Topical Guide 565
Mark Dorset
Obligations: Deadlines
Where Do You Stop? Preface:
THINGS LEFT UNDONE—how they haunt us. At any rate, they haunt me. I’ve noticed that they don’t haunt everyone else. A great many people seem to be able to walk through their days without hearing at their heels the dogged shuffle of neglected duties, but I am not a member of that lighthearted crew. The things I ought to have done are there behind me always, each with a hook in me, holding on with a thin but sturdy line, dragging along behind me, a nagging reminder of a debt I ought to pay to the past before I pack up and move on to something new. […]
I had left Miss Rheingold’s general science paper unfinished all those years ago because its requirements were so daunting and bewildering. […]
For another thing, the paper had no fixed deadline. We were to turn it in when we thought it was ready for Miss Rheingold to read.
Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities (translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser)
The right thing and the time it takes are connected by a mysterious force, just like a piece of sculpture and the space it fills.
Personages, Historical: Miss Rheingold
Sally Edelstein, “Miss Rheingold Contest a N.Y. Summer Staple, from Envisioning the American Dream:
Once upon a time, the selection of the annual “Miss Rheingold” was as highly anticipated in N.Y. as the race for the White House. […]
During the heyday of the popular contest, a clever marketing ploy which ran from 1941 to 1964 — a time when every third beer hoisted in NY was a Rheingold — the pictures of 6 smiling beauty contestants were displayed everywhere from bars, delis, restaurants to billboards and ads.
See also:
School TG 103; TG 107; TG 127; School; Education: Rote Learning, Memorization TG 131; School: Tests: Strategies for Preparing for: “Study Buddies” TG 165
Personages, Historical: Busby Berkeley TG 429, W. C. Fields TG 456, Dwight “Ike” Eisenhower TG 546
Here’s a project worthy of Impractical Craftsman or “Fantastic Contraptions”!
Nat Barker, “Lazerian builds racing car entirely from electronic waste,” dezeen:
Discarded iPhones, vapes, a fly swatter and a 1950s radio form Recover-E, a replica racing car built entirely out of electronic waste by Manchester design studio Lazerian.
Commissioned by Formula E team Envision Racing to highlight the growing issue of e-waste, Recover-E uses a modified drivetrain taken from a beach buggy to enable it to drive at slow speeds.
Everyday objects are dotted all over the car, such as the driver halo made from Nintendo Wii controllers, a Sony VR headset and an electric fly swatter.
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