Investigator Earle Spamer suggests that we collect and honor authority figures whose names name whatever it is they are authorities of, on, or in. These are top dogs — department heads, presidents, etc. — not mere eponym icons such as Dr. Doctor or icon cult figures such as Dr. Brilliant. This is a very special […]
Year: 2007
Further postal experiments
Investigator Denise Tolland writes: Jeff Van Bueren’s “Postal Experiments” study [published in AIR vol. 6, no. 4] has inspired the President of the United States, I think. The President is a curious fellow, according to this report in today’s New York Daily News: New postal law lets Bush peek through your mail President Bush has […]
Management Science: prototypical, prototypical, prototypical
The curiously-titled journal Management Science (editor: Wallace J. Hopp) offers “A sample word file that contains proper font, margin spacing, and other settings, as well as information on citation rules and formats.” Here is its beginning: ‘Tis a Far, Far Butter Place Snidely Slippery Department of Bread Spread Engineering, Dairy University, Cowtown, Illinois 60208, snidely.slippery@dairyuniversity.edu […]
Email, heaven and hell
A distinguished British newspaper editor writes: Among the electronic hate mail that I received after one particularly provocative article (a speculative piece that technology will soon enable a man to bear a child. Yes, I know) was an email that told me I was going to hell and that I lived in a nation of […]