Arthur Conan Doyle Quote

The September 27, 2011 of the NY Times reported that Arthur Conan Doyle's first novel, "The Narrative of John Smith" will be publish on October 3rd by the British Library. The original got lost in the mail, was reconstructed from memory, but was never published during his lifetime.

Regarding the loss of the original manuscript, Doyle sad, "My shock at its disappearance would be as nothing to my horror if it were suddenly to appear again — in print ".

Food Porn!

Honest.  Newsday has 190 web pages titled "Food Porn!".  (The exclamation point is theirs.)  If you're expecting phallus or pudenda shaped "food products" you'd be wrong. I include several images: 

#30 Watermelon, cucumber and blue cheese salad, photo credit: Marge Perry

#68 Potato chips at Deli King in New Hyde Park, photo credit: Erica Marcusof

Personally, I find it difficult to generate a prurient interest in salads or potato chips.  Am I alone in this?

Under a picture of grits there is a link to a story about Carolyn Brown of Boutte, Louisiana scalding her sleeping boyfriend with a pot of boiling grits.  Does that qualify as porn?

The closest I could find (and I'm stretching it) is image 122, the suggestive curves of triped bass and yellow tail sushi at Sushi Ya (Photo credit: Newsday Photo/Michael E. Ach):

Your experience might vary.

mot juste & crepuscular

I've found myself searching for words lately.  Could be a cold which has now arrived in no uncertain terms or it could be a harbinger of something darker.  Be that as it may, I stumbled across the term mot juste just in time:

Now, if I can remember the pronunciation (those wacky French) I may be able to sound competent.  ("Those wacky French" was a phase one of our French profs used to make light of the difficulty students had with French pronunciation.)

And another word which used to be applicable:

crepuscular

1. of, relating to, or resembling twilight : dim  
2. occurring or active during twilight 

In another time I would leave work in the wee hours.  I heard birds which only sang at night and discovered the scents of night blooming flowers.  I was the only one around except for campus safety and the night crews.  I did my grocery shopping without waiting on lines although I'd often have to find the night manager to get behind the checkout register.

My manager at work enjoyed saying that, considering the evidence: avoiding sunlight and being active at night, I was probably a reformed vampire.

But that was then, before other responsibilities intruded.

Machina ex Machina

In the "Identity Crisis" episode of Suits on the USA Network a number of problems/challenges in the episode  are neatly resolved through the marvelous use of computers: banking systems are broken into, a university registration system is penetrated, and, as if that were not enough, the über cute über sophisticated female hacker is able to get an official graduation certificate printed and mailed.

I remember the late John Chardi saying that he drew a line in the text of a novel at the point in the story where the writer violated the contract with the reader.  A digitally equivalent gesture is needed for the broadcast when a hacker breaks into all the banks in Luxembourg and gets a printout of all the account records in each bank.  That all the printouts create a stack of folders barely a foot high would indicate incredibly thin paper, exceptionally tiny fonts, or technology sufficiently advanced so as to be mistaken for magic.  Or screen writers who expect the momentum of their story to overwhelm the viewers' common sense.

Beware Pastors Bearing Gifts

There was a story in the April 23rd edition of the NY Times about an evangelical pastor, Isidro Bolaños, who offered jobs to many people after claiming to have received a grant which would pay their salaries.  The jobs never showed up, the claims were false, and the real question seems to be what was the purpose of the scheme?

It does not appear that he requested money from his victims, but only that he got personal information under the guise of processing their hiring.  Was this an amateurish attempt at identity theft?  A search on G\google didn't provide any answers about the outcome.  All the stories turned up in the first seven pages of results seem to hash over the same facts.

The pastor left for Latin America when his actions made the news.  He did return and eventually returned documents to those duped with a promise not to use the information. And there it stands.  Curiosity thwarted.

David Gonzalez's account of how he discovered the story is available online.

Sorrow and Longing /Tomorrow is a Long Time

Hearing Bob Dylan sing "Tomorrow is a Long Time" on pandora.com this afternoon transported me to ill-defined black and white images of rooms I couldn't place.  Wistful student longing, love which couldn't find a voice or a mate overwhelmed me.  What was I remembering?   There was a hollow, lost feeling in my chest.

Songs will do that to you - send you reeling back through the decades.

Pandor cited Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Volume II as the source. Surely, that had to be wrong. The song was such a part of my growing up that I was sure it had to be on one of his albums prior to the compendium. But, no. Other than bootleg recordings, the first time his own version was released was on the compendium. The song on the sound tract of my life was sung at different times by Judy Collins, Joan Baez, Ian & Sylvia, Sandy Denny, and Rod Stewart.

How very strange and faulty is memory.  "Music is the best form of time travel." (inexcelsis17 in a comment posted for George Winston's - Colors/Dance on his Autumn album.)