evanmorris.com

Guess which one I am.

This is a picture from a few years ago I stumbled across last night, taken at a signing at a Barnes & Noble in Columbus, Ohio, for the humor anthology 101 Damnations: The Humorists' Tour of Personal Hells (St. Martin's Press, edited by Michael Rosen (left rear)), to which I contributed two essays. The folks with us in the photo are three of the other ninety-nine contributors to the book (whose names I have, alas, forgotten, as I am sure they have mine).

It was a lovely evening, the only problem being that no one -- no one -- showed up (except various relatives, which is worse than no one).

As we were cooling our heels on the mezzanine of the bookstore while shoppers milled around on the main floor below, it developed that the reason no one had showed up for the reading and signing was that the store's Community Relations Coordinator, whose job it is to publicize such events, had done no publicity whatsoever. Nada. Zippo. When I asked her, for instance, whether she had notified the Columbus Dispatch book editor of the event, she seemed genuinely struck by the novelty of the idea, and gave every appearance, furthermore, of being surprised to learn that Columbus did, in fact, have a newspaper. She had sent no releases to the local radio and TV stations. She hadn't even put a leaflet in the store window.

I tried to rouse our small band to fling her over the railing visible in the photograph, but cooler heads prevailed and we all slogged home in the rain. I like to believe that she was fired the next day, but in truth, knowing Barnes & Noble, she's probably a Senior V.P. by now.

ps -- I'll be interested to see how Google parses this post for their ad block below.

pps -- Stay tuned for more B&N perfidy.

update: Even more hamburger ads. If I erase that post about Ronald McDeadcow, will the ads change?

Posted by evan at 11:51 PM | Permalink

Google ad floating below. I'll remove it if folks object.

update: never mind, it's gone because it was UGLY.

further update: woohoo! Got it to go in the sidebar and cranked down the color so it blends in. Not bad for somebody who has no, zero, zip idea of what he's doing.

But why am I getting ads for Happy Meals and Burger King? I haven't eaten beef in ten years.

Posted by evan at 6:27 PM | Permalink

The Observer | Comment | For the record

Our interview with American literary sensation Benjamin Kunkel (Review, last week) was accompanied by a panel of quotes from US reviews, supplied by his publisher. One, from Entertainment Weekly, read: 'Kunkel has succeeded in crafting a voice of singular originality' and omitted the next line ' - one you want to punch in the mouth.'

via Blog of a Bookslut

Posted by evan at 7:26 PM | Permalink

Ronald MacDonald Charged in Wendy's Theft - New York Times

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- You'd think that just working at a Wendy's restaurant would be difficult for Ronald MacDonald. Now, the 22-year-old MacDonald -- no relation to Ronald McDonald, the clown -- has been charged with stealing money from a safe at the Wendy's.

Police said the restaurant manager called police early Monday, saying he found MacDonald and another employee taking money from the safe at about 1:30 a.m.

MacDonald and Steve Lemay, 20, both of Manchester, were detained at the store until police arrived.

Posted by evan at 7:01 PM | Permalink

So bright and early Monday morning, the kittens took a vote and picked their representative to be tested for assorted nastiness at the vet clinic. The gray and white one won, and a few hours later he and, by extrapolation, his siblings, were declared fit to join the general population of cats in the house, at least until suitable homes are found for them, which at the rate things are going will be shortly after they have grandchildren.

The door to my office was thown open and their aunts and uncles were invited in to visit, which they did amongst all manner of joyous hissing and spitting. Then the kittens were encouraged to explore the Wonderful World of Somewhere Not My Office, with the ulterior motive being for me to actually get some work done. The brave little creatures toddled forth into the hallway and headed for the stairs down to the first floor as I stifled a sob and waved goodbye with a claw-tattered page from the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary I had found under what is left of my desk .

The room seemed suddenly empty without the pitty-pat of their little paws and their cries of joy when they knocked the router to the floor or chewed through another run of ethernet cabling. A cup of coffee rested, achingly unspilled, near a stack of important papers. They were gone. The nest was empty. Childhood's end.

Ten minutes later they were back, and they haven't left since. The only difference is that several of the other cats followed them back and I now have an average population of ten cats in my office. I left the room just now and returned to find Uncle Gus apparently conducting a class for the little tykes in Turning On the TV.

Maybe if I turn off the lights and leave the windows open for a few days....

Posted by evan at 9:23 PM | Permalink

Police Activity Report

• Nov. 10: A W. 5th Street man reported that his wife hit him in the nose and he wanted to press charges. Later, he decided that he wouldn’t press charges and just wanted her to leave.

• Nov. 11: A Walnut Road woman purchased a trailer from her son, but her son’s live-in girlfriend refused to leave after the trailer was purchased.

[more]

Posted by evan at 10:50 AM | Permalink

"So your plan is to go straight from never grew up to senile dementia?"

Backstory: There was a display of hobby-horses at Kroger's today. You squeeze their ears and they whinny. Loudly. I squeezed, oh, maybe a dozen ears. It sounded like a herd of little electronic horses having a very bad day. I found this amusing. So shoot me. I thought shopping was supposed to be fun.

Posted by evan at 5:51 PM | Permalink

Alan Coren

I was interested to read that James Bond’s Aston Martin DB5, expected to fetch more than $1 million at auction next month, wasn’t always reliable . . .

TWITCHING the Aston through the rain-slicked roundabout, Bond floored the bespoke Zwillinger throttle beneath his James Lobb loafer, took off down the long Chippenham straight, and began to close on Goldfinger’s Testarossa.

It was at that instant that his race-tuned ear picked up the tink-tink-tink from deep inside the pedigree bowels. It became a tonk-tonk-tonk. The car lost speed. Bond cursed, swung into a fortuitous BP forecourt, sprang out and threw up the bonnet. A small overalled man appeared beside him.

“Know what that is?” said the mechanic, peering.

“What?” cried Bond, relieved.

“Smoke,” said the mechanic. “You see a lot of that in my job. You get to recognise it.”

“How long would it take to fix?” said 007.

The mechanic looked at his watch. “Twelve days,” he said, “give or take. I am on the pumps till Tuesday week, due to Norman being in Doncaster with his Auntie May’s funny turn. He is her only heir, narmean?”

“Leave the pumps!” snapped Bond. “This is a national emergency.”

“Leave the pumps?” cried the mechanic. “You cannot leave pumps, son. You got to watch ’em every minute. They are like children, pumps.”

[more]

Posted by evan at 12:34 PM | Permalink

That's incredibly beautiful...give me a hammer...

ROME (Reuters) - If you thought art galleries were quiet havens of contemplation, think again. Looking at great works of art can inspire a strong, sometimes irresistible urge to destroy, Italian researchers have found.

Dubbed the "David syndrome," after the statue of the young Hebrew king by Michelangelo, the condition can provoke an overwhelming desire to damage the art being viewed, the psychoanalyst who identified the malady told Reuters.

Posted by evan at 10:26 PM | Permalink

... watching a fried chicken fly by.

Posted by evan at 12:03 PM | Permalink

Lynne Truss Has Another Gripe With You - New York Times

... Truss has just published her latest effort, and it, too, taps into the retro appeal of strict rules. The title offers its own mini-sermon: "Talk to the Hand: The Utter Bloody Rudeness of the World Today, or Six Good Reasons to Stay Home and Bolt the Door." The book's basic contention is that people in public places no longer bother to treat one another with even a semblance of Old World courtesy or respect. Writing in a tone of comic hyperbole, Truss claims that the "politeness words" - her term for "please," "thank you" and "excuse me" - have dwindled to the point of near extinction. Is there a scintilla of truth to her findings? Possibly not. In her book, Truss acknowledges the research of the British social anthropologist Kate Fox, who has conducted field experiments on politeness, like bumping into random pedestrians to see how many would say "Sorry." As it turned out, 80 percent apologized, and Fox concluded that manners have not declined.

But Truss remains unconvinced, and in her book she adopts an isolationist policy; instead of proposing a new code of social diplomacy, she laments the violation of her personal space. The offenders, as she sees it, include smokers, graffiti artists, moviegoers who chat in theaters, bicyclists who ignore red lights and children on skateboards and the "breeders" who created them. She is nearly always "shocked," except when she is "incensed," and at times she aims her ire at such seemingly innocuous subjects as waiters who say "There you go" when they put a plate a food in front of her. Rudeness follows her like an unwanted companion even when she is up in the sky. "Air travelers on long-haul flights change into pajamas in the lavatories," she notes with typical disapproval, leading you to wonder if it would be better if they changed in the aisles. ...

Is Andy Rooney married?

Posted by evan at 11:13 PM | Permalink

BBC NEWS | Americas | US dating agencies sued for fraud

A lawsuit recently filed in Los Angeles claims that Match.com's staff have turned up for dates with clients in order to keep them interested when no one else seems to be interested in them.

Posted by evan at 11:22 AM | Permalink

So one of my desktop speakers stopped working today. I checked the balance in Winamp, fiddled with the plugs, even opened up Windows sound thingy to check the balance. Most perplexing. A power surge (common out here) would have fried the whole system, not just one channel.

After 20 minutes of crawling around on the floor, I found the answer. One of these stupid lovely little cats had chewed through one of the cords. I couldn't identify the toothmarks, but I suspect the black & white one, a.k.a. "Bitey."

Posted by evan at 5:47 PM | Permalink

naming contest coming soon

Posted by evan at 4:24 PM | Permalink

Wired News: Tainted Sony CDs Used Open Source

Controversial copy-protection software used by music publisher Sony BMG on music CDs appears to have tapped an open source project, raising questions about copyrights, software experts said on Friday.

Posted by evan at 1:55 PM | Permalink

Food Authority Allays Consumer Concern About "Food that Glows"

The NSW Food Authority today moved to reassure consumers about the safety of their food following a number of media reports about "glowing pork chops." . .. “The Food Authority understands that many people would be alarmed to discover their food glowing in the fridge, but we can assure NSW consumers that the bacteria responsible is totally harmless if consumed,” Mr Davey said. ...

Posted by evan at 12:28 AM | Permalink

Auction at the Fairfield County Fairgrounds, Lancaster, Ohio.
Kathy bought a box of ceramic rabbits.

Posted by evan at 6:28 PM | Permalink

Viciously anti-kitten propaganda in a local mall.

Posted by evan at 6:13 PM | Permalink

This is Gus, the inventor of Cat Chow Hockey. Shortly after the arrival of Fuzzy, Gus taught him the game, and now they go head-to-head with Pokie for the prizes.

So the other day I'm sitting in my office with the five kittens, door closed, when I hear the doorknob rattle and see it turn slightly. I figured it was Kathy. The door can be sticky, so I got up, went over, opened the door, and beheld Gus sitting there. He had been trying to turn the doorknob to get in.

Gus with the ability to open doors is a possibility too terrible to contemplate.

But wait, it gets worse. Yesterday we were in the kitchen and I heard the doorknob on the downstairs bathroom rattle. Lo and behold, there was Gus showing Fuzzy how to turn the knob.

I guess it really is time to hide the car keys.

Posted by evan at 11:55 AM | Permalink

Cheap Laptops Are Planned for Kids

TUNIS, Tunisia (AP) - A cheap laptop boasting wireless network access and a hand-crank to provide electricity are expected to start shipping in February or March to help extend technology to school-aged children worldwide.

The machines are to sell for $100, slightly less than its cost. The aim is to have governments or donors buy them and give full ownership to the children.

[snip]

MIT Media Lab chairman Nicholas Negroponte, who unveiled the textbook-sized laptop on Wednesday, said he expects to sell 1 million of them to Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria.

Negroponte did not say who would build the machine, which will cost $110 to make, but at least five are considering bids to do so. He said a commercial version may be available at a higher price to subsidize machines provided to children.

[snip]

The devices will be lime green in color, with a yellow hand crank, to make them appealing to children and to fend off potential thieves.

Silly me, I thought Negroponte was gone, relegated to teaching communications skills to ag supply salesmen in Des Moines or something similarly more useful than his 90s gig as chief feather merchant to the digital revolution.

Posted by evan at 10:59 AM | Permalink

The Thurber House | Thurber Prize for American Humor

Thurber House is proud to announce that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, by Jon Stewart and the writers of The Daily Show, has won the 2005 Thurber Prize for American Humor. Authors David Javerbaum and Ben Karlin accepted the award in a ceremony at New York's famed Algonquin Hotel on Mon., Nov. 14.

Bravo, Jon Stewart, et al., one of the few reasons not to shoot your TV.

By the way, anyone wishing to know what I look like (sortof) will find a framed photograph of me hanging in the Thurber House in Columbus. Right above the bathtub in the second-floor bathroom. No kidding. I guess they ran short of space downstairs.

Actually, I can only presume that it still hangs there, because the last time I was in the Thurber House, about two years ago, I attempted to enter said bathroom in order to show the picture to my wife's cousins, but the four of us were repelled by a curiously rabid docent who announced, with all the hauteur a guardian of the Thurber Legacy is apparently issued, that this particular loo was verboten to the likes of us. Go figure. Maybe they'd had a rash of authors filching the toilet paper.

Posted by evan at 5:59 PM | Permalink

This guy is the ringleader.

Posted by evan at 11:29 PM | Permalink

The How Come? web site, which I seriously screwed up without realizing it last month, is up and running again.

Ask a question, win a free book!

Posted by evan at 10:22 PM | Permalink

I have decided to sell the kittens to a meth lab.

From a public policy angle, it's a win-win.
I'll get some work done and the meth lab won't.

Posted by evan at 12:27 PM | Permalink

Day three of five kittens living in my 15 x 17 office. Big mistake. I change the litter once a day and sift it every few hours and the place still smells like the men's room in Grand Central circa 1976.

They sleep much of the day but come alive in the late afternoon, bouncing off the walls, climbing the bookcases and kicking books off with glee.

How can an eight week-old kitten push the M-W Third International off a shelf? It must weigh five or six pounds.

The little black one climbs my leg, clambers up to my shoulder, pauses briefly and then sinks her claws into my scalp and hoists herself atop my head.

Appalling little savages. I have no idea of what to do with them. I've called four or five rescue outfits, all to no avail.

I'm trying to work, dammit. They don't care.

Update: Fritos. They like Fritos. I have given them the whole bag. Perhaps they will leave me alone for a while.

Posted by evan at 11:49 PM | Permalink

languagehat.com: OMBUDSMAN, SPARE THAT APOSTROPHE!

NPR ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin recently responded to what he describes as "a regular flow of comments and observations about language" from listeners; my response after reading it is to wish he'd stick to journalism and ethics and leave language alone.

Posted by evan at 12:01 PM | Permalink

is an ebay fraud seller free? | Ask MetaFilter

A long but fascinating (and ultimately very disturbing) thread on AskMefi.

Posted by evan at 11:37 AM | Permalink

beedogs

Equal time for dogs, as requested.

Posted by evan at 11:35 AM | Permalink

They're Soft, Cuddly and Lashed to the Front of a Truck. But Why? - New York Times

A bear with a prominent grease spot on his little beige nose spends his days wedged behind the bumper guard of an ironworker's pickup in the Gowanus section of Brooklyn. A fuzzy rabbit and a clown, garroted by a bungee cord, slump from the front of a Dodge van in Park Slope. Stewie, the evil baby from "Family Guy," scowls from the grille of a Pepperidge Farm delivery truck in Brooklyn Heights, mold occasionally sprouting from his forehead.

All are soldiers in the tattered, scattered army of the stuffed: mostly discarded toys plucked from the trash and given new if punishing lives on the prows of large motor vehicles, their fluffy white guts flapping from burst seams and going gray in the soot-stream of a thousand exhaust pipes.

Grille-mounted stuffed animals form a compelling yet little-studied aspect of the urban streetscape, a traveling gallery of baldly transgressive public art. The time has come not just to praise them but to ask the big question. Why?

That is, why do a small percentage of trucks and vans have filthy plush toys lashed to their fronts, like prisoners at the mast? Are they someone's idea of a joke? Parking aids? Talismans against summonses?

Don't expect an easy answer.

more

Me! Me! I know! I actually had a job in the late 1970s recycling paper from garbage, and we routinely pulled out stuffed animals to decorate our forklifts, truck and compactor. It's a way of goofing on the job itself, humanizing a dull routine and declaring your distance from a grungy job. Plus it really bothers some prissy people (such as, apparently, New York Times reporters).

Posted by evan at 7:13 PM | Permalink

Punctuation cop turns ire on bad manners

NEW YORK (Reuters) - When it comes to bad manners, today's society is pretty much a hopeless case, author Lynn Truss says.

That didn't stop her front ranting about it in her latest book, "Talk to the Hand," a self-described "moral homily" that attacks rudeness the same way she critiqued bad punctuation in her 2003 best-seller "Eats, Shoots & Leaves."

"Please" and "thank you" are endangered in the public discourse, she writes in her new work, increasingly drowned out by inane mobile phone chatter, dismal customer service and the vulgar epithet she writes as "Eff Off."

"I say in the book that I have a flame of hope (that manners will improve) but it's very, very, very small," she told Reuters in an interview Wednesday, the day after her book came out.

"Eats, Shoots & Leaves" sold 3 million copies worldwide, its publisher said. Seizing on that success, Gotham Books has rushed out "Talk to the Hand," which Truss calls "a big, systematic moan about modern life."

The New York Times called it "a thin and crabby diatribe" in a book review, adding, "The author may have been good for only one book-length conniption."

In any case Truss said writing her 206-page rant was therapeutic.

"It really, really made me feel better," she said. "I don't know whether I've just dumped it all onto my readers, which could be the case. I may have made everybody else feel bad in the process but I've made myself feel much better."

Posted by evan at 11:22 AM | Permalink

wherein the PR folks at Wal-Mart finally snap under the strain:

Wal-Mart Says 'Happy Holidays' Covers Several Events

... The dispute erupted after a Wal-Mart worker responded to a woman who complained that the company was replacing "Merry Christmas" with "Happy Holidays." The response described Christmas as a combination of world traditions from Siberian shamanism to Visigoth calendars.

The e-mail, which Wal-Mart spokesman Dan Fogleman said was genuine, said Wal-Mart had to act as a global organization in a world with many different practices.

"The colors associated with Christmas red and white are actually a representation of the aminita mascera (sic) mushroom. Santa is also borrowed from the Caucuses, mistletoe from the Celts, yule log from the Goths, the time from the Visigoth and the tree from the worship of Baal. It is a wide wide world," said the e-mail, from a customer service worker identified only as Kirby.

Fogleman said Thursday that Kirby no longer worked for the company.

Posted by evan at 11:50 PM | Permalink

Yeah, I'm gonna get a lot of work done today.

Note: that is, as it appears, a purple velour couch in the background. It was a freebie, as was the oriental rug, which we found by the curb in Granville. Long live Bulk Pickup Day!

Posted by evan at 11:26 AM | Permalink

The 'Permanence' of Web Content

As much as a third of article-page traffic generated on the Webby award-winning U.K. online newspaper site, Guardian Unlimited, is from articles that are more than a month old. Speaking at the Ifra/WAN/FIPP "Beyond the Printed Word" conference in Madrid, the digital director of the Guardian Newspapers Ltd Group, Simon Waldman, again emphasized that one of the key competitive advantages that the Web as a content medium has to offer is its "permanence." An article is published online and then it is there to stay, to be accessed, recycled, re-used over and over again ideally through to infinity.

Websites essentially extend the life of newspaper content. Unlike a newspaper, online articles don't end up in the dustbin or in some dusty archive, but are being constantly revisited and used -- and what could be more powerful than that? Waldman says that some newspapers that are skeptics of the Internet have failed to grasp this key advantage of "permanence" that the Web brings as a medium to a publishing operation.

Posted by evan at 10:59 PM | Permalink

Forecast says it'll be in the low 20s tonight, so I now have five kittens in my office. Pictures soon.

Posted by evan at 4:16 PM | Permalink

About a week after we took in the three kittens (Phoebe, Harry and Gus) in July 2004, I came across two more, an all-black female and a mottled calico (presumably female), 5-6 weeks old, in an old woodshed on our property. I gave them food and water, and later took a few pictures, but when I went back the next afternoon they were gone. I searched our north field for them and called them for a few days, but I never saw them again.

But I guess I did meet the black one again. Last night I was going through some photos from that time, when I came across a picture of that black kitten (above) and had a small revelation. I am 99% certain that she became the mother of the kittens now in our garage (i.e., the cat our neighbor apparently shot). She was a very small cat even as an adult, and her prominent ears and sharply triangular face were very distinctive.

Perhaps our earlier encounter explains why she wasn't afraid of me when I started feeding the current crop of garage kittens.

Posted by evan at 12:43 AM | Permalink

Very funny. Now open the damn box before somebody gets hurt.

Posted by evan at 8:04 PM | Permalink

On the good china, yet.

Posted by evan at 12:24 PM | Permalink

http://www.cartoonbank.com
(The difference in our house is that we're both writers, so reward distribution can get a little baroque at times.)

Posted by evan at 11:50 PM | Permalink

This is my all-time favorite keyboard.

It's an IBM Model M/1391401 buckling spring keyboard. It came with a used IBM PS-2 386 computer I bought for $200 in 1994 when my employer finally joined the Windows world. It was manufactured in 1989, and it's made of steel -- seriously. The keys are heavy plastic, but the case itself is steel and it weighs quite a bit, much more than the cheap plastic keyboards computers come with today.

I remember noticing when I bought my first Dell PC later in 1994 that the keyboard was a) much quieter (buckling spring keyboards are notoriously "clacky"), b) much lighter and "cheap" feeling and c) much more inaccurate. I made many more typos on the Dell board, even though I found I also typed more slowly than on the IBM keyboard. I soon went back to the IBM keyboard.

Since then, each computer I've bought has come with a flimsier keyboard than the last. The latest Dell I bought came with a keyboard so laughable that at first I thought the box was empty. I now have a stack of three brand-new, still-boxed Dell keyboards in my office. Together they weigh less than my trusty Model M.

Typing on one of these "buckling spring" keyboards is very similar to typing on the old IBM Selectric typewriters (on which they were based). The keys are well-spaced and give a definite "click" when they're hit. There is none of the uncertainty one gets with a cheapo keyboard, and far fewer of the accidental keystrokes you make when your fingers can't really tell where one key stops and its neighbor starts. These keyboards actually make typing fun (and I am a hunt-and-peck typist).

The one problem with these keyboards is that they lack the "Windows" keys useful for minimizing all apps at once, but I found a small free program called Key Tweak that lets you re-map the keys in Windows 2000 or XP, and I remapped my right "Alt" key (which no one in recorded history has ever used) to be a "Windows" key. Problem solved.

Still, 1989 was a long time ago, so a while back I started looking for a new version of my old keyboard. I even bought two current IBM keyboards by mail, but while they were definitely superior to the cheesy Dell boards, they weren't even close to my old pal. Nobody, it seemed, was making keyboards the way they used to.

A few months ago, however, I discovered that someone is. A company called Unicomp had inherited the IBM keyboard operation, and was producing the original keyboards as well as a few interesting variations. So I now have a brand-new keyboard:

It's every bit as great as my old IBM keyboard and lacks only the few annoying squeaks the old one had developed since 1989.

Buckling spring keyboards seem to inspire an evangelical loyalty in their users. This Wikipedia entry gives a good overview of the Model M keyboard mystique, and more info can be found here:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3078215/

http://www.dansdata.com/ibmkeyboard.htm

http://www.dansdata.com/clickykeyboards.htm

http://www.clickykeyboards.com/

Posted by evan at 3:49 PM | Permalink

Yet another garage kitten.

Posted by evan at 12:01 AM | Permalink

She looks a lot like Fuzzy, but has a complete tail.

[update: she is a he]

Posted by evan at 10:45 PM | Permalink

When displaced New Yorkers wind up in L.A., they all seem to gravitate to Mulberry Pizza because it's the only place west of the Mississippi where they make pizza that doesn't resemble a shower clog doused with melted Velveeta and ketchup.

B'klyn dream comes true in L.A.

I'd say "west of New Jersey," myself. Ohio pizza is godawful. Tasteless gunk on a stale saltine with way, way too much sugar in the sauce. But folks love it. There's a place in Buckeye Lake called Pizza Cottage that serves possibly the worst pizza I've ever had -- bland, soggy crust, sugary catsup sauce, weird, synthetic cheese -- but people around here regard the place with a near-religious devotion and line up in the parking lot to get in. Go figure.

Fortunately, there is a place in Pickerington (about 20 miles from us) called Pizzeria New York that serves excellent real New York pizza. It only took us seven years and 500 hideous "pizza" experiences to find it.

Posted by evan at 3:22 PM | Permalink

http://www.newyorker.com/

Posted by evan at 12:23 PM | Permalink

Fuzzy as a baby cat.

Posted by evan at 4:31 PM | Permalink

Can someone familiar with Movable Type tell me how to convert this fixed-width style sheet to floating width? Every time I try I break it, and css gives me a terrible headache.

I like the nice bright colors, though. Is there a way to make bits of it blink?

(update: I switched to a sedate style. Still need help.)

Posted by evan at 11:42 PM | Permalink

I have been informed that an excerpt from my book From Altoids to Zima -- The Surprising Stories Behind 125 Famous Brand Names will be published in the January issue of Readers Digest.

Posted by evan at 11:27 PM | Permalink

Our Son the Actor (screen name Michael Mercurio) is appearing in a commercial (for some kind of Tide stain-stick) in heavy rotation right now. It's a drill-sergeant-chewing-out-the-squad scene, and he's the soldier to the right (stage left) of the chewee.

(Link above is to an old resume -- he lives in LA now. Here's the IMDB link).

He's also in the movie Jarhead to be released this Friday.

Posted by evan at 6:01 PM | Permalink

Do not fiddle with website first thing in the morning, especially on weekday, when most of those slackers read it. Sorry. Fixed now.

Posted by evan at 1:12 PM | Permalink

WSJ.com - Google Will Return to Scanning Copyrighted Library Books

Google Inc. will resume scanning copyrighted library books into its search engine after a self-imposed hiatus, despite the efforts of some publishers and authors to block it from doing so without the copyright holders' permission.

The Mountain View, Calif., company said it plans to resume scanning copyrighted books in the collections of Stanford University and the University of Michigan "soon." In August, amid a backlash by publishers, the company suspended its scanning of copyrighted books in libraries until today in order to give publishers time to request that their works not be scanned.

Google also said it will focus on scanning copyrighted works that are out of print and is seeking publishers' permission to digitize books that are still available new from bookstores. The company hadn't publicly disclosed that it was targeting out-of-print works for its initial scanning efforts although it says that was always its policy. That distinction could strengthen its argument that the project won't negatively affect book sales. But it isn't likely to lead the two groups suing Google over the Print Library Project to back down.
[more]

Incidentally, what are the libraries getting out of this? And how come nobody asks?

Posted by evan at 3:31 PM | Permalink

The Word We Love To Hate - Literally. By Jesse Sheidlower

When I introduce myself as a dictionary editor to a stranger, I can usually count on a few things. The stranger will say, "Oh, I'll have to watch how I talk in front of you." The stranger will ask me about why some word like bling was put into The Dictionary (as though there's only one). And then the stranger will complain about a pet usage peeve, some error perpetrated by members of a disliked group—sportscasters, say, or teenagers, or Americans.

Recently, strangers I meet seem particularly peeved by people who use literally to mean figuratively (the ones who say things like "he literally exploded with rage"). Even strangers I don't meet are fixated—two of them run a reasonably informed blog devoted to "tracking abuse of the word 'literally.' "

As is often the case, though, such "abuses" have a long and esteemed history in English.

Posted by evan at 12:50 PM | Permalink