Your Ad Here -- a blog

Great advertising by Tax Analysts -- "[r]espectfully disagreeable since 1970." It's nice to see a group so specialized and so well-respected put a little thought into the ads, no? I particularly like the one with the pencils, though of course "Fuel your tax passion" is great too...

[Yes, I'm a little crazy, I know...]

Things that mean the opposite of what they're supposed to -- part I

Ever notice how people only say "no pun intended" when they're writing a completely intentional but painfully bad play on words?
I suppose the other classic is "it's not you, it's me" -- generally used in break-ups when the speaker wants to go out and find someone else. And I myself have been accused of often saying "I know" when I didn't and "just kidding" when I clearly wasn't. Any others? (I feel like someone else I read has blogged about this recently...)

Unrelatedly: S.W. is a sweetie :-D (though I beg to differ on the issue of his writing!)

Quantum crypto lives.

Happy Bastille Day!

:-D

What's wrong with this town?
There are no cafés in Manhattan, I tell you. There are coffee shops -- with food (typically American, home-style, though sometimes they get clever and serve up French or fusion) and sit-down service. These are not to be confused with coffeehouses, which are pitch-dark and generally boast some combination of internet access/random poets/loud live bands. There are numerous restaurants named "[Something-or-Other] Café", with bistro-type cuisine or pastas. And there are delis and the like, with panini, wraps, and salads. But no place to curl up at a cozy little table or on a big, circa 1992 velvet couch with a giant latte and a good book (e.g. Six Degrees of Separation, the pick for last night, courtesy of A.E.). I've searched in vain since I got here. I'd even settle for a French-style café, food and service and cigarette smoke but coffee-only orders entirely welcome. But the ubiquitous Starbucks is about as close as I've gotten. Last night I thought I spotted one, but stopped for real food first before going in, only then to lose the place in a tangle of tiny streets -- a mirage, I'm sure. It's times like these when I see the advantage of living someplace small and student-populated -- for all its flaws, New Haven has plenty of cafés to accommodate my roaming study habits (I've been known to do three in as many hours.)

Last night: a Mexican restaurant on an otherwise empty tiny, tree-lined street, the brightly-colored sign not quite obscuring the decades-old lettering advertising a nightclub of somewhat dubious repute, residents of the apartment above apparently continuing the tradition of loud and joyous celebration; a manga-meets-Dairy-Queen ice cream shop with mildly offensive T-shirts and a quite good cappuccino kahlua; paved street-corner parks with trees and benches and plenty of people taking advantage of the killer views of the Empire State Building.

Fun -- play The Rankings Game and find your ideal law school. (But honestly: how is it that Harvard does better than Yale on the "campus as art" factor? They must have been looking at the non-law-school parts of campus -- I admit I am more partial to red brick than neo-Gothic, myself -- 'cause the law school proper just can't compare... ;-) )

Read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code last night -- all the way through, in one sitting, with little pauses for a bite of raisin challah now and again. On the whole, it is great, great fun, and definitely worth reading. Though I take issue with some stylistic choices (every new discovery is lauded as a fantastic, incredible revelation, which starts to get a bit tiresome), the suspense and the can't-put-it-down quality are admirable -- and for the record, it has been a long time since I read a book for grown-ups of any considerable length in one sitting! The Big Secret actually comes out halfway through the book, which is nice because it gives the reader space to think about it, but there are plenty of surprises left -- though I found that the earlier puzzles, created impromptu by one of the characters, were more interesting and more difficult than the later, long-planned ones with carefully-set-up clues. Have to say I was quite pleased with myself for being able to figure out some of the more minor ones. Another advantage of reading in one sitting, I guess; the patterns are more evident when you're immersed in them. Plus, due to my personal views on certain topics, I found the Big Secret quite intriguing, and am feeling motivated to go thumb through a book on the Louvre and perhaps a translated ancient text or two, if I ever get around to it...

But for now, back to work. Having been visited in turn by the ever-fabulous D.H. and E.L., and then by a Mommy, I now need to catch up on some long-overdue administrative tasks, probably accompanied by a grande chai latte and a raspberry scone...

Finished Jeffrey Eugenides' Middlesex the other day. Great book. The narrator is a polite, sometimes painfully normal Midwestern girl who turns out to be very far from normal, at least to most people, though one of the aims of the book seems to be to change that. It manages to be at once graphic (has to be, given the subject matter) and innocent. I thought the last couple of chapters were a bit strained, but the rest of it is good enough to carry it through. I hear it's very different from "The Virgin Suicides", but given the quality of the writing here I may have to try that next...

Totally unrelatedly: Check out possible origins and early uses of "shake a stick at" here (the URLs are fabulous, by the way -- I particularly like the one for "ollie ollie oxen free".)
And yes, all of the playing fast and loose with American punctuation rules in this post is intentional.