Things I learned on my summer vacation (2011)

On the interstates, even lunatics seem to be thinking about getting better mileage. Traffic seemed saner and slower.

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Rude maneuvering in parking lots bugs me more than I seem to imagine. The evidence: a dream in which I punched out a guy who’d insulted Elaine in a parking lot. Three fast jabs to the side of his head, and he was out. The insult, like the KO, happened only in my dream.

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AT&T’s 3G service for the iPad feels like dial-up. 3G: Godawful. Godawful. Godawful.

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Tropicana now makes a six-pack: six eight-ounce cartons of orange juice. Each carton comes with a nifty straw that extends like a spyglass.

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“You’ve learned about juice.”

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Cornstarch and water combine to make a non-Newtonian fluid. Add a subwoofer, low-frequency sound, and a protective sheet, and you have a source of hilarious entertainment.

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On May 23, the-world-ends-on-May-21 ads were still all over Manhattan bus shelters and subways.

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“Assaulting MTA New York City subway personnel is a felony punishable by up to 7 years in prison”: New York State Penal Code 120.05.

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Luthier Mario Maccaferri dabbled in plastic. The plastic guitar I saw looked like something that might have come from the Woolworth’s of my childhood. Maccaferri tried to persuade his friend Andrés Segovia to switch to plastic. No luck.

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There is a venerable tradition of Italian-American guitar-making. (I knew that, sort of, but not really.)

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Veggie Heaven is an excellent vegan Chinese restaurant in Teaneck, New Jersey. The restaurant appeals to both those who abstain from eating animals and those who keep kosher (and thus do not eat in traditional Chinese restaurants).

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New Jersey is a peninsula. (Who knew?)

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Toilet paper can be an appropriate subject of conversation at lunch and dinner.

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On the Bowery is a 1957 film about life on the Bowery.

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Norman McLaren and Claude Jutra made the short film A Chairy Tale (1957). You can watch it on YouTube.

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Charles Sheeler was both a painter and a photographer.

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It turns out that we know someone who played with Charlie Parker at Birdland: a two-week Parker-with-strings engagement. Parker never repeated himself when soloing.

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“Smells Like Teen Spirit” can be heard on at least one “classic rock” station: 105.9 FM, The X, in Pennsylvania. (See this post for context.)

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If the language sounds a bit like Arabic, a bit like French, a bit like Portuguese, it might be Lebanese Arabic. (It was Lebanese Arabic.)

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The Corner Bookstore (93rd Street and Madison Avenue) is a wonderful Manhattan bookstore. It’s small, not exhaustive, but virtually every book is a good one. Browsing there is a matter of welcome surprises.

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Blue Ginger is an excellent East-meets-West restaurant in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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Pho Lemongrass is an excellent Vietnamese restaurant in Coolidge Corner, Brookline, Massachusetts.

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The Pewter Pot: that was the now-defunct Coolidge Corner coffeeshop where Elaine and I went with our friend Aldo Carrasco in 1984. Neither Elaine nor I could ever remember the name. I spotted the Pot in a 1983 photograph on display in the Coolidge Corner Theatre.

More things I learned on my summer vacation
2010 : 2009 : 2008 : 2007 : 2006

[Summer: the time between the spring and fall semesters, regardless of season.]

Memorial Day

One hundred years ago. From “20,000 in Riverside March: Prospects for the Greatest of All Memorial Day Parades,” New York Times, May 30, 1911.

A cappella Beach Boys covers

Robert Gotshall covers “Our Prayer,” “Gee,” and “Heroes and Villains.” Thirty-three voices, and just about perfect.

[“Our Prayer” is by Brian Wilson. “Gee,” one of the first rock-and-roll hits, is by William Davis and Viola Watkins. “Heroes and Villains” is by Wilson and Van Dyke Parks. The three songs begin SMiLE.]

Farewell, Liane Hansen

Liane Hansen hosted her last Weekend Edition Sunday this morning. NPR has a timeline of her twenty-two years with the show.

Liane Hansen is one of my favorite radio people. I especially admire her intelligence and tact as an interviewer. You hear that same intelligence and tact when she ventures an answer in Will Shortz’s Sunday Puzzle segments: she never outdoes the contestant playing by telephone.

I was lucky to talk with Liane on one such telephone back in the 1990s, when I got to play the Sunday Puzzle on the air. As everything was made ready for taping, we talked for a minute or two about what it was like having young children in the house. Liane was reminiscing (I think); my kids were playing downstairs.

[Yes, I still have my Weekend Edition lapel pin.]

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Three-and-a-half years later: found it.

The OED’s first-place verb

In the Oxford English Dictionary, run has overtaken set as the verb with the most meanings: 645.

On where one belongs

Writer, teacher, consultant Peter F. Drucker, on figuring out where one belongs:

A small number of people know very early where they belong. Mathematicians, musicians, and cooks, for instance, are usually mathematicians, musicians, and cooks by the time they are four or five years old. Physicians usually decide on their careers in their teens, if not earlier. But most people, especially highly gifted people, do not really know where they belong until they are well past their mid-twenties. By that time, however, they should know the answers to the three questions: What are my strengths? How do I perform? and, What are my values? And then they can and should decide where they belong.

Managing Oneself (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2008)

When I spotted this well-designed little book, I had to buy it. The text is a Drucker essay first published in the Harvard Business Review in 1999. Managing Oneself would make a great and perhaps surprising gift for a high-school or college graduate.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

“We are locked in history, and they were not”: director Werner Herzog, in his documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), an exploration of the Chauvet Cave in southern France.

This film is a powerful reminder of the vastness of time and of one’s own small place in it. My favorite moments: archaeologist Jean-Michel Geneste speaking of the human impulse to make marks on strange objects, and master perfumer Maurice Maurin seeking out hidden caves with his sense of smell.

Elaine and I saw this 3-D film in two dimensions. I doubt that we missed much. If we did, please let me know.

[Making marks on strange objects: like this screen, for instance.]

Re: tornadoes

Tornadoes were, in our part of Central Illinois, the dimensionless point at which parallel lines met and whirled and blew up. They made no sense. Houses blew not out but in. Brothels were spared while orphanages next door bought it. Dead cattle were found three miles from their silage without a scratch on them. Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law. Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration. I believe now that I knew all this without knowing it, as a kid.

David Foster Wallace, “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (New York: Back Bay Books, 1997)

Related reading
American Red Cross Expands Relief Effort as More Tornadoes Batter Midwest (American Red Cross)
Missouri and Minnesota: how to help (The Maddow Blog)

Telephone exchange names on screen

Though not nearly as baffling as The Big Sleep (dir. Howard Hawks, 1946), Murder, My Sweet (dir. Edward Dmytryk, 1944) is the kind of movie with which I choose to concentrate on atmosphere rather than plot. The atmosphere includes much cigarette smoke and three fine glimpses of exchange names: let’s call them WHitehall, OLympia, and GRidley. Where did I get those names? Not from a hat: from a list of Ma Bell’s Officially Recommended Exchange Names.

Dick Powell really is a fine Philip Marlowe. How did that ever happen?

More exchange names on screen
The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse : Baby Face : Born Yesterday : The Dark Corner : Deception : Dream House : The Little Giant : The Man Who Cheated Himself : Nightmare Alley : The Public Enemy : Side Street

Storybook Gardens

“Storybook Gardens has run its course. What kids know about these characters? Jack and the Bean Stalk, maybe, or Humpty Dumpty. We’re at a new generation now”: in the Wisconsin Dells, Storybook Gardens is no more.