My new neighbor

Is it possible to shoplift information?

A couple of weeks ago I was out driving around with the family. I had written down directions to a children’s museum but was having a little difficulty finding the place. We were in the right vicinity, but there was something wrong. So I stopped at a CVS, went in and headed right for the Hagstrom Maps stand. There I picked up a county map, found the place I was looking for, put it back and headed out the door. Was that shoplifting?

The Harvard University bookstore, the Coop, thinks so.

Coop President Jerry P. Murphy ’73 said that while there is no Coop policy against individual students copying down book information, “we discourage people who are taking down a lot of notes.”

The apparent new policy could be a response to efforts by Crimsonreading.org—an online database that allows students to find the books they need for each course at discounted prices from several online booksellers—from writing down the ISBN identification numbers for books at the Coop and then using that information for their Web site.
Murphy said the Coop considers that information the Coop’s intellectual property.

And they are prepared to call the cops on you.

Conceptual work art

Best use of tautology in a rock song

Sham 69's If the Kids Are United!

A day late, a dollar short

Happy labor day.

New Brunswick 1998

It didn’t snow very much in the winter of ’98. And the spring wasn’t particularly wet either. By summer, the state was under a drought emergency. You couldn’t water your lawn or wash your car and restaurants stopped automatically giving water out.

We were living on the bottom floor of a two family house in New Brunswick. Most of the houses on the street were rentals, converted from single family homes. Our house was unusual on the street because it had a double lot. I took care of the lawn for a little bit off the rent.

A couple doors down was a church—a holdover from when the neighborhood was more solidly residential. The priest ignored the water restrictions. Every morning he’d be out on the little patch of grass in front of the church in flip flops, shorts, and a guinea tee watering it with a hose. His grass stayed green all summer.

From June into July, my grass stopped growing. I could go weeks between mowings. Eventually it turned brown altogether and I stopped mowing. When I walked passed the church on my way to school, I cursed the priest under my breath.

Then one sticky August afternoon, one of those late summer thunderstorms rolled through. It was a great big storm. The sky turned black, the wind blew the leaves silver, and golf-ball sized hail clunked down on the window pains. Then an intense crash of thunder shook the house. A lightning bolt struck the steeple of the church, blowing the cross clear off and into the yard of a house a block away. I walked a little lighter passed the church after that.

I get it

Every so often I write an email at work.
Don't get me wrong, like every other contemporary office worker, I send hundreds of emails a day. But once in a while, I really take the time to write an email. It feels so modernist. So art for art's sake.
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an email that used 1)a double modal, 2)sincere use of the pharase "my bad" 3) a split infinitive with a callout to an editor who was one of the recipients that I had indeed split an infinitive, and 4) a reference to the John Denver song, Leaving on a Jet Plane. The other day I went minimalist and wrote the following email:

Yes no is.

Maybe it's an empty gesture, but I feel like I'm sticking it to the man.

They haven't got the Christmas goat yet

So far, the Christmas goat in Gävle has not burned down. For the past 40 years, the town has put up a giant straw Christmas goat. Traditionally vandals have burned the goat down.

The strange history of the Gävle Goat began in 1966. A man named Stig Gavlén came up with the idea of making a giant version of the traditional Swedish Christmas goat of straw. The aim was to attract customers to the the shops and restaurants in the southern part of the town centre.

On 1 December the 13-metre tall, 7-metre long, 3 tonne goat stood on the square. At the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve, the goat went up in smoke. The perpetrator was found and charged with vandalism.

Over the years, the goat has been burned down 22 times. But this year, the town officials impregnated the straw with fire retardent chemicals--the same used in airplanes. They are hoping that the chemicals won't wash out in rain and snow.
One attempt to burn the goat has been foiled. We'll have to see how long the goat can last this year.

The kids are alright

Finally, someone on a Board of Education had the gumption to say what we all know to be true: slang doesn't hurt.

Dr. Debra Robinson wanted to get people talking, and did she ever.
Robinson, a former Flint resident who is a school board member in Palm Beach County, Fla., has garnered a lot of attention with her suggestion that teenagers be allowed to continue to embrace street slang without being judged poorly by their elders or harangued to learn "standard English."

"There's nothing wrong with the way they're speaking," Robinson said. "Some of the best words I've gotten, I've gotten from teenagers. If you walk up to kids and say 'Speak the way I speak. This is the right way,' then, especially young people, they will rebel."

To paraphrase the movie Patton, a woman this eloquent deserves support.

There are people out there, of course, who just don't get language and insist that recognising that people don't all speak the same way might be the beginning of the end.

"That just smacks of finding an excuse for something that doesn't need to be defended. Learning (standard English) isn't a cop-out. ... it's just part of being an educated person, an avenue to self discovery."

One letter writer said Robinson's idea "is just another crude attempt to cover up the plague of Ebonics that has developed in poor communities across America."

A plague? Get a grip. Ebonics has been around for 100's of years.