bookofjoe

Adam Gopnik discovers the perfect book light (with apologies to Samuel Johnson)

In a wonderfully discursive New Yorker essay entitled "The Fifth Blade: On Razors, Songbirds, and Starfish," in what was styled "The Innovators Issue," Gopnik ruminated about why it is that Gillette keeps adding blades, why frivolity — not necessity — is the real mother of invention, and why relaxed selection, as opposed to survival of the fittest, may be the driving force behind ultimately beneficial mutations.

But then all of a sudden out of seemingly nowhere appeared the following toward the end of his piece, as he described his vexation with book lights for reading in bed at night:

I have tried them all, without much success. The business of shining a small bright light on a printed page in such a way that it does not also shine into the eyes of a nearby sleeping person is fiendishly difficult — so difficult that it produces a proliferation of failed solutions .... They look like the alien technology in "Independence Day," some mixture of long-necked flexibility and creepy extendibility — they look like aliens themselves, for that matter, long and segmented and misshapen and repellant, with short, sharp heads that shine. Some hang around your neck, some sit on your stomach; some clip onto the edge of the book, where they shake and waver, and some bend around the book's binding to shine creepily on the pages. None of them quite do the trick. Some are too narrow, some too bright, most are too fragile, and all too short-lived; you have to change their little lithium batteries every few weeks, and you can never find the right kind to replace them with. Failure, it seems, generates variety, too, but it is the variety of futility, the small changes made in a lost cause, like G.M. fiddling with the metalwork on the grilles of its cars. The difference between the relaxed and the genial and the despairing and the fretful was smaller than I'd realized. It takes the eye of God to see, in the acts of man, which are the children of delight and which the dead ends of despair.

Then, the other night, shaking and grumbling, trying to find a working nightlight, I stumbled on a line from Dr. Johnson. No one who worries in the middle of the night, he says, should stay up worrying; the thing to do is light the light by your bed at once, and read. Visualizing the thing as the Doctor might have done it, I went into the dining room, snatched a candle from the closet, and took it to bed.

It does all the work a reading light can: it casts a gentle, even glow on the page; it doesn't need to be adjusted on the binding as you turn the pages, and your spouse goes right on sleeping in its amber twilight. And when you reading is over, the chapter finished, there are no clicks, no sudden darkness, just a light blown out with a breath.

The solution had been there all along. The ideal technology was very old, and the proliferation of alternatives was not Darwinian but Freudian, a set of alibis and excuses designed to repress the old and primal truth. Whatever the West Coast evolutionists might tell us, abundance obscures the possibility of old elegant solutions even as it propagates new and varied ones.

I could not agree more.

OpenRailwayMap

Just

wow.

This site features the railroads of the world mapped by various criteria: Infrastructure, Maximum speeds, Signalling and train protection, Electrification, and Track gauge.

24 different languages.

You can drill down to really fine detail, including individual named buildings.

Fair warning: there goes the day.

Wait a sec — what's that song I'm hearing?

Sprinkler Hide-A-Key

Best one yet.

Much better than under the mat or a flower pot or on top of the door jamb.

I mean, come on... where would you look — and not look?

From websites:

Putting an extra key under the mat is old hat.

Leave a key for family or friends without worry by hiding it in our fake sprinkler head.

The Sprinkler Hide-A-Key sits inconspicuously in lawn or garden and easily opens when needed.

Durable commercial-grade black PVC plastic.

$4.35.