Author Archives: John McGrath

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New York, What Are You Smoking?

An item in today’s NYTimes City Room blog, on a proposal to tax illegal drugs, makes parenthetical mention of an earlier story on the official New York State misspelling of pot. In New York you get busted for smoking marihuana, not marijuana.

In the earlier story, former High Times editor Steve Bloom speculates the odd spelling is because “someone just spelled it wrong, and it stuck.” The ‘h’ spelling, though, appears to be common in American jurisprudence. An early anti-drug law is titled the “1937 Marihuana Tax Act,” and to stay consistent with that law, it is often so-spelled in modern laws relating to marijuana, according to Wikipedia.

Perhaps it’s a vestige of a time when Americans were even less aware of non-English spelling and pronunciation (in this instance, the Spanish pronunciation of ‘j’ as a breathy ‘hw,’ as in ‘juanita’) than they are now. If you can imagine that even being possible.

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Incubus, the first movie in… Shatneranto? Shasperanto?

Have you ever wondered what spoken Esperanto sounds like? Have you ever wondered what it sounds like spoken by Bill Shatner, in an expressionistic black and white fantasia of an arthouse horror movie?

Of course you have, so you need to see Incubus, made in 1965 by Outer Limits creator Leslie Stevens and written entirely in Esperanto. The plot is heavy handed in a moralistic, Bergmanesque sort of way–it’s plainly inspired by The Seventh Seal. But the cinematography was done by Conrad L. Hall, who later went on to win best cinematography Oscars for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, American Beauty, and Road to Perdition, and many of the shots are disarmingly beautiful.

The acting isn’t too bad either. While his later tendency to overact is sometimes apparent, young pre-Star Trek Shatner is, dare I say, rather dashing.

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Better Sorting for Lists and Comments

A small update: lists and comments on words now have more and better sorting options. Comments, previously unsortable, can now be viewed oldest to most recent, or vice versa. Lists had previously been sortable alphabetically, or chronologically by order added. That’s still the case, but now both those sorts can also be reversed.

For both lists and word comments, your last choice is remembered on subsequent words and lists.

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Make a Wordie Screensaver

If you’d like random words to float around your screen when you’re not using your computer, it’s easy to set up Wordie’s recent words feed as a screensaver.

If you’re using a Mac, open System Preferences and in the “Desktop & Screen Saver” section select “Screen Saver,” then choose “RSS Visualizer” (this is the effect Apple stores usually have going at their “Genius” bars). Under “options” enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordieLatestWords. When the screen saver fires up, you’ll see the latest nonsense from Wordie floating dreamily across the screen.

If you’re using Windows, NewsGator offers a screensaver add-on for their feed reader, and Lifehacker has a post outlining a similar download.

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Living in a Dictionary

Steve just sent in a post from apartment therapy explaining how to make a dictionary wall (they credit DIY magazine with the idea). I like the idea of living inside a dictionary, but one problem: what if you want to look up a word that’s on the back side of one of the pages?

A less permanent way to achieve a modern version of the same: get a projector and bath your walls with an image of a word cloud. Put the projector on a lazy susan for a mirrorball effect.

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Book Ads in the NYTimes, 1962-1973

I missed it when it ran this summer, but in June Paper Cuts, the Times book blog, posted a slideshow of old book ads from what it called the “Golden Age” of book advertising.

Included are ads for a bunch of heavy hitters like Susan Sontag, Edna O’Brien, Cormac McCarthy, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Donald Barthelme. I’m not sure I’d call it a Golden Age–the books may be impressive, but the ads seem to have thrived then as now on hidebound cliché*. But there’s some good stuff there, and more than a few signs of the time: overt sexism, boomer self-importance, and everybody’s smoking.

Unfortunately a number of the images are poorly reproduced. Seems a shame, for a slideshow, especially one so otherwise intersting. Maybe we should all chip in a few bucks and get Paper Cuts a new scanner.

* A cliché, I know.