I work so closely with words that I sometimes have to force myself to remember that there are other ways to learn. I saw a DVD of Annie Get Your Gun for the first time, and was sort of struck by the lines sung by the backwoods sharpshooter, “Folks are dumb, where I come from,…
An unexpected and unwanted text message from a wireless company prematurely exploded a would-be suicide bomber’s vest bomb in Russia New Year’s Eve, inadvertently thwarting a planned attack on revelers in Moscow, according to The Daily Telegraph. via Would-Be Suicide Bomber Killed by Unexpected SMS From Mobile Carrier | Threat Level | Wired.com.
#BuckRodgers was fun. Looks like The Music Man is next. Shirley Jones, Robert Preston, Buddy Hackett.#TheMusicMan Cash for the merchandise, cash for the button hooks… Love the traveling salesman opening number. #TheMusicMan It’s like rap, but it’s white guys rhyming about credit and sales territories. #TheMusicMan Hats! Hats and bow ties. Go ahead, surprised and angry salesmen,…
Soon I’ll start live-tweeting part 2 of #BuckRodgers, “The Plot to Kill a City” Opening chase in a cubicle farm without cubicles.#BuckRodgers #BuckRodgers , my kids warned you guys not to split up. @devolved Arrgh, I can’t un-see that now! Oh, thank you Wilma, for pointing out to the flunky bragging about destroying Chicago that he…
It wasn’t quite the five-minute installation process that WordPress promises, but within a couple hours I had created a new database in MySQL, linked it to WordPress, twiddled my thumbs while uploading a lot of files, and before long, it was working. It took another hour to convert my installation of WordPress from a single-blog…
I was working from home this morning, when my late-sleeping son woke up and came into the study, wanting to tell me about a dream he had. I was only half-listening, and when after a few minutes he was still talking, I grumped at him and sent him away. A little later, I came into…
What does it mean to look at the code not just from the perspective of what it “does” computationally, but how it works as a semiotic system, a cultural object, as medium for communication? How does it organize itself, understand itself, think about its own representations, its own capacities and workarounds? Critical Code Studies is…
What happens in a literature discussion class is very different from what happens in a traditional lecture. In The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another (which I just finished reading this morning), Rebecca Cox describes what students expect of college instructors, such as the presentation of “informative,” essential facts and clear explanation…
Is Amy Chua a tiger mother, for forcing her daughters to practice music four hours a day, and denying them sleepovers? David Brooks thinks not: “Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls.” Chua is applying to her own…
When I teach “Intro to Literary Study,” I ask students to review their media consumption, and propose their own “media fast.” It’s not as simple as simply asking them to sign off of Facebook. For instance, I pointed out that I spend far more time on email than Facebook, so giving up Facebook would be…
Type professionals can get amusingly–if justifiably–overworked about spaces. “Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go,…
This is my “Super Earth,” about 2.75 times the volume of our planet, orbiting very close to a wimpy Class M star. (Thanks for the link, Jefe.)
One blogging convention that I really like involves making corrections by striking out mistakes, bolding corrections, and adding a parenthetical note or a footnote explaining the change. But when a journalist makes a mistake on Twitter, is it more ethical to delete the post entirely (thus keeping a mistake from spreading) or is it better…
(First published 27 May 2020, when I found it in my “drafts” folder.) In an article on consumerism in role-playing computer games, Garrelts explores a history that leads back to Adventure and Zork: “At this stage, while there were objects that could be manipulated that had use-value, there were no developed economies; in fact, there…
My students are usually captivated by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and every time I teach it I get a paper or two with a thesis that argues the narrator’s husband is sexist, that the rest cure is demeaning, and/or that the narrator speaks for the author. That’s a bit like “proving” that the river is important…
Spooftacular stuff, from ladysisyphus. What are the plot-threads that clutch, what subplots grow Out of this pulpy rubbish? Son of James, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only Your third-person limited perspective, where your adverbs breed, And the caps lock gives no shelter, the chapter no relief, And the seventh book no sign…
Yesterday, my eight-year-old said, “I don’t like math, but I’m good at it.” This is a huge improvement from the math-related tug-of-wars we’ve encountered almost daily for the past year and a half. Yesterday, she also finished a “Star Wars Math” game, where the idea is to play a Trivial Pursuits style game, spaced-out versions…
What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child…
How did it go?
I first watched it on an iPod, so I didn’t see the translations, but I actually kind of liked it better when I couldn’t understand what the kids were saying in French. That left me feeling as isolated from them as they feel from the gadgets they are investigating, which in turn made the uncanny…