Chad Comello

Author: Chad

  • How Helen met Cliff

    Today would be the 75th wedding anniversary of my grandparents Cliff and Helen. In the oral history of her life, Helen talked about how she met Cliff:

    I was nineteen when I met him. He asked me if I was twenty-one and I said no. He was twenty-seven, so he was an older guy. I met him at a dance ballroom. In Baltimore, at Gwynn Oak Park, they had a ballroom and an orchestra there and it was fancy. I had gone with my girlfriends. About three of us would go to these USO dances and we would never, ever give anyone our phone number, and we would never let anyone take us home.

    After I met Cliff, I danced with him quite a few times. He asked me where I lived, and at that time I lived with my girlfriend, her name was Bertha Mae. She had been my next-door neighbor in Elkins and we had been in the senior play together. I met Cliff, I think it was in August, and over that winter we danced in several of the USO dances. He asked, ‘Are you ever going to give me your phone number?’ And I’d say, ‘Nope. We just don’t do that.’ Then, around Christmastime, another fancy place had a dance. It was called the Alcazar. We were there and I saw my girlfriend dancing with Cliff and I thought, ‘Where’d she find him?’ So I danced with him. And after a few more times of this, he said, ‘How am I ever going to get to know you if you don’t give me your phone number?’ And he looked at me and he said, ‘My intentions are honorable.’ [laughs] What do I say then? So I ended up giving my phone number. I didn’t know what to say. So he’d call and we’d go to movies.

    It was a very small wedding. Some of his friends in the Army were there. I was taking a huge chance, wasn’t I? He was straightforward. He said just what he thought. He didn’t gloss over a lot of things and pretend they were better. I thought he was a gentleman. And Cliff had a good voice. When dancing, he always sang, ‘cause he knew every song there was.

    It seemed like he filled a vacancy in our family. It was the first Christmas without Jake. But that’s when he asked me to marry him. And I said, ‘Oh my goodness, whoa!’ I hadn’t even thought of that, so I said no. But he kept asking me. He wanted to tell my folks and I said no because I knew that they wouldn’t go for that at all. He was at Fort Meade in Maryland and he was being transferred to Nashville, so that’s probably what stepped up this thing. He sent me a ring from Nashville. I was going to go down for a visit in Nashville over Valentine’s Day in February. He kept calling me and finally said, ‘Why don’t you just buy a one-way ticket. Let’s get married.’ So that’s what happened. My mother and dad did not want me to get married. Not at all. But that was the first time I ever did anything that was against their… Well, Cliff just seemed like a nice person. A good person. The Lord was watching out for me, believe me. He was just a gentleman. He had a lot of empathy for people. My mother liked him. My dad never really said anything for a while. It seemed to her, I think, that he sort of took Jake’s place. It seemed like it filled a void there. It just worked. But she thought I was too young. And I know that, I realize that. I was just very fortunate.

  • Not a proper typewriter

    Among my blog’s available stats are search terms people used that brought them to my site. One recent search made me chuckle: “smith corona corsair not a proper typewriter”

    This most likely brought them to my post Cursing the Corsair. Let me tell you, I’ve called my Corsair far worse things than “not proper”.

  • My favorite notetaking apps

    C.J. Chilvers wrote about the pros and cons of popular notetaking tools. Out of the four he features—Apple Notes, Evernote, Ulysses, and Bear—I have used two previously, and none currently. So, having already examined my favored podcasts and newsletters, here’s a look at the tools I do use and why I use them.

    Paper

    The once and future king of all notetaking apps. I keep a plain, pocket-sized Moleskine in my backpack for odds and ends, a larger journal as a daily diary and scrapbook (previously a Moleskine classic hardcover and currently a Zequenz 360), and a good ol’ composition notebook for my filmlog.

    WorkFlowy

    Dynamic, lightweight list-making with blessed few bells and whistles. Perfect for hierarchical thinking, tasks, and anything else you can put into a list. It’s built for marking tasks complete, but I use it mostly as an archive for reference, split between Work and Personal. Plus a To Do list at top for quick capture of tasks.

    Simplenote

    Good for taking quick notes in plain text. I often use it for first drafts of blog posts, taking book notes, and whatever else I need a basic text editor for. Helpful when trying to remove formatting from text you want to paste cleanly elsewhere—”text laundering” as I call it. Clean, simple, works well on the web and mobile.

    Google Drive

    For when Simplenote isn’t enough. Good for collaboration and as a document repository. Among other things my Logbook spreadsheet is there, as are lots of work-related docs, random files shared with my wife, my archive of book reviews, and my Book Notes doc filled with (at present) 121 single-spaced pages of notes and quotes from 108 books.

    Apple Reminders

    Used mostly for sharing shopping lists with my wife, because it’s easy to regenerate lists from completed items. Unfortunately it doesn’t sync well between devices without WiFi, which is a bummer when we’re out shopping.

    Google Calendar

    Google, don’t you ever get rid of Calendar. I mean it. Some former Google products had it coming, but you’re gonna ride or die with Gmail and Calendar, ya hear?

    Dropbox

    Essential for quick and easy file backup. Through referrals and other incentives over the years I’ve accumulated 5.63 GB in free storage on top of the 2 GB default. I’m using over 95% of it.

  • Going to the movies is a gift

    As the due date of my first child approaches, I’ve tried to account for and appreciate things I can do now, pre-parenthood, that won’t be quite so easy soon. Quiet nights reading, hassle-free dining, uninterrupted sleep, and keeping a tidy home come to mind. But chief among these activities is moviegoing, one of my most cherished traditions.

    Here’s my typical moviegoing routine:

    • I pick a morning showtime, usually the very first, to avoid crowds and get the cheapest price. (Having a job with occasional weekdays off helps.)
    • I drive our Nissan Leaf since the public parking garage near the theater has free charging stations for electric cars.
    • I use a theater gift card, which I always request for birthdays and holidays and which those cheap early showtimes help stretch into more movies. (Gift cards: like MoviePass minus the chaos.)
    • I take advantage of the theater’s free parking validation on my way out.

    (Who says there’s no such thing as a free movie?)

    My wife and I saw The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part on Friday. As I expected, it wasn’t quite as good as the first one (one of my favorites of 2014), but still had the same manic, joyful verve and heavy meta references. It’s also probably the last movie I’ll see in theaters before the baby arrives. My moviegoing days aren’t over, of course. But it does feel like the end of an era.

    I can certainly sympathize with the people driven away from the theater due to high prices or bad behavior. I remember the guy who took a phone call during Children of Men. I remember the old woman’s smartphone playing opera in her purse (unbeknownst to her) throughout the previews and the beginning of 12 Years A Slave. And I remember the lady behind me expressing her every dumb thought and question during Gravity.

    For me those incidents are few and far between. I just love going to the movies, and I hope my child will too. Because far more often, I emerge from the theater refreshed or challenged or bewildered or overjoyed, or sometimes dismayed or disappointed. Regardless, my aforementioned moviegoing routine isn’t special to me only because of its combination of thriftiness and good fortune. It’s special because it tells my mind and heart to prepare for something extraordinary.

    The late, lamented Sam Shepard called the movie theater “a dark room where a bunch of strangers sit down and watch huge images of other strangers who somehow seem more familiar than the people they know in real life.”

    A funny thing happens in the dark with those strangers on and off the screen: life feels a little less strange.

  • Sunday in the living room with Olympia

    Spent one of our last pre-baby Sundays repairing a typewriter, watching Jeopardy, and enjoying the snow. This caseless Olympia SM4, owned by a friend of a friend, was rescued from their deceased relative’s basement. It’s in fine shape mechanically. Just needed its metal polished, body scrubbed, innards dusted, and ribbon replaced. Now is (almost) as good as new:

  • Four quotes from ‘The Overstory’

    Here are four context-free quotes I like from The Overstory by Richard Powers, a book I’ve only just started and am not sure if I’ll even finish:

    “Makes you think different about things, don’t it?”

    “Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.”

    “A tree is a passage between earth and sky.”

    “They can’t believe a kid worked for months on an original idea, for no reason at all except the pleasure of looking until you see something.”

  • A modest grand bargain

    Charles C. Camosy has a modest proposal—a “grand bargain to save the planet and call truce in the abortion war”—that triggered my Pragmatic Centrist Solution alarm. This alarm seems to go off only for ideas that sound great, would help a lot of people, but will never, ever get through Congress:

    Democrats get a Green New Deal in exchange for a law that mirrors Portugal’s abortion policy. Under a law passed in 2007, Portugal bans the procedure after 10 weeks (with significant exceptions) and requires a three-day waiting period.

    Democrats may balk at this proposal, but the current pro-life majority of the Supreme Court could well create law that is even more restrictive — for which they would get nothing. Plus, it would take the political wind out of pro-life sails for years, as most Americans would think that they got more than enough. It may even be the beginning of the end of the abortion wars, which have disproportionately helped the GOP.

    Republicans (though many are quite eco-friendly) could also balk. But there is almost no legislative chance for a dramatic change to U.S. abortion policy without some kind of grand bargain. My proposal would test just how important pro-life priorities are for GOP leadership. Do they care more about neoliberal economics or about justice under law for prenatal children?

    It would also test just how strongly Democrats believe that climate change is on the verge of causing catastrophe. If the lives of millions hang in the balance, adopting Portugal’s abortion policy ought to be an easy decision. Does Democratic leadership really believe in an existential threat from climate change or is a 10-week limit on abortion the real end of the world for them?

    I look forward to this becoming law in my dreams.

  • How to help someone use a [insert frustrating digital device]

    Thanks to Jessamyn West for republishing Phil Agre’s advice from 1996 on how to help someone use a computer. Swap out computer for “smartphone” or “e-reader” and it’s still quite relevant. Some favorites:

    • Nobody is born knowing this stuff.
    • You’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a beginner.
    • If it’s not obvious to them, it’s not obvious.
    • Most user interfaces are terrible. When people make mistakes it’s usually the fault of the interface. You’ve forgotten how many ways you’ve learned to adapt to bad interfaces. You’ve forgotten how many things you once assumed that the interface would be able to do for you.
    • Explain your thinking. Don’t make it mysterious. If something is true, show them how they can see it’s true. When you don’t know, say “I don’t know”. When you’re guessing, say “let’s try … because …”. Resist the temptation to appear all-knowing. Help them learn to think like you.
    • Be aware of how abstract your language is.

    As someone who helps people with technology for a living, both at a public service desk and in one-on-one appointments, I appreciate the reminders. One of the biggest challenges I’ve encountered is breaking through people’s technological self-hatred. A common refrain I hear from people struggling with their devices is “I know I’m stupid, but…” It drives me insane. They are not stupid. Their frustrations are almost always justified, being the result of a user interface that was not built with them in mind. What seems simple and sleek for Silicon Valley technophiles might be baffling, counterintuitive, or simply too small for the less agile fingers of the digital immigrants I encounter every day.

    Agre has advice for these situations too:

    • Whenever they start to blame themselves, blame the computer, no matter how many times it takes, in a calm, authoritative tone of voice. If you need to show off, show off your ability to criticize the bad interface.

    Oh boy, can I criticize a bad interface…

  • Making Migrant Mother

    You probably know of Dorothea Lange’s famous 1936 photograph “Migrant Mother” (aka Florence Owens Thompson), an icon of the Great Depression. Perhaps you don’t know, as I didn’t, just how much the photo was staged and later altered.

    Evan Puschak of the video series The Nerdwriter breaks down the photo’s origin, the alterations (ghost thumb!), and the other photos from the session (h/t Kottke):

  • My favorite podcasts right now

    After examining my current newsletter situation, I thought it would be a good time to look at the podcasts I’m into right now.

    I say “right now” because since my September purging, I’m constantly looking for reasons not to follow a podcast. (For the record: I use Apple Podcasts, and I never increase the audio speed.) There have never been more to choose from. It’s a good problem to have, but the need for discernment has never been higher. Even with the ones I do follow, I don’t feel obligated to listen to every episode.

    So these are the ones I’ve stuck with, that bring me joy or enrich my soul or challenge my mind or lighten my mood:

    Regular Listens

    Filmspotting, Pop Culture Happy Hour, Judge John Hodgman, On Being with Krista Tippett, Armchair Expert, This American Life

    Depends On The Guest

    Typology, WTF with Marc Maron, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, ID10T with Chris Hardwick

    Depends on the Subject

    The Rewatchables, The Bill Simmons Podcast, This Movie Changed Me, Ask Science Mike, Slate Political Gabfest, The Liturgists, The Big Picture

    What are yours?

  • My favorite newsletters

    Newsletters seem to be A Thing these days. To me they are a strange hybrid of public and private discourse, like a corner booth at a restaurant. You can subscribe and interact with the writer privately, as if you’re in the booth together. Or you can just eavesdrop from the next booth, so to speak, following their recommendations and links as desired without needing to interact.

    Personally I prefer blogs (or anything that I can throw into my RSS reader). They’re easily accessible, don’t require subscriptions, and have space for other pages. But I get the appeal of newsletters and why people would start one.

    Which got me thinking about how many I subscribe to. There’s not a great way to figure that out besides looking in my email trash folder, which is limited to the last 30 days. Based on a quick perusal, I was able to nail down the ones I like and have stuck with. (With email in general, I am merciless about unsubscribing.) Some are daily, many weekly or occasional. Some merely supplement a blog, podcast, or other endeavor. All of them I’ve found enriching in some way:

    Books

    Prufrock, Ryan Holiday, Mark Athitakis, The Atlantic Books Briefing

    Culture/General

    Jocelyn K. Glei, Dense Discovery, Chris Bowler, The Art of Noticing, Austin Kleon, Robin Rendle, CJ Chilvers, John August, Alan Jacobs

    Libraries

    Jessamyn West, Read for Later, Shelf Awareness, PW Preview for Librarians, Top Shelf Reference

    Events

    Music Box Theatre, my local movie theater showtimes, my local library

    Podcasts

    Pop Culture Happy Hour, Filmspotting

    Not included are mailing lists for several bands and the newsletters that publish too infrequently to be in my trash folder.

    Subscribe to a newsletter you think I’d like? Let me know.

  • DuckDuckGo to Apple?

    From Macworld: Apple should buy DuckDuckGo and make it into Apple Search:

    Yeah, Apple could start from scratch in building its own search engine, but why? Buying DuckDuckGo would give Apple several years’ head start on building core search technology and a huge index of the whole web along with a talented team of engineers that share Apple’s privacy priorities.

    And buying DuckDuckGo is the fastest and likely most economical means of bootstrapping a hypothetical Apple Search. It would even be good for DuckDuckGo fans, as long as Apple keeps it available on the web and to other web browsers, not just to Apple device users. It would mean at least an order of magnitude more users and a huge boost in development resources (both money and talent), from a company that has the exact same privacy stance as DuckDuckGo. It’s a win-win.

    Hadn’t thought about this possibility until reading this article, but it makes sense to me. As much as I enjoy DuckDuckGo’s privacy features and indie web ethos, Apple is the only company that could do right by it and its many users. (And Apple Search is just a better name, let’s be honest.)

    Regardless of its future, try out DuckDuckGo if you believe in an open web. It’s not quite as robust and sleek as Google, but it’s certainly good enough for most things. And while you’re at it, use Firefox, don’t use Facebook, and start a blog.

  • Help, History is Addictive

    Magazine mashups from Sports Illustrated (forgot to write down issue date). More here.

  • Refer Madness: Librarian as Point Guard

    rm

    Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk.

    On Tuesday I hosted a discussion at the library on the films of 2018. It was an informal time to swap favorites (or least favorites) from the year, and discuss the Oscar nominations that had just been announced. Opinions abounded, of course.

    I brought a laptop and projector so we could watch trailers of the movies being discussed. This turned out to be helpful, as I was surprised by how few of the movies the attendees had seen. Of the eight Best Picture nominees, one man had only seen Black Panther.

    This gave me the unique opportunity of curating their exposure to the year in film. We watched trailers for high-profile nominees like The Favourite, Vice, Roma, and BlacKkKlansman, but also lesser-known indies like Leave No Trace, The Death of Stalin, Cold War, and First Reformed. I was this close to just going through the rest of my top 10, but I restrained myself (and ran out of time).

    Librarians are in this position often. Introducing readers to their next book or viewers to their next movie is part of the job, but also a privilege and a pleasure I take seriously. Maybe a title I recommend will become their all-time favorite, or become inextricably linked with a future memory, or be forgotten as soon as it’s over. Regardless, we’re point guards. We’re there to make the assist, to keep feeding the shooting guard and forwards and hope they score more often than not.

    After the program, I walked past the reference desk and saw the gentleman who had only seen Black Panther. He was asking to be placed on hold for Leave No Trace and The Death of Stalin, and I couldn’t help but smile.

  • Get thee a blog and an RSS reader

    Two belated New Year’s resolutions:

    1. Get more of my intelligent, articulate friends to start blogs.

    Maybe some of these intelligent, articulate friends aren’t the writing type or won’t have the time or inclination or find Instagram sufficient for digital socializing, thank you very much. Still I will try.

    (I halfway succeeded already with my friend Tone’s Mustaches and Tiaras, though she was already working on it when I gave her a final push.)

    I’m in my 13th year of blogging. I’ve not made a dime from it, but it has been one of the most rewarding endeavors of my life. The satisfaction of owning my turf and trying to make something worthwhile of it cannot be duplicated elsewhere on the Internet.

    If you’re reading this and don’t have your own blog, consider starting one. (While you’re at it, subscribe to mine.) If you have a little bit of money and are moderately tech-savvy, consider self-hosting with a custom domain. Then email me with the URL so I can add it to my RSS reader.

    2. Get more people to use an RSS reader

    An RSS reader, for the tech-challenged, is basically an app for following blogs or other regularly posting content.  There are several other options, but I use Feedly. Here’s what mine looks like currently, with all the latest stories already read:

    RSS is a much more pleasant way to get news and opinion than Facebook or Twitter, where instant emoting rules and thoughtful context drools. Some blogs post multiple times a day, some once a week or less. I don’t read them all, but whether I do or not I never miss a post, because there’s no mysterious algorithm deciding to hide certain posts from me like on social networks. Just a dumb, straightforward technology that provides me everything I ask for and waits for me to act on it. As good technology should be.

  • Perfect Bid

    Remember Terry Kniess, the guy who made the perfect bid on the Showcase Showdown of The Price is Right? Someone made a documentary about the guy behind that bid, and it’s surprisingly thrilling.

    Ted Slauson is a math whiz and The Price is Right superfan who’s attended dozens of tapings of the show and even wrote his own computer program to help him memorize the show’s thousands of different products and games. Using archival footage and Ted’s deadpan talking head interviews, the documentary pieces together how Ted’s savant-level mastery and willingness to feed other contestants exact prices led to some amazing television.

    Though amateurish in its choppy editing and overuse of background music, the doc is an effective love letter to one of the most popular game shows ever and a compelling investigation into its unlikely cult hero.

  • Why I love Kanopy, Hum, and System Information

    Want to give some love to three services I’ve enjoyed lately:

    Kanopy

    Kanopy is a free streaming service available through your public library. (If it isn’t, ask them to get it!) Abundant with titles from A24, The Criterion Collection, and other high-quality providers, it’s rife with a delightful array of foreign films, indies, and documentaries to fill the FilmStruck-shaped hole in the hearts of cinephiles. My watchlist expanded pretty quickly once I signed up, much of it classics and Criterion titles I’ve been meaning to watch and want to get to before my wife gives birth. In the last few weeks I’ve watched Three Days of the Condor, The Seventh Seal, 48 Hrs., Ugetsu, Battleship Potemkin, and The Wages of Fear, with more on the horizon. Get thee to Kanopy!

    Hum

    hum-songs

    I’ve been using Hum for a lot longer than Kanopy, but only recently realized how much I love it. It’s the perfect songwriting app. Super easy to quickly record song ideas, gather lyrics, and add helpful metadata. Beautifully made and a joy to use, though I really ought to use it more. Since I recently released the songs that comprised my 20s, I’m excited to see what will become of the song ideas currently residing in Hum.

    System Information on Mac

    I rediscovered this function while trying to clean out some disk space on my wife’s MacBook Pro and make it run faster. Previously I used Disk Doctor for this job; it’s a fine app that costs $2.99, but System Information is built-in and provides a more granular view of your files. It also makes deleting them super easy and satisfying. It’s a bit hidden, but well worth the hunt. If you’re a file hoarder or haven’t optimized your Mac in a while, you’ll be shocked by how much cruft builds up. Also by how large iOS backups are! (Seriously, my wife’s storage space more than doubled after I deleted those.)

  • Queer Eye and Straight Guys

    Karamo Brown of Queer Eye recently gave a free talk nearby, so I availed myself of the opportunity to see him in the flesh. He was the same as you see on the show, except this time he made himself cry. He got emotional as soon as the talk began because an old college friend of his was in the audience, someone who reminded him of how far he’d come in life. He then briefly told stories from the show and about being a dad.

    Unsurprisingly, he was very open with feelings and implored us not to make fear-based decisions. His sons probably do not appreciate when they bring girls home and Karamo pulls them aside and asks “Have you done anything out of fear lately?” But that’s something youths can only appreciate in hindsight (and something only a therapist/motivational speaker like Karamo could get away with).

    I never watched the original Queer Eye, though vaguely remember its cultural impact. But while I was in Denver for a wedding last fall, my straight-dude friends were effusive in their praise for the new version. It’s so much more than fashion, they said. They were right. It’s fun to see the Fab Five work their magic: Bobby remodeling homes and Jonathan transforming hair and Antoni inspiring cooking and Tan remaking wardrobes and Karamo shepherding the show’s “heroes” to a new self-awareness.

    But, like Karamo, I think I’m most interested in seeing what makes the subjects cry, or at least be vulnerable. Those moments are water wells, openings to the deep reserves of emotional underground that’s usually in darkness. Drawing from that space, for me anyway, involves work and risk but almost always reward. It happened for me that weekend in Denver, which is why I’ll always associate that time with the show. The ability to be vulnerable among friends—straight male friends, no less—and to do it so easily when it’s otherwise so daunting, meant it was good in the richest sense of the word.

    That inspiring of goodness is one of my takeaways from the show. The Fab Five dedicate themselves to new and challenging experiences around Georgia for the first two seasons, and in doing so demonstrate their goodness to everyone. Being willing to share their expertise for the betterment of strangers, prodding when necessary but remaining open to being changed themselves—that’s good. That takes guts, and vulnerability. And that’s what I look forward to seeing even more of in season 3.