J. Beaman - The Magazine

The New Yorker has an amazing new article on elevators. I especially love this bit and it reminded me of how I feel about Airborne, astrology and other causational nonsense. For the record: there are no personality archetypes determined by the apparent relative positions of celestial bodies and you would have not gotten sick anyway.

And, this video, accompanying the New Yorker article, is fucking chilling. Try and watch it with the sound.

“In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. (It does work if, say, a fireman needs to take control. But you need a key, and a fire, to do that.) Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.”

Our Local Correspondents: Up and Then Down: Reporting & Essays: The New YorkerThis is another favorite bit.

“Passengers seem to know instinctively how to arrange themselves in an elevator. Two strangers will gravitate to the back corners, a third will stand by the door, at an isosceles remove, until a fourth comes in, at which point passengers three and four will spread toward the front corners, making room, in the center, for a fifth, and so on, like the dots on a die. With each additional passenger, the bodies shift, slotting into the open spaces. The goal, of course, is to maintain (but not too conspicuously) maximum distance and to counteract unwanted intimacies—a code familiar (to half the population) from the urinal bank and (to them and all the rest) from the subway. One should face front. Look up, down, or, if you must, straight ahead. Mirrors compound the unease. Generally, no one should speak a word to anyone else in an elevator. Most people make allowances for the continuation of generic small talk already under way, or, in residential buildings, for neighborly amenities. The orthodox enforcers of silence—the elevator Quakers—must suffer the moderates or the serial abusers, as they cram in exchanges about the night, the game, the weekend, or the meal.”

Hat tip: Oliver.

According to Wiktionary the first sited usage:

• 1950: Beverly Cleary, Henry Huggins, p21

  “Whatcha got in that bag?” asked Scooter.

  “None of your beeswax,” answered Henry.

And I wanted to stop there. Why? Because Beverly Cleary is the awesomest ever! Just ask Sarah. But it seems, as it often does, that usage trails back further. Some goofy earthlink website dates it to the 20’s stating, “The twenties were the first decade to emphasize youth culture over the older generations, and the flapper sub-culture had a tremendous influence on main stream America.” Makes sense, but not the most reliable looking site.

And, upon further research, it seems that according to Eric Partridge’s A Dictionary of Catch Phrases: British and American from the Sixteenth Century to the Present Day, it was originally in the broadway musical No, No Nanette. From Wikipedia “…a musical comedy with lyrics by Irving Caesar and Otto Harbach, music by Vincent Youmans, and a book by Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel.”

So, Beverly Cleary didn’t invent beeswax but she certainly invented Beezus and Ramona, who are simply the greatest heroines in all of literature.

Thank you for coming.

Update: That janky earthlink website actually stole all of those definitions from the Antique Automobile Club of America’s website. Heh.

…on top of that Central Asian weirdness is all this Richard-Gere do-gooder nonsense about the peace-loving Tibetans assaulted by the ruthless Red Chinese. Both parts of that story are wrong, wrong, wrong. The Tibetans were never peaceful people at all. They were one of the most warlike peoples in Central Asia and even conquered the Chinese capital, Chang’An, in their heyday.

THE EXILE - Tibet: Five to One Against - By Gary Brecher - The War Nerd

Nouveau electronica shoegazer. Sex music. MBV, proud.

M83 - Kim and Jessie from Saturdays=Youth

Impress feminist girlfriends. TDT drummer, Albini recorded.

Nina Nastasia - I Come After You from You Follow Me

And holyfuckingmoly. Look at her. I believe everything she says. And drawn to her and terrified of her at the same time.

Update: I know that the Nina Nastasia song isn’t working. I have a team of high powered sysadmins working on it.

Update 2: My sysadmins are the shit. Problem solved.

The term ampersand, as Geoffrey Glaister writes in his “Glossary of the Book,” is a corruption of and (&) per se and, which literally means “(the character) & by itself (is the word) and.”

The symbol & is derived from the ligature of ET or et, which is the Latin word for “and.”One of the first examples of an ampersand appears on a piece of papyrus from about 45 A.D. Written in the style of early Roman capital cursive (typical of the handwriting of the time), it shows the ligature ET. A sample of Pompeian graffiti from 79 A.D. (fig. 1) also shows a combination of the capitals E and T, and is again written in early Roman script.

Adobe - Fonts : Type topics: The ampersand