Shovel Ready I recently heard our dean of academic affairs use the term “shovel ready” to refer to the progress of a campus construction project. I’d never heard that term before… A group of English faculty members experimented with remediating it to mean “ready to dig your own grave,” but I don’t think that meaning…
Sheet music began to have cars on the cover almost as soon as the automobile was invented. Some songs, like The Swagger Two-Step, didn’t have lyrics, and so the car on the front, along with the opulently dressed couple, seem to have been part of the illustrator’s attempt to make the tune symbolize wealth and…
The admission, during an interview with CNN, undermined Moore’s claim that Disney was trying to sabotage the US release of Fahrenheit 911 just days before its world premiere at the Cannes film festival. Instead, it lent credence to a growing suspicion that Moore was manufacturing a controversy to help publicise the film, a full-bore attack…
Beyrle hid in a hayloft near a farmhouse for a few days until around Jan. 15, when a Soviet tank brigade came by. “I went down with my hands up and said, ‘Amerikansky tovarishch, Amerikansky tovarishch,’” Beyrle recalled, using two of the few Russian words he knew: American comrade. Beyrle managed to convince the brigade’s…
Because digital cameras have features like automatic focus, they have made it easy for anyone to take technically good photographs. “You no longer have to have someone standing in bright sunlight to get a good picture of them,” Howe said. Combine that with Internet connections that have made it easy to send pictures in seconds,…
After a couple of hours of subscribing to favorite feeds, your news grazing habits will be changed forever. Just as TiVo lets you watch TV more efficiently, RSS readers do the same by letting you scan your favorite blogs and news sites faster or letting you cast your net over a wider range of material.…