay phone, 1932 : Chicago pay phones : “If your coin was not returned”

[Pay phone is dowdier than payphone.]