Illinois roadkill

Our state is in more trouble than I thought. From the Associated Press:

The view along Illinois highways this summer should be beautiful — for the turkey vultures.

The state's transportation department says it won't be picking up as much roadkill left along roads because it spent too much of its budget during the winter. IDOT says it spent more than twice the allotted $40 million on clearing ice and snow removal because of rising fuel costs and harsh weather last winter. Dead animals in driving lanes and any deemed hazardous to motorists will be removed. But much of the rest will be left for scavengers.

Kevin Gillespie of the Jackson County Health Department says the roadkill might be smelly and gruesome, but it shouldn't lead to any health risks.

Guerdon

The winning word from the Scripps National Spelling Bee is guerdon. From Merriam-Webster:

guerdon \ˈgər-dən\ noun
Middle English, from Anglo-French guerdun, of Germanic origin; akin to Old High German widarlōn, reward
14th century
: reward, recompense

When I read the news today, I immediately thought of guerdon as accompanied by thy. But where? Not in William Shakespeare. Not in Ezra Pound. In Hart Crane's poem of the Brooklyn Bridge, The Bridge (1930):

Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn…
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.

And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon… Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.

[Ellipses in the original.]

Mac year

I realized a few days ago that it's been one year since I began using a MacBook at home, having switched over at work several months earlier when I was up for a new computer. And now that I'm writing this post, I realize that my OS X experience has been in many ways a matter of what's missing. No long wait for the computer to start up and shut down. No registry to tinker with. No defragmenting of the hard drive. No Internet Explorer, an unwelcome browser that cannot be uninstalled. No Microsoft Office (I like iWork, thank you). No hours lost trying to get a wireless card to work. And no Vista, which I resolved long ago not to buy.

My XP computer was a pretty spiffy machine: with unnecessary services turned off and all sorts of registry tweaks, it was reliable and responsive (once it started up). But it cannot compare to my MacBook. If I'm writing in a text-editor and want to check a document's spelling, I just hit Shift-⌘-;. If I want to delete a file, ⌘-Delete. If I want to save an image from a DVD, I open VLC and use the snapshot feature. If I want to do almost anything, from opening applications (on the Mac, they're applications, not programs) to moving files to resizing images, Quicksilver makes tasks amazingly simple. Working on a Mac is sometimes so simple that it can at first be baffling. I remember how long it took me to realize how little is involved in installing most applications: dragging the application's icon to the Applications folder. That's it.

I started out on an Apple //c in 1985, and in retrospect, I regret ever moving away from Apple hardware. I could have been one of those people with a closet full of old Macs by now! Instead I bought into the false mythology that Macs were for people in design and that one had to use a PC to do serious writing. And now, when I talk about how great it is to be working on a Mac, I'm surprised by how many people assume that files created on a Windows machine — any files — cannot be opened on a Mac.

My year has not been entirely Windows-free: the classrooms I teach in are equipped with machines running XP. Every time I turn one on and wait for it to warm up (yes, like an old television), I'm reminded how happy I am working on a Mac. Every time I connect my USB memory stick to a classroom computer and wait for "new hardware" to be "installed" (say what?), I'm reminded how happy I am working on a Mac. Every time I put a disc in the tray and wait for the machine to grind away, I'm reminded how happy I am working on a Mac.

And yesterday morning I realized for the first time that I'm finally, really, out of it, Windows-wise: when I started up the Windows version of VLC to play a DVD, I clicked on the wrong dialog button. In OS X dialog boxes, Play, Save, and so on appear to the right; Cancel, to the left. In Windows, it's the other way around. I clicked Cancel, saw that nothing was happening, realized my mistake, and started over. I'm glad that I clicked Cancel on Windows last year.

Online comics

My local newspaper is dropping its daily Doonesbury and Peanuts. The editor assures us though that we will still be able to read Peanuts on Sundays.

What the editor of course cannot mention is that one can read just about any strip online. The Washington Post, for instance, offers a great selection, including Mark Trail and Zippy the Pinhead. Something for everyone!

[Above, a recent scene from Mark Trail. Note the misplaced speech balloon: it appears that Bill is replying.]

Oveness

Another quality adding-a-URL-to-Google experience:

Despite the lack of the second n, I've decided that oveness should be a word, with the pronunciation duly adjusted:

oveness \ UHV-niss \ noun
: a quality or state pertaining to an oven; specifically, an ashen, dry, hard, metallic quality or state, as of food left too long in an oven

Sample sentence: The baked potatoes had too much oveness to them.

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Movie recommendation: The King of Kong

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007)
directed by Seth Gordon
79 minutes

The King of Kong is so funny and heartbreaking, its characters so unwittingly self-revealing, that it's easy to mistake the film for a mockumentary. But it's for real, and it focuses on the rivalry between arcade-gamers Billy Mitchell and Steve Wiebe, as they engage in asynchronous combat to achieve the world-record score in Donkey Kong.

In competitive arcade-gaming, as in professional wrestling, there are good guys and bad guys, very broadly drawn. Wiebe, an endearing nebbish, practices on a machine in his garage and travels with his wife and children to an official site in an attempt to set a new world record. Mitchell, the reigning champion, is a well-groomed hot-sauce entrepreneur whom we see moving competitors' products to the back of a supermarket shelf. And as in professional wrestling, an official organization — Twin Galaxies (!) — seems intent upon elevating some competitors and impeding others.

My arcade life is pretty much limited to a Ms. Pac-Man machine in a Boston pizza parlor, circa 1981–1983. But the play's not the thing: you don't have to be (or have been) an arcade-game fan to enjoy The King of Kong.

Thanks to Rachel for introducing the rest of our family to this fine film, available on DVD.

Proust's LiveJournal

Today's Amazon recommendations include someone named Joyce. I should look into that.

Location: My room
Mood: Thoughtful
Music: The heartbreaking sound of nightingales outside the shuttered window of my distant boyhood bedroom
Tags: memory, Mother, fevers, weeping

Read the rest: Proust Discovers LiveJournal (McSweeney's)

Boston English

Jimmies. Regular coffee. Elastic. Bubbler. Tonic. Dungarees. Carriages. Gonzo. Packie. Parlor. Rotary. Bang a U-ey. Hosey. Wicked.

Read all about it:

Wicked Good Bostonisms Come and Go (Boston Globe)
The Wicked Good Guide to Boston English

Memorial Day

From the New York Times, June 7, 1868. This item is Memorial Day's first appearance in the Times.

The Vacation Reading Club

[Poster from the WPA Federal Art Project, artist unknown. Stamped on the back: May 25, 1939. Via the Library of Congress online exhibit By the People, For the People: Posters from the WPA, 1936-1943.]

I'm currently reading Allen Shawn's memoir Wish I Could Be There: Notes from a Phobic Life and Colson Whitehead's novel The Intutionist. What are you reading this May 25th?