Swintec is one of
the last surviving typewriter companies in the U.S., although these days its
machines are made in Japan and Indonesia. Brother International Corp., a Japan-based
company with U.S. headquarters in Bridgewater, N.J., still sells typewriters,
although unlike Swintec its business is diverse, including everything from
printers to sewing machines. A
spokeswoman says typewriter sales have been slightly declining every year for
the past 10 years and are one of its smallest categories, but she declined to
give specific numbers. Swinstec flirted with trendy new products such as
photocopiers and fax machines but decided to stick with its strength. "We're typewriters," Mr. Michael
says. "This is our specialty. This is what we know." Mr. Michael, 70 years old,
started at the company in 1985 as a traveling salesman. "It was growing and growing and growing. I thought: 'This will never end,' " he says, on a
recent tour of the company's headquarters in Moonachie, N.J., just outside of
New York City. The boom years didn't
last. Though Swintec is profitable, it
has slimmed down to about 10 employees from about 85 employees, Mr. Michael
says. He says the company sold
"thousands and thousands" of typewriters at the peak but declined to
be specific. Swintec still sells about
3,000 to 5,000 typewriters a year, to customers including universities, senior
centers and state and federal prisons. Typewriters
persist, experts say, because personal computers fail to perform some functions
with equal efficiency: Filling out a
form in a PDF file can require on-screen acrobatics that frustrate many
workers. Printing an address on an
envelope that isn't upside down or sideways requires a certain amount of
expertise. "Things stick around
long after you think they would have disappeared," says Darren Wershler, a
professor at Concordia University in Montreal who has written about
typewriters. "The future is already
here. It's just unevenly
distributed." In Jersey City, two
1980s-era typewriters are kept at City Hall to fill out marriage certificates
and personnel forms. Mayor Steve Fulop,
a 36-year-old former Wall Street analyst, was elected in May promising to
modernize the city's politics, but he says typewriters won't fall victim. "Those things are staying, as long as I'm
in office, I can assure you that," Mr. Fulop says. "It's a nice touch." On "The Wire," a police drama that
aired in the 2000s, Baltimore detectives pounded out warrants on electric
typewriters. In reality, some
law-enforcement agencies still use them. The Philadelphia Police Department has about
200 typewriters to write property receipts and search warrants, a spokesman
said. Swintec thrived on this type of
government business, but sales were declining by the late 1990s. Then the company stumbled on an idea: a clear typewriter for prisons. The company's owner, Dominic Vespia, says they
were inspired by other transparent products designed to prevent smuggling of
contraband, from televisions to toothpaste tubes. Laura Kusisto
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323639704579013240996151948.html?mod=WSJ_hp_EditorsPicks
Journalist and author John Griffith Chaney, better known as Jack London, was born on January 12,
1876, in San Francisco, California. Jack,
as he came to call himself as a boy, was the son of Flora Wellman, an unwed
mother, and William Chaney, an attorney, journalist and pioneering leader in
the new field of American astrology. His
father was never part of his life, and his mother ended up marrying John
London, a Civil War veteran, who moved his new family around the Bay Area
before settling in Oakland. Jack London
grew up working-class. He carved out his
own hardscrabble life as a teen. He rode
trains, pirated oysters, shoveled coal, worked on a sealing ship on the Pacific
and found employment in a cannery. In
his free time he hunkered down at libraries, soaking up novels and travel
books. His life as a writer essentially
began in 1893. That year he had weathered
a harrowing sealing voyage, one in which a typhoon had nearly taken out London
and his crew. The 17-year-old adventurer
had made it home and regaled his mother with his tales of what had happened to
him. When she saw an announcement in one
of the local papers for a writing contest, she pushed her son to write down and
submit his story. Armed with just an
eighth-grade education, London captured the $25 first prize, beating out
college students from Berkeley and Stanford.
For London, the contest was an eye-opening experience, and he decided to
dedicate his life to writing short stories. But he had trouble finding willing publishers.
After trying to make a go of it on the
East Coast, he returned to California and briefly enrolled at the University of
California at Berkeley, before heading north to Canada to seek at least a small
fortune in the gold rush happening in the Yukon. By the age of 22, however, London still
hadn't put together much of a living. He
had once again returned to California and was still determined to carve out a
living as a writer. In 1899 he began
publishing stories in the Overland Monthly. The experience of writing and getting
published greatly disciplined London as a writer. From that time forward, London made it a
practice to write at least a thousand words a day. London found fame and some fortune at the age
of 27 with his novel The Call of the Wild (1903), which told the story
of a dog that finds its place in the world as a sled dog in the Yukon. http://www.biography.com/people/jack-london-9385499 See also:
http://jacklondonpark.com/jack-london-biography.html
Quote from Ladder of
Years by Anne Tyler See, I've always pictured life as one of
those ladders you find on playground sliding boards--a sort of ladder of years
where you climb higher and higher, and then, oops!, you fall over the edge and
others move up behind you.nkis
Pinkie used
as a term for the little finger is actually quite old. Though it is now often thought of as an
American term, it began its life in Scotland — the first recorded example, from
1808, is in John Jamieson’s An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish
Language. You might think that it is
called pinkie because European little fingers are usually coloured pink,
but this isn’t so (though its modern survival might owe something to this
idea). It derives from a much older
sense of pinkie for something tiny, which in turn comes from one meaning
of the adjective pink. This
adjective came into Scots from Dutch. It
appeared first as part of the phrase pink eye for a half-shut or peering
eye (from old Dutch pinck ooghen, which may well be the source of the
modern Dutch verb pinkogen, to half close the eyes or squint). In modern Dutch pink means the little
finger, so it might look as though the American pinkie comes directly
from it. The evidence, though, is that
Scots played a key intermediate role. The
sense of the colour, by the way, came from the flower called the pink,
whose name probably derives from pink eye, perhaps because of the folded
petals that made the flower look a bit like a half-closed eye, or possibly from
a completely separate sense of pink that referred to making holes or
scalloped edges in cloth (as in pinking shears), because of the crinkled
edges of the petals. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-pin1.htm
EIGHT STEPS TO PERFECT PASTA
1. For every one pound of pasta,
bring 5 quarts of water to a rolling boil. Once water is boiling, then add about 2 tbsp.
of coarse salt, or
1/4 cup table salt.
2. Stir to keep the pasta from
sticking. Stir within the first 2
minutes of cooking pasta. The pasta is
more likely to stick together, in the beginning, before the starches are
released into the water.
3. Place the lid back on the pot to
help bring the water back to a boil. This is an essential moment, because if you
don't, the pasta will be sitting in hot water, resulting in mushy pasta.
4. Once the pot is boiling again,
remove the lid for the remaining cook time to prevent the pasta from boiling
over. This is where you need to actually
stand there and watch the pot.
5. Follow the package directions for
cook times. As a general guideline:
perfectly cooked pasta that is "al dente," or firm to the bite, yet
cooked through, requires you to test it yourself when the time is close. You may need to test the pasta 2 or 3 times
before it’s just right.
6. Once your pasta is ready, turn
off the heat and scoop out 1 cup of pasta cooking water. Reserved pasta water contains essential starch
that can be used later to adjust the consistency of your sauce, from thickening
it to thinning it.
7. Quickly drain the pasta into a
colander in the sink. Do not rinse the
pasta. Not only is the starch in the
water is what helps the sauce adhere to your pasta, but rinsing will cool the
pasta and prevent absorption of your sauce. The only time you should ever rinse your pasta
is when you are going to use it in a cold dish like a pasta
salad. In cases such as those,
rinsing the pasta helps to stop the cooking process.
8. Toss pasta in
a warmed saucepan with your prepared sauce. You don’t want to drain the pasta all that
well, you want your pasta to be loosely drained, still retaining some pasta
water. Cook together for about 2 minutes.
More on Seamus Heaney, word
animator by Robert Faggen
Thirty years ago, I became a graduate teaching
fellow in a popular undergraduate course at Harvard University called Modern Anglo-Irish
Poetry. What made it popular? The subject matter was certainly rich. But the professor, Seamus Heaney, was the
special attraction. He was already a
major figure in the poetic landscape; we watched him artfully mapping its
peculiar geography. With stunningly
fresh language, his poetry dug deep into the roots of human attachments but
also of human violence. The author of
the stunning pastorals "The Glanmore Sonnets" also created the
haunting Dantean poems of "Station Island." His versions of Sophocles, "The Cure at
Troy" and "The Burial at Thebes," reached to the heart of human
suffering and alienation. His work
embraced a vision of hope and the possibility of seeing, as he titled one poem,
"From the Republic of Conscience." And he made a fool of Woody Allen ("Never
take a course where they make you read 'Beowulf'") by making his version
of the Old English epic a bestseller. But
Heaney was that rare thing, an unofficial international poet laureate who had
become an ambassador for the entire institution of poetry. In addition to publishing more than a dozen
volumes of poetry, along with translations and several volumes of essays,
Heaney spent much of the second half of his life teaching and lecturing around
the world. While teaching at Harvard, he
would arrange social gatherings for the teaching fellows, providing generous
rounds of food and drink. He channeled
our overheated graduate student intellectual energies into fun, encouraging us
to sing songs or recite favorite poems. These sessions would go on for many fine hours
flowing with all varieties of song and whiskey.
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-seamus-heaney-appreciation-20130902,0,2053480.story
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