The Bureau of Labor’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system maintains a set of job and occupational codes to ensure consistent statistical and information gathering. As part of my research for a paper in my Organization of Information class, I looked up the SOC’s tortured history, starting from 1940 till the Office of Management and Budget mandated in 2000 …
Category Archives: Oddments
Bradbury was right: “We are the Martians.”
This graphic has been making the rounds this week.
An improv principle and event planning
In the winter of aught-six, I took a beginning improv class at DSI Comedy Theatre and learned a lesson that I pass along almost as holy writ to others.
National Night Out
I am taking a break from blog posts of ghastly length and inordinate self-absorption because today is National Night Out (NNO) and I’m my neighborhood’s NNO organizer this year.
Gore Vidal (1925-2012)
Steve Donoghue wrote what I thought was the best tribute to Vidal; it was graceful, heartfelt, lyrical. And absolutely the most gorgeous photo of the young Vidal I’ve ever seen. Though I will take him to task on Gore’s “abandoning his country”; Vidal always maintained US residence and lived in the US for the last decade …
Vivian Maier
In 2007, John Maloof ran across a storage locker at a thrift auction house that contained over 100,000 negatives of pictures. The photos spanned the years from the 1950s–1990s and were primarily urban scenes of Chicago and New York. Maloof began posting the pictures on a blog and dug into the life of the woman …
A Flapper’s Dictionary
Ran across this delightful post from a used bookseller in Pennsylvania. He acquired the July 1922 edition of Flapper magazine and reproduced an uncredited article that listed phrases and jargon that, while probably quite cheeky at the time, seem quaint and amusing now. It’s fun working out the chain of associations that lead from the …
Fibonacci sonnets
I have lately been enjoying a blog by Austin, TX artist/writer Austin Kleon, and have been happily plundering his archives for posts on sketching, storytelling, art, and the like. I was charmed by this post: Writing The Fibonacci Sonnet. It’s a neat little writing trick that uses the Fibonacci numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8, 13, 21) to create …
Atheists Don’t Have No Songs
A Steve Martin song, performed with the Steep Canyon Rangers
The Suck Fairy
From Jo Walton at Tor.com comes the idea of The Suck Fairy, that scourge of re-reading that somehow curdles fondly remembered books upon second reading. Working alongside the Suck Fairy are her siblings the Racism Fairy, the Sexism Fairy, and the Homophobia Fairy, according to Walton. One might add the Bad Writing Fairy; sometimes re-reading …
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