O, Henry

Last Saturday was the centenary anniversary of William Sidney Porter's death. Today's Wall Street Journal has a nice article about Greensboro's most famous writer: His Writers' Workshop? A Prison Cell. I wrote some time ago about my favorite O. Henry story, "A Man About Town", here. It tells the story of Porter's search around New York to learn just precisely what a "man about town" was. At the end of the story he is struck by a car on the street and sent to the hospital. The story ends:

A hospital nurse laid a hand that was not particularly soft upon my brow that was not at all fevered. A young doctor came along, grinned, and handed me a morning newspaper.

"Want to see how it happened?" he asked cheerily. I read the article. Its headlines began where I heard the buzzing leave off the night before. It closed with these lines:

"Bellevue Hospital, where it was said that his injuries were not serious. He appeared to be a typical Man About Town."

There has always been a little confusion between the name of the candy bar "O'Henry" and the writer "O. Henry". When the Grasshoppers opened the new stadium downtown they had an area called the "O'Henry" something-or-other, and I pointed out to them that was like Baltimore recognizing the great baseball player Baby Ruth. In short order and with a nod to economy, "O'Henry became "O, Henry".

UPDATE:
Here is a photo of O, Henry. Note the reused apostrophe.

Updated Update for 50th High School Reunion

Lynn Black and I mis-communicated and she didn't get my updated Bio for the Greensboro High School Class of 1960 Reunion booklet, but never fear, here it is for all of you who just can't wait:

After we all got together at high school graduation, I graduated from Clemson University in chemical engineering, married my high school sweetheart Ann Winchester, got a graduate degree from Clemson, worked for Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati for a year, defended Baltimore harbor from the Viet Cong for two years while in the Army, and returned to Greensboro in 1968 to work for Dow Corning Corp. In 1971 I joined Greensboro Printing Company and worked there until it closed in 2001. (We zigged when we should have zagged.) After a stint as a salesman(?) with a printing company in Charlotte, between unemployment and retirement, I attended the Fine Furnituremaking Course at Rockingham Community College, and then I officially retired in 2007.

Ann and I were divorced in 1977 with no children. (Ann passed away from MS in 2002). After 13 years of marriage and 13 years of single-hood, I remarried in 1900 to Brenda Brewer and acquired two teen-age step-children. Brenda and I were divorced in 2003 and I have been single since.

As to hobbies and interests, I have been interested in photography since high school and am currently trying to make the transition to digital technology. I have made furniture as a hobby for many years and particularly enjoyed learning how to do it right at the RCC woodworking program. I have traveled extensively in Ireland and Spain and made several other interesting trips to France and Germany, and one particularly memorable seven-day-two-night business trip to Israel in 1998. I have almost given up my dream of winning the US Open golf championship after never
getting my handicap below 15, but maybe there is still hope. And, let's see, seven more years of single-hood then I should be ready to marry again in 2016, if the 13-year cycle holds up.

I look forward to renewing friendships from a half-century ago. High school was a special time for me. (Actually, life has been a special time for me!), I hope we have a memorable reunion.

If Only High School Had Been Like This!

I'm going to my high school 50th reunion this weekend. I've written before about what high school should have been like here and here. Today's example is here. Those health films could have been much more interesting learning the Heimlich Maneuver and How to Do CPR.

Would You Like To Go To Paris . . .

. . . but can't afford the plane ticket? Here is the next best thing: an interactive 180º 26-gigapixel panorama of Paris.

"Paris 26 Gigapixels is a stitching of 2346 single photos showing a very high-resolution panoramic view of the French capital (354159x75570 px). Dive in the image and visit Paris like never before!"

For more about the project, go here.

(Another H-T to John Nack.) I bet Tom Lassiter is jealous.

Mayor Knight & Chief Bellamy on YouTube

For some reason, this YouTube video reminded me of the current spat between Mayor Knight and Chief Bellamy.

Joke of the Day

So, French philosopher René Descartes walks in to a bar. The bartender asks him if he would like a beer. Descartes says "I think not.", and disappears.

Today is Descartes' 414th birthday.

Spelling & Punctuation Rant

Some time ago I wrote about an interesting (but NSFW) post on grammar at Language Log.

Today they take on spelling and punctuation. Again, it needs a Vulgarism Alert!

Photoshop CS5: Content-Aware Fill

Last week Adobe announced the upcoming release of the latest version of Photoshop, CS5, which continues Photoshop's legacy of almost unbelievable photo manipulation tools. John Nack linked to the latest "magic", content-aware fill, with this demo.

Friday he expanded the report on the uses of this new tool:

"Adobe Photoshop again proving everything you see is probably a lie"

What I Learned This Week (or, Sue was wrong, will she admit it?)

It was D. P. Moynihan who observed that we are all entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts. Last Saturday, sort of in the heat of the moment, Sue Polinsky posted about the alleged cursing of Tea Partiers at the Saturday rally in Washington. By Sunday morning it was noted by a number of sources that those events may not have happened, and I wrote Sue asking her to note that the charges were "disputed" (see comments). She demurred.

On Wednesday, She doubled-down with another post, this one entitled "Socialist. Fascist. Nazi. Fa**ot. Ni**er".

Today she adds another post on this subject: "Our own shattered glass" . This one evokes the German Kristallnacht, comparing last weekend's events to that horror. This is all very good. It's her blog and she's entitled to her opinion.

Earlier this week, the Blogfather had a reference to an almost forgotten anniversary, the German Enabling Act of 1933. I had not heard of that particular act, but then I'm not a historian. The Wikipedia article is here. This was the act that gave Hitler the power to take over the German government and led to WWII and all its horrors. I suspect at the time that very few folks saw these outcomes as a possible result of that act.

An interesting sidelight of this story is the role Ludwig Kaas played in the passage of the Enabling Act and the events of last weekend and the passage of ObamaCare. If you read the Neo-Neocon post, which you should, you'll probably be struck by this:

"I am sure that rings a small, sad bell for someone whose name is somewhat similar (hint: instead of beginning with a “k” and ending with an “s,” it begins with an “s” and ends with a “k”)."

Am I comparing ObamaCare with the Enabling Act of 1933? I am not. Neither do I think last weekend's Tea Party demonstrations have any comparison to Kristallnacht. Dr. Sue is off the deep end worried about events which may have never happened. Will she realize that?

Note: I'm having trouble getting Blogger to translate the HTML in this post porperly. I have that problem often if I try to use their Block Quote function. I'm trying to edit it to display properly so it may change in appearance for a while.

Amazing Rube Goldberg Machines

Back in 2002 (or so) there was the Honda commercial "Cog".

Then last week an old college friend sent me this link about retired engineers with too much time on their hands.

Today, John Nack added another and made reference to one he mentioned last week that I had missed.

Is Rube Goldberg making a comeback?

Note: That's 12:24 of your life you'll never get back.

The Elements of Good Design

In my previous life as a printer, I always admired seeing a designer do great graphic design using a minimalistic approach:

1. Simple, uncluttered layout
2. Effective use of white space.
3. Consistant use of font variation (bold/italic/script/etc.), type size, and arrangement
4. Avoidance of All Cap format

Or not.

From Adobe's John Nack.

The Half-Blind Side

I was happy to see that Sandra Bullock won the best-actress Oscar Sunday night for her role in The Blind Side, but I think one the important issues that has been generally missed is that the movie should really been called The Half-blind Side.

The essence of the more-or-less-true story in the movie was that the Tuohy's (a wealthy Memphis family) rescued a poor struggling black kid from crushing poverty and helped him straighten out his life and become an NFL star. One point of conflict in the movie was that NCAA wanted to penalize Old Miss, the Tuohy's alma mater, for the Tuohy's improper roll in recruiting Michael Oher. In the movie the charges were sort of ridiculed as ridiculous in the light of the Tuohy's Christian charity.

In reality, Michael Oher was an outstanding football prospect when the Tuohys adopted him ("Stevie Wonder could have seen he was a future NFLer.") and the NCAA investigation was much more justified than the movie portrayed it. Oher has distanced himself from the movie, saying last fall that he hadn't even seen it, and commentators are even today ignoring his athletic accomplishments before the Tuohys took him into their family.

I don't know that this diminishes what the Tuohys did at all, but "the rest of the story" does give The Blind Side sort of a Paul Harvey twist.

Things I Learned Today: What do coconut, banana, and twinkie have in common?

They are racial insults.

If you are a conservative with Latino/Pacific Islander/Filipino heritage, you’re a coconut (brown on the outside, white on the inside).

If you are a conservative with Asian heritage, you’re a Twinkie or banana (yellow on the outside, white on the inside).

And if you are a conservative who happens to be black, you are an Oreo (black on the outside, white on the inside

Who Knew? "Oreo" I knew, but not the others. There's a lot to keep up with these days.

What He Said

Not him, him. Ed Cone had what I take was a positive reaction to last night's State of the Union Address: "Strong". I disagree. I agree more with what Ira Stoll wrote: " What a Phony".

In the Really-Super Bowl, It's Chicago 62, Iraq 3

The Blogfather points to a thought-provoking article by Victor Davis Hanson:

"There are a number of things we simply no longer talk about. The silence is partly due to intellectual laziness. Or maybe it is because of political correctness—or even attributable to ignorance and the absence of curiosity. In no particular order, I list five propositions that simply have become taboo:

1). Illegal Immigration and California
"Instead, illegal immigration is never much cited as a contributor to California’s fiscal implosion. To mention all this is considered racist. Yet, to take one instance, the cost of incarcerating the state’s illegal aliens alone exceeds the budget of the new UC Merced, a campus intended to serve mostly minority communities of the central valley."

2) Iraq
"We are tired of Iraq and have Trotskyized it out of our existence, given the huge cost and 4,000 dead. But consider: not a single America died in Iraq in December (38 murdered in Chicago during that period); three have been lost this month (24 murdered so far this month in Chicago)."

3) Affirmative Action
"For those who find the above illiberal, I’m sorry, but after twenty-one years as a professor I have never quite seen any American institution so corrupt, unfair, and cynical as the practice of affirmative action."

4) The Ivy League is a Naked Emperor
"By Ivy League I do not mean just Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, but the entire concept of high-priced elite schools like a Stanford, Duke, or Columbia as well. We know a BA from such institutions does not ipso facto any longer, as it once may well have, guarantee knowledge or competence. We know the race/class/gender craze has watered down the curriculum, and ensured therapy and empathy trump recall of facts and adherence to the inductive method. And we know that one’s first two years will probably mean instruction largely by graduate students and lecturers. Had we national exit requirements, I am convinced those leaving a Hillsdale College or St. Thomas Aquinas or St. John’s would do better than the average Yale BA."

5) The “Middle East” is a Fraud
"Sorry—take away three things, and the Mideast “crisis” is relegated to Cypriote status. If there were no oil in the Arab Middle East; if there were no Islamic terrorists; and if there was no endemic global anti-Semitism, we would be as likely to have a “Mideast czar” as we would an “Ossetian Czar.”

As they say, read the whole thing.

Bill Belichick Made the Right Decision

I wrote last year about football coaches punting too much. Most football fans think that those of us who advocate eschewing punting are crazy (or maybe just stupid). They see New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick's decision to go for first down on 4th-and-two at his own 29 with two minutes to go in last Sunday's last-minute loss to the Indianapolis Colts is further evidence that teams should always punt in situations like this. However, that is incorrect thinking. Belichick did the right thing. See here, here, here, or here.

Money quote (from Bill Barnwell), and the lesson we should take from all after-the-fact analyses:

"The important factor that the cacophony of responses seems to be missing is that you can't judge Belichick's decision by the fact that it didn't work. As we've mentioned more than once in these pages, you cannot judge decisions by their outcome. You have to consider the process that goes into them, and then decide whether they're right or wrong at the moment they're made."

If the goal was to win the game, Belichick made the right decision regardless of the outcome.

Humbling

Though I'd heard of him previously, I first met John McAlister in 2004 at the first event of the Society of American Period Furniture Makers (SAPFM) I ever attended. SAPFM may sound impressive, but it is really just 800 guys who have $35 and a table saw in their basement, and have a serious interest in 18th century American furniture. John had received the 2001 Cartouche Award from SAPFM recognizing outstanding American Woodworkers.He was the second person to be recognized with this award.

John grew up in Greensboro (he is of the Greensboro McAlisters) but spent most of his life in Charlotte where he was in the textile business. He began woodworking as a hobby in 1968 and is entirely self-taught--but boy, is he taught! I had the opportunity to visit John's home last weekend to see some of his furniture and his workshop.

Though he has never sold a piece, he has a large family (two marriages and seven children I believe he said) and so he has given away a lot of furniture he has made to family. I believe he said he is currently working on his fifth grandfather clock, for instance. Even with that, he has a home full of the most beautiful 18th century furniture you can imagine.

John's most famous piece is a copy of the Nicholas Brown tall secretary that sold for $12 million in 1989. Since then a number of woodworkers have made copies of this secretary, but John was one of the first, and he did a great deal of original research to be able to make the plans for the piece.

I've posted other pictures of John's furniture (and some of his workshop) on Flickr here but they hardly do justice to the scope of John's woodworking. I suspect there are very few woodworkers who have two bonnet-top highboys, one in their dining room and another in their bedroom.

Upon leaving John's house, one of the other amateur woodworkers in the group sighed "Boy, was that humbling." He got that right!

Mine Is Bigger Than Yours!

Joel Gillespie posts a picture of a big tree.

Ed Cone follows up with a picture of another big tree.

Steve Harrison adds his big tree.

John Nack of Adobe raises the stakes.

Game over.

(Be sure to watch the video at the NPR site.)

Oh, Wow! Oh, deer.

View Larger Map

On my way to supper earlier this evening I saw a large deer standing along Lakewood Drive as I turned left onto Lakewood from Farrar, heading towards Friendly Ave. The deer dove into the woods of Hamilton Lake park between Lakewood and Starmount about opposite 1106 Lakewood. This is the first deer I've seen this far into town. I don't know if it is a resident or a tourist, but I'll be looking for it on my daily walks through this area.

"What a coincidence!”

After the death of his high school friend Jas Howard, the UConn football player murdered a week ago, Clemson defensive back Chris Chancellor requested he be allowed to wear Howard's number 6 for the Tiger's Saturday game against Miami in his and Jas's hometown. The complication was that 6 was normally worn by Jacoby Ford, Clemson's outstanding wide receiver and kick returner. Coach Dabo Swinney realized that since Chancellor and Ford wouldn't be on the field at the same time (since one was on offense and the other defense) it was within the rules for two players to have the same number so he granted the request.

Chancellor played well in the game, making four individual and one assisted tackles in the game. Ford's play wasn't spectacular; he had two rushes for 16 yards and a first-quarter pass reception for 11 yards--until the last play of the game. In overtime, Ford caught a 26-yd pass for a TD and walk-off win for the Tigers. As fate would have it, #6 was the difference in the game. Coincidence, or the invisible hand at work? (For more details, see here.)