Happy anniversary

[Photographer long forgotten.]

Marriage is, I think, the best of all adventure stories. Or at least it can be. As André Gregory says in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981),

Have a real relationship with a person that goes on for years: that’s completely unpredictable. Then you’ve cut off all your ties to the land and you’re sailing into the unknown, into uncharted seas.

Elaine and I were married twenty-eight years ago on this day. We are still sailing. Happy anniversary, Elaine.

[May marriage soon be for all partners.]

National Coffee Day

[“Diner.” Photograph by John Loengard. 1962. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

Here in the United States, it is National Coffee Day. The Wilbur Curtis decanter is as recognizable as ever.

Tim Cook’s letter

At Daring Fireball, John Gruber calls Apple CEO Tim Cook’s letter re: Maps “humble and honest.” I’m almost willing to agree. What sinks the letter for me is one word the final paragraph:

Everything we do at Apple is aimed at making our products the best in the world. We know that you expect that from us, and we will keep working non-stop until Maps lives up to the same incredibly high standard.

Did you catch it? It’s that incredibly, which to my mind minimizes the company’s failure (the standard we failed to reach is incredibly high) while proclaiming the company’s greatness (the standard we will reach is incredibly high). Not exactly humble.

Bryan Garner v. Robert Lane Greene

In the New York Times: Which Language Rules to Flout. Or Flaunt? Greene scores re: that and which and the Lord’s Prayer, but I’m with Garner here.

Poem v. story, sidewalk v. floor

Getting the names of things right: it’s important. Not every short work of the literary imagination is a “story.” Some of them are “poems.” If you teach, you know that students will often get it wrong, even after getting an explanation.

In my Brooklyn kidhood, I would go a little crazy hearing kids call the sidewalk the “floor.” Don’t eat it! It fell on the floor! Had I lived in suburbia, I might not have had this experience, because 1) the kids might have known the difference, or 2) there might not have been sidewalks, just lawns, curbs, and quiet streets.

A poem is not a story. A sidewalk is not a floor. And the map is not the territory, but that’s another kettle of fish. I am not suggesting, however, that the map is a kettle of fish.

Separated at birth?

Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nicholson Baker. Photographs by Darryl Bush and Elias Baker.

Also separated at birth?
C. Everett Koop and Ted Berrigan
Ton Koopman and Oliver Sacks
Blanche Lincoln and Elaine Hansen

Happy harvest

At Mother Jones, a 1985 clip in which Mitt Romney speaks of the work of Bain Capital as a matter of investing in and managing companies before “harvest[ing] them at a significant profit.” If companies, like corporations, are people, my friend, this metaphor is one bloody mess.

Related reading
Other posts mit Mitt

SiteSucker

SiteSucker is a Mac app that downloads websites with no muss, not much fuss. It’s donation-ware: use it for free, or pay what you think it’s worth. It’s worth, say, at least ten dollars to have a offline backup of your site, don’t you think?

SiteSucker is available from the App Store or from the developer, Rick Cranisky. The app is a bit tricky to figure out. When I e-mailed with a question, Rick sent back a file with settings for downloading a year-by-year archive of Orange Crate Art. Good deal!

On the virtues of “site:”

BrownStudies explains the virtues of “site:” and points to a handy bookmarklet: A shortcut for Googling the current web site.

Orange Crate Art has a “site:” search box in the sidebar. Here’s how to make one.

Stuyvesant students speak

“You could study for two hours and get an 80, or you could take a risk and get a 90.” It seems that for many students at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, the choice was easy: Stuyvesant Students Describe the How and the Why of Cheating (New York Times). This article describes a school in which cheating is rampant and consequences minimal.

I am happy to know that barring some exceedingly strange sequence of events, I will never see one of these students in my classes.

Related posts
Cheating at Stuyvesant High School
Stuyvesant principal resigns retires