When I was 13 I learned the following song in summer camp:

If, after flushing,
The flow of water fails to stop,
Please give the handle
A short, sharp jerk

And you know what? It works.

Bookmarked for future reading: The Rape of Ma Bell and The Decision to Divest: Incredible or Inevitable?, about the court-ordered breakup of “Ma Bell,” AT&T, in the early 80’s. For some reason I’ve long been interested in this topic. This is a fantastic site about the pre-breakup Bell System. (It’s so weird that you used to have to rent your phone from AT&T – you couldn’t just go to the store and buy one.) Here’s a great primer of how today’s current phone companies derive from AT&T (it has maps, ooh) and here’s a chart.

I’m such a nerd.

I’ve been on a New Yorker kick lately. I’m reading About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, by Ben Yagoda. It’s filled with wonderful anecdotes (including some about pieces/authors that the magazine rejected), excerpts from correspondence, excerpts from New Yorker pieces, some famous cartoons, and summaries of famous articles and stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker (such as “Silent Spring,” “Hiroshima,” “In Cold Blood,” some Salinger and Updike stories, etc.). Great stuff.