No Squalor, Thanks

February 4th, 2010 §

I’m surprised no one has mentioned, in all this flap about the iPad—and I have my own theories about that name, I think it was Steve’s, pardon me, Teh Steve’s idea, and no one wanted to disabuse him. I mean, we know this thing has been His baby, for a long time. If a problem with the name didn’t occur to him—would you want to be the one to tell him?

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Green My Eyes

February 2nd, 2010 § 2

It was J.D. Salinger who taught me how to write. Not the man, but a person who seemed perfectly real to me—Salinger’s startling gift to literature, these people, their human vitality—Seymour, the oldest of the Glass children. Buddy, his brother, reads aloud, as it were, the letter that comprises Seymour,  Read the rest of this entry 

The Wheels On The Bus

January 29th, 2010 § 3

Nance writes today about the 50th anniversary, on February 1, of the Sit-in of The Greensboro Four …

… an historic event which, due to the media attention it received and the momentum it launched for desegregation, has been called the Dawn of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.

In my 12th year, my family moved from New England to Nashville, to various comic effects. One of my fellow students complained about my “put on Northern accent”  Read the rest of this entry 

Oh Frabjous iPad

January 27th, 2010 § 1

Just call me a happy camper. Why, this thing’ll write my books for me. Where do I sign. (Not to worry, already have.)

{ fin }

Apple Tablet Rorschach

January 18th, 2010 Comments Off


guardian.co.uk The invite, which shows the Apple logo superimposed over a series of graffiti-style paint splatters, gives few clues as to what Apple will announce at the event.

Now, now. Use your noggin. Colors. Paint. Freeform. Outside the margins. Creative. Do whatever you want? Layers. Layers? Be original. Lots of splatters.  Read the rest of this entry 

Clay Shirky: More Jerks Please!

January 16th, 2010 § 9

A Rant About Women,  he titles it, which is like dangling raw meat right there—or should I say, holding it out on a very long stick. Like they do at the zoo.

So Shirkey realizes he’s been conned, and by a bright student, and the realization makes him rather pleased. For is not his male student a reflection of himself?  Read the rest of this entry 

Disposed To Admire

January 15th, 2010 § 1

Profile of Adam Smith

Tony Judt, in The New York Review of Books: This “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition … is … the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” Those are not my words. They were written by Adam Smith, who regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted. It is now upon us.

{ fin }

Snow Leopard Stumbles

January 10th, 2010 § 1

You’d think it such a lithe creature. And indeed, Apple did a remarkable thing in releasing an OS update that is cheaper, smaller and more streamlined.

Until it bricked my external drives. All of them, except one lame, elderly firewire, thirty whole gigs in size. So we’re talking a chipset issue here, but not just Firewire. Three backup drives I used for USB backups—  Read the rest of this entry