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.
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.
At the risk of turning into a Times clipping service here’s another good one from Paper Cuts: A vending machine that dispenses books, discovered by one of their Web producers in Barcelona.
Of course these will soon be obsoleted by the Kindle, right?
Book kiosks are cool, though not as cool as this Chef Boy’Ardee vending machine that I took a picture of some years ago at Bear Mountain, NY. Best vending machine ever.
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.
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.
Nicholas Lemann had an interesting piece in last month’s Columbia Journalism Review*, in which he uses Orwell’s influential essay “Politics and the English Language” to discuss language, propaganda, and political writing.
Lehmann closes with the argument that corruption of information is now an even more frightening prospect than the corruption of language described by Orwell. He doesn’t fully develop the idea (worth an essay in its own right), and it feels bolted on. That’s a small quibble, though; the piece is well worth reading.
As a bonus the article conveniently comes with a numbing array of examples of both good and bad political argument. Mostly bad, to be honest. Just read the comments.
* Where I worked for a while in the 90s.
Apple’s Steve Jobs, talking to The New York Times about Amazon’s Kindle:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Which means sixty percent of people in the U.S.–180 million people–are, to some degree, readers. More if you count newspapers, magazines, and the web.
It strikes me as odd that Jobs, the head of a company that is doing very well with a less than 9 percent market share*, doesn’t appreciate that.
* UPDATE: Notice how I conflate the size of a market with market share? I think that’s called lying with statistics. Still, I think the larger point stands.