Story No. 1: Cover boy. Your average writer or artist spends years submitting work to The New Yorker magazine and has only a stack of rejection slips to show for it. Wayne Thiebaud, on the other hand, has had the pleasure of The New Yorker soliciting work from him. The cover of the Aug. 19 and 26 issue, a double edition called “The Food Issue,” features a Thiebaud original—a painting of a pair of upended ice cream cones titled Jolly Cones. In an interview with The Sacramento Bee, Thiebaud, a UC Davis professor emeritus of art, said that being selected by The New Yorker “feels pretty good.” And no wonder: “For years,” Thiebaud told the Bee reporter, “I tried to sell [them] cartoons. I always got rejected, so it was nice to have them call me.”

Story No. 2: Wine and noses. That same New Yorker food issue contains an article by humorist Calvin Trillin, who set out to investigate the so-called “Davis Test”—a purported blind tasting of red and white wines that supposedly proved even experts can’t always tell the difference between the two. Trillin came to the source: UC Davis’ Ann Noble, professor of viticulture and enology and expert on sensory science, whose wine aroma wheel has helped scores of novices differentiate between a Pinot Noir and a Zinfandel. Noble’s verdict: The “Davis Test” is an urban myth. The test she gives her students asks them to identify the varietal by use of smell alone. “The minute you put it in your mouth,” she told Trillin, “it’s game over.” To prove her point, Noble offered Trillin two black glasses, one filled with red wine, the other with white, for him to taste. He got it wrong.

NUMBER, PLEASE

How do we compute? Let us count the ways . . .

470,000: Average number of monthly searches performed in the MELVYL Catalog database by UC Davis library patrons.
13,200: Number of hits to the new UC Davis Mondavi Center Web site launched in late April.
80: Percentage of students who registered for courses via the Web over the last three quarters.
57: Percentage of incoming freshmen who selected “Downloading Music” as one of their top five uses of the Internet.
766: Number of stocks students are tracking via the MyUCDavis Web portal.
1,300: Number of unique hits to www.culturelover.com for the KDVS radio show “Dr. Andy’s Poetry and Technology Hour.” (All figures as of early June 2002.)

LIMOS R US?

Ad in the California Aggie, Aug. 5, 2002: “Seeking self-motivated, well-driven person to distribute The Aggie to various locations downtown and on campus.”

Owners of VW buses need not apply.

A BACKWARD GLANCE

A look at town and gown of 75 years ago, from the pages of the Davis Enterprise:

“A student dramatic club was formed on the college campus Thursday evening, Aug. 29, when a group of students met with Miss Nan Mountjoy, a member of the English faculty. The group selected The Importance of Being Earnest, a clever three-act comedy by Oscar Wilde. It abounds in clever situations and sparkling lines, and best of all, is not difficult to produce.” (Sept. 9, 1927)

Headline, lead story, Oct. 7, 1927:

“Another Step Forward in the March of Progress: New Laundry to Open Next Monday”