Ayveq died yesterday (this last story uses a photograph of mine as the illustration).

Ayveq the Walrus

Photographs of Ayveq, which, curiously, I have never uploaded to flickr.

Harry J. Aleo, the colorful and plain-spoken horse-racer, real-estate dealer, and baseball player (baseball player!), died over the weekend. Although I knew him from the signs in his 24th–Street storefront, he had led, by all accounts, a rich and sincere life.

I will never recover from that first shock of seeing a Reagan poster in Noe Valley.

One of the aspects of New York City's streets that has me shaking my head: the prevalence of half-stolen bicycles. Almost every block has a utility pole or parking meter with a scavenged bicycle stuck to it; I thought that, should I win sacks full of money by playing the lottery (which I don't), I would cycle around town fixing these bicycles and redistributing them. This idea now strikes me as naïve and optimistic: a more constructive approach would be to repair everyone's bicycle, for free, with priority to people who use the bicycle for everyday work (deliveries, commuting, et c.). Roadies and recreational riders probably don't want me wrenching on their bicycles, anyhow (me, tired after fixing on bikes).

I began taking photographs of these, which I call Unhappy Bicycles. See the slideshow of this neglected and picked-apart bicycles of Manhattan.

Hatred for stroller-pushing latte-sipping line-cutting moms in Brooklyn bike shops; hatred for the disappearing, long-forgotten past; and hatred for things in general, dammit. Warning: Some links more bilious than others.

Sometimes I find that a word in a completely ordinary context leaps away from the page and stands out. When reading Alberto Manguel's editorial piece on libraries — on his personal libraries — in The New York Times, prurient leaped out at me. From Sanskrit through Latin, it denotes something "marked by or arousing an immoderate or unwholesome interest or desire". It has as its immediate root the Latin word "to itch" as in "to crave": prurire, which the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests has a shade of "to be wanton". The Sanskrit root means "to singe", which conjures up all sorts of Roman poetry.

Alberto Manguel is a fabulous author and a writer of breathtaking skills.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has been dropping bird balls into the Ivanhoe Reservoir in order to control the creation of carcinogens within the water. The LA Times reported that "The water needs to be shaded because when sunlight mixes with the bromide and chlorine in Ivanhoe's water, the carcinogen bromate forms, said Pankaj Parekh, DWP's director for water quality compliance. Bromide is naturally present in groundwater and chlorine is used to kill bacteria, he said, but sunlight is the final ingredient in the potentially harmful mix. The DWP drop was designed to stop the three from mingling in the 10-acre, 58-million-gallon Ivanhoe Reservoir. The 102-year-old facility serves about 600,000 customers downtown and in South Los Angeles." Donna Barstow's blog has a different, well-informed take, describing possible risks to human health from the degradation of the plastic balls; the risk to avian life from the sudden inaccessibility of the water; and the overall inutility of the balls, considering the water flow through the Ivanhoe and Silver Lake reservoirs.

Dan Koeppel, author of the outstanding history Banana, has an editorial piece in today's New York Times. He suggests that the rising price of fuel and the ongoing floods in Ecuador will combine to produce $1/lb. bananas, a significant price threshold for this ubiquitous food. He discussed the factors that have kept banana prices low, and the monoculture that makes the contemporary consumer banana extremely vulnerable to blight, and draws the conclusion that we ought to look for a different fruit to enjoy on our bicycle rides.

His book (full title: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World) does not directly answer a question that pops into my mind almost every day: why do bananas from the street vendors always cost a quarter? His methodical research and vivid writing have brought me a more clear understanding of the supply chain and shenanigans of getting a banana to the cart. Last week I tried a short red banana, a different variety from the standard Cavendish, and found it surprisingly difficult to eat. After having eaten at least a banana a day for decades, I am completely accustomed to the specific taste and texture of a particular banana; this Red Banana (PLU 4236) took me by surprise.

The editorial is a reprise of themes from his book, written with a more moral tone than the book itself.

… the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets. It is the only kind that is shipped and eaten everywhere from Beijing to Berlin, Moscow to Minneapolis.

By sticking to this single variety, the banana industry ensures that all the bananas in a shipment ripen at the same rate, creating huge economies of scale. The Cavendish is the fruit equivalent of a fast-food hamburger: efficient to produce, uniform in quality and universally affordable. …

In recent years, American consumers have begun seeing the benefits — to health, to the economy and to the environment — of buying foods that are grown close to our homes. Getting used to life without bananas will take some adjustment. What other fruit can you slice onto your breakfast cereal?

But bananas have always been an emblem of a long-distance food chain. Perhaps it’s time we recognize bananas for what they are: an exotic fruit that, some day soon, may slip beyond our reach.

From Wikipedia:

Just after "I Fought The Law" became a top ten hit, Bobby Fuller was found dead in a parked automobile near his Los Angeles home. The police considered the death an apparent suicide, however many people still believe Fuller was murdered. The investigation was botched from the start. The scene was not taped off and no fingerprints were taken from the scene. A witness also had clamied seeing a Police Officer throw a can of gasoline found at the scene into the trash.[1] Police later changed the cause of death to "Accident". He was found with multiple wounds all over his body and covered in gasoline leading many to speculate that the perpetrators fled before they could set the car on fire. He is buried in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park (Hollywood Hills) in Los Angeles. Dead at age 23, Fuller barely outlived his idol, Holly, who died at 22.

Like Emily Jo Cureton's daily crossword-inspired sketches, Steven Frank draws inspiration from the electronic everyday. His muse: SPAM Subject: lines. Some favourites: thank snoop, Bug Message, and like flipping a switch that will allow you to get exactly what you want. Poorly-drawn cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines!

While reading through the NYC Donut Report!!, I found further evidence that the rumour of a below-ground Krispy Kreme outpost may hold truth. On National Donut Day (the first Friday in June), they gave away donuts to all comers. I need to draw in a deep breath and venture back into the bowels of Penn Station, so that I can treat myself to the yeasty sugary delight.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a beautiful poem. Wordle, an online application that creates art from type and text, reminds me of the first java applet I wrote. (Yikes! I can't believe that is still taking up disk space!)

Over three decades, Camilo José Vergara has photographed decaying gas stations. The New York Times published a slideshow of his photographs. Vergara photographs many aspects of decay and blight across America; the Chilean-born photographer received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2002.

While looking up the mythical town in France, Wikipedia's helpful disambiguation page pointed me in the direction of the yoctosecond, a unit of time representing one-quadrillionth of a second. Yocto is the smallest of the SI units, denoting a factor of 10⁻²⁴. The yotta in yottasecond, with the same ys abbreviation, denotes a factor of 10²⁴ and is the largest SI unit.

Although I have not seen Tom Sachs's massive bronzes at Lever House, I did walk through the Animals exhibition at Sperone Westwater.

The title of the exhibition might as easily have been Sounds, rather than Animals: the sounds of an absent cat, of tools on their racks, or deadened (or amplified) pianos, and especially of animals becoming extinct -- all these sounds played an important role in the pieces. The Waffle Bicycle broadcast the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer, from loudspeakers mounted to a massive modified bicycle. The bicycle has all of the necessary ingredients for making waffles, from the live chickens for producing the eggs to the refrigerated whipped cream for topping the end product.

I first encountered Tom Sachs's work in the infamous Barney's Nativity display, and more recently on the cover of Dana Thomas's Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster. I am still uncertain about my grasp on the intersection of consumer culture and art as Tom represents it, but I enjoy the very visceral presentation of his work in the gallery setting. Tom brings a lot of surprisingly frank and violent ideas to his outwardly-calm pieces, such as the wood block with King Heroin burned onto gold leaf.

Instant Rimshot vs Sad Trombone. If only the iPhone supported Flash ... well, that can be fixed: I recorded these into .mp3 files and made them easily accessible for my own nefarious purposes.

“It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies,” Mr. de la Torre said. “But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.”

An article in The New York Times discusses the precarious position of the guano-collecting industry off the Peruvian coast. I learned of guano from the Tintin adventure Prisoners of the Sun.

Arf's Sensible Units web site elegantly converts one measurement — 181 cm, say, — into something less abstract: 1.3 Alaskan moose antler spans. 15 CDs side by side. A little less scientific (and more joyful: "Convert boring units to real objects as you type!" is its slogan) than the sensational Google Calculator, but no less useful. For the record: 1 Wales is 8.0 Luxemborgs.

EV Grieve writes about an old New York magazine article lamenting the yuppification of the East Village -- the gritty neighbourhood party to labour riots, to burned-out crack houses, to endless attempts at urbanization and revitalization. Scans of the article are in the blog post:
http://sophiesbar.blogspot.com/2008/06/lower-east-side-there-goes-neighborhood.html.
How long will it take to get there (or here)? An Avenue C bar owner prognosticated five years in The New York Times: "C will keep its edginess for five more years," predicted Melvina Goren, a partner at Porch. That was two-and-a-half years ago; in a survey of places to drink beer of a Sunday afternoon, Aram and I found all of the contenders overrun with everyone (and thence retreated to the excellent Creative Time installation at the Governor's Island Ferry Building).

This should have been a perspective of the setting sun, the disc revealed in its entirety, but clouds moved in late afternoon and spoiled an otherwise spectacularly sunny day. The phenomenon of Manhattanhenge occurs a few times each other, but none as spectacularly as in late May. The term comes from an article in Natural History magazine by the astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

Google's new translation tool has more languages and more shine. This tool has helped me read through innumerable web pages in the past. Although it does not answer all questions about internet sites in other languages, it provides excellent tools for reference-checking and for aiding me in understanding foreign-language posts.

The new languages include Bulgarian and Greek (although not Attic, or classic, Greek; I am encouraging Google to apply statistical machine-translation methods to the corpus of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit literature), as well as improvements to the existing languages' translation facilities.

I didn't say babel fish, nor babelfish. Nor 72 views of the tower of babel (I have been waiting for a while to incorporate that into something. Now is the opportunity!).

Jesson Yip's Analogy.

The Burton Baton is the first beer from Dogfish Head that I have enjoyed quite so deeply, and possibly also the first IPA I have enjoyed in years. The heaviness of the beer offset the sparkle of the IPA, and overall it was a joy to drink.

I am perplexed and fascinated, not necessarily in that order, by Reportet the "gallery of reconstructed portraits". The gallery includes Herodotus and Vercingetorix, about whose physical characteristics I have never really been curious. Attila, however, does stir one's curiosity, as does Charlemagne, short and fat.

The New York Times's obituary has a good summary of Robert Rauschenberg's career and influences. Mr Rauschenberg died on Tuesday.

Andrew Bird wrote a piece about recording songs for his new album. Part of the New York Times's Measure for Measure blog, it has insight and humour and beauty. I love reading about the minutiæ of recording, especially about the contemporary music I really enjoy. Seeing large tape machines rolling, thinking about sliders and pots and mics and speakers and amplifiers, it's all quite exciting. Thanks, Aram, ever keen to the intricate technology of sound recording, for pointing this out.

Shoddy entered our language as a noun, mid-nineteenth century; it denoted a garment made from recycled or already-used wool, and shortly afterwards became an adjective describing anything shabby or inferior (it has an interesting secondary meaning, "pretentious vulgarity": showy).

Where it came from, I know not; nor does Etymology Online.

In looking over photographs on the internet, the short attention span in me enjoys many of the amusingly-captioned contributed-photography sites. LOLCats, of course; and also Man Babies, photobombing (not photobombing). Of course, plenty of stuff on flickr: sticker art, smashed cars, bicycle parking: something for everyone, especially for me.

Aram pointed out, via the excellent Brooklyn Vegan, that stalwart Gang of Four rockers Dave Allen and Hugo Burnham are leaving the band (again).

Did I write stalwart? I meant totally awesome. I could hope to fit all of that cool and kickass into my whole lifetime — they stuck it into each of their records. I got a copy of their first record from a girl at my high school who was moving to California (to attend Berkeley, if I remember correctly); I was a couple of years younger than she, and received a stack of her hand-me-down records (Psychic TV amongst them) when she cleaned house. I was not prepared for what came over the speakers when I first put the needle down: the rhythm! the energy! the anger! Give me punk rock! Give me funk!

The first video is from The Old Grey Whistle Test television programme twenty-five years ago, the second from the Electric Picnic festival recently.

The New York Times ran an excellent and exciting story about research at Lake Baikal. The story excited me for many reasons: a family has, from one generation to the next, steadily collected data about the water and the ecology of the lake.

Every week to 10 days, by boat in summer and over the ice in winter, he crossed the lake to a spot about a mile and a half from Bolshie Koty, a small village in the piney woods on Baikal’s northwest shore. There, Dr. Kozhov, a professor at Irkutsk State University, would record water temperature and clarity and track the plant and animal plankton species as deep as 2,400 feet.

Soon his daughter Olga M. Kozhova began assisting him and, eventually her daughter, Lyubov Izmesteva, joined the project. They kept at it over the years, producing an extraordinary record of the lake and its health.

Now Dr. Izmesteva and scientists in the United States have analyzed the data and concluded, to their surprise, that the water in Lake Baikal is rapidly warming. As a result, its highly unusual food web is reorganizing, as warmer water species of plankton become more prevalent. These shifts at the bottom of the food web could have important implications for all of the creatures that live in the lake, they say.

Although Dr. Kozhov is famous among scientists who study lakes — his 1961 book “Lake Baikal and Its Life” is considered a classic — the new report is “the international debut of the Kozhov family’s legacy of research,” Stephanie E. Hampton of the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said in an e-mail message.

Props to the New York Times for implementing a "Share" feature that provides an easy-to-use "permalink" to each of its articles. This is the paper of record, yearning to be free.

Emily Jo Cureton takes a few clues from each day's New York Times crossword puzzle and illustrates the resulting, sometimes fragmentary phrase. Favorites, though I needn't pick: bonsai egret, lets dropit, and ALIEN SOUSA.

I get a shifty feeling when people call me "Sir". I admire honorifics and epithets, but none apply to me: I am neither lord nor baronet to anyone, nor am I their sire. I suspect that people calling me sir have a mild inferiority complex, or a misguided sense that they are being polite, or labor under the painful misapprehension that they need to defer to a client.
Just as on the venerable television news program "60 Minutes", which I watched assiduously as a young'un, I see a pattern. When someone being interviewed on that program started calling the reporter conducting the interview "sir", then they were hiding something. The "sir" was a verbal distraction, a sleight-of-tongue (as it were) that meant, "Oh, I'm entirely honest and without reproach".

I don't mind if someone calls me "boss" or "chief" as much, although those do have a slightly disparaging edge (perhaps I read The Catcher in the Rye too often?) I prefer that people call me by my name, and, if they do'n't know it, that they ask.

During a business transaction, the man on the other side of the handshake kept calling me "Sir", without irony or sarcasm or even a hint of inflection other than his northern New Jersey accent. I found myself wondering, Why? and after we parted company (deal intact) I was humming a song with the refrain "Don't call me darling".

Of course, this video is available from the YouTube. Bless the YouTube for its ability to fulfill the vision that Eyebeam had two decades ago: FTv, or Filler TV. This channel gives you endless two- and three-minute pieces of programming designed to fit into the awkward gaps between other programs, before leaving the apartment, perhaps even between courses. Filler TV! The Fall!! Don't Call Me Darling!!

The New York Times obituary; the BBC report (with a classic photograph); and the Albert Hofmann Foundation.

I often think of Albert Hofmann's first deliberate trip -- on a bicycle, riding home from his laboratory.

update My father pointed out Albert Hofmann's speech at his hundredth birthday celebration, and some comments on the speech Hofmann gave.

I appreciate the cooky as a unit of measure, as a mathematical proof, but mostly as a chocolate-laden treat.

A few nights ago, the Empire State Building was lit in honor of the singer (and, lest we forget, actress!) Mariah Carey.

With her new album (E=MC2) and its first single, she now stands second only to The Beatles for number-one singles on the Billboard Chart. (Does her new album count as "math rock"?)
I like Mariah Carey: her voice, her songs, and how criticism about her enriches my vocabulary. I wonder how she ends up driving the music industry and having the lights on the Empire State Building honor her; why not Thurston Moore?

Cenotaph was a word familiar to me from name-play in Asterix and the Normans, in which the Gauls seek out the meaning of fear. I have yet to use it in a sentence, however; I could say, "What is the way to The Cenotaph" if I were looking for the memorial in London which has all sorts of curious geometry; I could more usefully ask, "Is this a cenotaph or a tomb?" when looking at a memorial; or I could wonder about the word's origin (literally from the Greek κενοτάϕιον, κενοϲ "empty" + ταφοϲ "tomb"). Or I could consult Wikipedia for a list of cenotaphs around the world.

An encomium of the Donnell Library Center, which is closing to make way for a luxury hotel-condo building; a picture, a thousand words:

Seeing these empty shelves stunned me; even though I knew the library was closing, I did not count on having my muscle memory (here is Calvino; here is Wodehouse; here, sometimes, are copies of Murder Must Advertise) thrown off completely. The empty shelves brought home the imminent closing of the library, and I wound up trudging to the Young Adult section upstairs to find a book. Some (adult) fiction remains on shelves adjacent the science and history sections, but most of the collection is headed to storage in anticipation for the summer-time closing of this library.

Often, when riding a crowded subway car in the morning, I will necessarily stare at the advertising placards, reading in each medical condition for which a cure is on offer (bunions! hammer-toe! skin blemishes! weight loss! weight gain!) and the social ills I might solve with a phone call: bankruptcy, a divorce, an injured child; the pleasures I will gain from cologne, whiskey, candy, patent medication. I stare at the ads to avoid staring at the newspapers around me, which I have learned is not done (in fact, I learned this from a whisky ad on the subway and then confirmed it with Anna). Sometimes I bring my own book, but more often I stare at the ads. On occasion, music from someone's headphones will bleed out into the subway and a tune will stick in my head.

This morning, the word bibelot popped into my head, and I couldn't get it out: where does it come from? (Latin, through French) How might I use it? (in lieu of bauble, chachka, geegaw, gimcrack, knickknack, trinket, or whatnot; the latter is a special favourite of mine).

One of P G Wodehouse's most outstanding efforts, replete with: the country house; the village intrigue (in this case, an election); the newly-rich; the thieving butler; the do-good putative fianc�e; the haughty millionaire; and a napping cat. I hugely enjoyed reading Much Obliged, Jeeves.

MTA Service Specialists have taken to the rails; never mind that straphangers will be shouldering the costs of Albany's rejection of the congestion plan, this is a certain way to improve subway ridership and have riders enjoy the trip.

The State Legislature's surprising decision to table the New York City congestion-pricing proposal still staggers me. Not only would does proposal address congestion within Manhattan, it tackles the critical issues of transportation funding and infrastructure. The Legislature's action smacks of provincialism. Streetsblog has excellent coverage of the congestion-pricing issue.

The New York Times had an enjoyable article on the new Hudson tunnels for New Jersey transit, a great feature discussing the urban communities around street design in "Taking Back The Streets", and a vehement editorial on equitable tolls for highways.

Everyone rides the subway: day or night, express or local, whenever I board a subway train the cars are full of people. The streets too are chock-full of cars, trucks, and buses; something must give, and sooner rather than later we must address both the cost and the financing of transit in New York City. The pillbox-hat-wearing stewardesses underscore the lack of service on the MTA: after exchanging a fare hike for service improvements, the agency reneged on the promise and left riders with the increase in fares but without a commensurate increase in service.

Sounds familiar, from what the San Francisco MUNI pulled in successive years.

The New York Times describes restoration of a acres-large terrazzo map in the Tent of Tomorrow, part of the fabled World Fair of 1964-1965.

Just what you would do with such a map — other than admire it — is unclear. Even after conservation, it would be too fragile and uneven to serve as a walking surface, much less a driving surface. (One World’s Fair-era photo shows a girl at the wheel of a toy car tooling down Route 83 out of Fredonia.) And it will almost certainly never again be used as a concert venue, as it was in the late 1960s, or as a skating rink, as it was in the early 1970s, when the terrazzo was covered with a layer of polyurethane.

This feels like an episode from a story by Jorge Luis Borges, in which an imagined world is laid out as part of a funfair; eventually Scharlach the Dandy runs his well-meaning quarry to ground, explaining that the hapless academic was drawn in by the promise of an antique manuscript, clues to which were found only in the map. The manuscript does not exist; the map was made for a promotion with a children's breakfast-cereal company; and the academic was the last witness in a case against the Dandy.

"The Bowery itself had fallen into desuetude."
desuetude: "disuse," from desuetus, pp. of desuescere "become unaccustomed to,".

Re-reading Luc Sante's Low Life, an account of New York's nineteenth-century underbelly, has proven a mixed bag. I enjoy the anecdotes and historical tit-bits about ragamuffins, pick-pockets, houses of ill repute, and political antics; but I yearn for more, and perhaps even a highly-illustrated reference to the dissolute Manhattan of yesteryear. An edition replete with maps, historical documents, and larger prints of the photographs Sante already includes would be splendid.

In conjunction with my perpetual reading of Burrows's and Wallace's Gotham and of The Power Broker, Robert Caro's monumental biography of Robert Moses (the latter links to his typsecript comments, from The Bridge and Tunnel Club web site), books such as Low Life provide a more digestible, or at least more portable, account of Gotham's yesteryear.

Every few weeks, I haul the pocket-sized sack of coins that I have accumulated to the store around the corner; there I exchange them for a certificate I can redeem at a favorite online merchant. Many of the coins are pennies, but some of the sackful includes nickels, dimes, and quarters; half-dollars rarely circulate (and, I imagine, annoy cashiers at least as much as the Sacagawea dollars and Jefferson twos I cheerfully use to pay).

The United States' approach to coin and paper strikes me as woefully sentimental. David Owens's penny piece in the New Yorker touches on points historical, technical, and social. It's great, including the misquotation (eggcorn?) of "hordes" for "hoards". I appropriated the new Jefferson nickel as an illustration, rather than the similarly expensive penny, because it is a truly impressive piece of engraving.

SFist has a nice roundup of recent Translink developments. I complained that the Translink developers were new to the transit world, only to hear that the Cubic Corporation, developers of New York's MetroCard

What is the importance of automated fare collection? and now of "touchless" fare collection? The accounting needed to manage fare collection, especially

http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/transportation/20060213/16/1758

The genius of this sculpture outside the site of the 2002 Commonwealth Games comes from a quotation attributed to the British sprinter Linford Christie (who is eminently quotable, and apparently ready to rumble): I start running at the 'B' of the Bang from the starter's pistol.

Never mind that the whole thing is slowly falling apart, and even when I walked past I thought it was still under construction (it's not; it's under litigation).

This one goes out to the trumpet player on the Lexington Ave. line, whose unexpectedly jazzy version of this song caught me unawares mid-day. I had a big-hole single of this song which split, perhaps from overplay, rendering it forever unplayable. I taped it to the front of the shoe-box which held all of my seven-inch singles. Consider the above video vs this one (warning: animated content).

vs

The former has amazing footage of a breathtaking band at its best; the latter is delightfully perverted. Neither is artful, but both make a point.

This fellow read the OED from soup to nuts (perhaps from alpha to omega?) and is now blogging about it; this fellow documents the inconsistent treatment accorded to the letter L in hand-written signs, and blogs about it (with photos!); me, I am fond of the grocer's apostrophe and puzzling punctuation.

... as are other people: Apostrophe Abuse illustrates the perils of modern-day puncuation; ritual observation of the importance of punctuation happens on National Punctuation Day; and the "emphatic" use of quotation marks in signs and signage.

And the most excellent writers of The Language Log share this gem:

Proofreaders rejoice! The missing apostrophe on the granite base of the new Ernie Banks statue is now in place. It took a stone carver about 30 minutes Wednesday morning to complete the work, said Lou Cella, the sculptor who made the statute. The missing punctuation was noticed when the statue was unveiled on opening day at Wrigley Field Monday.

later corrected to

I have been mis-using the word nonplussed for quite some time; like fey, inflammable, and unravelled it means the opposite of what I think it does (the latter two more so than fey, I suppose; I became overly excited about the denotations of fey one day in the eleventh grade, and eventually the teacher removed me from the classroom.)

Nonplussed means "surprised, perplexed to the point of speechlessness":

... The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: “Nonplused does not mean fazed or unfazed. It means bewildered to the point of speechlessness.” To me, it does (more or less) mean ‘fazed’ but does not mean ‘unfazed’. Despite this confusion, perhaps The New York Times copyeditors should pay more attention to the basically sound advice in their usage book. The fact that this book takes on the topic shows that the meaning of nonplussed has indeed become an issue; the previous edition did not have an entry for this word ... "

vs

shout out to Aden and to Mark Athitakis, and to the Hillel House concert where the former played this song with the name of the latter cleverly substituted into the chorus. I never especially enjoyed Superchunk, but the familiar name made the melody so much more appealing. Now, these fifteen years later, I find myself humming the refrain at all sorts of odd places (killing time on trains, for one).

vs

shout out to Aden and to Mark Athitakis, and to the Hillel House concert where the former played this song with the name of the latter cleverly substituted into the chorus. I never especially enjoyed Superchunk, but the familiar name made the melody so much more appealing. Now, these fifteen years later, I find myself humming the refrain at all sorts of odd places (killing time on trains, for one).