Odd Lots

[jeff_duntemann]

• The other morning, a fox apparently urinated on my Wall Street Journal (oh, the irony!) which I did not discover until I went out to pick up the paper from the driveway and got fox pee all over my left hand. We see the little guy dashing in and out of the 24" drain pipe that runs under Stanwell St. next to the house, and he has a very distinct odor, not anything like a cat but closer to skunk. Even though the paper was in a plastic bag, it smelled so badly that we had to pitch it. And my left hand still smells.
• A "turtle shop" apparently is a turtle shop; i. e., a place where you buy live pet turtles. Bruce Schneier unsheathed his Occam's Razor and cut a good guess, and Michael Covington nailed it by posing the question to Jesse Sheidlower, one of the editors of the OED, who would know if anybody would. This was Jesse's response: "In the '30s-'50s or so, small turtles were popular pets, and one could buy them at souvenir stores in Times Square (where the Capote passage is set). Usually they had a name painted on the shell. The stores weren't generally called 'turtle shops,' i.e. this phrase is descriptive, not lexicalized." Thanks to all who contributed to the debate. This is one of the things that makes me glad I live in the era of ubiquitous networking!
• While we're still talking turtles, Michael Covington forwarded this piece laying out some additional insights on the turtles-as-Salmonella-threats debate. I especially like the sentence giving the advice, "Do not kiss reptiles..." Roger. Wilco.
• From Mark Moss comes a pointer to a slightly weird hack: A downloadable program that will modify your installation of Windows XP to make it look like Vista. I'm not entirely sure that I will try the Vista Transformation Pack, since I have no idea where it's been, but if I were Microsoft I would let this guy quietly do his thing, and reap the benefits of what we hope is the good kind of "viral" marketing. (Maybe in a virtual machine. I'll give it some thought.)
• Another thought: It occurs to me that I should be able to write a small program in Delphi that intercepts the CapsLock key and makes it a Ctrl key. (When was the last time that I-or anybody-actually used the CapsLock key to lock caps? PEOPLE YELL AT YOU FOR USING ALL CAPS!!!!!!!) It's humbling to realize that I have long since forgotten what I knew about hooking the keyboard interrupt. Time to go digging.
• This slipped past me a year ago: On January 26, 2006, Western Union quietly ceased its telegram service. Telegrams are history. I don't recall ever dealing much with telegrams (I think we sent one from Baltimore in 1985 to counter an offer on our house in Rochester, NY) but they are very much a part of our culture, like steam trains and dial telephones, that now exist in cultural memory rather than in the culture of daily life.