September 2003 Archive Page

Being of the generation that wanted to both bring home the bacon and fry it, I didn't plan on going back to part-time work, and neither did many of my friends and colleagues who have done so. But we all had an eye open for opportunities and were willing to go out on a professional limb to get a life. --Lee Tobin McClain --Working Part-Time by Choice (Chronicle)

Dr. McClain directs the "Writing Popular Fiction" program at Seton Hill University.

Fingers in this cyber-saddled age are more dexterous with computer keyboards and Pavlovian mouse clicks than with the ragged edges of a new hardback's pages, with the satisfying heft of a book about to be cracked, with the spooning feel of its spine in your palm. Lost, too, are the inky smell of a book's virgin pages or the smell of time loosened from them, if the volume had the luck to age in a used bookshop. A book-banning spree is like a coming-out party for the things. --Pierre Tristam --Coming-Out-Parties For Censors' Ho-hum Targets in Hardcover  (Common Dreams)

I had to read that headline three times, but I think I get it now. A good headline should make sense before you read the article.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. I've added comments since you last sent me a link... drop me a note!

Over three decades of teaching has taught me that it's impossible to teach students. I can only teach English literature to students. And to do that I need to know a lot more about English literature than I ever plan to teach. --Nils Clausson --How to Tell the Good Teacher From the Bad.  (Irascible Professor)

Via Mike Arnzen's PEDABLOGUE

--Battlestar Galactica 'Launch When Ready' Bridge Girl Fan Page (SarahRush.com)

Today my five-year-old son was watching one of my wife's old Battlestar Galactica videotapes, and I remembered that when I was about 11 I had a crush on the cute bridge crewmember who told the Viper pilots stuff like "Transferring core command to probe craft. You may launch when ready." To my knowledge they never made a subplot about her... Starbuck never made a pass at her. She just sat there on the bridge, with her little headset microphone. Did they use the same clip over and over? I wanted to know.

Good Lord, the Internet is scary... somebody has already posted what appears to be every frame from the TV show that she was in: Sarah Rush Photo Gallery.

By the way, this fan website is a good argument for why you should avoid making web pages with frames... when I want to send you directly to a subpage on the site, you can't navigate back to the home page from there, becuase the author hasn't provided any navigation on the internal pages. (Well, there's a NEXT link, but that's it.) Frames trick beginning designers into thinking that they don't have to provide navigation on every page. The site also has a splash page... blech. Put your best content on your home page, and add links to the major sections. Somebody who has followed a link to your home page doesn't need to be told to "Enter" someplace else -- they're already there. Don't waste your chance to show them what you've produced.

A trend for naming children after favourite possessions is accelerating in brand-driven America. | The records show that in 2000, 49 children were named Canon, followed by 11 Bentleys, five Jaguars and a Xerox. --John Harlow --Branded anything but Unique (news.com.au)

The title refers to the fact that there were 24 children named Unique in 2000.

Welcome to the Bowling For Columbine TEACHER'S GUIDE.

The lessons and activities in this GUIDE are designed to help students develop critical thinking skills, historical analysis, and open their minds on many universal issues. --Bowling for Columbine: Teachers' Guide (Bowling for Columbine)

1) Moore is a very talented filmmaker.

2) I am personally in favor of all kinds of gun-control legislation.

3) Using a teacher's guide authored by (or at least marketed by) Michael Moore in order to study the film made by Michael Moore in which Michael Moore advocates the social positions held by Michael Moore will teach the students not to think for themselves, but to think like Michael Moore.

4) To teach critical thinking, open students' minds to the wider debate -- walk them through some of Spinsanity's objections to Moore, or better yet, analyze some of Moore's own comments. Show the videotape of the Hollywood crowd booing Moore during the Oscar presentation, and then show him afterwards claiming that the booing was actually some of his friends kidding him. Analyze with them the tautology of Moore's recent defense, "Every fact in the film is true. Absolutely every fact in the film is true."

5) Oh, wait -- no need to ask your students to confront that material head on, because Michael Moore has already told everyone "How to Deal with the Lying Liars when they Lie about 'Bowling for Columbine'."

6) Decide whether you want to use the controversy surrounding the movie "Bowling for Columbine" in order to teach critical thinking, or you want to teach the movie "Bowling for Columbine" to appreciate and/or deconstruct Moore's mastery of the art of persuasive filmmaking, and to discuss the origin and purpose of the documentary film, and the artifice of the "Reality TV" genre.

Or remind them that as long as Coulter, O'Reilley, Moore, and a host of others on both the right and left keep making money off of a host of books that rely upon anecdotal evidence, ad hominem attacks and all sorts of other things that you try to prevent them from putting in their assignments, our students are going to need to be informed about rhetoric so that they can make their own critical judgements about what they watch or read.

The Internet has become a grossly commercialized Wild West in so many ways. But the community spirit on which it was founded is alive and well. The Net depends on the same spirit that motivates volunteers in the physical world: a commitment to solve problems and make life better for those who might otherwise not have the resources or expertise. --Dan Gilmor --Remembering the People who Give Back to the Net, and All of Us (Silicon Valley)

"Detective Brown's death is a great loss," said Idaville Police Commissioner Rupert "Bugs" Meany, a longtime critic of Brown's unorthodox investigative technique who nevertheless appeared to be shaken by the murder. "Thanks to him, Idaville has the highest arrest-to-conviction-due-to-obscure-trivia rate in the nation. I believe I speak for everyone in Idaville when I say that Encyclopedia Brown was truly the greatest sleuth in sneakers." --Idaville Detective 'Encyclopedia' Brown Found Dead in Library Dumpster (The Onion)

It looks like I don't have to worry anymore about The Onion's poor naming conventions -- they've fixed that problem. Still, I don't know how long this link will stay up... so I'll mention here that the story is written in the style of the sleuth stories they are spoofing. I got a rush of nostalgia when I saw, at the bottom, "For the answer to this story, turn to page 76. "

As a kid, I read these 'Encyclopedia Brown' books voraciously. My brother and sister both took back-to-back half-hour piano lessons. My mother would drop them off at the teacher's house, and then we would go to the library, where I would load up on books.

In his new book, War Against the Weak, investigative reporter Edwin Black makes the case that 20th century American proponents of eugenics -- the belief that controlled breeding can improve humanity -- had substantive ties to the architects of Hitler's racial extermination machine. -- Dan Vergano --Book explores eugenics' origins (USA Today)

A student in my "Seminar in Thinking and Writing" class blurted out, as part of a long and fairly entertaining rant/critique of a recent attempt to scare freshmen and athletes away from unsafe behavior, that a certain person (not someone in the room, someone in the news) was unfit to breed.

We had a lot to cover that day, so I couldn't really follow up on her comment. Besides, in that class I work fairly hard not to let them know my opinions, because I don't want them to think that their job is to parrot my opinions. I've blogged about eugenics before.

In an elaborate scheme to dupe security companies and journalists, McWilliams acknowledged last night that he purchased the domain name last March and registered it under the name of "Abdul Mujahid of Karachi." He also left a legitimate mirror site in place on a server in Pakistan and by his own admission has been receiving e-mails from people looking to join the actual terrorist group. He then posed as Abdul Mujahid in his communications with people and the news media. --Dan Verton --Journalist Perpetrates Online Terror Hoax (Computerworld)

I missed this when it happend back in Feb 2003. Found via Cyberjournalist.net: Cyber Slip-Ups

Mr. Kazan's achievements in theater and cinema helped define the American experience for more than a generation. For Broadway, his legendary productions included "A Streetcar Named Desire" and "Death of a Salesman." His movie classics included "On the Waterfront" and "East of Eden." --Elia Kazan, Influential Director, Dies at 94 (NY Times)

Since the link to this long profile will probably die soon, here's a link to the much sparser Kazan article on Wikipedia. (I wrote the first draft of that mabye a year ago... someone else has already updated it to reflect Kazan's death.)

If I was to get a fake diploma, I'd pick a forger who could SPELL! But then, I have most of the real diplomas I need. Perhaps what this tells us is: if you are clever enough to figure out that a fake diploma needs to be free from typoes and look real, that means you don't need it, and the spammers are adhering to some weird darwinistic logic. -- Torill Mortensen --They Have to be Kidding (thinking with my fingers)

My guess is that this spammer, who promises a "full dmlpoia form non accieertdd uneveriitiss," is trying to get through spam-blocking programs that search for the properly-spelled keywords.

The nonprofit library cooperative that owns the Dewey Decimal system has filed suit against a library-themed luxury hotel in Manhattan for trademark infringement. --Dewey Decimal Owner Sues 'Library' Hotel (AP/Wired)

Not only does the author give examples that avoid sexist language, it differentiates between those which are stylistically desirable and those which are stylistically awkward. The site also explains the difference between gender neutral and non-sexist language, something that could be very helpful for students trying to understand sexist language. The author asks (but does not answer) the question of whether or not it is the job of the writing teacher to effect social change by advocating a certain way of writing. This could certainly be a thought-provoking query to pose to your class or collegeaues. Finally, the site provides arguments for and against gender-neutral language in new translations of the Bible as well as links to sites that more thoroughly explore the topic, if you’re interested. Guaranteed to spark powerful opinions and solid class discussion! -- Tiffany Grace Rayburn reviews my "Gender-neutral Language" handoutAnnotated Bibliography on Gender & Language  (Mike's Homepage | USM)

I'm happily procrastinating on a paper that's due later today. The above passage is from a review (Word | HTML) of an old version of my "Gender-neutral Language" handout. I really wish this had been posted in HTML, rather than as a Word document.

Coming across a favorable review of your work is good for the ol' self-esteem. The same goes for some hearty disagreement or even well-researched, thoughtful indignation at an issue you raise. On the other hand... this still bugs me. I posted a request for suggstions four days after somebody posted a brief mixed critique of my blog (great content, poor layout). I've completely re-designed it since then. But the criticism sits there, frozen... mocking me every time I surf for new references to my site.

The House and Senate voted Thursday to grant the Federal Trade Commission explicit authority to create a national "do not call" list for telemarketers, but the move prompted a second federal judge to block the move. --'Do not call' list faces more hang-ups (CNN)

An amusing side note... the judge who initially blocked the motion has been completely swamped with telephone calls and faxes from angry targets victims recipients of telemarketer assaults services.

The bottom line is that scholarly publishing isn't financially feasible as a business model -- never was, never was intended to be, and should not be. If scholarship paid, we wouldn't need university presses. --The Invisible Adjunct --Crisis in Scholarly Publishing (Invisible Adjunct)

The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library's catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound. --The Invisible Library

I think I blogged this a long time ago. It's not in my database, so it must've been before 2001. Since Rosemary suggested it, here it is.

I just submitted a suggestion... In Elmer Rice's play "The Subway," the character Eugene describes his desire to write "an epic of industrialism" called "The Subway," which his publisher won't buy. Eugene describes the plot as part of his attempt to seduce the heroine, but the play suggests he really is serious about writing it. The play was written about 1923 and performed in 1929.

Doctor Who is coming back to BBC One in 2005. It will be a new live-action series, written by Russell T Davies. --New Doctor Who TV series  (BBCi/Doctor Who News)

My son Peter will be thrilled, as will my wife. She has old videotapes from her teenaged years, and pulled them out to amuse our son. I'd much rather have him watch shows with plenty of action, convoluted plots, and classy British-accented space aliens than have him sucked into Pokemon or any of the other full-length commercials that market toys to kids. Yes, the Beeb has that weird socialist way of supporting its shows... I shouldn't really complain.

--Who Buys Rainbow Hector Weblog Shares? (Blogshares)

Who is deb_c and why, why did she purchase 2,500 blogshares of my Rainbow Hector Weblog just a few hours ago? According to Blogshares (fantasy blog stock market), deb_c's homepage is www.sugarfused.com.

Teachers should teach nothing.
Students should learn nothing.
Students should know nothing.

Nothing is worth teaching.
Nothing is worth learning.... --Nothing Matters

Read the whole thing -- I've had students stop after the first section, but the whole page expresses a single unified thought that develops from the first "Nothing Matters" section.

I've blogged this before. It's too bad so many links are dead, but this page was first posted in 1996. Steve, maybe this will help!

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Shakespeare's 'Hokey Pokey' (Google It)

Via Karissa Kilgore. Originally from a Washington Post contest. I'm sure the link has vanished by now.

A single sheet looks pretty much like ordinary paper. But the ink can be rearranged electronically fast enough to show video movies. --Philip Ball -- Electronic paper reaches video speed (Nature)

There are two very different reasons why papers like the Times default to the opposing view format for covering a subject. One is that fights make good stories, and the easiest fights to cast and cover are ones with only two sides.... The second reason that journals, and journalists, default to the Opposing View format is that they either don't know the subject, or have a highly masked position in the matter. Or don't know that they actually have an opinion on the subject. --Doc Searls --The Story story (Doc Searls)

Example (according to Doc): The New York Times skews all its stories on file-sharing so that it reflcts Hollywood/Record Compnay opinion that all file sharing is theft, and that protecting the income of these companies is more important than supporting technological innovations that consumers demand. Thus, a reporter whose story quotes an "any file download ought to be criminalized" extremist will counter with a "file sharing should be legal if companies can make money off it" centrist, and leave it at that.

Since I'm not a fan of any particular group or genre of music (I go for weeks without listening to the few CDs I own), I don't feel like a stakeholder in the "You'll have to pry my free music from my cold, dead hands" division. But a story quoting a teenager who says "I don't want to pay for that, all my friends get it for free" doesn't really do full justice to the "information wants to be free" philosophy that animates Internet culture -- and it's really that philosophy, not the actions of any individual file-sharer, that threatens Old Media.Two generations of music listeners have been taught to appeal to the tastes of a culture it created, to mistrust The Man and seek pleasure. The music is carefully engineered and packaged to deliver a message. I'm amused as I watch the record companies try to impose the ideas of "right" vs "wrong" on a populace trained to roll its eyes at the very mention of such terms as ethics and justice.

Microsoft is closing internet chat rooms because their misuse by spammers, paedophiles and others is damaging the reputation of its MSN service and the internet as a whole. --Chris Nutall --Microsoft to curb chat room abuses (Financial Times)

• J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism
• Hildy, You're a Newspaperman: Collecting Screen Scribes
  ("One film I never see on anyone's list is "Doctor X," an uneven 1930-something thriller in which the reporter not only climbs a drainpipe to look in a window, but crawls under a sheet to impersonate a corpse (complete with toe-tag) and eavesdrop on conversations at the morgue. Skills to remember!")
• Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication
  (See the AEJMC job page, which looks good. I'm not sure about the news page -- would be more helpful if it had dated entries, so I can gauge how frequently it is updated.)

Notable Journalism Links (

Thanks to Rosemary Frezza for suggesting that I check out Bob Stepno's Other Journalism Weblog

A U.S. court in Oklahoma has blocked the national "do not call" list that would allow consumers to stop most unwanted telephone sales calls, the Direct Marketing Association said on Wednesday. --Judge Blocks 'Do Not Call' Law (AP/Arizona Central)

Breaking news. Starting next week, it would have been illegal to call people on that list. Curse you, telemarketers!

Watch for the Slashdot article soon...

The Keyword Variation Checker is a tool I wrote using the Google Web API. It will go through all kinds of variations of a given keyword and google the result. All that was needed is a little text-file with possible endings for a word from a free dictionary I found online. For example, the word is "Googl", then I append "ology", "ist", "y", and so on. --Philipp Lenssen --Googling Word Variations (Outer Court)

Cool idea. Too bad this isn't actually available to the general public.

Google offers lots of cool features, like the synonym search.

In honor of Mike Arnzen's unmasking of a plagiarist, here are a few recent blog entries on academic dishonesty:

• Blair Hornstine (Plagarizing Valedictorian Kicked out of Harvard) (For those who think plagiarism isn't serious)
  
• Worse than a Plagiarist.. a SPAMMING Plagiarist! (what it feels like to have your work appropriated -- the evildoers did give credit to the source, but did not ask permission to excerpt nearly the whole thing)
  
• Online Plagiarism Spotted: What to Do? (A student posts work online and then asks a community what they think... eventually, the work shows up on KairosNews, where I recognize huge chunks of it from another -- uncredited-- online source. Hilarity ensues.)
  
• Noted War Blogger Cops to Copying (People don't like being plagiarized.) See also the Jayson Blair scandal at the New York Times.
  
• Teacher admits helping students on FCAT
  
• Hamilton College President Resigns -- Plagiarized Welcoming Speech to Freshmen (note -- this was the president, not the class president)
  
• Playing Dirty in the War on Plagiarism
  
• UVA Professor Nabs 112 Plagiarists (I'd say part of the problem here was the assignment design, and the fact that with so many students in huge classes, the TAs couldn't compare notes across sections.)
  

Plagiarism RoundupJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Chemtrails: 18,600 hits on Google. A lunatic fringe of dittoheads, convinced Doom is wafting down on the populace via 747s and DC-10s. A whole subculture of contrail conspiracy freaks. God bless 'em, at least they're looking up. --Matt Rasmussen --Contrails (Orion Online)

"English books and maps published through the 19th century generally spelled the country's name as Corea, as did the British government in laying the cornerstone of its embassy in Seoul in 1890. But some time in the early 20th century, the spelling Korea began to be seen more frequently than Corea, a change that coincided with Japan's consolidation of its control of the peninsula." --Barbara Demick --Breaking the occupation spell: Some Koreans see putdown in letter change in name (LA Times/Boston.com)

Did Imperalist Japan force "Corea" to change its name to "Korea" to assure Japan came first in English lists? Oh, well... it's probably good to see North Korea and South Korea agreeing on anything.

Despite its high visibility, I have not been able to authenticate "May you live in interesting times" as an ancient Chinese curse. --Stephen E. DeLong --Get a(n Interesting) Life

I am tempted to comment "Somebody has too much time on his hands," but the irony of typing that into my weblog would probably be too painful to bear.

Here I was in a place where the jungle goes all the way to the ocean, with only a strip of beach dividing the two. Sand crabs, hermit crabs, and crab crabs skitter across the path, and lizards are pretty common. If you look up you likely see white faced monkeys, and iguana are common here. I set up my spot and quickly got into the Pacific only to find it gentler and warmer than I expected from a childhood of going to Malibu and Costa Mesa beaches.| The dilemma? Well, how does a world view contain a place this nice? There is nothing that I know of in Martin Luther or John Calvin about tropical paradise (though it is true I don't have my Institutes of the Christian Religion along to check on this). You can kind of fit original sin into a landscape like northern Europe in winter. I comforted myself by thinking that minus malaria meds, this might be pretty inhospitable. But it was an exercise of rational thought of a kind that I haven't been doing too much of since arriving in CR. --John Spurlock --Costa Rica 5 (John Spurlock)

This is my favorite passage from John's blog, which is about 12 hours old and already full of his travel musings from a recent trip to Costa Rica.

"A Sept. 21 item in the Metro in Brief column about a woman fatally shot in Prince George's County and a child who was wounded incorrectly reported the woman's age, the child's sex, the child's location at the time of the shooting, and the street on which the shooting occurred. A correct account of the incident appears in today's Metro in Brief column." --WashPost Crime Reporter Should Consider a Job Change (WashPost)

I've made mistakes, too -- but this is pretty bad. One expects more from the Washington Post.

I had to laugh; well, of course this is why the Saudis hate us. Look at this: a beer garden, games of chance, rock music, hot dogs, teen girls with bare midriffs, purple hair, exposed bra straps and you-go-Jesus! baseball caps - and it’s a Catholic Church Fair. Of course, this is why I love us. --James Lileks --A weekend of fairs... (The Bleat)

It's true — we learn far more than we are ever able to use.... This may seem harmless, but does it, in fact, hinder our ability to produce? Does all this learning and all the attention span we spend on new technologies detract from what we should be doing in the here and now? How many applications have gone unwritten because we think some new technology will obviate them in the next few months? How many ideas languish because we're playing around with the new hyper-whizzbang protocol, convinced that this is the solution to our problems and will make every application fly off our keyboard with ease? -- Deane --Do Yourself a Favor and Stop Learning (Gagetopia)

This article is written for an audience of geeks. It's not so much an anti-intellectual diatribe as it is a reminder that having great ideas is not enough, since the business world demands practical results.

I spend an awful lot of time reading textbooks and novels and student papers -- and I have sacrificed reading and writing about the art and craft of teaching. I want to more self-consciously research and study pedagogy, learning from the experiences and speculations of others. Even the very definition of the "scholarship of teaching" is something I want to explore... I hear a lot of talk about it, but I know I haven't read nearly enough. | Have you? --Mike Arnzen --Pedablogue: A New Purpose (Pedablogue)

In his Pedablogue, my colleague Mike officially comes over to the Dark Side, with a blog that he will use to examine the "scholarship of teaching". Among other things, the "scholarship of teaching" is an effort by faculty at teaching institutions (that is, where we are primarily teaching undergraduates, rather than conducting our own research or directing the indepenent research of graduate students) to legitimize and sytematize the way we think and evaluate that part of jobs (the teaching) that our institutions have decided is most important. Composition teachers and ESL teachers have done something similar. Most college faculty members were trained in specific disciplines (English lit or critical theory) rather than the art of teaching. And the environment in which younger faculty teach is very different than that in which our more experienced colleagues earned their wings (and their tenure). So it's good to have a space to work out these issues in a public, collaborative space.

Mike and I have had several good, long meatspace conversations about teaching and blogging... he graciously reviewed a draft of an article I'm about to send out, and he's been a great supporter of the New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University weblog project.

He surprised me by deciding to use his blog to focus so specifically on this issue. I see a lot of good blogging in the future.

The [1938 Homes & Gardens] article depicts Hitler in glowing terms, such as the "Squire of Wachenfeld," and extols him as a talented architect, decorator and raconteur who "delights in the society of brilliant foreigners, especially painters, singers, and musicians." --Old Hitler Article Stirs Debate (Wired)

The above article provides some context for what came across to me as a Pittsburgh Symphony musician's gushing admiration for Hitler's estate.

For the last few months, I have been pondering the question why the present Pope is so keen on making saints — at least 465 at the last count and some 1,300 beatifications, more than all the canonisations and beatifications in the preceding 400 years. --Anne Sebba --Go Straight to Heaven (Spectator)

Once again, satire mazine The Onion spots a story long before anyone else. See: "Aging Pope 'Just Blessing Everything in Sight,' Say Concerned Handlers" (that last one will probably be offensive to Catholics without a sense of humor, and possibly even to those with...).

The fact is, in science fiction you can have any kind of reading experience you want--the highest art of the word, pure escapism, rattling good stories, dreamy tea drinkers musing on matters of great significance. Explore your favorite political/moral/religious stance. It's the literature of ideas, isn't it? --Rose of Charon --SF's Death Greatly Exaggerated (Rose of Charon)

Via RayneToday's post on KairosNews.

Comments can now be made on weblog entries.

Come on, post a comment and help break the system in! Comments Added to Weblog! (Will Gayther)

This entry posted by Will Gayther

Look, I don't believe in the journalist as hero, because I think that wherever we go, and whatever degree of resolve that may be required of us, there are always much, much braver people than us. I travel in a suit of armor. I work for The New York Times. That means that I have the renown of the paper, plus the power of the United States government. Let's be honest. Should anything untoward come to me, I have a flak jacket. I have a wallet full with dollars. I'm here by choice. I have the incentive of being on the front page of The New York Times, and being nominated for major newspaper prizes. | The people who we write about have none of these advantages. They are stuck here with no food and no money. I don't want to be pious about this, but for a journalist to present himself as a hero in this situation is completely and totally bogus. -- John Burns --John Burns: There is Corruption in Our Business (Editor and Publisher)

Burns comments on the emerging story of journalists who withheld important details about human rights violations in pre-war Iraq, in order to curry the favor of Iraqi officials and scoop the competition.

Had the journalists reported all the atrocities that took place, Burns seems to imply, Bush wouldn't have had to stake his war goals on what appear to be increasinlgy dubious claims of the presence of weapons of mass destruction.

...I thought [blogs] were stupid and confusing, but now that I have my own, I think its very fun, and its not that hard, I do suppose I'll get used to it and perhaps eventually I will become and expert. Its nice to know I am not the only one that thought it was confusing. --Lori Rupert, commenting on "I Think I've Got It!" --Blogs: Stupid and Confusing?

In the past couple of days, I've unleashed about 30 newbie bloggers on the world. Most of their first posts are of the "Gosh this is new but kind of fun" variety, but Lori's stood out because of its honesty. It's good to remind myself every so often just how different and... well... freaky blogs can be, especially to people who aren't familiar with the genre.

I took this photo from my next door neighbor's front yard. How do I contact the power company about down power lines. It won't be long before that line comes down. If there is a special number for down or damaged power lines. If so, please email the number or web link to me. --Richard
--Hurricane Isabel Blog (WVEC)

Note that the editor added a link to emergency numbers -- that will help not only Richard but anyone else in the area who reads it (before the power goes out and their laptop batteries die, that is). A good example of public service journalism in action.

Thoughts on Language in the Blogosphere

Some thoughts I'm putting together for a paper...

In the Blogosphere, one set of emotionally charged terms such as “link love” and its assorted extensions (“link slut,” “link whore”) emphasize proximity and interface. Blog A bestows “link love” on blog B by creating a hyperlink that encourages readers to visit blog B. By extension, a “slut” links promiscuously rather than selectively, and a “whore” links not out of genuine feeling but rather to secure personal gain. Another term related to proximity, though perhaps not obviously so, is “fisking.” The eponymous term refers originally to the activity of bloggers offering a systematic and usually disdainful rebuttal of a news article by Robert Fisk, but the term has generalized.

The text produced by a fisking alternates between the targeted author’s text and the critic’s response; the critic inhabits the body of the primary text, quoting from or paraphrasing it profusely. Because the target text is fixed in space and time, it cannot respond to the fisker’s frequent interruptions, and therefore can easily be forced into the “ignoramus” role in a one-sided Socratic dialogue. Earlier terms for similar activities, such as “flame” and “rant,” both seem to emphasize the emotions emanating from the author, but “fisk” seems to emphasize not the author’s response to a textual subject, but a persuasive act encouraging the involvement of third-party readers. A fisking is thus more deliberate and more targeted than a flame or a rant (even if it is typically no less ad hominem).

Twice in the last 10 minutes, people have interrupted me with telephone calls, once to admonish me for missing a meeting and again to remind me about another one this afternoon. My syllabus isn't quite done yet but a student has just e-mailed me for a copy of it. The computer in my office is possessed by demons, and I cannot for the life of me get a story idea about Texas home schooling out of my head. Most ominously of all, there's a stream of ants marching up my window sill and I have no idea whom to call about it. --James E. McWilliams --Pinch Me: I'm a Full-Time Historian (Chronicle)

This article is really about a part-time academic adjusting to his first full-time faculty job. But it was the above paragraph that motivated me to blog it... I have days like that, too.

Everyone should agree that good AI certainly creates more enjoyable games (see Barney in Half-Life). This is probably a correlative of the fact that bad AI ruins some games. But query: does smart AI create better communities? | Of course, real-life bots are the subject of a vast amount of pop literature. Asimov is a good place to start, but golems (not gollums) have an older pedigree. --Terranova: Golems and Community (TerraNova)

A pleasant introduction (via GrandTextAuto) to a group blog that's new to me. Even more pleasant because it links to my RUR website (suggesting that Google is doing a good job teasing out the new location of my webpages.)

A stylistic note... the passage that I copied above has lots of links. A passage that I chose not to excerpt has even more links -- and I am simply too lazy to re-create (especially when the source text is just a click away).

But I'm conscious that leaving those links out changes the tone of the original. Of course, removing the excerpt from its original context and inserting it into my own context also changes the text... but the omission of hyperlinks seems like a silent form of censorship. I often find myself selecting blocks that don't contain hyperlinks, simply so I won't have to wrestle with this problem. Hmm. Maybe I'll post this comment on KairosNews...

Well, after hours and hours and hours and hours and hours....of work, I've finally found a css layout that:

1. Allows the weblog content to appear in the html file before the menu. I don't know if this will actually help - see * below.
2. Is about 60% the size of your original index.jsp file (mostly because I was able to take out redundant and totally unnecessary tags and used tabs instead of spaces for spacing). This doesn't include weblog content, just the menu bar.
3. Dynamically resizes itself in IE if the text is wider than the specified width of the menu, which happens if you crank up the text size.
4. In non-IE browsers, text on the menu that is to big is simply cut off on the right side. This happens when a single word is bigger than 150pixels. Because I used div tags rather than tables tags, the links on the menu with multiple words now wrap when there's not enough room on one line for both words.

* I don't know if #1 actually allows the browser to display the content before the menu if the page is loading slowly. Please try it from your home over the modem, and let me know. http://jerz.setonhill.edu/weblog/index7.jsp

I've tested the page in the latest versions of IE, Mozilla, Opera, and Netscape on WindowsXP, and it works on all those.

This is as close to "ideal" as I think I can get with css - I think if you want nice predictable uncomplicated horizontal layout, use a table.

Changes I made to your jerz.setonhill.edu website:

1. Uploaded a new copy of weblog.css to your actual website - I looked first, you don't really have to worry about it.
2. I changed your general /resources/default.css file - .Sidebar "margin: 3px;" was removed
3. index7.jsp was slightly changed so it would compile - the version that we will use will be slightly different (but needs the changes made when comments were added to compile).

I don't know why I spend time on this kind of stuff, I really shouldn't. Ah well... --Will GaytherWill Gayther Keeps Working on Style SheetsE-Mail)

Wow... thanks a million! I tried it, and it works great for me.

CSS = "cascading style sheet," or a way to give designers more control over web page layout.

Will has been steadily chipping away at the download time for Jerz's Literacy Weblog. This is his latest contribution.

We write on paper, but we write to a magnetic disk (or tape). Part of what the preposition contributes here is a sense of interiority; because we cannot see anything on its surface, the disk is linguistically refigured as a volumetric receptacle, a black box with a closed lid. --Matthew G. Kirshcenbaum --Write To (MGK)

Thus Spake Google (completely unscientifically):

• "save on disk": 3440
• "save to disk": 76,400
• "write on disk": 366
• "write to disk": 14,500

Variations?

• "write to" disk: 537,000
• "write on" disk: 49,100 (the top hits seem geekier than those for "write to")
• "save to" disk212,000
• "save on" disk: 132,000

Just poking around a bit...

• "write on" paper: 273,000
• "write to" paper: 1,300,000

As Steven Johnson recently pointed out, Google's results will skew in favor of the geeky.

I add entries to various writing-charts like an accountant keeps a ledger book (and I do keep a ledger or sorts, too, for all my writing income and expenses). Why? Because no one else will.... There are lists that everyone should keep and others that some of just keep because we're odd. To each his own. Here are the sorts of accounts or lists I regularly update... Mike Arnzen --Keeping Track (Gorelets)

That article is an inspiration. Hmm... one reason I blog is that it handles the organization of my thoughts for me. But there's plenty of off-line work that I do (or should be doing) that is harder for me to track.

Next month I'll briefly be going to Texas to visit my wife's family, then I'll leave them there for another week and come back and work like a dog to tackle some off-line projects that have been suffering as I made the transition to a new job.

1. You think everyone cares about your opinions: They don't. They care about mine.

8. You will stop having normal conversations with family and friends: Real life conversations will go like this. "Oh, hey, I saw So-And-So in concert and the weirdest thing happened..." Friend, "Yeah, I know, I read about it on your blog." Silence. Friend, "Did I tell you that I'm..." You, "Blog." Friend, "Yeah."

10. You demand that your witty and clever friends be blogging. Constantly: Why aren't you all busy shirking your jobs and entertaining me? I need INTELLECTUAL STIMULATION.
--Top 10 Dangers of Living in the Blog Space  (Sarcasmo's Corner)

A good find from Julie Young's Work in Progress.

An armed man took students and a teacher hostage Wednesday in a classroom at Dyersburg State Community College in Dyersburg, Tennessee, officials said. | The group is being held in a classroom on the upper floor of the campus administration building... --CNN --Students, teacher taken hostage (CNN)

What a nightmare... "The chief said the man claimed to be a member of al Qaeda, and the FBI had been informed of the claim."

It wasn't until the package arrived last week that the secret was revealed. The man who sold Kunath the cookie jar was a brother he has never met. --Quest for cookie jar leads to long-lost brother (Orlando Sentinel)

That's a wonderful story, but that's one ugh-lee cookie jar.

Media conglomerate AOL Time Warner plans to drop "AOL" from its corporate name on Thursday, according to reports. -- Reuters --AOL Time Warner drops 'AOL' from name (News.com)

One more bit of Internet silliness becomes a subject for a future history lesson. It was a wild ride while it lasted (which was, unfortuantely for AOL Time Warner, not very long).

The Buckner brothers had no criminal record or any history of trouble-making. In court last month, they pleaded guilty to reckless homicide, aggravated assault and reckless endangerment. They were sentenced to indefinite detention. District Attorney General Al Schmutzer told the court: "They said they got the idea from a video game called Grand Theft Auto and that they were bored, that they went out and began shooting." | In a letter to victims and their families, Joshua said: "I did not mean to hurt anyone. I hate that it happened. This will stick with me for the rest of my life." Maxine Frith --'Grand Theft Auto' makers sued over teenage killing (Independent)

I don't want to just sit here and begin talking about how I have been writing all of my life and how I have kept a diary for years, so I won't, I will simply begin my first weblog entry, by saying, "I am stepping into new territory, and I do not know the ins and outs of this weblogging-blogging-logging-bloggorama that my college professor loves." --Amanda Cochran

--First Time for Everything (Girl Meets World)

Stand back -- here come new bloggers!

Amanda is taking both of the classes in which I introduced blogging this week. She's distinguished herself by her enthusiasm and her love of writing (and by the fact that she happens to be in all three classes I teach this term).

She's everything that I love about Seton Hill -- the positive outlook on life, the cheerful enthusiasm, and the eagerness to roll up her sleeves and get to work. Amanda has confided a few private worries, as well -- and that's part of the game. Here's hoping that Amanda's weblogging excursion is a rewarding one.

If you have the chance, check out some of the other student blogs on a new group site, New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University.

Plugs: Thanks to the administration at Seton Hill University for giving this project the go-ahead. And thanks to the good folks at MovableType, who are letting me set up a free blog for any student or staff member at Seton Hill. Dave Cornelson of Placet Soultions, Inc. is hosting the site for a very reasonable fee.

Dracula was not a misunderstood man, as the Coppola [movie] version, and the Badham/Langella version, and the Palance version, and on, and on, would have us believe. | And the novel suggests no such thesis. Actually, the best proof of this comes from within the novel, as Dracula feeds a baby-- a live baby-- to the three vampire women, then sics wolves on the baby's screaming, terrified mother. Dracula is a villain, albeit an attractive one, and it is irresponsible to suggest otherwise. Again, if Mina falls for Dracula, what will she say when she learns about the mother and the wolves? --Jason Henderson --What I Forgot About Dracula (Really Scary)

Jason is a friend of my wife's from her days at the University of Dallas. Link suggested by my brother-in-law, Andy Gigliotti.

--Best of 'Stealth Disco' (Stealth Disco)

"Stealth Disco" is the practice of creeping up behind an unsuspecting co-worker and dancing silently, to imaginary music. It is apparently a rite of passage that takes the form of semi-affectionate mocking -- a way of saying "Look at how square that poor working slob is... I'm having fun instead."

Strange, but harmless. The world needs more things that are both strange and harmless.

One famous case involved two pupils who had left 40 death threats on a teacher's telephone answering machine. After being expelled by the headteacher, they were readmitted on appeal. It is extreme cases such as this, and the fact that a third of newly qualified teachers are leaving the profession after three years, that have prompted the change of heart. --James McLeod --Bollocks to That, Sir [Misbehaving British Schoolboys] (Prospect)

I caught myself momentarily feeling relieved that it's not just the US educational system that's shot. Then I asked myself, what the hell was that emotion supposed to mean?

In other words, Madonna's just a poor little rich girl, and the rest of us only pick on her because we're jealous. There may be something to that. But it doesn't make her first book for children ("even grown-up ones," she suggests on the jacket -- ever the crossover artist) any less meretricious, cynical or unimaginative. Don't hate her because she's beautiful, the story transparently pleads. OK, we won't. But so long as she can't write her way out of a paper slipcase, we sure can't respect her very much. --David Kipen reviews Madonna's The English Roses --Madonna's kids' book lands with a thud: Million copies of overblown, empty story  (SF Gate)

Kipen puts Madonna on the analyst's couch by dissecting this transparently autobiographical whinefest. Not gonna file this one under "Literature." Nope.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe. ceehiro.

It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are?

Via Slashdot and dozens of other sources.

I hadn't blogged this because I never found a credible citation (some versions of this meme specify Cambridge, but I've seen nothing authoritative or convincing). Meanwhile, Kieran of Crookedtimber doesn't buy the explanation above.

If the first and last letters must always be in the right place, then any word three letters long or less will always be spelled properly. Having those words around adds a lot of context to a sentence, helping the reader to process the other words. To really test the idea, we need samples of text where that kind of context is missing.

And the new sample quote is indeed much harder to read:

Recrsheears souhld csrncotut secntnees unisg olny wodrs edxcieneg terhe lttrees. Tihs wlil psoe seevral polrbems beaucse wwreell-ittn Esglinh sluohd nlurtaaly cointan mnay sorht wrdos iunidnlcg pvrn-eborses, gtienvie csaes, cncoeinvets and (howpos) penrpsoitois, aongmst many ohtres. Lnoegr wrods soluhd povre useufl when tteinsg tihs ieda.

A fun test and a good example of critical blogging.

Narratives are the border. Nevertheless, as we talk about stories in my college classroom, I find that references to mainstays such as Star Trek and Star Wars are more difficult to sustain. Not because these items are old or out of date, but because the people with whom I speak have such diverse habits and because time keeps passing.... In a sense, students in a classroom still consider Science Fiction either as some sort of exotica or the subject matter of geeks hunched in the basement and tinkering among spools of copper wire and beeping mechanism, not realizing the ubiquity of science and cyber motifs in video games, cell phone advertising, the neo-regalia of all things cool, and Men in Black to numerous mainstream visions such as The Matrix. --Steve Ersinghaus --Science Fiction and Borders

No time for a considered response, but I thought this essay was quite blogworthy. Now I have to run out to the store to get another spool for the beeping mechanism in my basement.

About a year ago, Steve asked for my feedback on the development of a "new media communication" program at Tunxis... now, after my job switch, here I am, developing syllabi for a "new media journalism" program here at Seton Hill. Steve, thanks for your patience. I'll be hip deep in this stuff shortly, and will welcome the chance to reflect and opine.

People listen to the average CD many more times than they watch a DVD. Yet CDs are languishing in stores and DVDs are flying off the shelves. How to see this other than sheer music industry incompetence? --Michael Booth --Recording Industry's Missteps (Denver Post)

''Dalton McGuinty: He's an evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet,'' said a release from Eves's campaign headquarters, e-mailed to news organizations across the province on Friday morning in the latest, and oddest, Tory attack on the Liberal leader.... ''I think someone either had way too much coffee this morning or had way too much time,'' Eves said in a hastily arranged media availability on the campaign trail. --PCs call Liberal leader a ''kitten eater'' (Canada.com)

I kind of miss Canadian politics. I was riveted to the TV a few years back when Quebec just barely rejected a referendum that would have had it secede from Canada (though as I recall the leaders of the secession movement planned to retain use of the Canadian dollar and all the existing Canadian embassies, but not to take with them a share of the Canadian national debt).

Just one question... how necessary is the term "media availability"? When working for a news radio station, I tried to correct anybody who referred to a "press conference," but the term I used was "news conference."

Professor Leif Salford, who headed the research at Sweden's prestigious Lund University, says "the voluntary exposure of the brain to microwaves from hand-held mobile phones" is "the largest human biological experiment ever". And he is concerned that, as new wireless technology spreads, people may "drown in a sea of microwaves". -- Geoffrey Lean --Mobiles 'make you senile' (The Independent)

Is the mobile phone industry going to affect our lives and health like the tobacco cartel has for decades? According to this story, "the US mobile phone industry has succeeded in cutting research into the health effects". Because, after all, who would want to ruin their business due to the publication of a study that says their product can kill you?

And just in case you were thinking of Samuel D. Forrester (of a recent virology hoax), Google yields many references to Leif Salford.

I?ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world'sgood will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that'slashing out....We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn't. And we won't. | Which is why this war will be long. --James Lileks --When I was a kid I was terrified of the End of the World. (The Bleat)

--Torill's a doctor!!!!! (jill/txt)

Congratulations, Torill... I've enjoyed following Torill's account of the endgame in her quest for the Ph.D., and it seems only fitting that an online community helps her celebrate it.

My own doctoral defense was a rather lonely affair. The only date available was 3-5pm on the Friday after American Thanksgiving. My wife suggested that we all (just the three of us at the time) fly up to Toronto together, but I knew that I would probably be sullen and bookish, and the sound of Disney cartoons on the hotel TV wouldn't help me focus. Since Canada celebrates its harvest a month earlier (owing to its shorter growing season) it was just another Friday in Toronto.

At lunch my adviser made me feel completely at ease... he never held back his criticism at earlier stages of my dissertation, so I knew that when he agreed to schedule the defense he must have felt good about my work. During the defense, the committee members pinged me on a few omissions, rolled their eyes just a bit when I insisted that a light bulb counts as technology ("Well then, what about fire?" one of them asked.) and offered a short list of typos. Nothing really serious. At one point I mistakenly attributed Watch on the Rhine to Clare Booth Luce, and the committee members all chanted "Lillian Hellman" in corrective chorus (in fact, I was thinking about the Clare Booth Luce play Margin for Error -- I just misspoke). The final question asked me to explain the significance of an Edgar Allen Poe reference that Blanche Dubois makes in A Streetcar Named Desire. That was a perfectly legitimate question, because I used the Poe reference to make a point about Blanche's construction of the urban wilderness outside the Kowalskis' flat. But it had been years since I had written that part of the dissertation, so I came up completely blank. "I could speculate for you, if you like," I said, " but in order to answer confidently I'd need to look that up."

I figured they would push me until I broke, and there I was -- broken. But to my surprise, they all leaned back in their chairs and clicked their pens shut, smiling. I guessed that I had lasted long enough, and that when I broke, I did so gracefully -- I simply admitted what I didn't know.

Soon I was sitting in a little waiting area outside the conference hall, trying to push out of my mind the thought that the longer they stayed in there, the more likely it was that someone -- or more than one -- or all of them -- wanted to fail me. Of course it was at this time that I thought up a good response to their "fire" question.

After the defense, the committee took me to the faculty club, and my adviser lent me his cell phone to let me call my wife with the good news. Then I got up and walked, walked, walked around downtown Toronto. Later, I met up with some my former colleagues from the Engineering Writing Center. And the night before, while walking, walking, walking, I heard someone call my name -- a good friend just happend to be on his way to a pub to meet a mutual friend, so I tagged along.

Hmm... now that I reflect on it, I guess it wasn't that solitary after all. But it was difficult moving back and forth between teaching full-time and suddenly becoming a student facing the mother of all test-taking nightmares.

Time for me to get back to my day job, which means that it’s time for me to stop blogging. -- William Gibson --William Gibson is an Ex Blogger (William Gibson)

I can't say that I followed his blog much, but I enjoyed coming across other bloggers' links to his online work. He invented the term "cyberspace" after all.

Science Fiction seems always to be looking back at something -- often at childhood. Standing baffled and dazzled in the imperial spaceport of Trantor, we recall the trip from the shtetl to the City and on the the New World. Dreaming of Electric Sheep, we're alone in the long city night, our parents gone, and we feel inexplicable attraction for something alien and dangerous and forbidden. --Mark Bernstein --Looking Back (Mark Bernstein)

Mark contributes to the cross-blog thread on SF and fantasy that I've found enlightening. (He gets mucho points in my book for referring to Babylon 5.)

It's probably safe to say that everything humans do looks back at what has been done before... so I too was puzzled by Torill's statement that SF doesn't look back. Of course, we are all speaking relatively here. I like Torill's observation that SF which seeks answers from the outside has a blind spot. Carl Sagan's Contact intriguted me, because its central character had rejected traditional religious faith in favor of a zeal to contact alien life (though when she does make contact, the incompleteness of their answers suggests that the search for ultimate Truth is a unversal need that can never be solved, no matter how advanced the technology).

Escapist science fiction can be reduced to "bad guy with evil weapon and lots of henchmen thwarted by good guy with cool gear," but not all science fiction is escapist. Likewise, not all fantasy is escapist. There's nothing wrong with escapism, of course, but it's possible for popular literary forms to comment meaningfully on society while at the same time fulfilling the audience's expectations. If I can risk being too reductive, and suggest that the Mysterious Artifact of fantasy and the Advanced Technology of science fiction are both vehicles through which an author invites us to inspect our own lives and society, it seems to me very hard to differentiate clearly between fantasy and SF. (Case in point -- Star Wars. Do we really need pseudo technobabble about mitichlorian blood-counts to justify The Force? And did Little Darth need to be miraculously conceived for us to appreciate his importance?)

Whether used as a marvelous eating utensil, a cult worship figure, or even decoration, the Spork has brought joy to countless lives. This page has been created in an effort to pay them the justice they deserve in Cyberspace. --Justin W. Merry --Sporks are Godlike

The subpage, "Anatomy of a Spork" is amusing, but would be a better mechanism description if it began with a brief overview of the function, appearance, and operation of a fork. Instead, this page just throws details at the reader. In fact, the blurb I quoted above resembles the "don't let this happen to you" example I use on the mechanism description page. But it's still amusing.

Suggested some time ago by Rosemary Frezza.

A mechanism description is a short report designed to convey to the reader a technical understanding of the function, appearance, and operation of a particular object. In one or two sentences, give the reader a quick overview of these three elements, before you lauch into the details. --Dennis G. Jerz --Mechanism Description: Analyzing the Function, Appearance and Operation of an Object  (Jerz's Writing Handouts)

Someone at USC requested permission to reprint this page in a course packet, but the URL for the request was for my now-defunct UWEC technical writing website. So I dusted it off and reformatted it to fit into my new site layout. I'm glad someone finds it useful.

Protect your Email address from Spam (unsolicited Email advertisements).

The Enkoder Form will encrypt your Email address and convert the result to a self evaluating JavaScript, hiding it from Email-harvesting robots which crawl the web looking for exposed addresses. Your address will be displayed correctly by web-browsers, but will be virtually indecipherable to Email harvesting robots. --Hiveware E-Mail Enkoder (Hiveware)

Software suggested by oldtimey, whose secret identity is safe with me.

The Hivelogic Narrative is unusual because it is a weblog written in the second person:

You have no car.

Well, technically speaking, you do have a car, except your wife is driving it.

Is the Hivekeeper an interactive fiction fan? Google turns up an example of a few posts, but no survey of second-person blogs.

I said I didn't feel like blogging today, but this picture pretty much captures my mood:

--Yahoo's Idea of 'Entertainment' (Yahoo! News)

This photo rather indelicately appears in Yahoo's "Entertainment" section, as part of a profile of Edward Teller (inventor of the hydrogen bomb).

As a kid growing up in the 80s, when Russia was still the "Evil Empire," I often had nightmares of seeing the mushroom cloud rising above the trees in my backyard, at my school, etc. I decorated my textbooks with mushroom clouds rising in the background of every picture. That image actually stayed with me through college.

Skyscrapers in general, and the twin towers of the World Trade Center in particular, symbolize, for many writers, either prideful arrogance, or a new technological beauty. This site attempts to survey what has already been written on this topic. --World Trade Center: Literary and Cultural Reflections

I first put this page up on the afternoon of 11 Sep 2001.

I had already started blogging this entry when the bells started ringing outside my office window... Seton Hill University is marking the 2nd year anniversary of the moment of the first attack.

Update: The bells for the attack on the second tower just rang. I don't feel much like blogging anymore today. Here's a good timeline from CNN.

Jill/txt describes Beadgee

At first you see a collection of gizmos, each connected to a rhyme. Choose a gizmo and explode it into its separate pieces and a dot will start to dance along the words of the rhyme attached to it, just as a nun runs her fingers slowly along the beads on her rosary as she prays. Click a piece of the gizmo and it appears in your building area, bringing with it the word that the dot had reached when you clicked. Choose another piece, and another, and soon you'll have made both a new gizmo and a new sentence built from the pieces you took apart.

--Beadgee (Tamar Schori)

The links are down for the moment, but I'm blogging this so I remember it and try it later.

Big Idea Productions, makers of the best-selling VeggieTales video series, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Tuesday, as part of a deal to sell the financially troubled company. | Big Idea has agreed to sell its assets?including copyrights to Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber and other VeggieTales characters?to Classic Media LLC, which owns or manages media properties such as "Rocky and Bullwinkle," "Lassie," "The Lone Ranger" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer." --VeggieTales Creators File for Bankruptcy (Christianity Today)

I put this under "cyberculture" because the characters are computer-generated. Apparently the buyers do plan to keep the characters alive, but the creators will be employees now instead of owners.

The very idea of giving up perfect control over how and whether content is re-used is treason among insiders. But as the BBC understands, it does not live in Disney World. And in the course of its internal review an obvious question has become increasingly pressing: if the BBC could make its archive available cheaply, what reason is there for keeping it from the people who have already paid for it? Moreover, such access would increase the BBC’s chances of selling content commercially and make it more likely that the technology to cultivate this content (computers) will be more eagerly bought. -- Lawrence Lessig --Lawrence Lessig: The BBC's lessons for America (Financial Times)

Reflection on the BBC's decision to open its entire archive up to the public. This makes sense, because the British public has already paid for the content through high taxes and licenses for television sets. But it is the exact opposite of what Hollywood wants to do.

Fantasy stories of elves, dragons, and other denizens of faerie who intersect with the gritty streets of today's cities. --Elfpunk/Urban Fantasy [List of Books] (Readers Advice)

Elfpunk, modeled on "cyberpunk."

Amazing... I asked my journalism students to submit a report on a modern-day crime committed by a well-known fictional character, and the example I gave was from nursery rhymes, though some students chose fantasy/fairy tale settings. (My goal was first for them to have a little fun, and second to have some practice texts to work with later in the term when we talk about the rules for reporting on crime without violating the rights of victims or suspects.) I didn't realize that the genre actually has a name.

Thanks, Nick, for giving me yet another reason to lie awake and worry at night.

Update: If you're following the SF/Fantasy thread, I've added an update to my original Spider Robinson post.

Ex-New York Times reporter Jayson Blair has agreed to write a memoir about his life... Los Angeles-based New Millennium Press has agreed to publish the book, to be called "Burning Down My Master's House: My Life and the New York Times," sources said. | A contract in the six-figure range could be signed as early as today for a book expected to hit newsstands in spring 2004. --Keith J. Kelly -- A Blair Rewrite (NY Post)

Jayson Blair is the reporter whose fabricated stories caused a scandal and a personnel shakedown at the [now not quite so] esteemed New York Times. Was it P.T. Barnum who said that nobody went broke underestimating the taste of the American public? The reporter notes, "The move to give Blair a lucrative six-figure deal is sure to rankle some journalistic purists." Consider me rankled.

Thanks for the tip, Mike (who knows "sick" when he sees it).

"Bloom County," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987, appeared in nearly 1,300 newspapers via WPWG before ending in 1989. Its successor strip, the Sunday-only "Outland," ran in about 225 papers before ending in 1995....Shearer said Breathed has made great artistic use of the half page. "It's absolutely breathtaking," he said. Newspaper editors are being shown "Opus," but are not alllowed to keep copies of it. "We're trying to keep it off the Internet," explained Shearer. "The one place and the only place to see 'Opus' will be in newspapers. This is a tremendous opportunity to increase circulation." --Breathed Returning to Newspapers (Editor and Publisher)

Doonesbury is still pushing the boundaries of Sunday-morning taste... but I don't think that strip has the cross-generational appeal that the Far Side, Bloom County, and Calvin and Hobbes had. Is there a comic strip today that has that kind of cultural staying power? Or is the renaissance of animation on TV (Simpsons, South Park, etc.) taking over the role that newspaper comics used to fulfill?

By the way... the story was broken by The Washington Post, but I ain't a linkin' there no more if I can find alternatives (since most WashPost URLs expire).

Two Japanese girls shrieked and flapped, driving him away and giggling when he'd gone, swinging hands at each other in foreign conversation, and the woman beside them smiled as she listened, comprehending or not. The orange-haired goth wearing a black dress with a neckline that plunged farther than she may have realized jumped in her seat, fingers on either side of her skeletal black headphones, and pulled her booted feet from the floor in surprise when the bee buzzed her nose. --Steve Himmer --Strangers on a Train (OnePotMeal)

A very pleasant scene study, in which an annoying insect turns a bunch of commuters into a community. I'd prefer to call it "The Public Death of a Bee" (with apologies to Sue Monk Kidd).

Misconceptions about usability's expense, the time it involves, and its creative impact prevent companies from getting crucial user data, as does the erroneous belief that existing customer-feedback methods are a valid driver for interface design.... Market research methods such as focus groups and customer satisfaction surveys are great at researching your positioning or which messages to choose for an advertising campaign. They are not good at deciding user interface questions -- in fact, they're often misleading. | When a group of people is sitting around a comfortable table munching snacks, they're easily wowed by demos of a website's fancy features and multimedia design elements. Get those people to sit alone at a computer, and they're likely to leave the same website in short order. --Jakob Nielsen --Misconceptions About Usability (Alertbox)

Jakob is two-for-two in my book... his last column ("Usability 101) was also a retrenching and a return to basics. He'll never change the opinions of the uber-designers who despise him, but by continuing to provide a clear, easily linkable, not-too-geeky message, he'll reach people who haven't already been touched by the "design it becuase it looks cool" bug.

Who Cares About Andy Roddick -- So today I read a quick story about Andy Roddick. He just won the U.S. Open. I did a search for him on Google to learn more, and I found his official web site. Fine. No problem. Then I clicked on a link to read about his U.S. Open victory and I'm told that "You have reached a Members Only area" -- say what? Are you kidding me? Why the &$%^#*! would I register for this site? Whatever. I'm not going to spend any more time at Andy's site. What a complete waste of my time. --John S. Rhodes --Who Cares About Andy Roddick (WebWord)

From one of the comments:

Well, there is a Netiqette rule that whoever comes first across a site that requires 'free' registration, will create a 'guest account' using 'username' and 'password' as the username/password combination

Locking content behind doors will cause a few people to pay for it, but most people will probably give up and look elsewhere for free stuff -- and there goes your audience (and your potential future customers). Often, the value of any particular online document is not worth the cost in time and loss of privacy. What will Andy Roddick do with his knowledge of my e-mail address, gender, and birthday? Send me a blue e-card to help me celebrate my 35th next month?

I've been fretting and procrastinating over another definition I'm writing for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, you see, this one's on cyberpunk (the genre) and I've never published a thing on cyberpunk. -- Jill Walker --Definition: Cyberpunk (jill/txt)

Jill is taking comments on the draft of her definition of cyberpunk. Neal Stephenson says that cyberpunk is dead. Spider Robinson recently said that SF is in decline because young people are no longer excited about space and science -- they're already living in the future.

Controversial film-maker Leni Riefenstahl, who made the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will, has died aged 101. | Riefenstahl became a favourite of German dictator Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, making films for his fascist regime. | Her most famous work was Triumph of the Will, a propaganda film showing a Nazi rally in Nuremberg in 1934. --The Beeb --Film-maker Leni Riefenstahl Dies (BBC)

Riefenstahl's epic documentaries heavily influenced the genre, though her association with Hitler seems to have hurt her ability to get film work after the war. She was never a member of the Nazi party, and repeatedly insisted that her work honestly told the truth as it appeared to her in the 1930s.

Three short steps into the New Millennium, written SF is paradoxically in sharp decline. .... And the reason is depressingly clear: Those few readers who haven't defected to Tolkienesque fantasy cling only to Star Trek, Star Wars, and other Sci Fi franchises. | Incredibly, young people no longer find the real future exciting. They no longer find science admirable. They no longer instinctively lust to go to space. --Spider Robinson --Forward, into the Past (Globe and Mail)

Via Slashdot and KairosNews.

Update: Torill responds to Spider Robinson: "Personally, I'd rather have a hero who decided to try and find out what the problem is and do something about it, than a hero that builds more fantastic technology to solve it."

While there can be plenty of bad SF that centers around the creation of/response to technology, isn't there also plenty of bad fantasy that centers around The Chosen One who must use a Gift undo Evil Magic? Torill, help me understand... how is technology in SF intrinsically different from magic in fantasy?

Update: 11 Sep. Torill responds. Thanks, Torill.

"If people can confess on Oprah, Phil and Geraldo, I don't see why they can't confess right here on Eighth Avenue." So said Father Anthony Joseph, a Dominican priest from San Bernadino who peddled a confessional booth mounted on the back of a tricycle to the site of the Democratic National Convention in New York City during July of 1992.
--Portofess (JoeySkaggs.com)

"Father Anthony Joseph" is actually hoaxter Joey Skaggs, who has been tricking too-lazy-to-check-sources reporters into covering too-good-to-be-true stories for thirty years. Skaggs writes:

In the back of my mind, I keep thinking about the Jason Blair/New York Times folly and how the Times, with all its self-examination and hypocritical spin failed to admit that news rooms would be emptied if every journalist who had ever stretched the truth, took something out of context, embellished a quote or contrived a story admitted to it.

In December, 1990, Galileo began its “Earth-1” maneuver: the first Earth flyby. This happened to coincide with the buildup to the first Gulf War. nasa had to inform the North American Aerospace Defense Command that the blip that would appear on its radar screens on December 8th—an incredibly fast-moving object that might well seem to originate from the Middle East—was not an enemy missile but a robotic spacecraft coming from Venus. -- Michael Benson --What Galileo Saw (New Yorker)

NASA can use a booster story like this, especially due to the critical reception of the findings of the Columbia investigation. There are some sad notes in this story, like the fate of Randy Tufts's Europa explorer.

If you’re a freelancer, your online portfolio is your life. If you work for the man, it’s a great resource for that next job promotion, working with the design firm across the street. In either case, it is imperative that you create a website of value and visual interest. The part that most visual designers forget, however, is that the web is primarily a content-driven medium. For a well-rounded online portfolio, you’ll have to take your hand away from the mouse and start typing. --Bryan Zmijewski --Words Speak Louder than Pictures (ZURBviews)

In the past I've ranted about crazy advice designed to flatter clueless designers who can't comprehend the textual nature of the Internet, so it's only fair that I should blog a designer who knows what's what. Zmijewski is a breath of fresh air. He offers great advice for young designers working on online portfolios.

But just think of how much talent and intelligence we waste, simply because our educational system isn't particularly interested in motivating and challenging our most gifted students. | Most of Michael's classmates from the alternative high school, even the highly gifted ones, did not go on to earn college degrees. In fact, most of them are stuck in dead-end jobs where they make barely more than the minimum wage, just enough to supply their beer and marijuana habits. --Tina Blue's guest commentary. --We Don' Need No Stinkin' Gifted Programs!  (The Irascible Professor)

Don't miss this provocative statement, from the Irascible Professor's end notes:

The IP wonders if the decline in programs for gifted and talented children in our public schools stems from the fact that far too many of our public school teachers are drawn from the bottom third of the academic talent pool in our colleges and universities.

I had never heard that before. The statement would have more effect on me if it were cited.

The automated essay scoring engine behind Criterion, called e-rater, has been used to score more than 1.5 million essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, in tandem with human readers. The machine score and the human score are in agreement 97 percent to 98 percent of the time. --For Student Essayists, an Automated Grader (NY Times)

Last fall, the Criteria people contacted me and asked me to participate in a test. I never got to look at the algorithm, because the interface was so buggy -- about a third of the students reported some problem, including their text window blanking out when they used the spell-check or dictionary. The person running the test admitted (via e-mail) that they were having big problems, and that the other tests they had run weren't showing much correlation between the human-assigned and computer-assigned scores.

I was supposed to mark the papers and submit the scores to Criteria, which makes perfect sense, but quite frankly the students were so stressed by the experience that I had to tell them midway through that the assignment wouldn't count as a grade. Upon hearing that, some students stopped taking the assignment seriously. Furthermore, once I realized that the Criteria system was recording my students' real names in its internal database, I didn't like the idea of telling the company what grades my students were getting -- that would be a violation of the students' privacy. And, since so many students reported problems with the interface, the assignment wasn't really worth my time to evaluate -- I just treated it as one of the many "did they do it or not" exercises that compose the class participation score.

I can see this being a useful tool in huge lecture courses where it's impossible for one person to read all essays, in which case the tool can be used to normalize the scores (that is, to tell graders whether they have a tendency to give unusually high or low marks).

Link found via Slashdot, where at least one poster says that knowing an essay will be computer-scored provides a good rationalization for submitting comptuer-generated essays. Of course, the amount of effort that it would take to program essay-generation software would probably be a lot harder than the effort it would take just to write the damn essay, but a true hacker doesn't care about mundane stuff like that.

The professor of a huge art history course or a history or philosophy survey (where the point of the course is to communicate a lot of facts in the hopes that the students will be able to relate them and synthesize them during the course and perhaps build on them later in more advanced classes) might use a tool like this to help students practice working all the names and dates into coherent narratives. Although multiple-choice tests are easy to grade, they are a lot harder to create than a couple of short-essay prompts -- so I can imagine using such a tool to help me evaluate short quizzes that are designed to ensure that students have done the assigned readings.

Composition teachers and creative writing teachers do so much more than mark errors in grammar and punctuation. There's little danger that these teachers will turn to software like Criteria for any heavy-duty assignments.

I'd much rather see a tool that trains students to evaluate their peers' papers. Someday maybe I'll ask for a sabbatical to develop it as an open source projet, but until then I'll just dream.

I had been describing my reaction to the men who’d kill my daughter for the glory of Allah: give me the gun, show me the cave. The author of the piece suggested I would be perfect for the role of the WW2 black-out warden who scolds people for half-closed windowshades.

Why, it’s almost as if I thought we were at war, or something.

Obviously the guy had no kids. I’m not saying childless people can’t have a visceral reaction to terrorists, or that parenthood has imbued me with a special glowing Field of Righteousness - but until you have children you can’t quite realize what you’d do to defend them, because the emotion comes from a place you didn’t know too much about. The weeks after 9/11 we all thought that we were in for more of this - more planes, more bombs, and come the winter, Smallpox. I would jerk awake from nightmares where Gnat had the pox. You do everything you can to keep them safe - then this.

-- James Lileks --Just Took a Break [Blasting a MeFi Troll] (Lileks/Bleat)

I saw this Lileks column working its way through Blogdex. It started with a rant against Sony products. I just this afternoon got a business card from a Sony saleswoman who was also volunteering at St. Emma Monastery, so I was feeling a little conflicted. Could a woman who volunteers at a monastery actually sell crappy products?

I was about to skip blogging this one, but then Lileks got around to his main point: some poser on MetaFilter tried to pick on Lileks, and Lileks is firing back with both barrels. The troller wasn't even worth a preliminary fisking -- Lileks just blasted off on his own trajectory. Masterfully done -- Lileks knows how to channel his rage into his pen. As a father, I can't disagree with a word he writes here.

Yet this rage is exactly the rage that sets generations of Arabs and Jews against one another -- exactly the kind of tribal rage that terrorist groups draw upon when they recruit angry young men to fight their holy battles.

Headless Heroes, Car-crash Residue and Styrofoam Peanuts

As part of Seton Hill University's "Labor of Love" (a day of community action and volunteerism), about 150 people showed up on campus for breakfast, a pep rally and the send-off. Some went to a food back, a mom's shelter, and various other sites (some of them on campus, which seems to defeat the purpose of the event, but I digress).

I ended up with a big trash bag on the highway outside St. Emma Monastery. What did I pick up?

• Mangled action figures. Torsos. Limbs. Little plastic backpacks. I can hear a little boy crying, and I can hear his exasperated father saying, "If you'd listened to me when I told you not to hold your toys out the window, you wouldn't be crying now."
• Auto-accident debris. The cap from a flare. Bits of red and yellow reflectors. Bits of chrome and rubber. Whoever got into the accident was probably upset, possibly injured, and certainly distracted. Once I was bringing a bag of recyclables across the street when an inattentive driver smashed into my bag and then sent me up over the hood and into the next lane. I wasn't hurt, but the mall rent-a-cop made me pick up all the glass. I see a teenager racing home to beat curfew and a trucker on a two-week cross-country haul; I see a fender-bender, or worse; and I see the stunned look of someone with more important things to think about than picking up trash.
• Scores of styrofoam peanuts. I picture someone enjoying a new mail-order MP3 player, or a silver picture frame from Aunt Begonia. I picture that someone rolling down the window, holding the box lid closed so the peanuts won't blow back into the car, and then letting go. With each peanut I pick up, I say a prayer for the stupid little sh*t.

Recall is a search engine at the Internet Archive that indexes the text of over 11 Billion pages. The archive has pages dating way back to 1996 through the present day. --'Recall' Search Engine (Internet Archive)

The engine is in beta. I tried typing in a quoted two-word query, but the results came back as if I had typed two separate words.

Naked and empty-handed, I ran back to the forest in search of my body. As I approached my corpse, I was attacked by a half-dozen zombies. An hour later, after being continually slaughtered, I decided to call it a night. -- Aaron Delwiche --Warning: Do not follow strangers into Kithicor forest at night.  (Aaron Delwiche's Journal)

Delwiche taught "Ethnography of Online Role-Playing Games" at the University of Washington last spring.

Shopping for Digital Cameras

A communications faculty member suggested that the humanities division purchase a bunch of inexpensive digital cameras for students to check out. We're thinking of buying 5 or 6 cameras in the 2 megapixel range. Obviously we want the students to be able to use the cameras with a minimum of fuss, so they won't be distracted or frustrated (after all, we won't be grading the quality of the pictures, as we would if we were teaching a photography course). If anybody has suggestions, I'd welcome them.

(Contact me.)

Writing flash regularly -- sometimes several a day -- has taught me how to edit myself more closely than I've ever been able to -- and it's really got me in a new habit of getting the most juice out of verbs. I also am learning to really appreciate the art of indirect suggestion. I'm really proud of the stories I've written under 50 words that still "work." Those are hard as hell to pull off. -- Mike Arnzen --On Writing Flash Fiction: An Interview with Michael A. Arnzen  (FlashFictionFlash)

...an interactive tutorial on evaluating the quality of Internet resources.
--Welcome to Internet Detective (Social Science Information Gateway)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

The Social Science Information Gateway uses "SOSIG" as its logo. That's not quite an acronym... what does the "O" stand for?

Java and .NET take vastly different approaches to development, said John Rymer, a vice president with Forrester Research. Java's philosophy of development is to expose low-level system interfaces to give developers greater control. Microsoft simplifies the development process; the developer has less control -- but the tools are easier to use. -- Vincent Ryan --Is Java Finished? (News Factor)

Update: This blog has set off Will's FUD-sensors:

I read the article you posted on your blog. I don't have time to detail all the innacuracies, but this is my favorite: ".NET's ease of use and lower licensing costs also will be a draw." Lower licensing costs?!? How is microsoft offering lower licensing costs than "free"? They weren't giving away their software the last time I checked.

Oh, good... now I can live in denial for a little while longer.

Update: Will responds again:

And you may be thinking to yourself "What if java/jsp goes away? Will I have learned all this stuff for nothing?" I say - it's not going to go away. Even if microsoft gains a decent market share in the dynamic web page market, I don't see them giving away their server software any time soon. Which means java/jsp will still be your best choice, because it's free. In addition, I would like to point out that Sun is not the only company backing java. IBM also puts a lot of support into java (the free IDE you're using, Eclipse, is actually made by IBM). And Oracle is a big backer of java as well.

I'm sure in 20 to 30 years (just like C++), java will be outdated by some new programming language/paradigm that probably doesn't even exist now. But it's still the longest lastest technology that you could learn today.

Update, 06 Sep: Will sends a link to "blah blah blah," whose author tells technological doomsayers "stfu."

Thanks, Will.

just finished a draft of an encyclopedia entry about "artificial intelligence." It's for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and so, of course, it deals with how AI relates to narrative. Following Jill's example, I have posted this draft in case anyone has comments on who I might have slighted, how I might have misrepresented AI, etc.... --Nick Montfort --Nick Montfort on Artificial Intelligence (Grand Text Auto)

For those with time to notice, blogs are also a great cheap farm system for talent. You've got tens of thousands of potential columnists writing for free, fueled by passion, operating in a free market where the cream rises quickly. | Best of all, perhaps, the phenomenon is simply entertaining. When do you last recall reading some writer and thinking "damn, he sure looks like he's having fun"? It's what buttoned-down reporters thought of their long-haired brethren back in the 1960s. The 2003 version may not be so immediately identifiable on sight — and that may be the most promising development of all. -- Matt Welch --Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld (Columbia Journalism Review)

Excellent overview of weblogs from the perspective of a journalist. Welch laments that the alternative weekly newspapers, once famous for their offbeat egalitarianism, have become comformist and stodgy. But he also warns,

[A]lmost every criticism about blogs is valid - they often are filled with cheap shots, bad spelling, the worst kind of confirmation bias, and an extremely off-putting sense of self-worth (one that this article will do nothing to alleviate).

In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us - through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear. -- Tom Coates responds to Clay Shirky's Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of Publishing. --(Weblogs and) The Mass Amateurization of (Nearly) Everything (Plastic Bag)

People tend to make the United States Superman. They think the United States is all-powerful, the bastion of freedom, democracy, strength.

They thought that the United States would come in and with superhuman power overnight transform Baghdad into New York and Mosul into San Francisco.

It is traumatic to realize that America is not God and is very, very human.

--Ken Joseph Jr. --Commentary: Letter from Baghdad (WashTimes)

There are the always-in-fashion temptresses -- DeepThroat, Hooker, FunLove, Love Letter, NakedWife, Paradise -- and the ones that seem to refer to the person who created the worm: Annoying, Brat, Coma, Faker, Glitch, SadHound, Slacker, Small, TheThing and Yo Momma.

And there are also names that seem to make no sense at all: Gokar, Klez, Nimda, Welyah, Yaha.

A name is expected to have some relation to the capabilities or concept behind the virus, but antivirus researchers admit that more than a few viruses have been named in a rather whimsical fashion. -- Michelle Delio --Viruses, Worms: What's in a Name?  (Wired)

Via blacklily8 on KairosNews.

MOther of God i need freaking cliff notes for peace like a river please someone help

i love felicia -- fava --Desperate for Study Guides (see comments) (12 Frogs)

From another comment: "J., do you get the sense that some teacher assigned Peace... as summer reading and a whole bunch of people blew it off?"

Sigh. The desperation and rage of these students who can't find online study guides is very sad to witness. I say bravo for whoever picked that book -- if there aren't ready-made study guides online, it might get more people to think about what they are reading. In the real world, you will face problems whose solutions aren't written in the back of the book, or carefully outlined in study guides. One of those real-world problems is how to get students excited about their education. Back In the Day, people only went to college because they wanted to... now that so many more people have opportunities to go on to higher education, it seems that some are just coasting.

I count myself very fortunate here at Seton Hill, since my journalism courses are full of people who like writing (that wasn't the case with the technical writing courses I used to teach at UWEC).

I was the type who called my professors over the summer and asked what books I should read to get a head start on the class. I read Milton's Paradise Lost one summer, and loved it.

The case of an Oklahoma teen who was charged with a felony for writing a violent short story about attacking his school has been dismissed by a judge who ruled that prosecutors failed to prove the teen actually intended to commit the act. --Kim Zetter --Teen's Felony Case Thrown Out  (Wired)

A turning point in the trial was when Brian's mother used Google to demonstrate that the first paragraph of the story Brian expanded into a military assault on the school was sample text supplied with a textbook for Adobe PageMaker.

I blogged a bit about the effect of juxtaposing Brian Robinson's mugshot and family snapshot from his website. Robinson now wants to go into journalism.

Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of "cut-and-paste" plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior trivial or not cheating at all. | Only 10 percent of students had acknowledged such cheating in a similar, but much smaller survey three years ago. --Sara Rimer

--A Campus Fad That's Being Copied: Internet Plagiarism (NY Times)

The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection

This year the incoming freshman class was asked to read Sue Monk Kidd's The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel set in the deep south during the summer of 1964. Faculty, staff, resident assistants, and anyone else who wanted to lead a discussion was given a free copy of the book and invited to participate. I don' t know whether the students were given free copies as well.

Today (whoops -- yesterday; it's after midnight as I blog this) I sat at a table with a few students I recognized and many I didn't. While some of the other freshman seminar teachers were taking attendance at the book discussion, I didn't -- I'd rather trust my students.

After spending a few minutes dragging comments out of my tablemates, I asked who had actually read the book. Everyone at the table pointed to one student, who admitted (confessed?) that yes, she had actually read the whole book -- though she didn't seem to understand what I was talking about when I mentioned "catholicism". The room was noisy, so it's possible she simply couldn't hear what I was saying; still, it kind of threw me for a loop when here we are at a Catholic school, one of the central images in the novel (besides bees, of course) is a picture of the Black Madonna, and the central characters have concocted for themselves a sort of folk Mary-worship that is pretty much a parody of what all good Southern Baptists are taught to fear from those scary, statue-worshiping papists.

The other students at my table had at least started the book, and most did contribute when asked... one even said her mother had a black nanny, which surprised me; all the students were from the midwest or northeast, so the Deep South setting of the novel didn't seem to resonate very strongly with them. Still, they all seemed intelligent and I liked the chance to get to know them. I did feel a little bummed when nobody from my breakout table contributed to the lively all-group discussion.

During that closing event some polite and well-spoken male students called the book "girly", resulting in some lively but good-natured gender friction. Since Seton Hill has only officially been a co-ed school for two years now, I'd rather see a book that emphasizes gender. And, while the book presented a cross-racial teen romance and presented white males as a pretty vicious and ugly lot, Lily (the protagonist) is so likable, and the novel presents such a hopeful image of female racial harmony, that I did think it was well worth reading and discussing.

I did find it hard to accept that the novel is supposed to have been written by a 14-year-old girl. Passages in which the first-person narrator refers to "snot and boogers" are appropriately adolescent, but other passages are clearly an adult woman reflecting on youth from a great distance. It didn't bother me too much, until the last chapter, which has passages written in the present tense (suggesting that Lily has just finished scribbling what I'm reading, not that the manuscript has been carefully constructed from memories and edited and crafted to perfection). Samuel Clemens uses much the same conceit in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, even though Huck is supposed to have been illiterate just a year before. Maybe that's just a convention of books with adolescent narrators.

"I have no idea how to make the plastic milk jug look gay," Bellisle said. "I don't want to make him a bottle of water, for obvious reasons. Maybe I'll use a soy-milk container when I draw the gay jug. Or maybe they'll let me switch him with the Chicano, this tin can here. I wasn't too pleased with the Chicano tin can to begin with, especially because my first instinct was to put tomatoes or beans on the can. Not because he's Chicano, but because he's a can."Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables (The Onion)

The Onion brilliantly satirizes political correctness... but beyond that, it also makes a painfully funny joke that goes beyond ridiculing racial hypersensitivity, and instead emphasizes the need for the very self-awareness lampooned in this short piece (I'm referring to the final quote about the thumbs-up soda can). [Update: Jim sends me a link to "How to do Deconstruction," which is of course what The Onion is doing.]

But I'm annoyed...

Has The Onion gone through a recent re-design by someone who doesn't understand web links? The URL for this story is http://www.theonion.com/current_news2.html, which means the content of this link is obviously going to change with the next issue. I've gotten used to the fact that The Onion gradually moves stories out of its archives in order to create a market for its books... and I've gotten used to the fact that Pathetic Geek Stories is nearly unfindable and unlinkable -- they want to force you to go through the far less interesting and far more conventional content in the AV Club. And now I've spent five minutes on the site looking for a link to this stupid ethnic anthropomorphism story, which is amusing, but really not worth that much effort.

I continue to think The Onion is hilarious and and important source of social commentary. The same issue of The Onion has a pretty humorous article on a mad scientist whose plans are thwarted by budget cuts. I've blogged a few of these over the years, but since the old links to The Onion all die, and this link will be dead in a week, I don't see much point in blogging it.

Oh, boo hoo, The Onion will be so crushed that Jerz isn't blogging it anymore. Okay. But I've seen plenty of websites that hide their permalinks out of ignorance (posting new contentent in a "current issue" directory that keeps changing, and only archiving that content when a new issue is created, thereby breaking any links that people have created). The Onion used to do its links right, and left its content online long enough that I felt it was worth blogging. Oh, well...

Update, 06 Sep: This is hard to belive. The file that used to be called "current_news2.html" has been renamed "previous_news2.html", and there is still no sign of this article in the permanent archives. I can only conclude that The Onion doesn't want any more permanent links to its articles.

The Enlightenment knew what to say about religions, all of them: "Écrasez l?infame!" In the 19th century, the progressive party believed that one of the reasons for European superiority over the benighted regions of Asia and Africa was the conquest of superstition. | Today, credulous doting on Islam is not just an expression of western self-hatred. On the face of it, Islam and the western left have nothing in common at all. But they do, in fact, something profoundly important. They share the common experience of defeat. Islamic terrorism is not a function of success but of failure. -- Geoffrey Wheatcroft --Two Years of Gibberish: The garbled utterances of the left after 9/11 merely flattered the arguments of warmongers. (Prospect)

Some gut-wrenching observations from the author of The Controversy of Zion.

I wish I had the answer. I don't, but I've taken some small steps of my own.

First, I will not open e-mail attachments, period, unless I know the item is coming beforehand or have extremely good reasons to believe it's not carrying an evil payload. If you want me to see a file such as a PDF document, post it on a Web site and let me know where to find it.

Second, I'm being more selective. I have several private e-mail addresses that I give out only to a small number of people for vital communications.

Third, I'm trying to get away from e-mail as much as possible in any event. My favorite way of communicating online is instant messaging.

Dan Gillmor --Spamming sleazebags ruining e-mail (SiliconValley.com)

We hear it echoed in recent debates over the ways professors spend their time. What do we do all that time when we're not pontificating? Surely it can't take all that time to write the lectures we deliver. Surely there can't be that many books in our fields worth reading. The only logical solution that some people can draw is that we must be goofing off, or, just as bad, doing what is promiscuously labeled as "research." That word conjures up images of mad scientists in the basement or nervous twits poring over something like an elaborate stamp collection in the attic. In either case, research is something antisocial, something detached from real education -- which, I take it, is envisioned as something like Robin Williams standing on the desks in The Dead Poets Society. -- Edward L. Ayers --What Does a Professor Do All Day, Anyway? (Inside UVA)

Via Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, who writes:

Ed’s one of the best around. The piece is ten years old, still well worth the read. For those who hate academics because we teach a couple of classes a week and spend the rest of the time working on our golf swing, Ed breaks it down hour by hour.