Sarah Wrote That

One For The Tumblr Wish-List

An option to specify a custom slug for the ‘notes’ next to your name/avatar when adding text to a reblog.

Upside of knowing CSS: you will be invaluable to your employer.

Downside of knowing CSS: you will be invaluable for knowing CSS.

The Best Euro-thriller Music Ever…

…adapted by an Australian composer to sell a Ford Lincoln.  Ironic concept for an ad,  concocting a glossily Euro confection and tagging it as “American luxury.”  But it sure is purty.  Go, global capitalism! (Tumblrers, click to see the video).

If anyone finds this version of Rob D’s “Clubbed To Death” as a single, without Dylan McDermott’s sexxxy voice over, let me know.

When the ad aired, in 2000, my producer at the time played it over and over on the original Ad Critic web site while we were editing.  Those gorgeous nested scenes—none of our clients (we thought) would ever have the budget or products for anything this complex and beautiful; and therefore our reels would never be cool enough for anyone who did have projects like this to hire us.

This bothered us a lot.

Like a lot of people in advertising, we were more interested in telling stories, making little movies, our hundred thousand dollar origami, than we were in selling anything.

I do like knowing how visuals like this get made, being able to admire the artistry (and overtime!) that goes into them.  But mainly, these days, I listen to the music, and enjoy the sense of being pulled through space—which is what, I think, the ad’s creators hoped for.

"I begin by producing a simple neither/nor sentence. “Neither his age nor his disability prevented him from competing.” I then ask my students to write their own sentences on that model. Most of them are able to do it, and they produce sentences with 20 different contents, but only one form. The next step is for the students to figure out what that form is. Just how does a neither/nor sentence organize items and actions in the world?"

Stanley Fish

This Word Does Not Go With This Word…

…so, paired together—comic gold!  Mike Hale reviews the pilot of V in the Times:

Most of the episode’s time is spent introducing the small and hackneyed band of humans who will, however implausibly, be the key players in the coming battle.

F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the same technique in The Great Gatsby, sparking delightful little mental shifts to process items that are grammatically correct but combined in violation of conventions for parallel construction:

[they had] drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together.

Writing has to do interesting things word-by-word if the larger concept is going to fly, and after seeing the full pilot, I have to agree with Hale that V is done in

a cramped, underwritten style, content to fall back on prime-time formulas to get from one set piece to another.

The More You Know…

I JUST THIS WEEK realized there’s a keyboard shortcut for em-dashes—you don’t have to let Word make them from a pair of normal dashes.

See?  Wasn’t that easy?

Shift+Option+Dash.

Live it.  Love it.  Use an em-dash today.

The Fascination Of What’s Difficult

Laura started a good discussion at Apt. 11D about Friedman’s take on the need for education reform.  The moustache of understanding Friedman thinks that education needs to focus on… well, on what Tom Friedman focuses on:

So our schools have a doubly hard task now — not just improving reading, writing and arithmetic but entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity.

(You might note the missing gerund in front of “entrepreneurship”—perhaps ‘teaching’ or ‘encouraging’?)  But, as Laura notes, it’s heartening simply to see education on the Times editorial page, and Friedman manages to avoid putting too many metaphors through his usual enhanced interrogation.

Is it useful, though, to draw the kind of distinctions the piece is about?  The idea of teaching creativity is more than the inadvertently ironic fodder for self-satisfied hipster smirking it initially seems. 

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A Rabble Of Worrying Freebutters

Yesterday I caught myself employing usage I recall first hearing on cable news.  A lot of expressions from mainstream or social media are fun, like shared jokes.  The trick is knowing when to drop the joke.  “WTF,” “fail,” “not so much”—aren’t they all getting to be like Top 40 hits you’ve heard one too many times?

But some usage sounds wrong from the start, and for me this was one of those cases—“concerning” as a synonym for “worrying” or “worrisome,” as in:

I find Johnny’s meth use concerning.

Gah, nails down a chalkboard, right?  But is it incorrect, or am I simply unaccustomed to it?

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Something Out There

In the New Yorker Money Issue, Nick Paumgarten writes about people who search for cycles and patterns underlying finance.  (A subscription is required to view the entire article but the abstract is still fascinating stuff, especially if you’re, say, thinking of writing a conspiracy-minded thriller!!).

Paumgarten, as feature writers often do, uses a prominent example (here, financier Martin Armstrong) as the entry point for a wider discussion.  It’s an effective rhetorical strategy, but frustrating; Paumgarten veers into the history of cycle theory just as he gets to Armstrong landing in jail for defrauding Japanese investors of billions of dollars.

Unsurprisingly, this touches on Dan Brown territory, discussing the Fibonacci sequence and Armstrong’s fascination with pi:

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