Humanities: April 2003 Archive Page

Play the part of the famous lovers with this customized version of the classic Shakespearean drama. Relive the thrill of classic lines with you in them.

"Oh Brad, Brad. Wherefore art thou Brad?"
"But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Helen is the sun."

What's more, if you choose the Happy Ending Version a new scene is added with a twist -- the lovers live happily ever after! A short scene is added after Act V Scene III. It turns out the apothecary's poison didn't work and Romeo survives, and Juliet's stabbing of herself merely made her pass out."

The "Happy Ending Version"? I bite my thumb at Customized Classics and say, "Ancient damnation! O most wicked fiend!" -- Brad and Helen, Act IV Scene V --DGJ

Update, 01 May: The good sports at Customized Classics write, "Heh. Methinks the blogger doth protest too much," and offered me a 20% discount. --Romeo and Juliet Starring YOU as Romeo or Juliet and a special someone as your true love (Customized Classics)

"Trainee teachers are being told to avoid the word for fear of offending pupils with epilepsy. Instead they are being advised to use 'word storm' or 'thought shower'." Liz Lightfoot

--Talk of Brainstorming 'May Offend Epileptics'Telegraph)

Who or what is telling these teachers not to use "brainstorming"? The reporter quotes a charity that says some teachers had asked them about the word, but there is no quote from a person stating that they are telling other people or they have been told not to use the word. The quoted words appearing in the headline aren't assigned to any speaker. This is a rather pointless non-story; the best thing about it is the reporter's cool name. Many amusing linguistic goodies are to be found on Tongue Tied.

"Ravitch reports that a textbook committee rejected the heroic story of Mary McLeod Bethune, the black woman who founded the Daytona Educational and Industrial Training School for Negro Girls nearly a century ago. Why? The word 'Negro.' That was bad. Also because Bethune raised the money for her school from rich white men like John D. Rockefeller. That was also bad." Bruce Ramsey reviews The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch.

--Exposing the Overediting of Textbooks Seattle Times)

The book faults both liberals and conservatives for methodically censoring references to any subject that may make a reader feel bad. But I don't think you can really make a student read unless you can inject some controversy that pushes students to answer difficult questions -- ones in which reasonable people may expect to disagree. The result is that the books schoolchildren read are dull, dull dull. Thanks, Jim -- long time no link.

"Anyone can write a bad poem. To appreciate a good one, though, takes knowledge and commitment. As a society, we lack this knowledge and commitment. People don’t possess the patience to read a poem 20 times before the sound and sense of it takes hold. They aren’t willing to let the words wash over them like a wave, demanding instead for the meaning to flow clearly and quickly. They want narrative-driven forms, stand-alone art that doesn’t require an understanding of the larger context.|I, too, want these things." Bruce Wexler

--Poetry is Dead. Does Anybody Really Care?MSNBC/Newsweek)

A heartfelt elegy, but perhaps overstated. Due to the enthusiasm of several members of the UWEC English faculty and a larger number of students, the local scene in Eau Clare features visiting poets, poetry slams and more. Will the students continue their love for poetry after they graduate? One hopes so. Wexler's essay is perhaps an agit-prop piece, inciting the faithful to rise up and take action. Don't miss the reference to Frost in the closing lines.

"I expect this course to be challenging, but that's not what I want. I want just to be able to write better." -- anonymous freshman comp studentTough Lesson: Good Writing is HardMy Files)

"A company is making two versions of the same product... One has a little more gold and foil on it, but they're essentially the same. One is $14.95; the other is $18.95." Not surprisingly, the $14.95 item is selling better. It's also the lower-profit product.|"Then a competitor comes in with a third product. Again, it's essentially the same thing, but a fancier version. And it's much higher priced: $34.95."..."[W]hat becomes the best-seller? Why, the $18.95 version, of course." Business professor Kent Monroe, quoted by Charles Fishman

[Via Robot Wisdom. The article also includes a good anecdote about Coke's attempt to float the idea of a vending machine that raised prices during hot weather: "Consider what the reaction might have been to this headline: 'Coke testing machine that automatically discounts prices in cool weather.'"--DGJ] --Which Price is Right?Fast Company)

Robert Frezza writes:

I ran across an interesting passage in a book about the native peoples of Siberia called "The Shaman's Coat." In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a lot of well-educated Polish revolutionaries were exiled to eastern Siberia where they acquired a certain reputation among the natives. As one of them put it: "When the inhabitants learned that I was Polish, they came to me for solutions to all their problems; they brought me their broken guns, asked for advice on smoking fish, demanded that I cure the blind, that I heal their sick women, and wouldn't believe that I wasn't capable of doing all this. 'But you're Polish!' Yukagirs and Yakuts would say, surprised and hurt by my refusal. For them, a Pole was a man with 'golden fingers', who knew everything and could do everything."

Polish PerceptionsE-Mail)

Now that's a cultural stereotype I could live with.

One of several paintings that were, according to a spam I received Sunday, stolen from a museum in Manchester, England.

WARNING: Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin have been stolen in UKE-Mail)

When I went online to check the validity of this spam I found a BBC story which reports "The paintings - Van Gogh's The Fortification of Paris with Houses, Picasso's Poverty and Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape - were found the next day crammed into a tube behind a public toilet.... A note was attached to the paintings claiming the motive of the thieves was to highlight poor security at the gallery." Oh, what a noble cause.

"The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging.| Who needs television? Let's just eliminate the middleman....Candidate gives speech. ABC News reports speech. ABC's Note blogs speech. Then candidate blogs his own speech, knocking down any negative interpretation by other bloggers. And we blog the whole incestuous process."

--Modem MadnessWashPost (reg. req'd))

This article will disappear in a few weeks, but I still thought it was worth blogging.

"The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms 'positivism.' According to this view, the application of the scientific method ? that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing ? to social phenomena is both epistemologically and ethically wrong." D.M. Gorman

--Prevention Programs And Scientific NonsensePolicy Review)

But see also: "The Battle for American Science," which argues that "Creationists, pro-lifers and conservatives now pose a serious threat to research and science teaching in the US." It must be tough to be a pure and utterly objective scientist, surrounded by imperfect social creatures who dare to assert their values. I guess scientists will just have to learn to communicate their truths in such a way as it appeals to the intellect and passions of the masses -- that's what everyone else needs to do in order to promote a viewpoint or earn votes. Scientists, come forth from the laboratory and learn to write!

"A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of a shock to realize that the age of the population explosion may be coming to an end. | Just thirty years ago, people like Stanford University's Paul Erlich were telling us that the Malthusian Angel of Death was at the door." J. Bradford DeLong --The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?Project Syndicate)

"Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.|And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage, has been abandoned because teachers do not have time to grade it anymore." Tamar Lewin

--Writing in Schools is Found Both Dismal and NeglectedNY Times)

One more for the "That Explains a Lot" file.

fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt.
Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk.

Over the past month, I've seen the verb "fisk" pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous verb is named for Robert Fisk, an award-winning reporter for the UK Independent. His writing talent is without question:

Did I sit on President Saddam's throne? Of course I did. There is something dark in all our souls that demands an understanding of evil rather than good, because, I suppose, we are more fascinated by the machinery of cruelty and power than we are by angels.|So I sat on the blue throne and put my hands over the golden armrests and surveyed the darkened chamber in which men of great power sat in terror of the man who used to sit where I was now. -- Independent 12 Apr 2003

While not flinching from calling Saddam evil, Fisk has been highly critical of the U.S.-led coalition's invasion of Iraq. He is extremely popular with [some] anti-war forces, in part becaue of his opinionated writing; but his consistent pro-Palestine slant does not escape the watchful eyes of pro-Israel media watchdogs, some of whom find his statements anti-Semitic.

But just as "boycott" derives not from something that the evil English landlord Captain Boycott did, but rather what the Irish villagers did to him, so too "fisk" does not refer to what Fisk does, but rather what is done unto him. In the blogosphere, some feel motivated to respond to Fisk's writing by refuting him in minute detail -- often repeating long chunks or the entirety of his articles, and interlineating their challenges. See: "Fisking Fisk."

The best definition I have found so far is by Eugene Volokh, who recalls an article in which Fisk "(1) recounted how he was beaten by some anti-American Afghan refugees, and (2) thought they were morally right for doing so." This, then, would seem to be the very first "fisking". Volokh credits an August 8, 2002 Instapundit post, and asked whether anyone had found an earlier usage. I wonder whether the term owes something to "MiSTing" -- a form of cultural criticism that formed the premise for "Mystery Science Theatre 3000," in which silhouetted wise-crackers in the lower right corner of your TV screen comment on and ridicule bad movies.

In general, then, the term "fisking" can be applied to any point-by-point critical annotation of another text. It is a mode of criticism well-suited to the WWW, since it begins by copying the full text of the target text, and proceeds to point out logical flaws and raise doubts. Since the fiskee's fixed text cannot respond to the challenges, the fisker can without too much trouble make the fiskee look ridiculous. While the term seems to have originated in conservative attacks against liberal positions, I recently came across a postmodern blogger who fisks an anti-postmodernist.

--Fisking as a Rhetorical ConstructLiteracy Weblog)

My idle curiosity about the term has turned into something of an epic quest... I think I'll post this now and take a break. You can post comments on the KairosNews version of the fisking entry.

"Whoo whoo whoo oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh ooh ooh oooh oooh." -- Primatologist Jane Goodall imitating a chimpanzee in the U.S. State Department, yesterday. --Notable QuotesABC News)

CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US forces have swooped down on an Iraqi primary school and captured 6th- grade teacher Mohammed al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested, Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a geo-board, base-10 blocks, algebra tiles, a computer, a data projector and a graphing calculator.

President George W. Bush proclaimed that this was clear and overwhelming evidence that Iraq indeed possessed weapons of math instruction.

New Evidence: Protracted Calculations from Iraqi RulerE-Mail)

This version floating around on e-mail (thanks, Rosemary) is an improvement upon the apparent source on BrokenNewz.

"A panel of celebrity judges will help eliminate two contestants each week, leaving one lucky winner the undisputed leader of Iraq at the end of the season. Viewers can participate by casting phone-in votes, although Darnell noted that voting is restricted to calls originating from within the continental U.S."

--New Fox Reality Show to Determine Ruler of IraqThe Onion)

The title of the spoof series, "Appointed by America," is a brilliant detail that makes a concise political point.

When a blogger dies, what happens to the blog? "I keep it on my 'friends' list just so I can see his name every so often, but I can never bring myself to click on his name. The first year or so after he passed on I visited it with decreasing regularity, until eventually I couldn't handle the emotions. I had to move on. But the idea that it is still around is comforting ? it's almost as if he isn't dead." Garrett Palm, quoted by reporter Christopher Null

--Online, Some Bloggers Never DieWired)

Then there is the blogger who never lived, Kaycee Nicole.

What if "pi" were a recent discovery? How would journals publicize it, and how would the educational system absorb it?

"Once the discovery had been reported in a contemporary journal, mathematicians could be expected to begin using and citing Archimedes? constant... While the term Archimedes? constant would become increasingly familiar even to school children, scientists themselves would begin citing Archimedes? primordial paper less and less, until finally citations to it would be dropped, and the idea of citing it at all would finally disappear. While Archimedes? constant would survive, his original paper would, in terms of citation analysis, have been obliterated." Eugene Garfield --The 'Obliteration Phenomenon' in Science -- and the Advantage of Being Obliterated!Essays of an Information Scientist [PDF])

"In my opinion, the application forms for humanities Ph.D. programmes should carry the warning: 'Enter at your own risk.' The fine print should read: 'The risks include poverty, shame, humiliation, and clinical depression.' You will of course find no such warning on the graduate-school application forms. And incredibly enough, even at this stage in the game, you may still encounter tenured faculty members in said programmes who refuse to even consider the very sensible proposal of limiting graduate-school admissions in order to address the problem of an oversupply of academic job candidates, and who justify their position with such nuggets as, 'Well, nobody's forcing them to go to graduate school.' The more fools they. And the more fool you if you don't ask yourself some pretty tough questions before you sign on with them." Invisible Adjunct

--Still Thinking about Graduate School in the Humanities?Invisible Adjunct)

A painful assessment of the dark side of academia. An "adjunct" is a college teacher who does not have a long-term contract.

"It is rare for a pregnant woman to vanish. But Peterson's case likely received extra media attention from the start because she was from the same town as another well-known missing person and homicide victim -- Chandra Levy, the Washington, D.C., intern who had an affair with then-Rep. Gary Condit."

--Eerily Similar Case [Missing Pregnant Woman] Languishes in ObscuritySF Chronicle)

The victim of the story making headlines was a white girl-next-door. The victim of the story nobody is following was an illegal immigrant, and the father of her baby was a married man. Meanwhile, an official with the National Organization for Women challenges the double-homicide charge against Laci Peterson's husband.

I'm a little behind in blogging Elwyn Jenkins' response to Dan Gillmor's Making the News. Here's what Elwyn says: "Writing, that you see here in this [Elwyn's] weblog, is not journalism. This is more about pedagogy than it is about journalism. This is about organizing information -- some bloggers do that by simply amassing a list of links and a little comment to cause others to look and think. I practice more of what I used to do in school -- drawing together an argument in order to present, cause thinking and seek from my readers their attention to think this topic through for themselves.|This differs from journalism, whether you are a linker and pointer blogger or a didactic blogger like myself. Journalists are much more even-handed, they are objective, edited and far more objective. We teachers tend to move towards the perimeters of thinking and over-emphasize what we are saying. Or we act like Dave Winer who keeps pointing and pointing to what he is reading and thinking. Do not trust him to be even-handed or objective. He is a teacher -- he has even taken up a teaching job at a University, so much is he like a teacher. Bloggers worldwide would very easily take up teaching, few of us would be able to take up jobs as journalists."

--Helping Gillmor: Making the NewsMicrodoc News)

Hmm. I'd quibble with this. Really good teaching involves holding back your own opinion so that students can, on their own, develop skills that help them master the material. When I stand in front of the classroom and voice my personal opinion, the quality and direction of the discussion is affected. There are always a few bright students whose educational strategy is to get good grades by flattering and parroting the teacher. (It's one reason why arrogance is an occupational hazard of college teachers-- we are constantly surrounded by bright young people seeking our praise.) In the humanities, where there are probably more often conflicting philosophies than there are in the sciences, teaching involves empowering students to make their own judgments. In the sciences, where empirical evidence validates certain approaches and invalidates others, the nature of the material lends itself better to a mode in which an expert presents information to learners.

Jill Walker recently observed, "It's hard to work out quite how to teach independent, critical thought. To my great surprise I've discovered that giving a 2 x 45 minute lecture is way easier than setting up tasks and discussions and problems that actually help the students develop their own skills."

Perhaps blogging offers both Elwyn and Dan a middle ground, where teaching and journalism borrow from each other and become something new and better. Plenty of "Town Square Meetings" look very much like college seminars. I think all Gillmor really needs to do is state his assumptions up front, refer to what is to be gained from people whose opinions are different, and demonstrate how pursuing his particular line of thought will advance everyone's understanding of the subject.

On a related note, Jenkins refers to "pointing bloggers," which, according to "personality blogger" Rebecca Blood, are so different from the "journal blogs" that they need a different term. Taxonomy is fun, fun, fun!

We all look at blogging (and everything else) through the lens of our experience. Jenkins sees weblogging as information management; Gillmor sees it as a new kind of journalism; Blood sees it as a form of personal journal. (If I weren't a teacher, here's where I would say what I think blogging is -- but instead I'm going to be coy.)

"Unfortunately, I never actually heard the protester's name pronounced, just caught him spelling it out for others and jotted it down in my notepad. | I wrote the story for Sunday's paper, tucked the quote down near the bottom, filed it to my editors in Charleston and blithely went about my life, unaware that this one name was about to make my own name known around the country. | On Monday afternoon, thanks to some astute readers with a vivid recollection of elementary school vernacular, I realized I had been duped." James Scott

--Embarrassing lesson: Duped reporter learns the hard wayPost and Courier)

"The writing skills college instructors most want from incoming freshmen--proper grammar and usage--are considered least important by high school English teachers....Among six writing skills, grammar and usage were taught the least by more than 700 high school English teachers surveyed during a national curriculum survey ACT conducts every three years." Rosalind Rossi

--Grammar Valued More in College than High School Sun Times)

File this under "This Explains a Lot." Via KairosNews.

"The one thing that everyone who has studied college education can agree on is that students learn more when they work in groups. Yet colleges don't build infrastructure to support this. A university will spend hundreds of $millions on dormitories, i.e., places for students to drink beer and sleep together. Why is there is no budget for cubicle farms where students in the same major could do their homework together, asking for help from the person at the next desk and, if necessary, raising their hands for help from roving teaching assistants?" Philip Greenspun --Why Do Colleges Build Dormitories? And Teach Half-Time?Philip Greenspun's Weblog)

"King County prosecutors and sheriff's detectives asked the editors at the Eastside Journal, now called the King County Journal, to run a fake story about a staged arson to make Sherer believe an accomplice had carried out his plans. The newspaper complied."

--Ethics of Paper's Fake Arson Story Debated Seattle Times)

Woah! When does the paper's responsibility to the community include publishing a lie? This is troubling. But this isn't a story about simply trying to catch an arsonist. The suspect was planning multiple murders, and wanted to test whether he could trust an accomplice before hiring him for additional murders.

"Retail employees who sell violent video games to minors would face a $500 fine under a bill passed by the Washington state Senate."

--Peddle a Violent Game [to Minors], Pay a Fine Wired)

A tiny news item. I added "to minors" in the headline, because this tiny news item seems much more flame-worthy without it.

"The arctic rodents called Lemmings are well known for their periodic mass suicides by collectively swimming into the sea and drowning, or at least the Norway lemmings do. This is probably caused by environmental pressures usually from over population..."

--Mass SuicideHolology)

Actually, the cause of this behavior is more likely to be Disney employees hurling animals from cliffs in order to provide striking visuals for the 1958 movie White Wilderness. Another good Snopes find, which, among many other things, ruins an important metaphor in the classic IF game Trinity.

"American troops in Saudi Arabia have been listening with amusement to Baghdad Betty, Iraq's version of Tokyo Rose, who tries to demoralize them with her radio broadcasts. In one monologue, she warned them that their wives back home were sleeping with 'famous movie stars,' including Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger and even Bart Simpson...." David Ellis

--Flashback: Have A Cow, G.I.!Time, 1991)

I have used this anecdote in my tech writing class, so I was surprised to read on Snopes that this particular joke comes from a Johnny Carson skit (though Carson's list of names was different). The joke was spread in late 1990, via the Usenet group rec.humor.funny, in a post that claimed "This was reported by an American serviceman in the Middle East and picked up by the Clarinet news service." There really was a Baghdad Betty, who was famous for not quite getting American culture right.

The above article is from the Time.com archive, which shows you the above 53-word blurb and then offers to sell you the full article, which, the page informs me, is 53 words long. So, what will I get for my $2.50? Not much, I guess.

Far more annoying is the fact that, when you hit the "go back" button, you get a pop-up window that reads, "Don't pass up on this opportunity to sign up for the TIME archive and read the article you selected." How many people, after already signaling their lack of interest in purchasing the article by clicking "go back", are going to change their minds because the "go back" button spawns a pop-up?

"Good evening, I'm Andy Card -- Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush. I welcome you to the inaugural 'Ask the White House' online discussion. I am pleased to be here tonight to answer your questions. The Internet is an important communications medium. We have witnessed, especially during Operation Iraqi Freedom, a substantial increase in the amount of traffic to Internet sites as more and more people -- worldwide -- are relying on the internet for information. | We see the 'Ask the White House' series as another way for our citizens to interact with the White House. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and answering your questions during tonight's online discussion. | With that, I'm happy to begin . . . " Andy Card

--Ask the White HouseWhite House)

While this appears to be the perfect set-up for some Onion-style humor (see "Ask a High School Student Who Didn't Do the Required Reading"), it's actually the introduction to a real event that took place last night. Card's responses are a bit dry, but I hope this feature returns. When it does, the new transcript will probably replace the one I've linked to, which is annoying. They should put a copy of the transcript in an "archive" file right away, if they're really serious about following up with similar events featuring other government figures. It's a good experiment in providing raw blogger fodder, unmediated by professional journalism practices.

"Many people who were classified as feebleminded would now be called mildly retarded, learning disabled, or simply underachievers. Although the eugenicists saw the Buck family as a pedigree of degeneracy, many would now say that they had few problems a bit of money, education, and opportunity would not have solved. Their only sin was to have been born poor women in the impoverished South....Carrie Buck was sterilized because it was thought that she carried a gene that condemned her and her offspring to substandard intelligence and immoral behavior. Hers was deemed a worthless lineage to be snuffed out."

--None Without Hope: Buck vs. Bell at 75 (Dolan DNA Learning Center)

The history of eugenics is closely tied with racism and elitism, supported by pseudo-scientific claims that have long since been debunked. While the study of genetics is not the same thing as the social practice of eugenics (as a reader reminded me a few months ago when I ranted against a comment made by James Watson), the successful sequencing of the human genome raises interesting questions. The cerebral Sci-Fi movie GATTACA explores some of them quite well.

"For years, games have been racing to catch up to the visual standards of animated films. Before long, Carmack says, game graphics will rival Monsters, Inc. in their detail. When that happens, technical advances in games will proceed at Hollywood's more measured pace - incrementally instead of in great, creative leaps. Innovators will focus on optimizing existing code, and major revisions will happen less frequently. In effect, Carmack will be obsolete. 'There's a real chance that the next-generation rendering engine will be a stable, mature technology that lasts in more or less its basic form for a long time,' he says. 'Programmers will move from being engine coders to being technical directors in the Pixar style.'" David Kushner

--Prepare to Meet Thy DoomWired)

OK... but what will we do in these multiplayer worlds that provide cinema-quality visuals? Just shoot each other? Obviously that's what lots of players want to do. I'm uncomfortable with the idea that game design will stop evolving once it blends seamlessly with cinematography. Of course, this article presents Carmack as the creator of the graphics card industry, so it's to be expected that the author focuses on the visual. I've been playing NeverWinter Nights for the past few weeks, and while I was so enamored of the design that I spent the first few nights up way too late playing, lately I have been having to force myself to fire up the game in order to trudge through yet another dollhouse village where the interiors of the buildings don't have any spatial relationship to the shape of the exteriors. Maybe I was spoiled by Deus Ex, or maybe I'm misunderstanding the point of the 3rd person "camera running along behind the PC" console style game. I've got a long backlog of new text adventure games I've been meaning to try...

"I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first 'live shot' on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. '[CNN President] Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera,' he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by [Iraqi] Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.... The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda." Peter Collins

--Corruption at CNNWashTimes)

The print media don't mind taking potshots at the electronic media. And The Washington Times has its own history of "issues" stemming from its ownership by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. But still food for thought.

"Never, ever pick a fight with a surrealist. Not unless you are packing a kipper yourself, and are prepared to use it. That much I now know. But at lunchtime on Monday, when I tried to slip through the surrealist blockade of the André Breton auction at the Hôtel Drouot, I assumed a black polo neck was protection enough against accusations that I was a bourgeois lackey bent on picking the bones of the great man." Fiachra Gibbons --I Don't Have Any Cash. Do you Take Mackerel? (Guardian)

"Are you out there Dennis Jerz? Are you reading this? Are you keeping track of me? I kind of hope not...it's weird to know that my anonymous readers aren't so anonymous. But if you are, that's OK too." [Anonymous Blogger]

anonymous readers aren't so anonymous

A UWEC student who keeps a weblog is blown away by the fact that I recognized her and said hello yesterday. I found her weblog because I regularly search for links to pages on the UWEC site, since that's an easy way to tell whether soneone has linked to one of my pages. In an article I recently submitted, I wrote about how I felt when, as an elementary school student, I ran into my teacher in the grocery store. Two worlds that had been completely separate were suddenly colliding, and I was momentarily stunned. Sorry if I freaked you out, [Student].

On a related note, Jill sparked a recent run of blog posts on the personal nature of blogging... Steve does a good job blogging some of the reaction.

Update, 21 June 2006. The blogger who had blogged about how I recognized her in person just contacted me and asked me to remove her name and the link to her blog. I've done so. (I didn't check to see whether she removed the blog entry she wrote about me.)

"I started an e-mail network almost spontaneously several years ago, when my next-door neighbor was mugged walking home from the bus stop at 6:30 p.m. Outraged, I sent out an e-mail to perhaps 20 neighbors, and within 24 hours, a dozen of them had volunteered for neighborhood patrols. | With that, our e-mail network was born." Jim Buie --Neighborhood Networks Recreate Village AtmosphereNat'l Neighborhood News)

Via KairosNews.

"If you like Interactive Fiction at all, I would like to draw your attention to Ad Verbum, a marvellous game written in 2000 by Nick Montfort. When I first downloaded this, I really didn't expect it to be any fun at all -- I prefer IF that is more a story than a game, and I generally detest puzzle-heavy games because they tend to get me stuck early. As Graham Nelson puts it, an adventure game is a narrative at war with a crossword puzzle; in this game, the narrative doesn't really put up much of a fight at all. And I love it! Because the puzzles in Ad Verbum are really good puzzles." Arnt Richard Johnson

--Ad Verbum: A Successful IF ExperimentARJ)

With Stuart Moulthrop, Montfort will be presenting "Face It, Tiger, You Just Hit the Jackpot: Reading and Playing Cadre's Varicella." at Digital Arts and Culture. The paper, among other things, challenges Nelson's formulation of IF, and suggests that theorists and artists move beyond the old categories and recognize works of IF as accomplishments in their own right.

Completely unrelated query. The quote I took from Johnson's website included a passage that reads "any fun at all &emdash; I prefer". I changed the "&emdash;" to "--", which was surely the author's intention. But I feel somehow that I may have violated the Blogger's Code by changing a quotation. Oh, well. Nick's site seems to be down for the moment... here's the ELO 2002 gallery page for Ad Verbum.

"The Sims Online married a hot concept -- multiplayer online gaming -- to The Sims, the best-selling PC game series of all time. In addition, it was designed in part by Will Wright, one of the game industry?s most renowned developers. All of this combined into a rich maelstrom of hype: The Sims Online was featured on the cover of the Nov. 25, 2002, issue of Newsweek and GameSpot posted a 13-page behind-the-scenes feature. Mainstream press and hardcore game publications touted The Sims Online as the first mass-market online game. | Then the reviews came out." --Ethics in Videogame JournalismOnline Journalism Review)

I've come across two websites that use news photos to tell very different stories. A Tale of Two Cities contrasts photos of anti-war protests in San Francisco with photos of Iraqi citizens kissing US soldiers and celebrating in Baghdad. But "A Tale of Two Photos" shows a wide-angle shot of the site of statue torn down by Iraqis, where it appears the square is nearly empty, surrounded by US tanks. The absence of huge crowds of Iraqis suggests that the statue incident was staged.

But consider this editorial in the NY Times, "The News We Kept to Ourselves", written by a CNN employee: "I came to know several Iraqi officials well enough that they confided in me that Saddam Hussein was a maniac who had to be removed. One Foreign Ministry officer told me of a colleague who, finding out his brother had been executed by the regime, was forced, as a test of loyalty, to write a letter of congratulations on the act to Saddam Hussein. An aide to Uday once told me why he had no front teeth: henchmen had ripped them out with pliers and told him never to wear dentures, so he would always remember the price to be paid for upsetting his boss. Again, we could not broadcast anything these men said to us."

It will be a long time before the full truth really emerges.Does the Camera Lie?Literacy Weblog)

"With the burgeoning Sars epidemic spreading fear among travellers worldwide, the Hong Kong tourist board must be ruing the day it commissioned a series of magazine ads telling readers a visit to the city will 'take your breath away'. Shortness of breath is one of the main symptoms of Sars - severe acute respiratory syndrome..." Jason Deans

--Hong Kong in Hot Flush over Ad BlunderGuardian)

Incidentally... why is AIDS spelled in all caps, but Sars with only an initial capital? Both are acronyms, and both make pronounceable words. Who decided that?

"Saying they are appalled by the way the United States and Britain defied the will of the United Nations and attacked Iraq, the four [German] professors declared war on borrowed English terms in German such as 'okay,' 'T-shirt' and 'party.' They have devised French-language alternatives: 'd'accord,' 'tricot' and 'fete.'" --German Professors Declare War on English TermsReuters)

...So I Became an Asshole.

My Parents Said I Could Be Anything I Wanted...Serendipity)

Slogan on a T-shirt worn by a student I just passed in the hall.

"Peter Arnett, recently fired from NBC for giving an interview to Iraqi TV, has provided a lesson in media relations in today's global society.... We live in a celebrity age. Arnett had turned himself into a controversial celebrity. As such, anything he says is fair game. The Dixie Chicks just learned this when lead singer, Natalie Maines told the audience at a performance, "We're ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas." Within hours, that comment was being replayed, and fans made it clear they were ashamed of the Chicks. Despite an apology from the group, stations and fans around the country are boycotting their songs. One of the perverse aspects of celebrity is that missteps can ultimately bring more celebrity. Arnett was hired within hours by one of London's leading tabloids. Other journalists may sniff that he is lowering his journalistic standards, but he certainly raised his market value." Merrie Spaeth

--Words Matter: Arnett's Baghdad Boo-BooUPI)

The authors warns, "you don't have a personal opinion" when you are a public figure (journalist, politician, or entertainer) and there is a TV camera nearby. Reagan is still being ridiculed for his infamous "we begin bombing in five minutes" joke, and footage of the assistant combing Bush's hair as he prepared to address the world a few weeks ago will outlast many other less candid moments.

What does the above title make you think? It's a quote from an article in the Chicago Daily Herald., which reports that in a particular precinct, a worker registered 127 residents of a treatment center for sex offenders; 120 residents of that facility later submitted absentee ballots. "In the clerk's race, 229 voters were cast in that precinct. So sex offenders made up more than half the vote.| Voots, the Republican, received 42 votes in the precinct. May, the Democrat, received 187."

The reporter notes that the Republican (who ended up winning after all had "championed the 1998 state law responsible for [sex offenders] being detained for treatment, perhaps for life, rather than freed." Thus, this particular group of offenders would have had a motive to vote for the Democratic opponent. The statistic provided in the news article applies only to a particular precinct that happens to contain a sexual assault facility; but by taking that quote slightly out of context, I can create the impression that the news article is making a statement about all Democrats (or all sex offenders). The moral of the story: be skeptical when you read a startling statistic (or any statistic, for that matter)."Child Molesters, Rapists and Other Sexual Deviants Overwhelmingly Supported Democrats"Literacy Weblog)

"Bidding on the auction site eBay ended Friday after a month on the Internet auction site with no offers reaching the minimum reserve price. Amboy, with seven residents, has a listed value of $1.9 million, but the top bid reached only $995,900.|Amboy has a post office, motel, cafe, gas station, church, gift shop and two landing strips."

--California Town Fails to Sell on eBayAP/Seattle Post)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

I found this quote on Megnut: "59% of all Americans believe that what is written in the Bible's Book of Revelations will come to pass." She was citing a BBC article about Bush and religion. My question is this... what, specifically, does the study say 59% of Americans believe about Revelations? Conservative evangelical churches can't agree whether "The Rapture" will be pre-tribulation, mid-tribulation, or post-tribulation, and Catholics have a completely different understanding of the meaning of the Book of Revelation (few Catholics believe the Church is the Whore of Babylon, for instance, and I recently heard a radio interview with a theologian who argues that Revelations is actually a highly poetic description of what goes on during the Mass -- thus from a certain point of view, it is not a distant prophecy but something that most Catholics see every week). My point is not simply to raise a theological question, but rather to note that the BBC could have added a web link so that the curious could find out more about this intriguing statistic. (A few minutes with Google led to me to a blogger who credited a Time poll, but I didn't get any farther than that.)Apocalypse StatisticsLiteracy Weblog)

"Fourth-graders in the United States score better in reading than many of their peers around the world, but poor and minority U.S. students still lag behind other U.S. learners, a new international study shows. | Students in U.S. public schools outperformed 23 of 34 other countries in the project, known as the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study of 2001."

--Rating U.S. Kids' Reading SkillsCBS News)

Among the other findings cited by the study: girls outperformed boys in reading comprehension in all 35 countries examined in the study.

"It is bound to go down as one of the great moments in PR history. | With US tanks rolling into Baghdad and the sound of artillery fire reverberating around the city, Iraq's ever jovial information minister popped up yesterday to declare that the 'infidels' were facing 'slaughter'.... Standing on the roof of Baghdad's Palestine Hotel, Mr [Mohammed Saeed al-]Sahaf ignored the sight of Iraqi troops running for cover on the other side of the Tigris river to declare: 'Baghdad is safe. The battle is still going on. Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad. Don't believe those liars.'"

--'Baghdad is Safe, the Infidels are Committing Suicide'Guardian)

Reuters quoted Abdul-Aziz, a Saudi writer: "Sahaf is vulgar but he is a brave liar...If the rest of the Iraqi government or army were this brave, they would inflict many more losses on US and British forces." Black humor is always difficult to laugh at in the face of real violence, but I couldn't help but think of The Black Knight from Monty Python and The Holy Grail, who continues to attack King Arthur despite the fact that Arthur eventually lops all of his limbs off. "Alright, we'll call it a draw," he assents. When Arthur starts to leave, the Black Knight taunts him.