Et Cetera

Let’s see how geographically specific I can make my recommendations.:) (But hey, there are enough Chicagoland CT readers that this may be relevant.) I’ve been so preoccupied with looking up summer events in Chicago proper that I’ve missed things in my own backyard. (Well, technically it’s more in front of the building than behind it, but you get my point.:) This weekend – June 18-19 – is Custer’s Last Stand. I literally ran into the preparation yesterday as I went around the block for dinner. It looks like it will be fun. Then again, Jonathan noted in the comments to the other thread that these neighborhood street fairs can be somewhat disappointing. He suggested we check out the ones in our neighborhood. So this being 100 ft away sounds like a good target. It looks like there will be several other such events in Evanston this summer. Of course, if all else fails, there’s always the beach.

• Transparent screens [I don’t remember how I found this one, probably on del.icio.us somewhere]
• Human tetris [mpg] [thanks]

:-)

From a delightful “short essay”:http://www.ansible.co.uk/sfx/sfx128.html by David Langford on footnotes in literature.

bq. My favourite helpful annotation in fantasy appears in Lord Dunsany’s story “The Bird of the Difficult Eye”, where “beasts prowling in the blackness gluttered” at the doomed protagonist. Gluttered? A footnote is provided: “See any dictionary, but in vain.”

The essay discusses Alasdair Gray’s use of fictional footnotes, but curiously fails to mention his Lanark, an almost uniformly depressing novel, with a happy ending which is only described (implied?) in the endnotes to a nonexistent final section. It also mentions in passing J.G. Ballard’s short story, “The Index” (which nabakov talks about in the comments to this “post”:https://crookedtimber.org/2003/10/15/indexing-as-artform/ on ‘Indexing as Artform’). Of course, Anthony Grafton has written an entire book on the genealogy of the footnote. However, despite frequent displays of Grafton’s personal literary flair ( e.g. “Like the high whine of the dentist’s drill, the low rumble of the footnote on the historian’s page reassures: The tedium it inflicts, like the pain inflicted by the drill, is not random but directed.”), the book confines its scope to the academic footnote, almost entirely ignoring its exotic fictional cousins. Finally, Scott McLemee “writes”:http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/05/10/mclemee about the guilty pleasures of reading reference books for entertainment, and solicits nominations for “favorite reference books” to provide “diversion, edification, or moral uplift .” My personal favourite is Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, available in a thoroughly outdated (and thus vastly more entertaining) edition “here”:http://www.bartleby.com/81/. “Fowler’s English Usage”:http://www.bartleby.com/116/ (again available in an antiquated edition) runs a close second, although I understand that its most recent edition has lost much of the vigour and charm that earlier versions had.

Update: I’d always assumed (without reading it) that Fowler’s “The King’s English” was an early and rather different version of “Modern English Usage.” Not so; they’re separate (if related) texts, and the link above is to the former rather than the latter.

This just came through on Drago Radev‘s IList:

I was visiting a government office recently and I noticed the following sign at the entrance:

D.

!http://images.amazon.com/images/P/6305074305.01._PE_SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg!

If you do an Amazon search for “Glenn Reynolds,” the movie Troll II appears in the first page of results, beating out Reynolds’ book with Merges on space law and policy (the latter is actually quite a useful volume, and the reason I was doing the search in the first place).

And while we’re on the subject of Thomas Friedman’s latest burblings, isn’t it about time that someone brought up Edwin Abbot’s classic novel, Flatland and its hero and narrator, “A Square?”

Zoe Williams has an interesting article in the Guardian about howThe Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is now a nostalgia item. In the US, the Hitchhiker’s Guide was more nerd samizdat than cultural phenomenon. However, I’m attracted to the idea that my generation is seeing the nostalgia media complex turn the 80s into something that we don’t recognize.

Of course, people whose formative decade was the 60s say exactly the same thing. When Tony Blair made his ill-considered attack on that decade’s legislative liberalism some months ago, I asked my mother what the 60s were like, and she said: “They really were a lot like the 50s.” The historian Dominic Sandbrook, writing in the Sunday Times last weekend, gave us the killer fact about this era: “There were almost 60 million people in Britain and, at most, only 1 million bought the best-selling single of the week. In comparison, 20 million regularly tuned in to watch The Black and White Minstrel Show.” It wasn’t liberal, and it wasn’t cool. It’s news like that that turns your world upside down. Next we’re going to find out that there wasn’t really a war on in the 40s.

Peter Briffa “passes the latest meme thingy”:http://publicinterest.blogspot.com/2005/04/via-peter-cuthbertson-youre-stuck.html on to Crooked Timber. It’s a good job I never became a major celebrity (it was touch-and-go for a while there) because I am useless with these kinds of questions, and celebrities seem to get asked them all the time. I never know what my favorite _x_ (color, food, piece of music, composer, book, whatever) is; I can rarely remember the right answer to the “What’s the last …?” questions; and I can never think up a good response to the “If you only had …?” questions. This one is no different.

[click to continue…]

Reading up on hometown blogs I came across the unfortunate news that rat poopie was found in a warehouse holding airplane snacks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport (and you don’t have to live in Chicagoland to use that airport during your U.S. airtravel given how many transfers occur there). The article states that “inspectors discovered more than 1,000 rat droppings where pretzels, beer and other airline snacks and beverages are stored”. To this a Chicagoist reader responded with the following astute question: “who got stuck with that counting job?”.

From a “local news report”:http://abclocal.go.com/wls/news/040105_ap_ns_birthcontrol_orders.html in Chicago:

bq. Governor Rod Blagojevich today filed an emergency rule with the Illinois Secretary of State’s office requiring birth control prescriptions be filled without delay at pharmacies selling contraceptives. Under the rule, if the contraceptive is not in stock, the pharmacy must order it or, if the patient prefers, transfer the prescription to a nearby pharmacy. If the pharmacist does not fill the prescription because of a moral objection, another pharmacist must be available to fill it. … Blagojevich is a result of a Chicago pharmacist recently refusing to fill orders for contraceptives because of moral opposition.

Well no wonder he’s taking the lead on this.

“Snort”:http://www.sumama.com/misc/911_tape.wma. (Via “Pangadon”:http://www.pandagon.net/mtarchives/004875.html).

I just got off the phone from an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Of course, you’ll all be agog to read my views on bankruptcy reform, social security, the trade deficit, the impending crisis of capitalism, and so on. You’ll have to wait a little while, however. The topic of the interview was bunnies vs bilbies.

In O’Hare airport, the Starbucks sells Lemon Poopy Seed muffins. At least they’re honest about it. Makes you wonder what’s in the coffee.

I have left the bitter “Sonoran desert”:http://www.desertusa.com/du_sonoran.html behind and am in balmy Chicago for a “conference about body parts”:http://www.law.depaul.edu/institutes_centers/health/pdf/body_parts.pdf. Packing my suitcase, I realized that I’m going to have some trouble keeping my own body parts at a reasonable temperature: where are all those Winter clothes I used to own? Didn’t I live in New Jersey and Connecticut for years? So I just brought everything I had.

The conference should be interesting. Mainly lawyers and bioethics people, along with some economists. I am the token sociologist. I’ll be talking about some work I’m doing on organ procurement rates in seventeen OECD countries, so obviously I am on the panel titled “The Battle Between Bioethics and Religion.” As it happens, my friend “John Evans”:http://sociology.ucsd.edu/faculty/EvansJ.htm wrote “the book”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226222624/kieranhealysw-20/ref=nosim/ on the battle between bioethics and religion. The final score was Bioethics 3, Religion 1.