Was the turkey bigger than Tiny Tim this year? “The holiday turkey business is somewhat resistant to recession,” according to a letter promoting Northbrook-based Loewy Foods as an economic barometer. “When economic times are softer, a significant number of companies still buy holiday gifts for associates, however they give smaller-sized turkeys. When the economy is on an upswing, businesses give larger turkeys and sometimes even hams.” Come the depression, look for Spam.
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“Lawyers and law professors have long made an art out of cadging the words and ideas of others and presenting them as their own,” writes Northwestern University law school graduate Mark Melickian in Student Lawyer (October). “You would expect that academics would not tolerate even the slightest bit of unattributed borrowing. In my experience, you would be wrong….I flagged one yet-to-be-published article for dozens of instances where citations were either inaccurate or material was inadequately attributed. Turned out that the author was a big shot, something I didn’t know at the time, although the fact that he cited himself at regular intervals should have tipped me. In any case, it was suggested to me by my superiors that I flag the inaccurate material but leave the issue of attribution alone.”
The Good Housekeeping award for bad architecture? According to a recent press release from Taylor-Johnson, a marketing and communications firm, local architect Pat Fitzgerald attributes the decline of Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie school of architecture after World War I to the rise of women’s magazines. She’s quoted saying, “Page after page depicted homes of the rich and famous. Classical, Revival French, English Revival, Tudor. Simpler, honest architecture was no longer in vogue.”
“We have tried on a large scale the experiment of preferring ourselves to the exclusion of all other creatures, with results that are manifestly disastrous,” writes Kentucky poet/farmer/professor Wendell Berry in Sierra (September/October). “And now, conscious of those results, we are tempted to correct them by denigrating ourselves, by wishing somehow to efface ourselves. But that is only the opposite kind of self-indulgence, utterly worthless as an answer to any problem. Misanthropy is not the remedy for ‘anthropocentrism.’”
