[Beatrix] Potter’s aunt and uncle owned a cat called Squintina (Squinty). Dated to about 1895, as a publishing firm adapted the picture that year for a cover of their ‘Comical Customers’.

Jandek’s reference to a BibliOdyssey post featuring ornamental typography prompted me to succumb to temptation and revisit BibliOdyssey (always a danger), where I found lovely Beatrix Potter rarities.

Including many bunnies.

When I first experienced 2001 (in the huge Cinerama theater on Broadway), I guessed that the effect of HAL dying simply had to have been done on an Eltro machine, or a close copy of one. By absurd coincidence, I was an engineer in NYC who may have had the most experience with an original Mark II, at Herb Moss’s Gotham Recording Studios, now long gone.

Spotted this today and just had to share. Ain’t nothing but the geek in me.

(Via Coudal.)

“Happy” Birthday Cindy will not do.

McWhorter argues. Far from being truth-tellers, he says, so-called “conscious” rappers recycle endless clichés and conspiracy theories about inner-city blight, the drugs trade and Aids. Instead of generating a desire to change the system, rappers and their acolytes in the media and academia simply encourage a sense of passivity. “Insisting that things are still so simple that black people need to get together and rise in fury against an evil oppressor makes for entertaining hiphop,” he writes. “It sounds good uttered fiercely and set to a driving beat. But this way of parsing things does not correspond to what black America really needs today, as opposed to what it needed 50 years ago.”

I also highly recommend his book Doing Your Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music. The book does not argue what you think it does.

Astorgy is the lack of natural affection when it would normally be present.

Accismus is an insincere refusal of a thing that is desired.

Agathokakological means made up of both good and evil.

It has fewer pages than three years ago, the paper stock is thinner, and the stories are shorter. There is less foreign and national news, less space devoted to science, the arts, features and a range of specialized subjects. Business coverage is either packaged in an increasingly thin stand-alone section or collapsed into another part of the paper. The crossword puzzle has shrunk, the TV listings and stock tables may have disappeared, but coverage of some local issues has strengthened and investigative reporting remains highly valued.