Articles
Olio (Oleo?)
Last updated: 01/08/2012Olio or oleo? The two are staples in crossword puzzles, and I can’t keep them straight. One is a butter substitute, the other a melange, a potpourri, a miscellany. This wonk of course will be the latter, but which word applies, you ask? Hey, look it up. I can’t be doing everything for you. But Happy New Year. We have survived another one. And I promise that if this is a retrospective, it will be only accidentally so.
Dear Me
Last updated: 12/24/2011There is a book just out entitled Dear Me: A Letter to My Sixteen-Year-Old Self. The instigator, Joseph Galliano, invited many celebrities to do just that, to write such a letter. (To his credit, the profits will go not to Galliano but to a charity.) This letter business is not a new idea, but as a writing prompt it is certainly a cut above “My Pet Peeve.” It invites somber reflection, wiseacre humor, and much in between.
Reposition Windows for Multiple Monitors with AppleScript
Last updated: 12/19/2011Editor's Note: The Code Mojo column features user-submitted code snippets that you can edit and use on your own Mac. To share your creation on Macinstruct, please submit an AppleScript, Automator action, or bash script to support@macinstruct.com.
Roadie
Last updated: 12/11/2011I’m in love.
I don’t mean with the Longsuffering Diana, although that is certainly true and forever will be. And our kids and grandkids are so rooted in my heart as never to be extirpated. But I find myself in love with 23 pounds of canine named Roadie. Never thought we’d have a dog again, and I have a good story for you.
Calvin Untroped
Last updated: 12/04/2011Readers of this space know that I teach classical tropes every fall (see “Tropes”). The basic assignment that I give my trope babies is a “lemon squeeze” of a passage—identify all the tropes that you can—and I usually pick out something that is reliably rich with tropes: poetic prose perhaps, or oratorical prose (Lincoln, Kennedy, King, etc.).
Steve Wozniak Interview
Last updated: 11/28/2011Editor's Note: This "interview" was actually a series of questions that I emailed to Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, on December 31, 1999. While the rest of the world was ringing in the New Year or worrying about Y2K, Woz was typing up his responses. He responded about two hours after I emailed him!
Crazy Grammar
Last updated: 11/27/2011Because we use words, we must use grammar to string them together. “Grammar” has a telling history, being related to “glamour” and “grimoire.” Glamour has come down some in the world, referring now mostly to Tinsel Town denizens, jet-setters, all that social fluff. But originally it referred to magic, to witchery. Similarly, a grimoire was a sorcerer’s handbook, a book of spells. Hocus Pocus, Dominocus (a parody of church Latin) and all that.
Me and Charlie Rose
Last updated: 11/25/2011(I seldom stay up late enough to watch Charlie Rose on PBS, but when I do I am always reminded of how much I’ve been missing. Charlie is an excellent interviewer, I think because he has a genuine interest in his guests and in ideas and events. He is definitely and definitively connected. Add in that dulcet North Carolina accent and you have a real treat. His guests the other night were Tom Brokaw and Calvin Trillin—Charlie doesn’t traffic in the usual Tinsel Town fluff—both pushing their latest books. No surprise that I slipped into the following reverie.)
Moxie II
Last updated: 11/25/2011(Yes, this is Moxie, Part Two, in which your intrepid wonker faces his fate!)
At this point, nostalgia turns mean. My Moxie reminiscing had followed a docile pattern, predicated on the sure assumption that the Moxie enterprise had gone belly-up in the late ‘40’s, that this elixir of the Puritans had gone to join the shadows. But ten minutes’ research revealed that the Moxie makers were alive, well, and now based outside of Atlanta, Georgia, the soft drink capital of this country. I did not rejoice.
Moxie
Last updated: 11/25/2011(I hope you will indulge me once again, my friends. This essay was written over twenty years ago, but I hope it has stood the test of time. Also, it is long enough that I have chosen to break it in two. Here’s the first part.)
One morning a few months ago I caught myself saying, to no one in particular and about whom I can’t recall, “You know, that took a lot of moxie.” The expression surprised and delighted me. Moreover, it set me on a digging that tunneled its way to the roots of nostalgia.
