Vermont Country $tore

We just received yet another catalogue from the Vermont Country Store, a company we must have ordered from many moons ago. Having noticed that a recent VCS catalogue offered replica Blackwing pencils for $3.90 each, and having now noticed what appears to be a very high VCS price for a pencil sharpener, I decided to check the sharpener and three more random VCS items against Amazon’s prices:

Boston X-Acto Model KS Pencil Sharpener
VCS $29.95 : Amazon list $18.40 : Amazon $9.39

Caswell-Massey Almond Oil
VCS $24.95 : Amazon $20.00

Gumby and Pokey
VCS $16.95 : Amazon list $12.95 : Amazon $10.95

Swing-A-Way Can Opener
VCS 15.95 : Amazon list $11.99 : Amazon $9.98

Bag Balm Ointment
VCS $10.95 : Amazon $7.99

VCS total: $98.75 + $16.95 shipping = $115.70
Amazon total: $58.31 + $12.66 shipping = $70.97

Amazon comes out 38% cheaper.

There may be some mystical (or semi-mystical) cachet that accompanies items from the Vermont Country Store, but realists are better off ordering elsewhere.

Alfred and Guinevere

“What I like about a ship,” Alfred said, “is they have free movies, free food, free games and free soap.”

“So do hotels,” Guinevere said.

“Hotels don’t either have free movies. And they can’t float."

“They can’t sink, either.”

Alfred and Guinevere Gates, brother and sister, seven and eleven, are the children of a fractured and struggling family. The siblings are given to fantasy, insults, lies, speculation, threats, and witty repartee. James Schuyler’s Alfred and Guinevere (1958) is a charming, inconclusive novel told entirely through dialogue, diary entries, and letters. it’s available once again from New York Review Books.

More James Schuyler posts
Mildred Bailey, the stars, and us
The poem “December”
Willa Cather and James Schuyler

Hey?

In Bloomberg Businessweek, an article on the Obama campaign’s e-mail strategy:

“The subject lines that worked best were things you might see in your in-box from other people. . . . ‘Hey’ was probably the best one we had over the duration.”

All I can say is that it’s a good thing I wasn’t directing the campaign’s e-mail effort.

Related posts, from the 2008 campaign
Campaign e-mail etiquette
Campaign e-mails (again)
Obama e-mail improvement

Chinese typewriters and predictive text

Worth reading: Chinese typewriter anticipated predictive text, finds Stanford historian (Stanford University). I’m not persuaded that what’s involved here is any more predictive than a typesetter’s practice of keeping common letters closer at hand, but the idea of a typewriter set up to produce with greater ease the “ready-made phrases” (as George Orwell would call them) of political ideology is eerily fascinating.

OED wars

From an article in the Guardian: “An eminent former editor of the Oxford English Dictionary covertly deleted thousands of words because of their foreign origins and bizarrely blamed previous editors, according to claims in a book published this week.”

Jesse Sheidlower, the OED ’s editor-at-large, responds: “This claim is completely bogus.”

Uncle Mark 2013 Gift Guide & Alamanac

The 2013 Uncle Mark Gift Guide & Almanac is available for download as a PDF. This year’s guide might be called a post-Sandy edition: Mark Hurst offers just two product recommendations, along with suggestions for helping those hit by the storm and some observations on our relationships with screens and stuff. Good food for thought.

Orange stem art

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

My guess is that only Californians and Floridians get to see oranges with stems and leaves. I saw these oranges at Farmers Market, Los Angeles.

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange mug art : Orange notebook art : Orange notecard art : Orange peel art : Orange pencil art : Orange soda art : Orange telephone art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art : Orange tree art

Stanley Kubrick notebook

[John Baxter, Stanley Kubrick: A Biography (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1997).]

The Stanley Kubrick exhibit at LACMA makes clear Kubrick’s penchant for writing things down. Here is a notebook from the making of The Killing (1956):


[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

The exhibit includes another six-ring pocket notebook (opened to a page of notes on Felix Markham’s 1963 biography Napoleon) and a card catalogue of index cards with Kubrick’s chronology of Napoleon’s life.

Los Angeles palimpsest

[Palimpsest: “a manuscript or piece of writing material on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for later writing but of which traces remain” (New Oxford American Dictionary).]

Things to do in Los Angeles

[An incomplete list.]

Arrive from elsewhere. Meet key associates at LAX. Eat dinner at Real Food Daily.

Go to the Griffith Observatory. Think about the knife fight in Rebel Without a Cause. Eat lunch at Fred 62. Go to Skylight Books. Go to Olvera Street. Buy postcards. Listen to the street’s musicians and think about the old people who are also listening. Go to the Museum Of Jurassic Technology and see it get better exhibit by exhibit. Go to Ralphs (no apostrophe). Eat dinner at Larchmont Bungalow.

Walk great distances. Walk around Pan Pacific Park. Go to CVS and get asked to donate to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital “in the name of a grandchild.” Donate, yes, but ouch, not that old yet. Go to Peet’s Coffee & Tea. Pass up the table with the wheelchair icon and watch another customer place a laptop over the icon before getting in line. Address and mail postcards. Go to Farmers Market. Go to The Grove. Feel the surreal, with 70°+ weather and piped-in Christmas music. See the Wall Project. Eat lunch from the Cali Bánh Mì food truck. Go to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Marvel at Caravaggio and company. Examine the documents in the Stanley Kubrick exhibit and think about the hard work and pure luck that make a film possible. Be delighted by the painted words of the Ed Ruscha exhibit: street names, Spam, Standard (as in Oil). Be delighted by everything. Eat dinner at Bulan Thai Vegetarian Kitchen. Eat dessert at M Café.

Go to the J. Paul Getty Museum. Experience the prodigiously vertiginous tram. Stand in awe of Giotto. Learn how painters applied gold leaf to surfaces. Eat lunch in the Cafe (no accent). Study the colors in Van Gogh’s Irises. Stand in awe some more. Go to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf (aka “Coffee Bean”). Eat dinner at Alexander’s Brite Spot. Watch Go On.

Go to the Hammer Museum. Marvel at Gustave Moreau. Look for a long time at Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man Holding a Black Hat. Write down the names of attractive fonts from the exhibit Graphic Design: Now in Production. Eat lunch at Native Foods. Browse in Aahs!!, a gift store with party supplies, naughty T-shirts, toy guns, and an impressive array of fake poop. Pick up a key associate at LAX. Eat dinner at Pann’s. Realize when leaving that they let you stay well past closing, and be happy that you left a generous tip.

Walk great distances. Go to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Think about Frank Sinatra’s small shoe size. Go to Whole Foods. Buy Thanksgiving-appropriate foodstuffs and drinkstuffs. Eat lunch at Canter’s Deli. Go to the Santa Monica Pier. Remove shoes and socks and place feet in ocean. Remove feet from ocean and replace them in socks and shoes. Have Thanksgiving dinner. Watch Modern Family.

Go to the Apple Store. Go to Bennett’s Ice Cream. Go to Bob’s Coffee & Donuts. Watch Lincoln. Go to Scoops. See Michael Cera eat ice cream. Act as if there’s nothing unusual about that. Go to the Echo Park Time Travel Mart. See the Paramount Pictures gate and go slightly nuts. Enjoy leftovers. Listen to key associates make music.

Smell the La Brea Tar Pits. Eat breakfast at Fiddler’s Bistro. Watch Sunset Boulevard. Enjoy a lunch of leftovers. Seek out the Alto Nido apartments, Joe Gillis’s residence before his move to Norma Desmond’s garage. See the Capitol Records building on the way. Visit Culver City and another Native Foods. Drink good coffee. Make a list.

[The context for this list: Elaine and I spent a week in Los Angeles, seeing our daughter and her boyfriend and our son. I am now at work on a SparkNotes version of this post. Kidding.]