“Politics is the study of who eats… and who gets eaten.” So, when it comes to humans, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid *everything* political. But the Oval Office Firehose of Bullshit can overwhelm the best of us. Also, I keep setting aside interesting articles that never get linked.
So, let’s try a Saturday-morning experiment: How many comments can we thread before somebody Fails to Read the F***ing Header?
.
And apart from that one restriction, what’s on the agenda for the day?
***********
Inside One of America’s Last Pencil Factories https://t.co/4qBoIdbohs
— Katherine Miller (@katherinemiller) January 12, 2018
I’ll confess, I always assumed that liquid lead must somehow be poured into cored wooden cylinders, but noooo. Definitely click over for the Christopher Payne photos that go with Sam Anderson’s text:
A pencil is a little wonder-wand: a stick of wood that traces the tiniest motions of your hand as it moves across a surface. I am using one now, making weird little loops and slashes to write these words. As a tool, it is admirably sensitive. The lines it makes can be fat or thin, screams or whispers, blocks of concrete or blades of grass, all depending on changes of pressure so subtle that we would hardly notice them in any other context. (The difference in force between a bold line and nothing at all would hardly tip a domino.) And while a pencil is sophisticated enough to track every gradation of the human hand, it is also simple enough for a toddler to use.
Such radical simplicity is surprisingly complicated to produce. Since 1889, the General Pencil Company has been converting huge quantities of raw materials (wax, paint, cedar planks, graphite) into products you can find, neatly boxed and labeled, in art and office-supply stores across the nation: watercolor pencils, editing pencils, sticks of charcoal, pastel chalks. Even as other factories have chased higher profit margins overseas, General Pencil has stayed put, cranking out thousands upon thousands of writing instruments in the middle of Jersey City…
PIGL
Good morning, tout le monde!
I like pencils. If miss the Laurentian brand pencil crayons of my school days.
randy khan
I just read that article yesterday. The photos are really great.
LaNonna
Less lurking, with the time difference I am finally online for an open thread. Today’s plans, 6 friends here for a focaccia lunch followed by the movie “O Brother Where Art Thou”, as we are learning a couple of the songs in our choir, and some of us have never seen the movie.
The January weather has been warmish but dryer than normal (this is nominally the rainy season in Puglia), 60 F today with a clear week ahead, also time to catch up on extending in the decorative succulent garden, tomorrow.
Lapassionara
Good morning. Great topic to start the day.
ThresherK
Pencils smear for me (a lefty), so I’m fussy and don’t use them. Any southpaw use pencils out there?
NotMax
“So, what is it you do all day?”
“I get paid to make No. 2s.”
If you’ve never seen the British documentary-ish So You want To Be a German, the family-owned pencil factory therein is a wonder, both for the work ethic and for the bennies provided its work force.
Jager
@ThresherK:
My school teacher daughter does.
NotMax
Liberté, égalité, bananeté.
Baud
The NYT should stick to these types of stories.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: Heh.
Ummmm…. I think I spot a flaw in their thinking.
HinTN
This reminds me that I have to go sharpen the many many pencils I will provide to the middle school mathletes who will be participating in our local instance of the national MathCounts competition next Saturday.
Pencils are, indeed, a magic wand.
Good morning!!!
Baud
I went through a pencil phase. Honestly, it’s been so long since I wrote anything long hand. I’m actually thinking of going back to it. I think the physicality of writing may help to slow my cognitive decline.
Jim Parish
If you really want to know about pencils, Henry Petroski wrote a fascinating book on the subject, The Pencil. (Among other things, you will learn why the stereotypical pencil is yellow.) Petroski is an engineer with a regular column in American Scientist, the Sigma Xi magazine, and he’s a very engaging writer.
HinTN
@Baud:
The quality of my cursive is massively deteriorated in this modern age.
BC in Illinois
In my dorm at college, there was a freshman, who was a great musician, singer, etc. and we referred to him as our “true romantic.” He was able — apart from the use of any drugs — to simply marvel in awe at the world around him. He had a wonderful spirit and outlook on life. And one day he was marveling at the miracle that is the pencil. “Look at it! Think about it! How would you ever get the lead in there? So straight. So perfect!” Awe. Wonder. Happiness. Joy.
He had, of course, a roommate who could explain, correctly, in detail, how pencils were made.
Baud
@HinTN: I don’t even do cursive anymore when I write. I hear they don’t teach it in schools now.
lowtechcyclist
Down the ticket, have people read this piece about the resistance that grassroots Dem Congressional candidates are running into from the DCCC and groups like EMILY’s List? A sampler:
The DCCC, EMILY’s List, and the state Dem establishment all got behind Christine Hartman as the 2018 candidate.
So the D-trip and EMILY’s List and the Dem establishment basically said, we’re endorsing the well-connected candidate who can rake in the bucks but sucked at winning voters, and froze out a grassroots candidate with a great organization to tap into who, despite lacking those connections, managed to raise $100,000 over a year before the election.
That’s just one example, and alas, the article gives a whole bunch more.
You’d think that even the DCCC could read the tea leaves and realize that this year is all about grassroots energy. That’s what took Virginia by storm just two and a half months ago, and that’s what’s been winning state legislative races all across the country, even in inhospitable places like Oklahoma.
But what really upsets me is EMILY’s List. Remember what the name originally stood for? Early Money Is Like Yeast. EMILY. The idea was they’d help women candidates who showed promise but who didn’t have big money to tap into, get enough of an early money boost to get over the hump.
They’ve clearly abandoned that approach.
delk
When we were house hunting a couple of months ago we looked at a loft in a former pencil factory. Nice space but we were moving out of a loft ( former printing factory) and we were ready for something different.
NotMax
From a while back but fits in for a laid back weekend morn.
Amazing sometimes what people will rally proudly around to save in a neighborhood.
If you can’t see the image at the link, here’s the sign in question.)
For those who might be interested in more of the backstory, here ya go.
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: Way back in HS, I discovered that the mere act of writing things in a notebook negated any need of actual studying for various tests and exams. Sadly, that is no longer a dependable strategy for even navigating my days. Once I write a thing down I no longer need to remember it, I only need to remember where I wrote it down.
No where did that list get to?
It has gotten so bad that when I am working I write all measurements down… on my carpenter’s whites. Sometimes when I’m at the grocery, I get strange looks over the indecipherable scrawls and #s on my pants, especially when I am referring to them for the next item I need to get.
Raven
Fucking cold came back!
Amir Khalid
@ThresherK:
Southpaw here. I use mechanical pencils: they don’t need sharpening, and these days you can get very cheap ones so you aren’t helping to kill as many trees. Never had much problem with smudging, even though I hold a pencil in my hand the way a right-handed person does. Do you hook your hand to hold the pencil, like Obama does?
Quinerly
@Baud: “Slow cognitive decline?” Poco 2020 heard that all the way in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. He wants you to know he is 10 days, 1935 miles into his “sniffing and pissing tour.”
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m using the notes function on my phone more and more. I also take pictures of stuff all the time, it help in identifying and reconstruction.
PaulWartenberg
Wibble.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: It’s The Intercept. Take it with a grain of salt.
Don’t know what behind the decisions on who to support, but calls have to be made. Being the upstart little guy isn’t necessarily the most important consideration.
Raven
@Baud: my old man used to read EVERY sign out loud and it drove me nuts, now I get it.
Baud
@Quinerly: If Poco starts writing long hand, I’ll gladly concede to him.
Anne Laurie
@OzarkHillbilly:
If those baboons are like the escape-artist dogs I’ve known — or, thinking back, my youngest brothers when they were toddlers — you put them back in the confinement space, and the first thing they do is go straight to the “escape hatch”. Then you stop the escape-in-progress, and patch the hole.
My sibs had the advantage of being identical twins, who took full advantage of working in tandem, starting when they were about 8 months old & discovered that one twin could escape their joint crib by climbing on the others’ back and throwing himself over the railing, *thump.* That’s when they went into separate cribs, even though they howled the apartment down for the next couple days…
Wouldn’t surprise me if those French baboons had a similar multi-animal methodology, TBH.
HeleninEire
Morning all. Headed to look at a new apartment. Closer to work – a 30 minute walk or 7 minutes on the bus. And it’s €400 less than what I’m paying now. I’ll miss the city center, but not the apartment I’m in. The shower was built for munchkins and the heat and hot water are always breaking. And, really there are 4 buses to the city center just a block away from the place I’m going to see. 15 minutes, tops. I’ll report back.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
What’s the point of cursive anymore, really? Its advantage used to be that you could write in cursive faster than you could print. But composing on a keyboard and screen is way faster than cursive.
So now its only remaining advantage is that it looks very pretty. Which is fine: teach it in art class, and let artistically talented kids like my son learn it if they want. But there’s no reason to teach it to everybody any more.
geg6
@OzarkHillbilly:
I found the same thing in college. I would study by re-writing my notes and some sections of my textbooks. Simply writing it out by hand made the information indelible in my brain. I thought I was the only person for which this worked.
Just one more canuck
@LaNonna: great movie
“For that, you sold your everlasting soul to the devil?”
“Well, I wasn’t using it.”
What songs will you be singing?
Lapassionara
@Baud: There is a fight about that among educators, I think. More problematic to me is that people don’t write letters anymore. I have a collection of letters from my friends over the years, and they are fun to review every so often.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: Makes sense. Learning to type is more important these days.
Anne Laurie
@HinTN:
As a dyslexic, my cursive never *had* any quality.
Back in first grade, I got ‘honor buttons’ for every subject except math and penmanship. And was introduced to the mantra “See, you can do things well if only you’d apply yourself… “
Raven
@Just one more canuck: Funny,I just never liked it that much. I think I was annoyed that all of the sudden the music got noticed when I’d been into it for years.
Baud
@Lapassionara: True. Something lost there. For me, though, not so much, since I am not very adept at storing things.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Yeah, but Ryan Grim and Lee Fang, who wrote the piece, aren’t Glenn Greenwald. They’re competent reporters.
The disturbing thing was less that the D-trip and EMILY and so forth made the decisions they did. It was more that the grassroots candidates were frozen out almost from the get-go; they couldn’t even get a hearing, even after demonstrating both fundraising and organizing ability.
Raven
@Lapassionara: I have a Christmas card I sent to my grandparents from Korea and I misspelled Christmas!
geg6
@lowtechcyclist:
I could type on my computer all day and, at the end of the day, couldn’t remember three words of it. Writing it out means I retain it forever. Very useful for tactile learners like me.
HeartlandLiberal
My complaint about today’s pencils? Too many are manufactured with hard rubber erasers that will not erase, but simply smudge what you are trying to erase into an indelible blot. I occasionally do challenger sudoku puzzles at night before I turn out the light, and there is nothing worse than discovering you have screwed the puzzle up because the pencil you just used to erase made a smeared mess out of the paper. I am sure this has happened because some manufacturers decided they had found a way to save some money during manufacturer of the erasers.
Oh, look, Google is still my friend. The following is a quote from an “Atlantic” article from 2014.
P.S. FWIW I tried the link button in the comment dialog, and it created a link that would not display after posting. I edited the comment, removed what the blog had created, copied the raw URL to the Atlantic story into the text, and it seems to work. FWIW.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
I don’t know. This is from your excerpt.
This is a completely useless comparison. Suggests the reporters have an agenda other than honest reporting.
geg6
@lowtechcyclist:
Not sure about Grim but Lee Fang lost the reality thread a long time ago. I don’t trust anything he writes any more than I trust anything Greenwald writes.
Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady)
@Raven: The weather or the disease?
ETA: I draft by hand and then key it into my ms. Writing by hand matches the speed of my thought. By the time I get to the end of a sentences, I have another one ready. On a keyboard, I get to the end and have nothing. So then I’m off surfing the web, which is, of course, readily available at that point.
delk
It’s great to have good penmanship unless you know a tap dancing girl named Rhoda.
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: I generally keep my camera in my truck because photographic subjects are everywhere. Among the many things I find it useful for is taking pictures of furniture I ‘discover’ and think I might want to build.
NotMax
@HeartlandLiberal
Erasers too cute for words.
Somewhere in the back of a drawer still have a regular pinkish eraser, except that it is 7 inches long and 2½ inches wide, on which is printed (verbatim) “I Never Make BIG Misteaks.”
NeenerNeener
I’m going to test drive hybrids today. The SOTA has changed a lot and gotten cheaper since I bought my now 8+ year old Honda CR-V. I still love the car, I just hate stopping once a week for gas, especially in foul weather, and this car doesn’t have blind spot sensors or any of the other nifty new safety features I see in commercials. I’m going to have to go new, because you never see a used hybrid for sale around here. And I’m thinking of leasing this time, because I’m too close to retirement to want to kill my emergency cash stash on a car, and the SOTA may move a lot again in the next 2 to 3 years. The first test today will be a Kia Niro, and then the Toyota Rav4 hybrid. The Niro gets significantly better mileage than the Rav4, but it may be too small and pokey.
Raven
@Dorothy A. Winsor (formerly Iowa Old Lady): disease
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: that’s why I’m so happy with my 7plus, the photos are great.
lowtechcyclist
What’s useless about it? In 2014, the Dems got crushed all across the country. In 2016, we roughly broke even. And the candidate with a million bucks in an even year did only marginally better than a nobody with no money in a disastrous year.
The only excuse for the party to give the million-dollar candidate another shot is the possibility that the $$ candidate learned an awful lot from her mistakes in 2016. But instead, if you read the article, they fawn over what a great campaign she ran in 2016.
The numbers say she sucked, that she pissed away a million bucks. Sorry, but that’s the bottom line.
NotMax
@Raven
The cough-y thing? Yeah, it takes a break now and again. But after 6 to 8 weeks, gives up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: That did get irritating, but I like the movie anyway.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: I can write on my smarty pants phone. I always know where that is.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: 2014 and 2016 had different electorates. You can’t take national figures from those two elections and use this to compare the results in one district. Plus, this is Pennsylvania, where Trump did well in bringing out the misogynist vote. Maybe she is a bad candidate, but the information you excerpted doesn’t inform me that she wasn’t the best candidate to support.
HinTN
@Raven: I am rapidly discovering how much I like that notes function.
/geezer
OzarkHillbilly
@HeartlandLiberal: I hate those erasers.
NotMax
@NeenerNeener
Not a hybrid, but was mightily impressed with the Honda HR-V when took a test drive while shuttling landlady around to car lots. Dealer happened to have a special on HR-V leasing which was so attractive that it took a concerted act of will to convince to not pounce on it myself.
Mom’s Mazda 3 (which she loves, although also not a hybrid) consistently gets around 40 mpg, and has an interior appointed far beyond what one would expect from the sticker price..
p.a.
Might go to a benefit food raffle this afternoon: 6-8lb lobsters, prime ribs, pork loins. For $5 they’ll cook the lobster for you.
Otherwise I’m broiling a strawberry grouper, making stock from the carcass.
Donal Clancy concert tonight.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@geg6: Nope, I used to do outlines combining my notes and the textbooks.
OzarkHillbilly
@lowtechcyclist: Comparing off year elections to years with presidential elections is of very limited utility. You can not make a straight comparison.
HinTN
@geg6: That’s how I got through engineering school. Go to every class and have the brain process the lecture into symbols on paper. That and working a shit-ton of homework.
lowtechcyclist
OK, but the Dems lost PA by a whisker in 2016. They did not do that well in PA in 2014. The electorate in PA was better for Dems in 2016 than in 2014.
I’m not saying that Grim and Fang are painting a true picture. But surely someone who knows their shit better than you or I has read this article and can say whether they are or aren’t, and if they aren’t, how they’re painting a misleading picture. That’s really why I brought this up here.
But ‘oh, it’s the Intercept’ isn’t going to cut it. I can see through Glenn Greenwald’s crap without trying. If this piece is crap – which it could be – it’s beyond my ability to see the flaws in it. This needs a critique from someone who knows their shit. But that 2014-2016 comparison in that one district isn’t a flaw, it’s about as solid a metric as you can get AFAIAC.
And I need to reiterate: this was just one example of many. They did their legwork on this one. If they picked a bunch of slanted examples, they had to spread an awfully wide net to find them.
Immanentize
@LaNonna: I love the Oh Brother sound track… Good choir choices. I assume one will be “River to pray?”. Y’know I am sure that O Brother is the Odyssey remade….
HinTN
@Anne Laurie: Ooooo, the penguin’s ruler applied verbally. Passive aggressive to the MAX.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@lowtechcyclist: lee fang is a joke – suffers from Democrat derangement syndrome and is a russia-denier. Grimm is a good guy, but is a knee-jerk establishment critic.
gene108
@HinTN:
I have forgotten how to write in cursive. Last spring, we were clearing out my mom’s house, as she was going to retire and move closer to me. I found papers from middle school, where they made us write in cursive and I cannot do it anymore.
My cursive was always bad, so at some point in high school, I experimented with printing, but that has too slow, so I settled on print-cursive hybrid. Still wasn’t terribly legible (I have bad handwritting), but it felt easier for me to do.
Also, too my English teachers were incredible given the amount of handwritten papers we turned in and how bad some of the handwriting was. I’d have been tempted to just chuck it up as illegible and dock a few points in grading, but they all made sure to read papers through.
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I always know where my pants are: On my ass or around my ankles. My phone on the other hand…. Where did that thing end up now? ;-)
Immanentize
@Baud: They still teach cursive, but as mostly a passive skill — how do you read your grandmother’s cards to you….
?BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: See, I have a solution for that. I have a smarty pants watch than can find the smarty pants phone.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone ???
danielx
@Baud:
I’ve been making notes in longhand of late; it’s definitely improved with practice.
Quinerly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: ?
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
Used to be troublesome to memorize dialogue for plays I appeared in until discovered that sitting alone with no distractions and reciting each page of the script three times in succession, out loud, imprinted it sufficiently to last for the run of the show.
Of course, that was many moons ago. Today it might take 10 or 15 times. :)
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Immanentize:
That wouldn’t have been much of a motivation for me, my last grandparent passed when I was 6.
HinTN
@NeenerNeener: I love my hybrid ’15 Camry. It beats the pants off the ’09 4 cylinder.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
It was brutal. Reminiscent of the first “Rocky” movie. Each had to get their corner man to “cut me”. Ain’t gonna be no rematch.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist: All I’m going on is the excerpt you provided which I found lacking in analysis and not credible. Not interested in giving The Intercept hits, so if someone else wants to follow up, I’ll gladly listen to what they have to say.
billcoop4
I live 4 miles from Graphite, NY, which at one point (from the 1880s to 1921) was a most productive mine, supplying the Dixon Ticonderoga Company–which made pencils 13 miles away in Ticonderoga until 1968.
Sadly, no Dixon Ticonderoga pencils are made in the US anymore.
BC
Baud
@rikyrah: Good morning.
NotMax
Anyone watched the Danish TV series Heartless? Can’t for the life of me figure out who the intended audience might be.
Sab
@Baud: Goodbye and good riddance to cursive. It’s beautiful, but half the time it’s damn near illegible. We have a lot of handwritten stuff pass through the office where I work. I can always read the ugly scrawled print, but scrawled cursive is just a bunch of loops and bumps that could mean anything. Is that an s or an r? Is that an m or an n? Is that a j or a y?
donnah
@NeenerNeener:
We’ve driven a Kia Forte since 2010 and it’s a great small car. No major mechanical issues, easy to drive, very good car. When they put it up on the rack for an annual check up, the mechanic called my husband over and marveled that the original muffler was still clean and looked new. It’s been a wonderful vehicle.
So we’re looking at a Niro next because I drive a lot for my job. Our concern is mostly the size, if it will be big enough for all of the materials I take with me when I travel. I love the fuel mileage, though, and all of the amenities.
Tell us what you think when you test drive one!
OzarkHillbilly
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I don’t wear a watch. Up to and thru puberty it was impossible for me to wear one without my eczema breaking out. Post puberty I decided I hated having the damn thing on my wrist and just gave up on it. Ended up feeling the same way about all things jewelry related. Tried wearing a medical alert necklace but it was constantly hanging up in the claw of my hammer and breaking. My first wedding ring ended up getting cut off my finger when it got mashed by a bundle of drywall I was carrying. My present wedding ring is in my ear where I am able forget it’s existence entirely.
rikyrah
@Quinerly:
Morning to Poco and the tribe ??
rikyrah
@HeleninEire:
Happy house hunting!
debbie
@HinTN:
Art school destroyed my penmanship. I still do a lot of writing (no online banking for me), but sometimes, even I have trouble deciphering my notes.
Jeffro
@Baud: @lowtechcyclist: @Lapassionara: @Immanentize:
Cursive isn’t taught in too many school anymore. Count me in w/ those who consider it a waste of time.
Some kids’ parents actually treat it like a culture-war issue: “how are kids going to read things like the Constitution” (not making this up) “if they can’t read cursive?” Yes, that is our secret stealth plan: take away cursive so that kids have no sense of what the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc say and depend upon us to spell it out for them. Librul edumacation!!
(If I’m feeling particularly cranky I would usually ask them back if they read an exact copy of the Constitution – in cursive, with ‘s’s that look like ‘f’s and all – or if they read in in regular type in their textbooks and worksheets)
HeleninEire
@Baud: One of the other regulars in my favorite pub (his name’s Liam, cuz we’re in fucking Ireland) comes in most nights and pulls out a white legal pad and one of those crazy expensive pens and he just writes and writes; literally for hours as he drinks his Guinness. Cursive. I have not yet asked him what he’s writing. For some reason I feel like that is an incredibly intrusive question.
debbie
@lowtechcyclist:
Did you read Anne’s post?
NotMax
@Sab
Knew a gentleman born somewhere between 1900 and 1910 whose cursive handwriting was so elegant it was a pleasure to behold that the actual message took a back seat.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
That was my “study method” too! It mostly worked because I had a photographic memory and visualized turning the pages of the book/notebook to find what I needed. I really miss that now; I can’t visualize beyond the cobwebs any more.
Immanentize
Cursive was designed so you did not have to take your quill from the page creating blobs of ink, I think….
Immanentize
@?BillinGlendaleCA: I’m sorry. My (3 living) grandparents proved to be great shelters in various storms when I was growing up. Plus, their cards often had a dollar or two tucked inside.
Jeffro
On another note, the usually inspiring Washington Post has as its main ‘magazine’ feature…”The Golden Age of Conservative Magazines: In The Trump Era, They Matter More Than Ever”.
Say WHAT? They matter exactly diddly/squat in the Trumpov era, get with the program! Nobody’s doing any THINKING on that side of the aisle, WaPo!
It starts off Rich Lowry who “believes Trump has mostly decent policies, mostly indecent behavior, and a mostly crazed opposition”. Hey Rich, go fuck yourself, how’s that for crazed? (But I do have to thank the Post for the big picture of Rich…I needed something new for my dartboard).
Best of all is the big picture of Jonah Goldberg standing up on the roof of his building, cigar in hand. I actually pushed the picture twice before I realized he wasn’t going over the edge.
David ??Merry Christmas?? Koch
@Sab: I gave up cursive a long time ago. Now I only write in comic sans.
debbie
@Jeffro:
Did you read Anne’s post?
NotMax
@Jeffro
Friend who was a teacher (now a principal)) once mentioned that his students complained they were incapable of reading his comments on their papers because he wrote them in cursive.
OzarkHillbilly
@HeleninEire: Go ahead and ask. Once upon a time I used to do the same thing, and it never bothered me to have people ask. If I didn’t feel like explaining I just said, “Stuff.” If they didn’t get the hint, I’d add, “that’s none of your business.”
Baud
@debbie: To be fair, she didn’t say no politics.
ETA. Nevermind. Thought you were responding to someone else.
ETA. Never mind part 2. You said the same thing to two different people.
Just one more canuck
@Raven: it gave a lot of musicians exposure they wouldn’t have had otherwise
Immanentize
@Baud: Lawyerly nitpicking defense….
(I approve)
Immanentize
@Raven: sorry about the return of the creeping crud cold…
Real question: What kind of music are you NOT into? That list seems pretty short.
ThresherK
@Amir Khalid: I manage to drag all of my hand immediately over the words I have just written.
I’m fussy about paper and pens, too. Gel pens are too smeary for my clumsy efforts. And it’s not like my handwriting is very fast or very legible.
To offset these issues, I have been touchtyping since I was 12.
debbie
@Baud:
Guess I woke up on the crabby side of the bed. I was curious to see how long it would go on without politics.
Immanentize
@debbie: I just chortled a bit when folks ‘went there.’. It’s so hard to resist….
NotMax
@Immanentize
Memory lane from days long, long past.
One set of grandparents, at family gatherings. Grandfather would signal me to follow him into an unoccupied room, reach around and stuff a five or ten dollar bill into my back pocket, along with the admonition “Don’t tell your grandmother.”
Later on that same gathering, grandmother would do the same thing, along with “Don’t tell your grandfather.”
OzarkHillbilly
@Just one more canuck: Most of whom were soon ignored once again.
Chyron HR
@lowtechcyclist:
Unless they did and the print edition of Russia Today was presenting a deliberately misleading accounting of what happened as propaganda against the Democratic Party. Again.
MattF
@ThresherK: In the old days I used pencils for crossword puzzles– but, being a leftie, I had to wash my graphite-covered hands afterwards. Eventually, I went ‘pro’ and switched to doing puzzles in ink.
ETA: And, in the modern world of today, I do puzzles on my phone or computer.
debbie
@NotMax:
They also had candy!
HeleninEire
@HeleninEire: So I really liked the apartment. It’s small but I don’t mind that. It’s clean and incredibly convenient.
She says she’s has lots of interest. I believe her. Says she’ll call me tomorrow.
debbie
@HeleninEire:
Good luck! Is it near enough you wouldn’t need to find a new favorite pub?
HinTN
@gene108: The number of hand written, blue book philosophy and religion exams that profs had to wade through boggles my mind. My “pretty good” handwriting became a scrawl under the pressure of time.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: My grandparents admonitions were always to not “tell your parents.” I loved conspiring with Gramps against the forces of No Fun.
mad citizen
I love pencils! Have a bit of an office supply problem. Anyway, just google vintage or cool pencils, and you get to this excellent site: https://cwpencils.com/. I especially like the jumbo pencils from Viking and I have a German one here I’ve been using from Wassenbock that is nice, though I just noticed it has a Faber-Castell brand on it as well.
Sab
@HinTN: I had an auditing professor who wouldn’t let us take notes, because it would “distract us from listening.” Jerk. There is a reason they call themselves auditors. Made the class useless for me. I finally had to go to the dean and threaten to transfer to a different school.
NotMax
@debbie
Yeah, but is was that ribbon candy set out in a covered candy dish, meant to be looked at but never, ever consumed.
:)
HeleninEire
@debbie: Well my current favorite pub is only a 10ish minute bus ride so I’ll continue to frequent it. Although I must say the pubs right by the new place look rather inviting. Although in fairness, all pubs look inviting to me. ;)
Aimai
@Baud: bingo!
gene108
@lowtechcyclist:
Democratic challenger for governor, Tom Wolf, handily beat incumbent Republican governor Tom Corbett.
I will have to check other races, but 2014 was not a horror show for Democrats in PA.
Sab
@debbie: Politics forbidden, or just WH?
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: Wasn’t it you who said “kids and grandparents get along so well because they have common enemies?”
debbie
@NotMax:
My grandmother kept a milk glass covered bowl of chocolate-coated marshmallows by her chair. The sound of that lid being lifted was enough to set our little hearts a-beating.
debbie
@Sab:
It’s all of a piece, sadly.
JPL
@Baud: What does Anne have against white houses?
debbie
@HeleninEire:
All the better!
OzarkHillbilly
@Immanentize: Maybe, but if I did I was just repeating what I had heard elsewhere. My own personal version is, “Grandchildren are a parents revenge.”
ThresherK
@MattF: Newsprint I always figured to smear more than copier paper (let alone my favorite, a somewhat toney (ha!) legal pad), so it was always ink for me.
I still like it on paper rather than computer, probably because I had dialup for the longest time, and the library near me prints a hundred copies of the NYT Sunday xword for those of us who like it.
ETA: On paper I can do that half-assed thing where I write two tiny letters in one (or several) spaces of an unknown word and then I have a nice visual to play with the possible words.
Jeffro
@debbie: I’m pretty sure it said “no white house”, not “no politics”. What, the part about pushing Jonah Goldberg’s picture wasn’t funny?
oldgold
Anne: Are we allowed to make comments about 1600 Pencilvania Avenue?
Jeffro
@NotMax: That’s classic…I wonder if he ever figured out the solution? =)
raven
@Immanentize: Classical and opera.
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: also true!
Immanentize
@oldgold: Pencils come from Pennsylvania, Tents from Tennessee….
frosty
@lowtechcyclist: The PA Dems made (IMHO) the same mistake in the last Senate race, boosting McGinnity over Fetterman. She was a bland cipher, he was a small-town mayor with an interesting backstory that might have resonated in the year of Trump.
I don’t like seeing this play out again.
drdavechemist
Re: handwritten notes and memory/learning
There’s significant research showing that students who take handwritten notes learn and retain better than students who use electronic devices for the same task. The suggestion is that it’s impossible to even try to record everything verbatim when writing by hand, so your brain has to be engaged in paraphrasing and summarizing. Spousal unit forbids electronic note-taking in her college biochemistry classes, and in my high school classes I don’t distribute slide show presentations until after I have presented them in class. Both of us explain to the students the reason for our choice.
Re: cursive
My sons, current high school seniors, learned cursive sometime in elementary school, at about the same time they were taught keyboarding. I don’t think that either one uses cursive at all, with the possible exception of writing a signature. I have some curmudgeonly tendencies, but I think it’s probably time to let cursive go the way of the dodo.
chris
On a time scale of around 200,000 years the current predicament is a tiny thing. Pay no attention to those atomic scientists!
(Don’t know how long that website will last but there is some interesting stuff on the home page. Just be careful, last night I clicked on a column by Peggy Noonan!)
Sab
@debbie: Yeah, and I do like pencils. I had no idea the leads were placed in the wood by hand.
NotMax
@Jeffro
As G’kar on Babylon 5 responded when someone complained they couldn’t read a book he insisted they peruse because it was written in Narn, “Learn!”
:)
Phylllis
@mad citizen: I’m all about the office supplies. And just found some cool pencils and an eraser at that sight. Thanks for highlighting it. I think.
gene108
@HinTN:
I remember note taking, when I was incollege. The profs would go so fast, I just scribbled as best I could to keep up. Afterwards trying to read my notes, I realized I couldn’t read every word. I also concluded I could only write about 20 distinct characters, because I was writing so fast, which is why I couldn’t always read what I wrote.
agoqthe_bago
137 comments and no mention of Wacom?
zhena gogolia
I’m completely shocked and demoralized by all the anti-cursive comments here. It’s the quickest way to write by hand. Printing by hand is slow and awkward. Writing by hand is a human activity. Losing the ability to do it is a terrible thing.
Brachiator
@Baud:
I guess I’m waiting for someone to bite the bullet and redesign the keyboard and re-arrange the keys so that typing efficiency is maximized.
I think the conventional wisdom is that the original layout of the keys was designed so that the metal strips which held the letters as they struck a sheet of paper would never collide against one another due to the speed of a fast typist.
Baud
@Brachiator: I believe you can choose a different layout for your keys electronically. Of course, the problem is that you can’t rely on the symbols etched into the keyboard.
laura
I still use a pencil at work, I love sharpening them to a fresh point, and add the after market, soft pink eraser.
My grandfather had the most beautiful Palmer Method cursive writing and his cards and notes were a joyful thing.
It’s a quarter to six here in Sacramento and I can stay in the sack for just another hour then it’s time to glaze, blitz and slice a ham, scramble four dozen eggs and squeeze bucket loads of oranges. At least 50 of our friends are coming over for a breakfast party. Good weather, good eats, good friends and conviviality! We’re in the serious illness and loss age group and so getting together seems and act of defiance of late.
Cheers Jackals!
NotMax
@Brachiator
Dvorak got there first.
MattF
@Baud: The only useful thing I learned in Junior High School was how to touch type. Long ago. Everyone took a typing class (taught by Miss Penn).
OzarkHillbilly
@chris: And as always, some will overinterpret the significance of said discovery while other’s dismiss it’s importance entirely.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
I do a combination of both, but I’m not sure it helps with legibility.
debbie
@Jeffro:
First sentence: “Politics is the study of who eats… and who gets eaten.” So, when it comes to humans, it’s pretty much impossible to avoid *everything* political. So, that sounds like all politics to me.
But no worries. I’m off to do too many errands.
Brachiator
@NotMax:
True enough, but that keyboard has not become the new popular standard. I’m not sure what it would take for a new keyboard to really take off.
I wonder. Can you select Dvorak or another option as a keyboard on a smartphone or tablet?
ETA. Forgot to mention that I loved the pencil story. It really got it “write.”
Others probably said it as well, but I always thought that any really useful technology is like a pencil. You easily use it without thinking about it.
schrodingers_cat
Pencils are indispensable while doing proofs and solving problems. I used a mechanical 0.5 drafting pencil and Japanese or German erasers. It is easier to write it than use the computer, which is PITA.
I love writing implements and paper and the tactile sensation of writing, something that a keyboard just can’t replicate.
bemused
I never took to cursive which teachers attempted to teach me well over 50 years ago. We had to practice on lined paper to keep handwriting uniform, etc. I abandoned cursive as soon as I could get away with it in school. I like using a printing style and reading others’ printing or printing/cursive mix much more than all cursive writers. I am impressed with relatives in their 80’s and 90’s who can still write perfect cursive but never wanted to achieve that “perfection”. Too regimented for me.
agoqthe_bago
seriously…
https://www.staples.com/pressure+sensitive+tablet+stylus/directory_pressure+sensitive+tablet+stylus
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: My handwriting is a mix of both. Its hip to hate handwriting now? I have never been hip, so I don’t really care.
frosty
@NotMax:
Mine too. Well, consistent high 30s and occasionally into the 40s if most of the tank is on interstates and I keep the speed down. Which is sometimes difficult because Mazda made ’em fun to drive, too,
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: That’s why you need to get yourself one of these.
JMG
@lowtechcyclist: The district for the Pennsylvania area in that article last elected a Democrat in 1834. Yes, that’s 18. So other factors might have been working against the story;s heroes,
NotMax
@Brachiator
Per the link:
Ken
OK, I haven’t read the thread yet, but my guess is 25. Now to back up and check.
(I was going to guess 3, but decided that was overly cynical.)
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
But also this discovery, if confirmed, will lead to new insights about humanity and human evolution.
I had a professor who taught me a lot about the exciting immediacy of science. He lectured during a time when some new finds contradicted and invalidated some of his own earlier research. He was happy to have this happen. It only made him more eager to do new research. And he contributed significantly to the understanding of new discoveries.
These advances in knowledge about human evolution also make me shake my head even more at creationst dopes who believe the world is just a few thousand years old. It amazes me that some people can be so stuck in their ignorance. And then you have the resurgence of flat earth nonsense…
BruceFromOhio
@LaNonna: This sounds awesome. Great flick, I hope everyone enjoys it!
Taking TeenFromOhio to the airport for the journey to Germany for spring semester, then loafing around with some old friends and dinner in Pittsburgh, and NOT talking or thinking about whatchamacallit.
HeleninEire
Just got my first paycheck. WOO HOO!
schrodingers_cat
Before printing became common place, Marathi was written in Modi (the d is strong, like drum) which is the cursive form and the standard form used in printing. Now most people can’t read Modi and there are thousands of historical documents which only a few people understand. The race is on to transcribe them and teach more people to read and write in the Modi script.
Quinerly
@frosty: When do you leave on your yearly trip? Weren’t we “traveling together” last year? Poco and I are 10 days, almost 2000 miles into ours.
BruceFromOhio
Having access to brand new #2 pencils with nice full erasers is a joy. Mechanical pencils run hot and cold, some work well while others are a chore. I gave up after one self-destructed in my laptop bag leaving me without a writing instrument. Couldn’t tell you brands,my buffers are already maxed to overrun.
For fast note-taking, nothing beats a nice fat-bodied medium black ink Bic – you can write until your fingers fall off and never lift the tip from the page.
Also: a neighbor down the street just rolled by on his Harley. If I didn’t already have an itinerary today, I’d throw off the covers and chase him down on the Shadow.
agoqthe_bago
And who writes in cursive on paper? You can’t hit Ctrl +F on that.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: Sounds a bit like the German Sütterlin script, which nobody under the age of about 75 can read, as it stopped being taught before the war. Cleaning out my mother’s stuff, we found some interesting letters, but very few people we knew who could translate them for us.
Brachiator
@drdavechemist:
I am skeptical of this research. That is, it may be broadly accurate, but there must be other ways that people can effectively reinforce learning.
Writing has only been around for a little more than 4,000 years and only recently has been available to masses of people. But people have always been able to learn and remember what was needed via oral tradition.
p.a.
The future loses if a writer strictly uses digital media. The thought process of editing and revision is lost, unless the author autosaves everything and creates new docs every time in. On solid media even erasure leaves some evidence of process.
OzarkHillbilly
@Brachiator: Remember all the excitement about homo naledi? Trappist 1? These are all important stories, but only time, study, and further discoveries will tell their true significance. The breathless pronouncements of one who was quoted in the Guardian story were just a wee bit over the top.
Quinerly
@rikyrah: ??
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: IIRC, the Vedas were recited and passed from one generation to the next for a 1000 years before they were written down.
The word Veda comes from Vadane which means to speak.
It is frowned upon these days but memorization is another key to remembering things.
OzarkHillbilly
@Gin & Tonic: 59 and I can still read it. Mind you, my high school German was so long ago that I no longer remember the meaning of the words.
Gelfling 545
@ThresherK: My granddaughter does as ink smears for her too and pencil washes off her hand easier. Bought her notebooks bound at the top for school which helped some.
dm
@Jim Parish: you also learn the important role Henry David Thoreau played in the perfection of the pencil
Immanentize
@OzarkHillbilly: Does this new discovery finally prove once and for all that Jerusalem is the capitol of Israel?
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
And of course, there was a long oral tradition before the Bible was written down. And a long tradition of oral commentary continued.
And then we have the oral homeric tradition before The Iliad and The Odyssey were written down.
Also, there is some evidence that writing was practical in some early societies, used for accounting purposes.
chris
@Brachiator:
I love that stuff! They’re so sciency. I got banned from a website for repeatedly asking to see the edge. You can’t, they said, it’s blocked by giant walls of ice. Well, how come I can’t see them? And the hammer came down…
Gelfling 545
@Baud: It’s making a comeback. Fortunately they never dropped it in my area, though they did experiment with a kind of hybrid form called D’Nealian. Funny thing is a lot of kids seem to WANT to learn to write in cursive, seeing it, I think, as a step toward doing what adults do.
GregMulka
@ThresherK:
Paper rotated about 50 degrees left of vertical and my wrist twisted so that I’m writing two or three lines below where my hand rests.
agoqthe_bago
Who writes out https://flamingdogspoo.com/accounts/9c5923e9-de52-33ea-88de-7ebc8633b9cc by longhand?
Brachiator
@OzarkHillbilly:
Hell, I remember the excitement over the Lucy discoveries.
The excitement is part of the process. And then you dig in again and do the hard work.
Tenar Arha
Blackwing Pencils had a sketchbook/sharpener/Palomino pencil combination pack that I bought & really like. the sharpener is great because it does it in two steps. Sharpener slot #1 is for the wood & #2 is for the lead.
gene108
@schrodingers_cat:
There are a lot of scripts and languages in India that have come and gone over the ages. It is sort of sad that things that were commonly known get lost over time.
Brachiator
@chris:
My provisional theory is that some people’s brains are wired for nonsense. Also that the easy ability to find facts and disseminate knowledge and information via the Internet inevitably led to a pushback from those committed to perpetuating ignorance, blind adherence to tradition, and conspiracies.
Another Scott
Morning all. I haven’t read the article or the comments yet. I remember some story years ago about why pencils were painted yellow. (Maybe that’s mentioned in the article.)
I’m going to try to do more to support voting rights organizations to get a certain monster out of the **ite **use.
VoteRiders.org – Get Involved:
It’s a good list. The encouragement to support local groups, and have partnerships between local and national groups, is a very good one.
Also, if you’re not on smile.amazon.com – please sign up. Take 0.5% of every purchase you make there away from Bezos and give it to a charity of your choice (like VoteRiders). It doesn’t cost you anything and every little bit helps us to move the country forward.
Have a good weekend, everyone.
Cheers,
Scott.
(“Now, to start on the comments!”)
agoqthe_bago
@agoqthe_bago:
That domain is totally available, btw.
nslookup flamingdogspoo.com
Server: cdns01.comcast.net
Address: 2001:558:feed::1
*** cdns01.comcast.net can’t find flamingdogspoo.com: Non-existent domain
JMG
The first thing told anyone covering high school football in New England for a newspaper is “bring pencils. When it gets cold ballpoint pens freeze.” So the pencil will live as long as high school football does.
Immanentize
@Brachiator: Julian Jaynes’, “The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind.”. He covers all this stuff. I love that book.
Brachiator
@JMG:
On the BBC satirical radio show, The News Quiz, it was noted that little pencils we’re still used in elections, by gamblers and in certain stores (not sure of the reasons for stores).
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: There are several non-profits which teach Modi for free. If you know the standard Devnagari script its not that hard. I can read Modi if I have a key (Devnagari – Modi), but that becomes cumbersome if you are reading historical documents (taxation records, treaties etc). My mother is pretty good both at reading and writing in Modi, and she used to be active in a non-profit that was trying to teach Modi to lay people.
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud: My direct experience with Emily’s List is that they provide training (truly excellent, by the way) to brand new candidate wannabes all the way up and down the ticket. Funding might be a different matter, but I don’t know as much about that. Similarly, the Dems have a candidate training program called Emerge for women in many states. There’s an application process, but it’s geared towards people who are not already establishment. So I’m guessing the Intercept narrative is selective. I see a concerted effort among our progressive betters to tear down the Dems on many fronts. This may just be another example.
Kathleen
@OzarkHillbilly: Bill Paxton who starred in HBO’s Big Love and who was also in almost every scene said he prepared by renting a monastic cabin on location and repeatedly writing his lines.David E Kelley writes his scripts on yellow legal pads.
On another note I’ve missed lots of threads. I hope all is well with your son.
JMG
@Brachiator: In my town in Massachusetts, which uses optical scan ballots, the pencils used are those really big ones that are given out to first graders learning to make print letters. The kind where you don’t sharpen them, you unwind the covering to expose more (blunt) point.
David Evans
@NeenerNeener: The UK consumer magazine Which? reviewed the Rav4 Hybrid. They found that it was more economical than the diesel Rav4 in town traffic but less so on the open road. If you do many long journeys the Hybrid might actually cost more to run.
Of course these are UK spec cars so the result may not be valid for you.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist: I’m pretty sure Lee Fang has gone full “burn down the Democratic Party”.
Brachiator
@JMG:
Wow. Now there’s a blast from the past.
Also, I think we didn’t start learning cursive writing until the third grade. I got really sick during that time and had to stay home for a chunk of time, so that my mother was the one who taught me cursive writing.
Lee
I’m I in San Marcos visiting my oldest in college. We have a day of walking around campus and doing some odds & ends shopping. I’ll probably have a few more pictures of Noodles for the picture threads.
Kathleen
@OzarkHillbilly: Yes. I can attest to that.
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: I distinguish between connected script, which is a fine idea, and the particular form of connected script that Americans call “cursive,” aka the Palmer Method, which was designed to look good when written with dip pens and has things like disconnected capitals with unnecessary curlicues all over them. In many countries they teach kids forms of connected italic script that are superior to Palmer cursive. I don’t know why we can’t do it here.
Another Scott
@geg6: I think the general way (most of us) learn is via a combination of methods. Seeing stuff, saying and singing stuff, writing stuff. I think that’s one of the reasons why we’re able to learn the alphabet when we’re so young – “… ElEmEnoPee …!!” And RoyGBiv. And how to memorize the digits of e to 15 decimal places. I think brain scientists have found that they each exercise different parts of our brains, also too. It’s another argument for keeping music and penmanship and even game playing in the grade schools – it exercises those different parts of our brains and makes us more well-rounded.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
I remember cursive writing being taught as one topic in English Language in fifth grade at primary school. I went to an SRJK(E) — a National-Type Primary School (English medium), in the Ministry of Education’s classification system of the 1960s and early 1970s. Oddly enough, I don’t remember being evaluated on the standard of my cursive, and I was never taught it after that. Probably just as well, since my southpawness made cursive writing cumbersome: my letters were irregular in size and width, and tended to lean to the left instead of to the right. I can read cursive writing just fine, especially nowadays, if it says “Fender” or “Squier”.
Matt McIrvin
(The cursive capital letters are a sore point to me because I switched schools between the second and third grade and there were a few subjects that fell through the cracks–one of them was the cursive capital letters, because my second-grade class had only worked through the lower case. I had to catch up by just copying them off a diagram on the wall and I never did get them “right”, especially since there seemed to be variant versions for some of the more abstruse ones like the capital F.)
bemused
I can’t keep up with the “latest” trendy things.
News to me:
ASMR, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, videos of people whispering, etc to calm. I get watching videos of soothing sounds, like babbling streams or wind softly ruffling tree leaves would be relaxing but not the ASMR videos I tried to watch.
Air Fryers. Are they really the greatest new thing since the Hot Pot? Who has room for all these new appliances even if they are fantastic?
schrodingers_cat
@O. Felix Culpa: At this point anyone who criticizes the Ds gets a side eye from me. They are the only organization that can provide some deterrence to Rs.
ETA: Yes, they are not perfect, but they are all we have.
Matt McIrvin
(I also once got docked on a math quiz because I didn’t write my answers in cursive. The teacher had to go by that because she was a drama teacher involuntarily dragooned to teach math, and was such a mathematical ignoramus that she certainly couldn’t grade the answers for correctness–the problems she’d written were often internally inconsistent and had no correct answer.)
Brachiator
@Immanentize:
I think that his work is very intriguing, but I don’t quite buy it. We don’t have access to ancient populations in which we can fully test his ideas.
schrodingers_cat
@Matt McIrvin: Wow that’s stupid. In my school we were taught the running hand but it was never compulsory. We could write in whatever fashion we chose to.
Another Scott
@HeartlandLiberal: In my experience, the red erasers on pencils were always horrible. Especially the ones with the abrasives built in. Even the little blue-green erasers on decent mechanical pencils were pretty bad. It was a revelation when I discovered (in the mid-late 1970s) the Japanese (?) white rectangular paper-sleeve-covered erasers (whatever polymer they were made of). Dunno what’s “best” these days – I use pens for my notes now.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amir Khalid
@Matt McIrvin:
Did you or your parents complain? Unless competence in cursive writing was somehow on the maths syllabus, the teacher had no business doing that.
CapnMubbers
In 1976, I wrote a proposal (as civilian employee) that the Air Force switch to the Dvorak simplified keyboard for increased efficiency cost savings. No response whatsoever.
Matt McIrvin
@Amir Khalid: In that case, yes. This was in the seventh grade!
It ended up moot, for kind of horrible reasons: she got hepatitis and was out of commission for the second semester, and we got a better teacher who just started in on algebra.
Brachiator
A question. Does anyone write his or her signature in a non cursive style?
How about kids or grandkids?
ETA my college age niece and nephew have never hand written a letter in their entire lives, just short notes.
One of my great grandma aunts thought the telephone was newfangled. I would call her on holidays, and she would insist that I later write her a letter.
O. Felix Culpa
@schrodingers_cat: As with any human organization, the Dems have their flaws, but the best way to address those perceived flaws is to GET INVOLVED and get others of like mind involved too. I hate the sniping from outside. I’ve always voted D, but never worked in the organization before. Now I’m a Ward Chair and member of the county party’s executive committee. I’m running to be elected delegate to our state’s pre-primary convention, where we vote on which state-wide candidates will be on the primary ballot. I’m seeing firsthand how the process works and developing at least a little influence on it. One of the major lessons I’ve learned so far is that there is no Democratic monolith that decides on who gets to run. Sometimes I wish there were, to weed out bad candidates. It makes sense that better-known people are more likely to attract donors, but no one is stopped from running and doing their best to raise funds for their campaigns.
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I took a mechanical drawing class in high school and I was thrilled to find out there were different numbers. I guess I should have known there were different numbers- if there’s a #2 there must be other numbers- but I was like “oh, that’s what that means”. Ultimately we made a mallet with a screw-on handle, which I still have. Every time I pick it up I notice the mistake I made on the cross-hatching on the grip section :)
Another Scott
@Sab: My mom worked as a secretary and took notes in Gregg shorthand. Talk about illegible scrawl!!
;-)
My cursive handwriting is pretty bad any more, but the meaning comes across. Our brains can make sense of jumbled letters, if they’re jumbled the right way:
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
Apparently, the West can thank Muslims for the standard cursive style we use. From the Wiki.
Amir Khalid
@Another Scott:
The notion of “correct”, standardised spelling in English is only a few centuries old. As recently as in Elizabethan times, it hadn’t quite come together yet.
SFBayAreaGal
The next time you are in England visit the Derwent Pencil Museum located in Keswick England.
It is fascinating and worth the time.
JAFD
Happy Mozart’s binthday, everyone!
Erasers – Go to art supply store, get a _Staedtler Mars plastic_ eraser. Latex-free, made in Germany, should cost about a buck, you’ll never use anything else.
The Dvorak keyboard – I got a Smith-Corona 2200 cartridge-ribbon portable electric typewriter in 1974 (the height of office tech in those days) with a Dvorak keyboard, when that meant 10% extra cost ($15 + $150). I have never looked back.
The difference between Dvorak and Qwerty is the difference between working with a sharp knife and a dull one, between driving a Porsche and a UHaul 22′ box truck. Less work and more fun.
Is not problem to set computer keyboard for Dvorak – eg. settings > control panel > Region and Language, in Windows; AnySoft Keyboard from AppStore for Android
On my shopping list is a More Keyboard – morekeyboard.com – made for people like me with big fingers – keys 24mm apart ‘on center’ instead of the standard 19mm. Will report back when I’ve tried it out.
gene108
@Kay:
I took a wood working class in the 7th grade. Final project was to make a fuzball game that could be placed on a table top or on the ground.
Anyway, we were standing in line to drill the final set of holes. The guy in front of me asks what the measurement needs to be from the edge of set. I tell him an inch and a half, which was correct. When I get my turn next, my mind wanders and I measure off an inch and drilled the hole in the wrong spot. This mistake haunts me to this day.
Marcopolo
@lowtechcyclist: I read about half the piece. Established “party” organizations supporting candidates with whom they have prior relationships is about as old a story as there is. It’s not “fair” but is understandable. I just hope that Jess and her backers take the snub in stride, work their asses off, and beat establishment candidate in the primary. In the D primary (in August) to see who will take on Ann Wagner (MO-2) in the general the local D establishment had already lined up behind (and many endorsed) one of the 4 candidates last November. They will argue that they “know this guy” and that it is important to have the most strong candidate possible coming out of the primary but I know a lot of folks who were pissed off at them putting their thumbs on the scale so early. And a lot of the local grassroots folks have coalesced behind a different person partly as a result. Not sure how it will turn out but we should at least have a spirited primary contest.
And good morning everyone.
Kay
@Gelfling 545:
D’Nealian is a step toward cursive they use in 2nd grade, with the idea being to get to cursive by 3rd grade. They use it here.
You-all may already know this but cursive has become political. I’m on a school committee and there’s a small group of very far Right parents who believe children not writing in cursive was some kind of liberal plot. It’s just a tiny group. I think of them as people who follow far Right “fads”. I have no idea what it’s based on but demanding cursive is a kind of code now.
I myself like cursive but I don’t feel strongly about it and now that these cursive conspiracy theory people exist I go out of my way to avoid being lumped in with them :)
germy
Whenever i watch Finding Your Roots with Louis Gates, I always notice the beautiful handwriting on the old recordkeeping ledgers. Anonymous people who are lost to history, whose job was to write information into official forms.
Of course, much of what they wrote was horrific, like number of slaves owned.
Brachiator
@Amir Khalid:
This was largely due to the printing press and the printing of vernacular language (as opposed to Latin texts). A person would go out into the world, hear someone speak a regional dialect and ask the magical phrase, “Er, how do you spell that?”
Over time, as books and pamphlets and other works were more widely distributed, the need for uniformity in spelling became paramount.
Immanentize
@Brachiator: I know, some is speculative. But I still lik eit all. I was speaking with a current brain researcher and he told me that Jaynes’ was writing perhaps at the height of the interest in consciousness, but that soon after, researchers (or more accurately research funders) switched to processing issues. That said, he said that research into consciousness is once again ‘hot stuff.’
Phylllis
@Brachiator: Reminds me in a roundabout way of an older lady I knew who would hang up if she got anyone’s answering machine, saying “I don’t talk into machines.” I always wanted to ask her what she thought the phone was if not a machine.
germy
It’s weird. I was taught cursive in grade school, and practiced endlessly each letter upper and lower case.
But now after fifty years I find I’ve completely forgotten how to create capital letters in cursive, so my handwriting is slanted, printed capital letters followed by properly cursive lower case.
Gelfling 545
@mad citizen: I like Black Warrior pencils. My daughter prefers Blackwing which are lovely but pricey as pencils go. I used to “lend” pencils by the gross to students who might lose them again by the next period. If I gave them a Black Warrior pencil, they treated it as an heirloom of their house. They’re quite pleasant to write with.
germy
@Immanentize:
But where do they make balloons?
Brachiator
@germy:
Also, often beautifully clear handwriting in US census reports. I was reading the information online recently for my great grandfather.
Nicole
@germy: Although, if you spend any time researching your family tree, you’ll find plenty of records filled in by people with terrible handwriting, too. Census forms can be a source of both information and hilarity, especially when you know how the name was supposed to be spelled.
Kay
@gene108:
Isn’t it funny how it sticks out? You’re stuck with that mistake FOREVER :)
This mallet is steel and I had to get over being afraid of the machines because they’re so loud and it’s a screeching loud, like a collision, metal on metal – but once I did it was fun to make it. I don’t know but I think that’s a beneficial class for anyone, making something start to finish. The time just flew in there. I was always running out of time.
Gelfling 545
@germy: Most everybody adopts an idosyncratic handwriting style as an adult. Some for your reasons, others for esthetic preferences. Those who keep strictly to the style they were trained in tend to be those who were real artists at it, as my mother was.
Ken
@Another Scott:
I just sum the infinite series…
(Attributed to John von Neumann.)
germy
@Brachiator:
I predict that in twenty or thirty years time, written language will undergo a drastic simplification. This is in part due to texting.
For example “okay” will be OK. “Though” will be tho. “You” will be u. And current day spellings will look odd and Shakespearean to the future generation.
Llelldorin
@gene108:
OK, I’ve done some sketchy preliminary digging through the numbers. Keep in mind that this is a very superficial look; it ignores the specifics of things going on in districts entirely.
PA has 18 congressional districts. Of these, 5 were uncontested in one or both of the 2014 and 2016 cycles, so I ignored them. Of the remaining 13, 7 swung towards the Democrat from 2014 to 2016, 5 swung towards the Republican, and one, PA-10, is a bit confusing because opposition to the Republican incumbent split in 2014, so both the Republican and Democrat won a larger share of the vote in 2016. The swing in the 16th was near the median of the 2014-2016 changes.
Brachiator
@Immanentize:
Yep. I don’t dismiss Jaynes despite my reservations. And as you say, this research is again hot stuff, not just because of humans and other animals, but also because of AI and “intelligent” machines.
scav
Even if people don’t use it much later, there may be a reason to teach hand writing, especially for some. The physical act of writing different letters seems reinforce the learning going on in the brain and a few other things. Things may be less known about cursive (strictly defined, especially Palmer et al) v. printing or other styles, but the rush toward an all computer-based literacy seems to come with costs. (Cursive Handwriting and Other Education Myths)
I get to learn about pruning fruit trees today — hands on even! — from a group of local gleaners. And it’s not actively raining, although the wind may kick up. Apples ho! (Cherries in theory.)
Llelldorin
(If I were serious about this I’d focus on comparable districts in nearby states, but I’m just sitting in bed and screwing around with numbers.)
Schlemazel
@germy:
I always hated the capital version of the first letter of my last name so in high school I started using the printed letter. Yes, it is an affectation but 50 years later I still like the way it looks and it is part of who I am now.
O. Felix Culpa
@Marcopolo: On the opposite side, we have been suffering under a horrible Republican governor because an “outsider” D candidate got himself on the ballot and turned out to be a lousy campaigner. So there can be justification for supporting candidates who share your values sufficiently AND have a chance of winning. Our state by-laws prohibit party officers from endorsing primary candidates in their official capacity, although they may do so privately I suppose. I don’t get the thumb on the scale argument. Seems to me it comes from people who (1) don’t understand the process and (2) aren’t involved in it either.
Brachiator
@germy:
Already happening.
I remember seeing how spelling of some words would get simplified as English speakers from different countries would “converse” on X Files and SF forums on CompuServe (in the ancient past).
Later, I would read about how the umlaut and other special characters were being used less frequently in texts. Then, as you note, texting introduced it’s own abbreviated spellings.
But God help us if some future historian finds a text written entirely in emoji.
Kathleen
@Another Scott: While I never took shorthand I developed my own speedwriting which included Latin and math symbols. I passed the shorthand test at my place of employment which enabled me to be promoted to a secretarial position which was stepping stone to promotion to management
That was the 70’s. Good times.
germy
@Brachiator:
Written text will have gone full circle, back to hieroglyphics.
chopper
@LaNonna:
my favorite movie!
Brachiator
@germy:
In Balloo, a village in Northern Ireland, by immigrant Walloons.
scav
@Brachiator: My signature’s based on (in the ancient of days, thus now loosely) drafting letters. Hated cursive, so when I got to either Jr or Sr High and learned drafting lettering in wood shop, I just switched completely.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
I know we call it a “lead”, but I don’t know how long ago it actually was made of Pb. It seems to me I’ve known since I was a kid that it was made of graphite, i.e., carbon.
We were required to learn cursive in 3rd grade. It became optional somewhere around middle school, and I stopped using it instantly, adopting this semi-italic printing, by which I mean I was using curvy letters of the type I used in writing algebra, rather than angular letters made of straight lines. I was forced to recall cursive when I needed a signature to begin applying for colleges and doing other official paper work.
I was aware that my Dad had a printed style but wasn’t consciously trying to emulate him. But there was one eerie occasion, possibly around the time our Dad died and we were going through his papers, where my brothers and I all discovered we had adopted nearly identical printing styles, which were also similar to his. So similar that we could barely tell who wrote what.
Dad’s story, incidentally, was that he was a lefty who the NYC public school system of the 1930s had forced to write right-handed. For the rest of his life he did his writing right-handed, in that printed style, but everything else lefty.
I also gave up on pencils early in life, including while doing puzzles. I just didn’t like the lightness of the line, I thought ink was much more satisfying. And it’s not a claim that I never make mistakes. I make plenty of mistakes, I just cross-hatch over them or (in the case of puzzles) write the correction even darker. It’s quite a mess, but I still prefer it to pencils.
Also, like others experienced, pencil erasers never really worked. Some kids in school taught me the trick of rubbing the eraser on your pants leg to try to abrade it down to a soft, usable surface. But that had mixed results at best.
germy
@Brachiator:
So finally, an answer to the musical question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwBjfQPuhFA
Brachiator
@germy:
Also, a lot of misspelled words will become standard. This is mainly because even in the age of the Internet, people don’t read, or don’t read widely. So they spell words the way they think they hear them.
So, “moot point” is mangled and becomes “mute point.”
Immanentize
@germy: Balls Falls, Ontario?
Those lines come from a Blossum Dearie song:
germy
@Brachiator: “Looser” has become the new spelling for “Loser” which I find odd, because it has more letters, not less.
And once people exclusively use abbreviations, they eventually forget the original phrase that is actually being abbreviated.
Llelldorin
To be clear, I’m computing swing as the change in the Democratic result only. The Republican results are a bit fiddlier because Libertarian candidates occasionally appear and vanish; they appear to strictly steal votes from the Republican, as you’d expect.
O. Felix Culpa
@O. Felix Culpa: Here’s another example from real life. We have an open seat for a very important state-wide position. There are three Dems running to get on the primary ballot, two of which I consider to be good possibilities. However, one of those two entered late in the race and is running a lackluster campaign so far. I would have been inclined to support her for various reasons, but her (lack of) outreach thus far concerns me. We need to win that post. So I’m seriously considering supporting my #2, because he’s showing himself to be a serious and effective candidate. Winning matters and I’ll go with the somewhat less optimal candidate ideologically if they show greater likelihood to get elected. That’s my calculus. YMMV.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@chopper: My wife, being a church musician, is offended that they used the song “Down to the River to Pray” for the Sirens. But those Coen Bros know what they’re doing and know the male psyche. There is something so completely sexy about that scene and the way it is sung, despite the fact that what we’re witnessing is in fact a baptism service.
I love that movie (we both do). One of my favorite things about watching it the first time, because somehow I knew or realized that it was using the Odyssey as a framework (was that part of the pre-release discussion? Don’t recall), was waiting to see how various key Odyssey points and character would show up. When the Cyclops appeared, I laughed out loud.
germy
@Brachiator:
I remember hearing a Lenny Bruce record where he was trying to sound like an intellectual legal expert, and he said “For all intensive purposes…”
Amaranthine RBG
@PIGL: Have you tried these: https://www.amazon.com/Palomino-Blackwing-Pencils-12-Count/dp/B006CQWILK
Another Scott
@Ken: If I ever heard that story, I’d forgotten it. Neato! :-) Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Brachiator: I may be the only person I know who never abbreviates in text messages.
What, never?
Well, hardly ever.
At any rate, I just can not bring myself to write D for “the” or “UR” for “you are”.
But on the other hand, I’m kind of fascinated by text abbreviations in other languages.
dmsilev
@Kay:
Learning how to make stuff yourself is great fun and useful as well. I deal with a lot of college students and grad students and we make all of them go through a training course on machine tools. It’s a big shock to some (mostly students from some countries in which the education is very centered around classwork and equations, and almost no hands-on), but they get a lot out of it by the end.
zhena gogolia
@Immanentize:
It’s a Dietz-Schwartz song.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: I had number of drafting pencils and used pencils with thicker leaders B, 2B, 4B, 6B etc to draw and shade pencil drawings
HB is equivalent to #2 pencil.
marcopolo
@O. Felix Culpa: In the MO-2 D primary none of the “electable” (there is one dude who has run in just about every contest for the past 2 decades but he is not take seriously) candidates have any prior campaign experience. A candidate forum in November (10 months! before the primary) was the first chance most folks had to see these people in the flesh & hear them speak. I am a member of the MO state D party and have worked on local campaigns on an off since the 80’s. I know most of the local Ds who did the early endorsements (and actually I probably would have been less pissed if those folks had just provided behind the scenes support at this time–voter/donor/volunteer lists–as opposed to giving a public “named” endorsement. They know that candidate because he “runs” in their social circles (is a lawyer, works at the local U). My preference would have been for the local pols to stay out of the way publicly until later this spring and actually gauge what kind of traction the candidates were getting on the campaign trail–you know, who is connecting with the voters. It isn’t my district and other than telling friends who live in it my opinions vis a vis the candidates (worth about 2 cents) I am staying out of the primary (though I am committed to helping whoever win in their fight against the R incumbent).
Immanentize
@zhena gogolia: Sorry, I meant sung by Blossum Dearie. Who I love and want to marry.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: I can’t understand emoji – beyond a simple frown or smile – right now. Plus the fact that they’re rendered (at least on my devices) almost microscopically so they mostly look like little yellow filled in capital Os with a few pixels of a different color, and incompatibilities between iOS and Android, they just seem to add noise. I almost always avoid them.
It’s a horrible system for actually trying to communicate ideas or information.
Cheers,
Scott.
Amaranthine RBG
@Brachiator:
I’ve been reading Lewis and Clark’s unedited diaries. Their spelling – esp that of Clark – is inventive, if nothing else.
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
2B or not 2B, that is the question.
I used to love my HB pencils. Loved pencils more than pens. I used to do sketching based on comic book characters and mythological figures.
lowtechcyclist
@debbie:
Depends. If you’re talking about her post at the top of this thread, then yes. In this thread, I’ve stayed away from the White House, its occupant, and any discussion of the Administration’s words and deeds.
If you’re saying that she’s already made a post that’s relevant to the Intercept piece, then no, I haven’t. If she has, I apologize for raising this topic without having read it. I very much prefer to read what the front-pagers have had to say about a topic before commenting on it; they’re all topnotch.
Amaranthine RBG
@Another Scott:
That’s why you need Animoji!!!
Animoji is best moji!
LaNonna
Yes the movie is The Odyssey, complete with blind Homer, Sirens, and Cyclops. We are singing Man of Constant Sorrow, and Down to the River to Pray. The Sirens sing a lullaby Go to Sleep Little Baby in the movie, Down to the River to Pray is a full-immersion baptism scene complete with 2 of the 3 outlaws being “saved”. BTW, our English friends loved it, but needed subtitles, or me translating some of the Mississippi dialogue.
Brachiator
@Ceci n est pas mon nym:
I try never to abbreviate. But I will sometimes drop pronouns. So instead of I was just not taught that way, I would write “Just not taught that way.”
Immanentize
@LaNonna:
“you and me and the devil makes three….”
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@dmsilev: My introduction to machinists: During an internship at an electronics factory, I needed to construct a reference high-current resistor (something that was going to get thousands of amps passed through it). I figured out that graphite was a suitable material and was told the machine shop had cylindrical graphite stock of various diameters.
I worked out that about an inch of this one stock would work for me, so went down to the shop and asked for “about an inch”. If it was me in my basement, I would have just grabbed the stock, roughly estimated a 1″ mark with a ruler, and taken a hacksaw to it. That’s not the way machine shops work. They wrote up the work order and delivered me the next day, a beautifully cut cylinder of graphite stock of length 1.0000″, guaranteed good to those four decimal places.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Padmavati (now called Padmaavat) has been finally released but the nearest theater to me is in Connecticut. I feel like I need to see just to say fuck you to BJP’s goonda sidekicks like the Karni sena.
zhena gogolia
@Immanentize:
I’m just a songwriter defender! Blossom Dearie is great. Nancy La Mott sang it too.
catclub
@Brachiator:
filling out numbers for lottery tickets – more gambling.
marcopolo
@O. Felix Culpa: I don’t actually think we really disagree or at least are particularly far apart. I have problems with D party establishment folks (and affiliated groups) trying to snuff competition out of the gate in primary contests by throwing around money/endorsements/etc… If they want to make their voices heard, say, two months before the actual primary date fine. But the candidate highlighted in the article and my experience here in MO was folks putting their thumb on the scale months and months out (in the article the primary was in May and they were doing it the October before; here the primary is in August and they were doing it the Oct/Nov before).
catclub
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Isn’t that your fault for not including a “+- 1/32” in the spec?
Steve in the ATL
@germy: fewer letters, not less letters. Looser!
Immanentize
@zhena gogolia:
First, song writers ought (and need) to be defended so good on you.
Second, I like La Mott, and just listened to her version. She really can’t do bouncy jazz humor. Her New Jersey line made me cringe, although beautifully sung.
Librarian
I was taught cursive in school, and I can’t imagine writing any other way. It’s so fast and easy. I guess it helps if you do a lot of writing.
Immanentize
@catclub: and golf cards
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: I have a letter written to my great grandfather in 1862 by his parents. The handwriting is simply beautiful but was difficult for us to decipher because much of the writing style in use when the writer learned it in Ireland, circa 1800, has long been forgotten. It took me a month to transcribe it.
Sorry this is so small. I haven’t located the larger scan of the pages.
Civil War Letter
Brachiator
@schrodingers_cat:
It is playing at 6 theaters in the Los Angeles area, including one fairly convenient to me. I’m tempted to try to go see it, but am knocked out by a stupid nasty cold (not sure if any showings have English subtitles, but I love the visuals).
Kay
@schrodingers_cat:
I like a thicker line so I was very happy to find out that’s a “softer” pencil. The world is orderly and it all makes sense! :)
It’s funny how you get attached to a certain brand of pen if you write a lot. I like the cheap, thin, light Bic with the broad-er line more than the fancy pens I have received as gifts.
Shell
Probably the the time we all heard what pencils are made from , was in grade school an the first time we poked our finger with one. “You’re gonna get lead poisoning and die,” taunted the class jerk. “Its just graphite, dear,” said the teacher to our tearful selves, “theres no lead in pencils anymore.”
Brachiator
Just wanted to throw this in before going to pick up some medication.
The LA Times may be going through its death rattle. The irony is that management and corporate owners are also trying to kill it. Great stories at HuffPo and the Washington Post. Apologize for the naked link.
https://washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/anything-could-happen-amid-newsroom-clashes-los-angeles-times-becomes-its-own-story/2018/01/26/f8c2d382-02b6-11e8-9d31-d72cf78dbeee_story.html
lowtechcyclist
@Marcopolo:
Thanks for taking the trouble to read more than my excerpts! Yeah, politics isn’t a field you should go into if ‘fair’ is important to you. It’s more that we need the people on our side of the divide to be smart and perceptive and at the top of their game.
It’s been a long time since I’ve had much faith in the DNC/DSCC/DCCC/etc., but 2017 was quite obviously The Year of the Grassroots, 2018 is liable to be even more so, and I expect the various Dem orgs to have enough of a clue to realize this and respond in a way that’s not too freakin’ ham-handed. This is where they should stand back, give the folks who’ve been working their asses off for the past year a chance to show what they can do, and if they can do it, you get behind them. But in the races where it’s clear, a month or three out, that the grassroots candidate just isn’t ready for prime time, you throw your weight behind your reliable establishment candidate.
What I’d hate to see happen is a sense developing among the Resistance types that the Democratic Party, as an organization, really isn’t on their side. Because that would take the wind out of everything that’s been happening since last January 21.
Amir Khalid
@catclub:
Surely you mean +- 0.03125″ .
FlipYrWhig
I have to say, I have *zero* sympathy for the “waah grassroots candidates have it so hard” thing. Overcoming disadvantages is kind of the whole fucking point. Conservatives somehow manage to do it without, or in the face of, “establishment” support. “Our candidate was so popular but lost anyway” is a self-negating proposition.
Also, Lee Fang is an idiot.
Frankensteinbeck
@Brachiator:
Everyone’s brain is wired for nonsense. That is the default human state. We are not rational animals, we are animals capable of rationality, through hard work and training.
@schrodingers_cat:
The ratfuckers are really hustling trying to turn as many young idealists off of the Democratic Party as possible right now. They have a #DemExit hashtag going. The special elections must have them terrified.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Its being released by Viacom so will probably have subtitles. Besides its a pretty straightforward story. I doubt that you will have a problem understanding it.
ETA: Its an SLB film so the visuals will be spectacular if nothing else. BTW critics have loved Ranvir Singh’s performance, he plays the Khilji of the Delhi Sultanate. Because of all the protests what survives in the final cut is a pretty boring and goody two shoes portrayal of the Rajputs.
Fair Economist
@schrodingers_cat: @Gin & Tonic: It’s not difficult to transliterate an alphabetic script, as long as somebody has written a key.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
I think there’s sometimes a misunderstanding though about “relationships” in Democratic circles, especially at the state or local level. There’s an assumption on the Left that it’s based on policy – that there is some master plan to push centrist policy but it’s much more human than that. You develop relationships with people when you’re in an organization. They aren’t going to be able to end that and they shouldn’t want to because people operate on more than a “strictly the facts” level. In fact, the relationships are what keep the thing going when you have a string of losses. It bugs me when they won’t admit this, won’t admit to being human. The truth is many of them LIKED Bernie Sanders. They thought he was a good man. They trusted him.
I really tire of what I perceive as this attitude of “I operate on a higher plane than you do, what with your silly friendships” It’s not that it’s arrogant it;s that it’s bullshit. This idea that they’re clinically parsing policy while the rest of us are stupidly following the crowd is annoying. They’re their OWN crowd, they just won’t admit it.
Shell
Isn’t Balloo the bear in “The Jungle Book?” ;-)
trollhattan
“Back in the day” driving through Stockton, CA on I-5 you’d often smell CalCedar milling pencil slats, which would exactly mimic sharpening a pencil. Sadly, they offshored that process to China although they still make finished pencils here.
schrodingers_cat
@Frankensteinbeck: Orders from Moscow for the Intercept, me thinks.
Ruckus
@HinTN:
I write cursive regularly. In pencil and ink, depending on the instrument at hand. For pencils my boss and I use wooden or whatever those ones with a clicker are called, that use a .3mm lead. Everyone else, the kids, use wooden.
We actually have 2 pencil sharpeners, one electric and one old school manual.
schrodingers_cat
@Fair Economist: For a human or for a program?
schrodingers_cat
@Shell: Bhaloo is the Hindi word for bear, and sher is the word for tiger. You can see where Kipling’s names came from.
schrodingers_cat
@Kay: For me, I like the nib of the pen or a pencil point to be 0.5mm or less.
But her emails!!
@lowtechcyclist:
Taken at face value it doesn’t look like this outsider candidate has much to worry about. The organization and energy are behind her, so provided her base of support is registered and bothers to vote, she should win the primary over the establishment candidate. At that point the DCCC and Emily’s list will certainly throw their resources behind her for the general.
Then regardless of whether she’s elected or fails to be elected, she’ll end up being the new establishment candidate with the initial support of these organizations if she chooses to run again and the Intercept can write about how unfair it is the establishment is supporting her and not the brand new outsider with all the energy behind her/him.
I’d also add that this particular case seized on the by the Intercept is undermined by the large numbers of new “outsider” candidates that these organizations are also supporting. I could point at Virginia and point out that many of the newly elected Representatives their were not establishment candidates, but were indeed supported by the establishment in their elections.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@lowtechcyclist: I like Ryan Grim a lot, and I was a bit disappointed to see him go to the intercept. I’d give him the benefit of the doubt, but that article, IMHO, takes too much of an eagle-eye view of local races to be of much value; I think you’d have to say more about the individual candidates and districts to get a good idea of who’s doing what and why, and whether they’re doing good or dirty. A few red flags across the left(ish) spectrum: Peterson foundation lackey and Obama-hater Ed Rendell; conservaDem Stephen Lynch presented as a regular guy up against the establishment; Krystal Ball, who seems to have been broken by 2016– she always struck me as a cheerful pragmatist but now comes across as a bitter Bernie or Bust type; and of course, Lee Fang.
PJ
@Brachiator: The notion that capitalists should have to pay anything – let alone a living wage – to workers, particularly those that work with airy “intellectual” matters, is an antiquated one that I am finally glad to see is being disrupted in the news industry (I mean, who needs reporters when you have a Facebook feed.)
Last year, the owner of DNAinfo, a collection of local news websites, purchased the city news “ist” websites (Gothamist, DCist, LAist, etc.) and linked them together. The writers of the now-merged businesses then voted to unionize, upon which the offended owner shut all of the websites down and shuttered the business, even though the “ist” businesses, at least, were all profitable. So we can see it’s better to lose a business opportunity than to have to pay workers a fare wage.
NeenerNeener
I just got back from a Kia dealership, and if I can successfully reverse the credit freeze I put on last year then I’ve just leased a loaded 2018 Niro Hybrid Plug-in for $100 a month. It’s more of a regular hatchback than an SUV, but it’s cuter than a bug’s ear, handles nicely, and I get to give Donald Cuck and Big Oil the finger every time I plug it in. Plus, my fat Aussie will have a much easier time getting in and out of it because it’s lower to the ground than the CR-V I’m trading in. Other than worrying about taking the credit freeze off, I’m very pleased.
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
Dad could print faster than cursive. Extremely neat as well. Never could understand how he could do it so fast. If I tried to write cursive that fast it was unreadable by the end of the second line.
Kay
@lowtechcyclist:
They would be more believable as policy purists if they didn’t have such knee-jerk reactions to what they perceive as the “establishment” candidate. Connie Pillich is probably to the RIGHT of Cordray in Ohio. I say this because of where she won and what she says she believes. Yet she’s running as the anti-establishment candidate, which is annoying and makes me like her less. It’s like she can’t even decide which “establishment” she’s running against. One day she’s all mavericky on “political correctness” so I guess she’s a Joe Manchin aw shuckster – I’m wary of those! – and the next she’s telling us Emily’s List supports her, where I feel she’s telling me that because I’m female. They can’t even decide what they are.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
I think this is the real purpose behind Chelsea Manning’s run. She won’t win, but it’s a good return on investment having her run.
O. Felix Culpa
@marcopolo: I hear ya. I have also seen situations where people aligned themselves with a candidate too early and boxed themselves in and, as you suggest, potentially short-circuited the electoral winnowing process.
gbbalto
I started with cursive and didn’t like it especially the capital G. In 7th grade, my teacher could not read it, so I switched to italics. In 9th grade, I had to switch to printing, similar is appearance to my father’s and brother’s. Must run in the family…
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
Dyslexia makes me sarcastic and gives me bad handwriting. Math I do great at. But it’s because I learned to compensate. I have to see the numbers, if you tell me your phone number and I don’t write it out, it’s never going to be correct on my end. I can look at numbers on a print and have no problem remembering them for months. If you tell me the same number I can’t repeat it 10 seconds later. And yes my hearing works fine. And yes it’s been tested.
opiejeanne
This is an obit you will want to read:
http://www.geisenfuneralhome.com/m/?p=memorial&id=2064544
Fair Economist
@But her emails!!:
Are you trying to mess up an attack on Democrats by citing facts? You must be a Deep State agent or something.
Brachiator
@PJ:
The LA Times is dying. The newsroom has dwindled to 400, from 2500 staff.
Circulation is plummeting. I don’t know anyone under age 35 who reads the paper or gives a crap. Soon there ain’t gonna be no money to pay nobody.
I sympathize with the union’s efforts, but it is a futile struggle against evil.
Also, people support a living wage, and yet people want news and entertainment to be free, or cost no more than $9 a month, with no advertising. Odd.
opiejeanne
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: I suppose someone else has corrected you already, but they did not use Down to the River to Pray. That was a gospel Baptist choir singing it at a baptism in a river.
Didn’t Leave Nobody But The Baby is the siren song.
Origuy
When I went to Moscow, I had been studying Russian for several years, so I was fine with the alphabet, but had never bothered to learn Cyrillic cursive. The lady I was staying with wrote me a list of Metro stations that had particularly interesting decoration. I couldn’t read half of the names. Just like English cursive, a lot of the letters look different, T looks like M, for example. Plus a lot of the letters are hard to tell from one another, too. I don’t know if the same thing is happening in Russia as in the US, I suspect they still teach cursive in school.
Jinchi
@Baud:
Actually, they do, at least in my state.
I always thought it was a bit archaic; cursive was developed to deal with the problems of quills and ink pots. It became obsolete the day they started selling ball point pens. Personally, I’ve always been able to legibly print much faster than I can write in cursive.
donnah
@NeenerNeener:
Thanks for the feedback! We’ll be looking at the Niro when the weather gets better.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Running as “anti-establishment” is becoming the political equivalent of those clickbait ads like “trainers hate him! Local man’s One Weird Trick burns fat fast!” There’s some THEY that dominates everything and stifles creativity and probably wears grey suits, and THEY don’t want you, an independent thinker who is cool, to know THE REAL TRUTH. The way “the left” falls for this over and over and over and over again is disheartening.
Jinchi
@Brachiator:
People want everything to be free. That doesn’t mean they aren’t willing to pay for it, though.
Origuy
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: @Origuy: My college housemate worked in the Physics department shop. They got an order from an asshole professor for a 10cm metal cube to use as a heat sink. Only the asshole wrote it as 10.00cm. So the machinist, wanting to teach the guy a lesson, spent hours polishing to the hundredth of a centimeter. Then billed him for the labor, taking a good chunk of the guy’s grant.
Another Scott
@opiejeanne: Nice. Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Ruckus
@JAFD:
I was pretty sure that eraser was exactly what I use. I also have a pen like holder and the same eraser in round form. They are great and work very well. I have several of each shape that I’ve had for decades. I’d bet that I’ll never be able to use them up if I haven’t before now.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Right, And how they present themselves as this hated minority who just want a seat at the table is NOT in any way how they are in real life. They don’t want a seat at the table. They want to run the whole room the moment they arrive, and they don’t mind lecturing and scolding and patronizing while they’re at it. I refuse to do this again with them. I went thru it when they all (ridiculously) fell madly in love with the centrist Howard Dean and gave him superpowers. He was a fairly standard-issue Democrat from Vermont and that’s ALL he ever was. I went thru it when they all (blindly) supported Kucinich who is an eccentric centrist Democrat- his distinction isn’t “policy” it’s that he’s odd and not in a good way, either. He’s oddly unappealing. They AREN’T, in fact, focusing on policy or they wouldn’t fall for this bullshit again and again.
Another Scott
@Origuy: There’s a piece of equipment at work that takes some round metal discs that are 90.0 +0/-0.25 mm. I didn’t notice the +0 the first few times we had some custom ones made. “Hey, this new one doesn’t fit!!11”
:-/
Tolerances matter!
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Brachiator
@Jinchi:
Sadly, this is not true, especially in the age of the Internet.
But more to my original point, increasingly you can’t even give the LA Times away. It is sad to see the newspaper die, and to see how rapidly it is going down.
Authoritarian regimes typically would try to stifle the press, intimidate journalists. But here, in a democracy, dopes let themselves be distracted by entertainment, and eagerly dismiss information as fake news, as their Dear Leader suggests. Who would have guessed that so many idiots would voluntarily embrace tyranny.
Ruckus
@Kay:
Welcome to my world. I still make things out of metal and occasionally plastic. The boss always wants it done in less time (even when I was the boss) than it takes to do it right. When I was the boss I used to have to quote the price of things we made and when I was done I always added 20% more time. Just because being the boss puts one in charge doesn’t make time speed up.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
I went thru it with the Scots Irish thing or whoever the fuck that tribe is while I patiently and sweetly listened to lectures from white men on how we had to “reach out”, oh, I was all ears! I’m nothing if not inclusive! They were never able to tell me how this focus on white people would play in Ohio, where Democrats do not win without massive turnout in urban areas.
It doesn’t work for me on any level. They can’t even sell this to me as real politick because I know better. YEARS I have been listening to them, hoping against hope they wouldn’t bolt from the coalition. Now I don’t give a shit if they go because they were never reliable anyway and while “establishment” Democrats may not be as liberal as I am on economic issues at least they understand that this is some fashion a coalition and every piece is vital in a 50/50 state. I no longer apologize for being a team player because yes, that is what I am and I’m not sure I want them as teammates :)
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
Just made a special U shaped stainless steel go/no go gauge the other day, inside dim is +/- .0002 across the flats. It was the second one made for the same customer. They lost the first one.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
and you still run into (at least on the internet) people who are convinced that only Howard Dean can lead us back! His main cred in ’04 was his opposition to the Iraq War, which I shared but never quite got on that train. In recent months he’s been talking about how he often agrees with OG neocon Lindsey Graham on foreign policy, which I’m sure has nothing to do with the Iranian ex-pats who pay him (and Rudi and Newtie) for lobbying services.
J R in WV
Last week and several years ago we in the neighborhood lost an old friend.
Yesterday evening we went to a neighbor’s farm to remeber old friend who spent the last 10 years forgetting everything due to a condition called Pick’s Disease, yet another kind of dementia I never heard of until Dan began losing his ability to safely do work.
Dan turned me on to one of my biggest hobbies, collecting rocks. All kinds, fossils, geodes with crystals inside, or agate or chalcedony inside. Crystals inside vugs (openings in bedrock of one kind or another), fossils that became geodized (hollow) with crystallized minerals inside, every kind of interesting or beautiful rock you can imagine, we hunted for it.
As a little boy I read Treasure Island and immediately began digging in the woods around our home for buried treasure. After not finding any for years I gave up. Then I visited Dan, and his cabin was surrounded by plates of bedrock covered with quartz crystals, fossils just an amazing rock garden. And I realized that while a child digging in the woods around his home had approximately a zero chance of digging up buried treasure, an adult with a USGS topographical map showing the locations of mines was a totally different situation~!!
We collected rocks from Maine to Colorado and Wyoming. Petrified wood from the blue forest, geodes filled with fluorescent minerals, tourmaline crystals in Maine (who knew Maine was filled with mostly abandoned gemstone mines?!?!).
Dan would walk 5 miles around a fence topped with concertina wire to find a hole he could slip through to search a mine for collectibles. We joined a mineralogical society and took mining safety classes to join geologists visiting active quarries on Saturdays, mostly in Ohio and Indiana. I severely strained his tendency to trespass on private property to collect, I wouldn’t do it and I wouldn’t help him do it.
Dan worked for me too, handyman around the house and farm. He was slow and didn’t spend enough time reading the instructions sometimes. I redid some of the things he had done not quite right. I didn’t know at the time, but this was the Pick’s Disease first showing up. He once mentioned his uncles dying of dementia, so he knew it could be happening to him.
We worked all one summer installing 24×36 inch polished slabs of Green River Formation limestone with fish fossils in it onto a big chimney with a fireplace in wifes and my bedroom. We would do 5 or 6 stones each weekend, using bondo as the adhesive and two or three levels to get the stone plate level, and plumb and square. Easier said than done. The first weekend I think we only got 3 or 4 done as we had never done such work.
The memory service last night was a pot-luck dinner, bring a dish and your drinks, although there was a ton to stuff to eat and drink. It was 60 degrees yesterday, pretty nice for mid-winter. Not a big crowd, but most of the people Dan would have wanted to be at his memory gathering. We had a small bonfire off the back deck, which was good as after dark it did get cold.
Kathy had found another batch of paper hot-air balloons, which when lit would glow pink or gold or white, and rise straight up in the moonlight until they got above the ridge line, when the gentle breeze would take them away. It was pretty damp, so no danger of a fire if they came down into the forest which surrounded the farm where the gathering was.
Dan also collected artifacts, arrowheads and similar items from plowed fields. He could look at a farmer’s field and tell you where the lodges were built, where the cooking hearths were, where the men worked on hunting tools and weapons, where the pottery was heated and cured in fires. I could collect as well as I could out in front of him, and he could come behind me and find dozens of artifacts I had walked right over.
He tended to be a hoarder of these things, and tried to found a small-town museum with his hoard, but was too disorganized to do it in the abandoned building he got an old friend to donate to him. By the time he went into a VA nursing home in pretty bad shape, some years ago, the “museum” was so messed up that all of that went to the lawyers the court appointed to try to straighten things out. Many of us tried to help keep it straight, but Dan was cantankerous enough to make that difficult to impossible.
He taught many of us how to look for different interesting or beautiful rocks in the midst of plain old “leaverite” rocks, as in leave ‘er right there where she lies. Sandstone in a mass can be beautiful, but it isn’t collectible, not really. Granite can be beautiful cut and polished into a cabinet or other construction material, but again, not really collectible.
There was no one there last night Dan hadn’t pissed off over and over, but he would come over to help put on a roof, or use a come-along to pull a neighbor out of a muddy ditch in the freezing rain, too. We toasted him with tequila and whiskey and champagne and lit hot-air balloons in the moonlit sky. There won’t be another like him.
There is buried treasure on the ridge where his cabin sits, we all know that, because we saw his finest treasures, once, and then never again. He stashed it somewhere up on that dark ridge top, among the giant boulders and huge twisty oak trees that mark the ridge tops around here. Not worth a dime to most, he saw history and geology and ancient men learning how to fashion sharp flint blades and tools in those treasures.
He left us years ago, Picks Disease took him away. The VA home took good care of the husk that was left, until last week. RIP Danny! I’ll miss you, you crusty old bastard! ;-(
Another Scott
@J R in WV: A fine remembrance. Thanks for sharing.
Condolences to you and yours.
Best wishes,
Scott.
J R in WV
@lowtechcyclist:
But there is a good reason to teach it. So people can still read old property records at the county courthouse, or the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. Or old church records of marriages and births and deaths in a neighborhood, for historical purposes, or just to learn when your great-aunt and great-uncle were married for their tombstone. Or the deed from your grandfather’s long closed business in your dad’s lock-box.
Fair Economist
@Brachiator:
It’s sort of sad, but I’m rarely interested in a physical paper anymore because it’s basically yesterday’s news. Almost anything interesting I’ve already read about. And, more than ever, it’s often not even that, but yesterday’s conservative propaganda.
Fair Economist
@J R in WV: Great eulogy. My condolences for your loss.
Marcopolo
@Kay: Kay, I normally agree/align pretty closely to your view of things. However, your comment that Dean was just another centrist Dem in 2004 tells me you weren’t paying attention at the time or your memory is faulty. For those of us here old enough to remember, after 9/11 most of the D party establishment turned coward & started kissing Bush’s @ss. For example, there is the famous Rose Garden event where Gephardt & other D leaders stood next to Bush & cheered on the rush to invading Iraq. Dean was one of the few D voices saying that D’s needed to provide opposition to Bush on Iraq, yes, but also on his environmental policies, his school policies, pretty much all the crap Bush was trying to push. Here’s Dean’s speech to the CA Dem party convention in 2003. Remember, he was way way out on the limb on this.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SaXQobfaQzA
Second, Dean also offered a pragmatic vision of what government could do for folks. He was a 5 term (10 year) governor of VT. One of the stories he told was about looking at the state budget the first year & seeing that spending on corrections/prison was the fastest growing area. His administration looked at what issues led to folks committing crimes, determined it was lack of employability, linked that to lack of educational attainment, and then linked that to prenatal/early childhood nutrition & healthcare. That led him to implement a program that did well-baby visits with ALL women in Vermont who were going to be moms, doing education & hooking the up with available community resources. By the time he was running for Prez, research was showing a drop in the number of Vermont kids failing out of high school.
Anyways, Dean may not have been the best D Prez candidate ever (and where he is now leaves me scratching my head a lot (such as with the Iranian lobbying crap) but he had a hella lot more street cred than Wilmer or Kucinich.
FlipYrWhig
@Marcopolo: Dean was the first candidate I ever gave any money to but still he seems to me in retrospect a kind of Al Gore-ish technocrat who was willing to raise his voice. That’s not a bad thing to be but I get a little tired of the fetish on “the left” for performative outrage. Sometimes that leads to Anthony Weiner and Alan Grayson.
Another Scott
@Fair Economist: Yup.
The WWW killed many trade magazines (I used to love reading the dead tree version of InfoWorld) and car magazines (similarly with Car and Driver under DED, Jr.). It’s working its way up the food chain.
Printed daily newspapers are mostly an expensive anachronism. And if you’re getting your news on the WWW, then it doesn’t really matter which site you point your browser at – one click is as easy as any other.
There’s lots of great writing and information sources out there that are worth supporting (and I do support in many cases). But “OMG! The local Daily Farmer-Worker-Democrat and Daily Bugle is failing, buy a subscription or else!!” is not persuasive to me.
The Washington Post basically was worth very little when Bezos bought it in 2013:
It’s good he’s making a go of it, but I have not been tempted to re-subscribe (I think we dropped our subscription around 2008 or so). He’s right that it’s vital that the press keeps an eye on government. But ultimately, for-profit newspapers have to provide something that readers are willing to buy. If they can’t, then something else (probably not another printed newspaper) [will] fill the niche (if the niche remains).
Cheers,
Scott.
Yutsano
@Immanentize: That’s a little complicated, as she has been dead for almost 9 years.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100471291
I feel bad for only knowing her from Schoolhouse Rock. But as far as legacies go, that’s not a bad one.
Brachiator
@Fair Economist:
Online sites are struggling as well, and many are still part of a physical paper organization.
I suppose that this will settle down eventually, but until then, the shake ups will be very unpleasant.
Brachiator
@Another Scott:
I totally agree. The LA Times is dying. I don’t think that anything can save it, and it has clearly become irrelevant to many people.
And while there is a lot of fine writing on the Internet, there is not a lot of good journalism from sites not linked to a physical newspaper. Or something like the Washington Post, sustained as a pet project of a billionaire.
J R in WV
@raven:
Don’t like “Classical and opera.”? I don’t care for get-down traditional Buck Owens style country, though I like more modern edgy country, like Ray Wylie Hubbard and his fellow Texans, Willie and his gang. Lucinda Williams, Trio, Bob Dylan, well, some Dylan more than others.
I love most classical music, tho I confess Mozart uses too many notes some times. Piano concertos touch me, especially the Russians, Opera not so much. We did go to the Metropolitan Opera once in NYC, which was fun, partly for the spectacle! Wife sat beside a family from Italy, Milano, and enjoyed listening to them, she had some French as her mom was an AP French teacher, and could tell when they were dissing the Met. But I don’t care to listen to opera on a stereo at all. Go figure.
Mid century jazz and blues, modern blues, Local public radio has a show on called Eclectopia, which is a mix of music, as the name would imply. It’s quite good, from Benny Goodman, because he had a black electric guitar player, which was a big deal back then, an integrated band… The horror!!… to African and Cuban big band music.
J R in WV
@Brachiator:
“Hell, I remember the excitement over the Lucy discoveries. ”
I met that guy years ago in southern France, Donald Johanson was the guy who found the first signs, may have been the expedition leader. We were touring the caves in the Pyrenees with ancient paintings, and our archaeologist knew him and introduced us at a famous site he was visiting. Seemed like a nice guy.
Steeplejack (phone)
@J R in WV:
Leaverite—ha!
My RWNJ brother in Las Vegas is an expert amateur geologist and veteran desert rat. He introduced me to leaverite and also to the related mineral annamite. “And it might be this, and it might be that . . .”
Brachiator
@J R in WV: Very cool. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him.
I liked this bit from an interview, where he talks about the importance of giving his fossil find a name.
J R in WV
@Phylllis:
My dad hated answering machines. So he would call when we were both at work, and say in a tired and sad voice: “Never mind!” and hang up. Who did he think was gonna answer the phone on Tuesday at 2 pm???
Bonnie
I don’t think I even own a pencil.
germy
@Steve in the ATL: Now what’s the proper grammar: Do I say you have fewer brains or less brains than anyone here? Or is shit for brains the best description?