One word novel (or screenplay)

A pair of shoes with steel toecaps (punta accaio) in the window of a shop at the Central Station in Milan (only €29!) are labelled:

antiinfortunistiche

A quick Google translation returns the phrase ‘accident prevention’. However, I feel that the word antiinfortunistiche rates as a finished work of prose, replete with its own critique of capitalist mores, conjuring up scenes of a potential shopfloor tragedy (or employer’s liability) averted while simultaneously suggesting the hubris of materialism. Contained within that single epithet, like the reflection of a factory caught in a raindrop, is a Futurist Hard Times, or a postmodern Modern Times. I particularly like the way the ancient concept of Fortune’s wheel (now converted into the wheel of industry, spinning out of control to the strains of Carmina Burana) is framed within the initial recursion of two prefixes (like a film within a film) and the “not with a bang but with a whimper” ending of the adjectival agreement of the suffix (feminine plural), suggesting a group of women, their heads bowed in silent, sobbing prayer at the factory gates as the camera pulls back, infinitely slowly and it starts to snow a Tarkovskyesque / Lawrentian / Zolaic, soot-stained snow.

Yes, his shoes were made of iron, but his heart melted, nonetheless, in her small, chapped hand.

…Because time wounds all heels

Slogan printed on the back of the cobblers’ sweatshirts at Shoe Key Services in Liverpool Street station,  January 2008

Original quotation attributed to John Lennon on his being refused entry to the United States. (But I think it works much better here.)

For more High Street humour, see…

Belli Capelli

Ikea, You-kea, Wikipedia

Baudrillard’s The System of Objects  ‘attempts to discern the abstract language that underlies our relationship with ordinary, domestic objects, arguing that we interact with them not so much in terms of their ostensible use value or function but as a way of communicating with others.’ [My emphasis]

Rex Butler, “Jean Baudrillard, The Defence of the Real”

Up close and impersonal

‘One can then maintain that it is not true that a code organizes signs; it is more correct to say that codes provide the rules which generate signs as concrete occurences in communicative intercourse. Therefore the classical notion of ’sign’ dissolves itself into a highly complex network of changing relationships. Semiotics suggests a sort of molecular landscape in which what we are accustomed to recognize as everyday forms turn out to be the result of transitory chemical aggregations and so-called ‘things’ are only the surface appearance assumed by an underlying network of more elementary units. Or rather, semiotics gives us a sort of photomechanical explanation of semiosis, revealing that where we thought we saw images there were only strategically arranged aggregations of black and white points, alternations of presence and absence, the insignificant basic features of a raster, sometimes differentiated in shape, position and chromatic intensity. Semiotics, like musical theory, states that where we recognize familiar melodies there is only a sophisticated intertwining of intervals and notes, and where we perceive notes there are only a bunch of formants.’

Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (1976), p49 – 50 [Eco's original emphasis is in italics; mine is in bold.]

How to use the semi-colon (1)

‘There is no general agreement on the best way to fight a recession; there never has been.’

William Rees-Mogg, The Times 12 January 2009, ‘We may want to borrow but will anyone lend?’

This is a great example of how to deploy the semi-colon in action. Note that the clause up to the semi-colon could stand on its own as a complete, meaningful sentence:

There is no general agreement on the best way to fight a recession.

However, in the clause after the semi-colon, ‘there never has been’ there is not enough content to justify making it a separate sentence (even though it has a subject and a main verb):

There never has been (what?)

Vulcan pinched

‘And so ended the political career of one of the Bush ideologues [Scooter Libby], part of the original neoconservative group known as the Vulcans who advocated an aggressive foreign policy, in particular the invasion of Iraq.’

The Guardian, 7 March 2007, ‘The CIA agent, her husband and a leak… how high-flying Bush aide fell to earth’

(Trial of Lewis “Scooter” Libby)

Something for a Renée day

Renée Zellweger, the star of Bridget Jones’s Diary, Chicago and Miss Potter has a Norwegian mother and a Swiss father. She grew up in Texas and worked for a while in a topless bar.

Weekend Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4, 14 January 2007

Big Sleep, small world

Lauren Bacall, the American actress who played opposite Humphrey Bogart in film noir classics such as The Big Sleep, is a cousin of Israeli politician Shimon Peres.

Lauren Bacall was born Betty Joan Perske. Her mother Natalie Weinstein-Bacal legally changed her name to Bacall (adding an extra “l”). Her father was called William Perske. They were Jewish immigrants from Europe.

See more How they are related:

How they are related (Nicole Farhi and David Hare)
How they are related (continued) (Matthew Freud, Elizabeth Murdoch, Ruth Rogers, Lord Rogers, Evgeny and Alexander Lebedev, etc) 
Five star romance (Paris Hilton and Stavros Niarchos)

Nudnik

‘When we say “Cherie gave Jim a headache”, we mean that she caused Jim to have it, presumably because she’s a nudnik whose antics made his head hurt, not because a headache walked over on little legs from Cherie’s head into Jim’s.’

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought, p59, (Chap 2, Down the Rabbit Hole)

Definitions of nudnik (Yiddish):
‘a person who is a bore or nuisance’
Merriam Webster online dictionary. Click here to see full entry.

Five star romance

‘The heiress [Paris Hilton] did her best to quash reports she and her Greek tycoon boyfriend Stavros Niarchos are about to split’.

London Metro 19 February 2007,  ’Happy birthday, Paris!’