June 2004 Archive Page

Most Americans claim they don't believe what they read in newspapers or see on TV -- only a third say news organizations generally get the facts straight -- yet their opinions continue to be influenced by the media. Multiply this curious effect by the dozens of cable TV news shows, the hundreds of newspapers and perhaps thousands of websites and millions of blogs dedicated to disseminating news, and it offers great bounty for any media columnist. --Adam L. Penenberg --New Media's Age of Anxiety (Wired)

The reason most pre-1940 musicals are unrevivable is that their books tend to be both slapdash in literary quality and fanciful to the point of absurdity. It was only in the late 30’s that the songwriting team of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart began to emphasize dramatic plausibility, most notably in Pal Joey (1940). And it was not until Rodgers joined forces with Oscar Hammerstein II in 1943 to write Oklahoma! that the "book show," whose songs are integrated into a more or less realistic plot, became the norm. --Terry Teachout --Is the Musical Comedy Dead?  (Commentary Magazine)

I'd make a comment, but I can hear the pit orchestra is gearing up for a big dance number, so I'd better go.

Chunking | Forms | Frames | Fitts Law | Flash Usability | Guidelines & Principles | Link Rot | Liquid Design | PDF | ROI | Writing, Reading & Content | Articles & Related Links --Usability (The Net Place)

Great collection of links to practical online articles on each of the above subjects.

--No Train, No Gain

A great collection of short articles focusing on such topics as how to find an interesting story in a boring budget meeting, the basics of interviewing, and taking notes. For the first time this fall, students will be able to get credit for working for the student paper (of which I am the adviser). Blogging this so I can find it in the fall.

Let's say a mother finds an application to Duke University's Ph.D. program in English under her daughter's mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally's cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?

To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions. These "academic exit counselors" could foster the kind of loving, supportive environments that "academic captives" need to return to a normal life. --"Thomas H. Benton"

--Is Graduate School a Cult? (Chronicle)

I had a pretty good experience in grad school, though it was research assistantships on humanities computing projects that made me want to get out of bed each morning, not really the classes or the solitary work on my dissertation (a literary and theatre-history examination of the theme of technology in American drama).

She was witty, sexually adventurous and intimate with her readers, sharing photos of her travels and exchanging private e-mails and instant messages with fans. She posted messages to other people's Web logs and created personal profiles at social networking sites. Many readers felt deeply connected to her.

Then, three weeks ago, the "Plain Layne" Web log mysteriously disappeared from the Internet, sending her fans into a tizzy.

Now the person behind Layne has come forward and admitted that it was all an elaborate hoax. --Michael Bazeley --Net fans jolted by man's blog hoax (Twin Cities Pioneer Press)

The story of John Henry, told mostly through ballads and work songs, traveled from coast to coast as the railroads drove west during the 19th Century. And in time, it has become timeless, spanning a century of generations with versions ranging from prisoners recorded at Mississippi's Parchman Farm in the late 1940s to present-day folk heroes. --Carlene Hempel --John Henry: The Man - Facts, Fiction and Themes (ibiblio)

I've got a John Henry project I've been sitting on for several years... I'm planning to dig it out soon. This site has a good biography (which actually cites the online abstract of a talk I gave at the MLA years ago, though that was 3 websites ago.)

Update. 29 Jun: A few other nuggets: NPR (good bibliography), Garst (recent research claims Alabama, not West Virginia, as source of the legend).

Those who complain loudly about how many jobs have been “exported” to other countries because of international free trade totally ignore all the jobs that have been imported to the American economy because of that same free trade. Siemens alone employs tens of thousands of American workers, and Toyota has already produced its ten millionth car in the United States. --Thomas Sowell --Low Taxes Do What? (Hoover Digest)

I'd never considered this perspective before. Here's another fascinating quote, an attempt to counter the meme that Regan cut taxes for the rich and soaked the poor, leading to defecit spending:

What Reagan’s “tax cuts for the rich” actually cut were the tax rates per dollar of income. Out of rising incomes, the country as a whole—including the rich—paid more total taxes than ever before.

As Sowell puts it, "Simple stuff like this is not very exciting for economists, and there is no payoff in one’s professional career for clarifying such things for the general public." That kind of explanation won't fit on a bumper sticker as easily as something designed to get you in the gut, like "AIDS: The Reagan Vietnam."

Sadly, I think that regardless of their political persuasion, this topic would probably put the average freshman comp student to sleep, so I won't bother Googling for a good counter-opinion to present as a pair of readings. Someday maybe I'll teach an upper-level rhetoric course...

Spirit has begun to negotiate her way up into the Columbia Hills where she has encountered a strange rock called Pot of God that she found contains hematite, something that may well lead to the discovery of past water there. On the other side of the planet, Opportunity has continued her descent into Endurance Crater and is now investigating some intriguing rock layers that are already expanding the water story at Meridiani Planum. A.J.S. Rayl --Spirit Finds Hematite; Opportunity Discovers Signs of More Water (The Planetary Society)

That should be "Pot of Gold," methinks. In other, completely unrelated news about pot...

On his way into District Justice Mark Bilik's office, Harris, wearing a "Flamehead USA" T-shirt, told reporters "Yes, I did," when asked if he set the fire. --Jason Lesher --Latrobe men admit setting apartment building fire (Tribune Review)

Note to self... if ever going anywhere near someone involved in the investigation of an arson case, change out of "Flamehead USA" T-shirt before speaking to the media.

A Canadian man, driving a car packed with weapons and ammunition, was intent on killing as many people as possible in a Toronto neighbourhood but gave up the plan at the last minute when he encountered a friendly dog, police say.

--Puppy prevents Canadian killing spree (ABC (Australia))

There... do you see how nice Canadians are? And the puppy didn't even need a little keg of Molson strapped around its neck.

I readily admit that my accomplishment has no practical social purpose or business application. But as a story that spans 18 years from Hoey's palindrome to mine, it has a moral about how it is becoming easier to do big things. Hoey is an excellent computer scientist, but he said he spent days writing a disk-based B-tree package for his program. I was saved all this, because a dictionary now fits in main memory and I could use straightforward binary search. --Peter Norvig --A Man, a Plan, a Pointless(?) Program (Google Blog)

Norvig used the power of Google to assemble the world's longest palindrome (a text that makes the same words backwards and forwards, such as "Madam, I'm Adam.").

Okay, but Norvig's palindrome is pretty much a list of words, not a narrative. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the palindrome story written by Nick Montfort and William Gillespe is worth checking out, even if it's much shorter.

U.S. investigators said on Wednesday they had arrested an America Online employee and a Las Vegas marketer for stealing the Internet provider's customer list and selling it to a purveyor of "spam" e-mail. --Andy Sullivan --US Charges AOL Worker Sold Customer List for Spam (AP|MyWay)

Retro video gaming has become something of a pop culture phenomenon lately, with video game music and themes featured in television commercials for Hummer and Saturn sport utility vehicles. A top 20 R&B hit, "Game Over (Flip)" by Lil' Flip features sound effects from "Pac-Man."

It's not just nostalgia that's fueling retro video interest, says O'Hara. He thinks the old games were simply more fun to play: "There's a phrase that's used a lot in marketing - 'easy to learn, hard to master' - that describes most classic video games." --Michael Felberbaum --Classic Video Games Make a Comeback (AP|MyWay)

The Queen has allowed herself to be the subject of the first royal hologram. --Queen's holograph 'makes me look lost in woods' (Telegraph)

Thanks for the offbeat suggestion, Rosemary.

blind users are finding that they are spending disproportionately more time sorting through their junk e-mail than their sighted colleagues. That's because sighted users can simply scan large batches of messages for that one important piece of mail, whereas blind users must listen to the subject line of each message before they know whether it's spam or not.

It's a process that has become so unbearable that some blind users say they are giving up on e-mail altogether. --Amit Asaravala --Blind Get Earful of Spam Daily  (Wired)

Chappelle's harshest words were addressed to those audience members who worship entertainers and athletes.

"Stop listening to celebrities," he said. "They do what they do for money - that's all. I don't even know why you're listening to me. I've done commercials for both Coke and Pepsi. Truth is, I can't even taste the difference, but Pepsi paid me last, so there it is."

Celebrity worship harms the object of affection as well, Chappelle said. "One day people love you more than they've ever loved anything in the world. And the next, you're in front of a courthouse dancing on top of a car." --Jim Carnes --Chappelle lets rude crowd have it  (Tribnet)

The 40-year-old male teacher handed the boy a box-cutter and paper and told him to write an apology in blood. --Japanese boy writes apology in blood (CNN)

Now that's harsh. Looks like the Reuters reporter did some independent checking of a story that appeared on local news... if not for that line, I'd wonder whether this was one of those "too strange to fact-check" hoaxes that often one finds slipping past editorial filters.

Thanks for the suggestion, Jim.

Tiny, even microscopic, cameras, deployed ubiquitously, should worry us in any number of ways. Individuals will lose even more of their privacy. Companies will find it difficult to maintain traditional notions of trade secrets. And governments will confront a world in which, to some extent, people will spy on the official snoops, not just the other way around.

Technology has already led to some of these changes in what for the most part are relatively small ways compared with what's coming.

How can we respond appropriately? --Dan Gillmor
--How do we adjust when cameras are everywhere? (Sillicon Valley)

How did Eats, Shoots & Leaves land on the best-seller list? I'd like to think it reveals a late-blooming hunger for self-improvement by the ignorant masses. Somehow, though, I doubt it. Truss certainly doesn't seem to be addressing such people as her readers. "What happened to punctuation?" she wails. "Why is it so disregarded when it is self-evidently so useful in preventing enormous mix-ups?" This isn't what Henry Higgins would say to Eliza Doolittle. It's what Higgins would say to Col. Pickering, his linguist sidekick. Truss wants you to read her book not to learn the rules of punctuation but to join her in bewailing, as you review these rules, the sorry ignorance of those who don't know them. It's to feel superior, and smug, and, well, almost -- English. --Timothy Noah --Reads, Chortles, & Smirks: Why nobody's learning anything from Lynne  (Slate)

I've got this one on back order at the local library. I'm thinking of using it in "Intro to Literary Studies" next spring -- the course is a kind of sampler of the flavors of English major we offer (lit, creative writing, & journalism) and I'm trying to find a way to more nonfiction and grammar into the course.

Full disclosure: I played Col. Pickering in high school, and it was mostly the reference to him that made me want to blog this.

I would guess that people are either buying the book to give to friends who like writing, or they are buying the book precisely because they want to be spoken to as if they know this stuff already. If the book really is that basic, then maybe it's designed to flatter people who pick it up and tsk-tsk at all the examples of mistakes.

Blogs and E-Mail DownJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Grr... blogs.setonhill.edu is down again. I noticed it while in the middle of drafting an e-mail message, and the university e-mail also went down. Grr.

The U.S. Army, riding the success of its action video game America's Army, has set up a video-game studio with industry veterans to write other kinds of software to simulate training for a variety of armed forces and government projects. --John Gaudiosi --Army Sets Up Video-Game Studio  (Wired)

Flying a foam composite rocket ship powered by laughing gas and burning rubber, Mike Melvill took off faster than a bullet over a ramshackle airport in the desert Monday and overcame serious malfunctions to become the first astronaut to reach space in a mission entirely funded by private entrepreneurs. --William Booth --Starship Private Enterprise: Rocket Plane Becomes First Civilian Craft to Reach Space  (WashPost (registration, will expire))

I don't like linking to The Washington Post anymore, since the site requires registrations and the links expire, but this is good writing, from the headline on.

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery. --Christopher Hitchens --Unfairenheit 9/11: The lies of Michael Moore (Slate)

Woah... Hitchens is known as one of the few to attack pop-culture saints such as Bob Hope and even Mother Teresa, so it can't be easy to dismiss his attack on Moore. He's not a conservative who's annoyed that Moore has trumped Rush Limbaugh-style politics-as-entertainment by using images (which speak directly to our emotions, as opposed to words, which at least sometimes engage our minds).

Hitchens, who has made a few documentaries himself, sounds a bit bitter in the following quote, but I think it's an important perspective to consider:

[A] documentary must have a "POV" or point of view and that it must also impose a narrative line. But if you leave out absolutely everything that might give your "narrative" a problem and throw in any old rubbish that might support it, and you don't even care that one bit of that rubbish flatly contradicts the next bit, and you give no chance to those who might differ, then you have betrayed your craft. If you flatter and fawn upon your potential audience, I might add, you are patronizing them and insulting them.

Materials that could jump-start organic evolution have shown up in interstellar dust clouds and dusty planet-forming discs around many stars. These findings fuel an increasingly strong suspicion that the raw material of planet Earth was primed for life. --Robert C. Cowen
--Outer space: not so lifeless after all (CS Monitor)

"There's a silence in the family," says a newsreader, "because they're glued to the box".

An arts producer tells me that sleeping habits have changed: "Now people stay up late to watch their favourite programmes".

Another explains how the main family room pre-TV would have seats facing inwards to ease conversation with family and friends or to face the altar, but now television households re-arrange their rooms to the fount of visual stimuli. --Susie Emmet --Bhutan gives TV cautious embrace (BBC)

A great quote from "the maroon-robed lama":

Change is not to be feared", he says calmly, "without choice you cannot choose the right path".

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

Blogging is dead, long live blogging. I suspect that over the next few years we will see a lot of calls suggesting that blogging has died, and I suspect that in a sense they will be right. The act of keeping a "Weblog" as a separate entity will become something of an anachronism. The broader world of collaborative Web publishing will continue to grow and converge with other technologies, including IM and e-mail. Imagine asking someone today if they are an "e-mailer." That question made sense, among a certain group, 15 years ago, when you weren't sure if someone had e-mail or not. I have a feeling that the production of public media -- whether in the form of Weblogs, wikis, collaboratively filtered lifelogs, or some form that I am too shortsighted to predict -- will be the moving force of a new era. --Alex Halavais participates in an e-mail interview by Mark Glaser
--Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication (Online Journalism Review)

Only getting around to blogging this now.

The genre of "e-mail questions to a bunch of people and compile their answers" certainly speeds up the process of getting the news out, but of course it only works when the people you interview want to talk about their subject.

Today Juneteenth commemorates African American freedom and emphasizes education and achievement. It is a day, a week, and in some areas a month marked with celebrations, guest speakers, picnics and family gatherings. It is a time for reflection and rejoicing. It is a time for assessment, self-improvement and for planning the future. --Juneteenth

Happy Juneteenth.

Weblogs, Comments, and Law (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

IANAL ("I am not a lawyer"), but here are some links I found interesting.

While a newspaper has a responsibility to check the accuracy of letters to the editor, if person A were to start a cafe, and person B walked into the cafe and made statements that the court deemed libelous, it doesn't seem likely that person A should be held responsible.

If Person A rents a hall, calls a public town meeting and invites people to walk up to a microphone to say whatever they like, and Person B makes statements that a court deems libelous, would person A be legally responsible for any offense committed by person B?

Last year, in Wired, the article "Bloggers Gain Libel Protection" described a ruling involving the re-use, in electronic form, of information taken from elsewhere. Thus, if a blogger were to quote an excerpt from someplace else, and the author of that excerpt was charged with libel, then according to this ruling, the blogger would not be responsible. Let the reader beware -- the title of the Wired article mentions blogs, but the case actually centered around an e-mail.

I missed it when I blogged the original article, but Jack Balkin quickly put it into perspective:

This does not mean that bloggers are immune from libels they themselves write. It means that they are immune from (for example) libels published in their comments section (if they have one) because these comments are written by other people and the blogger is merely providing a space for them to be published. Congress wanted to treat operators of chatrooms and other interactive computer services differently from letters to the editor columns in a local newspaper.

Balkin also notes that corrections, clarifications, and retractions are part of the weblog culture, in ways that traditional print journalism doesn't provide.

If that's so, when blogger A posts an inaccurate statement, visitors to blogger A's website can publish corrections -- by commenting on the post (and thus adding their text to the main text), or perhaps simply by sending an e-mail. The technology and practice of weblogs makes it easy for bloggers to correct their mistakes or give space to opposing views. This built-in series of checks and balances is part of what makes the online media so exciting, from a "power to the people" perspective.

A 24-foot sailboat was raised Thursday from the murky depths of Monterey Harbor by divers who filled its hull with pingpong balls. --Kevin Howe --Sunken boat raised by pingpong balls (Monterey Herald)

We highlight U.S. prisoner abuse because the photos aren't too offensive to show. We downplay Saddam's abuse precisely because it's far worse -- so we can't use the photos. And that sets the stage for remarks like Sen. Ted Kennedy's claim that Saddam's torture chambers have reopened under "U.S. management." --Deborah Orin --Reporting for the Enemy (NY Post)

An extremely interesting argument. Two wrongs don't make a right, so if it's true that the US media are downplaying Saddam's tortures and hyping the US tortures, that doesn't make what the US did right. But it's still fascinating to consider, in terms of a media perspective, that the US torture was just outrageous enough to get coverage (after all, these photos don't document removing limbs or executions).

SHU Blogs Down

The SHU blogs are down. I exchanged three e-mails with the sysadmin yesterday, who described the problem as something minor, that a reboot would fix. I haven't heard back from him since yesterday afternoon and don't know what to say. Let's all keep our fingers crossed.

Update: The sysadmin writes,

Argh! The machine has hard errors on the boot drive, it turns out.

I believe I can get it booted, but it looks like I need to start planning a migration to a newer box.

What If... There Were No IF? An Alternative History of Games, sans Crowther's Colossal Cave (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

During a break in the Princeton video game conference a few months ago, David Thomas asked me, what would computer games be like today if Will Crowther hadn't created Colossal Cave Adventure? I pulled Nick Montfort into the brief discussion that followed, but then the next panel started, and the topic went onto the back burner.

Here is a possible alternative history of computer game design, based on the premise that Will Crowther never wrote his 1975 original.

For want of Adventure, the magic word XYZZY is lost. (Computer users around the world are forced to think of less-guessable passwords, and information technology is more secure.)

For want of Adventure, Zork was lost. (But now everyone uses a really cool spreadsheet called VisiCalc.)

For want of Zork, Roberta Williams does not create "The Mystery House."

For want of Adventure, Adventure International was lost.

For want of Adventure International, Ken Williams does not work briefly for Scott Adams.

For want of Ken and Roberta Williams, Sierra was lost. (A generation of youngsters don't bother nagging their parents to upgrade their video cards from CGA to SuperVGA; when an explosion at a factory in Japan cripples the world's supply of memory chips, about six people notice.)

For want of Sierra Online, Leisure Suit Larry was lost.

For want of Leisure Suit Larry, Grand Theft Auto was lost.

For want of Grand Theft Auto, Grand Text Auto was lost. (The creators choose the name "Rogues' Gallery" instead, because it got more votes than "The Pong Throng" or "VisiCalc User Forum.")

For want of the text adventure genre, the entire field of computer science seems lifeless and boring to a significant number of young men and women who briefly consider it in the late 70s and early 80s. They drop out in droves. The ones who don't end up running computers at financial institutions, but are eventually put out of work by high-school dropouts using VisiCalc.

For want of the text adventure genre, the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure genre is lost.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, scholars groping for a way to describe hypertext to their non-technical colleagues think harder and come up with a better metaphor, one which magically prevents the premature dismissal of hyperfiction, leading to its rapid acceptance into the literary canon.

For want of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books, a generation of youths watches more TV. Later, in college, these youths daydream during their hyperfiction survey courses, wondering how their life would have turned out if they had dropped out of high school like their stoner friends did.

Oh, and Dave Thomas has a scar, Nick Montfort has a beard, side-scrollers all scroll the opposite way, and all ships have funky spikes on their warp drive nacelles.

A bit more seriously, now...

I've read many anecdotes from programmers whose early experience with interactive fiction games turned them on to computers, so I do think that without text adventures, some of these people might not have considered careers in computing. While it's a meme that Adventure set the field of computer science back two weeks, I'd prefer to think that after everyone finished Zork, they went back to their jobs energized by what computers might be able to accomplish, and perhaps they shifted their expectations in such a way that might have affected the development of CS in positive ways.

Since the average computer user didn't have access to CRTs that displayed fancy graphics, and since a significant chunk of computing took place on printer terminals, I suppose that ASCII genres such as Rogue, and strategy games such as Wumpus and mainframe Trek would have attracted the attention of the amateur hackers and students who, after playing Adventure or Zork, tried their hand at creating their own amateur interactive fiction.

Hosting the wild speculation up to the next level...

Perhaps the players who lost countless hours playing interactive fiction would have instead spent more time getting their game fix at the arcade. If coin-op video arcade games developed a little faster, then perhaps users of personal computers wouldn't have been at all satisfied with the bleeps and blips that they saw on their home computers... maybe they would have been so disappointed by the offerings of home computer entertainment that they would have preferred dropping coins in the arcade, playing games that emulated familiar TV shows (however badly), to typing in lines of code from magazines in order to play games on their home computers. This might have delayed growth in the market for PC games, paving the way in the future for a direct transition of loyalty from the video arcade to the gaming platform.

They circle in front of the motion detector, the doors open, and the birds fly through and take lunch up to the kids that are nesting in the building. Then it's back to the door, buzz by the motion detector -- and fly through again to hunt for more food.

--Birds Learn to Operate Automatic Doors (WABC-New York)

Update: In Virginia, it was a bear.

In other news, dolphins evolve opposable thumbs.

The 363-foot-long behemoth has lain on its side in front of JSC since 1977, a favorite sight of tourists, but also a victim of the elements. --Apollo moon rocket to get face-lift (CNN)

The Houston Space Center was one of the places I visited on my honeymoon (10 years ago next month). If I recall correctly, there was a shuttle mission in progress. Very cool!

Rich, beautiful, coastal types are liberal precisely because their lives are so wonderful. They want to preserve their lives exactly as they are. If I were a rich movie star, I'd vote for peace and poverty relief. War and domestic insurrection are the greatest threats to their already-perfect lives?why mess with it? This rational fear of the peasantry is frequently misinterpreted as rich guilt, but that's not the case. They just want to pay off all the have-nots to keep them from storming their manors and impaling them on stakes.

Republican elites don't set off the spite glands in the same way, and it's not only because of a sinister right-wing propaganda machine. Take a look at a photo of the late billionaire Sam Walton, a dried-out Calvinist in a baseball cap and business suit, and you'll see why. If Republican billionaires enjoy their wealth, they sure as hell hide it well. As far as one can tell, Republican billionaires genuinely like working 18-hour days in offices. Their idea of having fun is a day on the golf green (a game as slow and frustrating as a day in the office) or attending conferences with other sleazy, cheerless Calvinist billionaires. If that's what all their wealth got them, let 'em have it?so says the spite bloc. --Mark Ames
--Spite! It Wins Votes! (NY Press)

Another of the "doesn't quite fit into one camp or the other" essays that I find interesting reading these days. (Starts with some salty language.)

The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. --Mike Arnzen --Tips for Office Hours (Pedablogue)

A good collection of musings on office hours.

I've always arranged my office so that there isn't a barrier (such as a desk or bookcase) between me and the door, so that students who stop by won't feel they are imposing.

I generally work with the office door open. I will shut the door partway or completely in order to signal various degrees of isolation that I desire. When I really want to concentrate, of course, I take a stack of papers or a book and I find a quiet corner on campus.

Winer, who has offered free hosting to bloggers for the past four years, has promised to make exportable copies of blog contents available to the blogs' owners at their request. He says it will take at least two weeks to provide copies of the blogs' contents.

Meanwhile, the affected bloggers cannot access their work, a situation that angers many, who said they believed they should have been given advance notice that the Weblogs service would be terminated before their sites became inaccessible. --Michelle Delio --Thousands of Blogs Fall Silent  (Wired)

I noticed this as it was happening, and had planned to investigate and post a followup, but Clancy beat me to it.

I applaud those bloggers who remembered to thank Winer for the years of free service he provided, but I also sympathize with the bloggers who suddenly found themselves without access to an important part of their lives.

Slow-motion Nightmare (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I had a busy day yesterday, with adventures that included diving fully-clothed into a large kiddie pool to retrieve my 2-year-old daughter, who had slipped and was floating face down, unable to straighten herself out.

An older girl had taken my daughter's hands and lured her to the center of the pool, where I doubt she would have gone on her own.

It was a very big, in-ground kiddie pool, maybe 20 feet across... and by the time I scrambled over to her, I had slipped several times and was soaking wet all over.

Carolyn was fine, fortunately -- she couldn't have been face-down for more than four or five seconds, but the horrible impotent feeling one gets when trying to run in a nightmare is remarkably similar to the feeling one gets when trying to run through water.

When I showed up at my wife's deck chair, dripping wet, Carolyn chirped, "Daddy took me out of the pool."

Fortuantely I had handed my fanny pack (containing my PDA and a digital camera) to my wife before taking my daughter to the pool, but the contents of my wallet were soaked. Small price to pay.

Children as young as seven in one British school are using weblogs as part of their normal routine, and are doing better than non-webloggers as a result, their teacher says.

Weblogs, easy-to-use personal journals published on the internet, get children more interested in school work they might otherwise have disliked, says junior school teacher John Mills. --Giles Turnbull --The seven-year-old bloggers (BBC)

While hardcore online gaming remains the preserve of young men, research firm Screen Digest found that "bored housewives" are fuelling the growth of other games offered on the net. --Net games lure 'bored housewives' (BBC)

It's not clear from the article whether the term "bored housewife" is used in the report, or whether it was just a joke made by report co-author Nick Gibson.

See a good reflection from Ian Bogost on Water Cooler Games:

This is a very dangerous kind of thing to say, and it suggests that even researchers who seek to expose the viability of online games don't take them seriously. As I have argued before here on WCG (1, 2, 3) the reasons women play casual games seem complex, deliberate, and worthy of both serious study and respect. Joking about "bored housewives" is a pretty dismissive and derogatory way of treating both the players and the market. What a foolish thing to do.

The bad words we removed, meaning that "The meteor is going to be pissed" was changed to "The meteor is going to be mad." Howie Rubin of Jaleco (the company that was going to publish the game under license) advised us the that the baddest bad word is Kill. The central activity in most Nintendo games is killing things. The image and the act are good, but the word is bad, even if the word does not suggest the image or the act. --Douglas Crockford --Now You're Really Playing with Power: The Expurgation of Maniac Mansion for the Nintendo Entertainment System (Crockford.com)

A bizarre story. Quotable quote: "Nintendo is a jealous god."

Want to play a game that involves Monty the Mole? Commander Keen? David "Knight Rider" Hasselhoff? With RoN you can. The fact that anyone can freely contribute to the series means that its potential for growth is unrivaled. Indeed, at the time of writing this article, there have been over sixty RoN games. Even King's Quest could only manage eight... --Robert Lacey
--Deconstructing Reality  (Adventure Gamers)

Hmm... this is more about the communal construction of virtual reality than it is about the deconstruction of reality, but it's a good article nonetheless.

It must be the painkillers, we thought. Or maybe hypoxia, the oxygen deprivation in the blood that often contributes to delirium in sick people. Or that the cancer now was destroying his mind, just as it had racked his body.

But then our cousin Lynne mentioned that her parents had done a lot of similar traveling in the last days of their cancer battles. Uncle Larry (Lynne's father) had insisted that his passport and fanny pack be kept by his bedside; he was intent on keeping an imaginary 3 p.m. appointment with the emperor of Japan, where I was living then and where he had hoped to visit. He too had asked for a map — of Japan. Aunt Lois, who had died four years before, had talked about needing to catch a train, asking Lynne to buy her a ticket.

There seemed to be a pattern. --Valerie Reitman --Taking Life's Final Exit (Yahoo!|LA Times)

I don't usually blog articles that will expire soon, but this one really caught my interest. Very intersting.

Researchers at Cambridge University have discovered sheep prefer smiling or relaxed human faces, over angry or stressed ones. -- Sheep like smiles say researchers (BBC)

What about sheepish grins? Okay, that was a ba-a-ad joke.

The news story says this research took place three years ago. What is the "news hook"? Is this article discussing recent research? If so, where was this recent research published? A web link or journal name would be immensely helpful. National Geographic reported on Kendrick's sheep memory research in 2001.

(Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.)

An atheist's attempt to remove the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance failed on Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court avoided the constitutional question and ruled he could not bring the challenge on behalf of his daughter.... The ruling came on Flag Day and on the 50th anniversary of the addition of the words "under God" to the pledge. The U.S. Congress adopted the June 14, 1954, law in an effort to distinguish America's religious values and heritage from those of communism, which is atheistic. --Top Court Rejects Atheist's Challenge to Pledge (Reuters|MyWay)

I couldn’t have been less interested. The pedagogical approach was entirely vocational. Just as my French and Spanish courses revolved around hypothetical trips to Paris or Madrid (like I was going to get there any time soon), my programming courses were filled with unlikely scenarios that read like a cross between an inter-office memo and a GRE logic problem: “You own a small hardware store in Schenectady. Write a program that will display items in your inventory sorted in such and such a way, but not screwdrivers on Tuesdays when the moon is full.” --The Pedagogy of Programming (MGK)

NASA's Mars rovers have completed their long cross-country quests and are now at two very different sites that scientists have been restlessly waiting to reach.

--Mars rovers arrive at long-awaited sites  (New Scientist)

Oxford and Cambridge interviews have long been the stuff of legend, or more probably, urban myth. Most people have heard the story of the candidate who is supposed to have set fire to his interviewer's newspaper when asked to surprise him, or the student who, when asked to describe bravery, said "this" before walking out of the interview.

Other questions asked of Oxbridge applicants included:

English: "How does the author use hay fever as a metaphor in Howard's End?

Philosophy and psychology: How do you test social stereotyping?

Philosophy and Spanish: "If everything is predetermined, should we punish criminals?"

English: What is the point of me teaching you?"

History: "To what extent is it possible to trace the history of the use of sound?

Social and political science "What do you think is the effect of the Japanese mafia on Brazil and America?"

--Sarah Womack --How Santa's reindeer can lead to Oxbridge (Telegraph)

Several thousand Dubliners, tourists and literary experts filled the capital's major boulevard Sunday to celebrate the fictional anniversary of "Ulysses," James Joyce's famously complex epic set on a single Dublin day 100 years ago.
--Thousands in Dublin celebrate 'Ulysses' (AP|Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

June 16, 2004 is Bloomsday. The mad cow disease scare means the thousands re-creating Leopold Bloom's breakfast of "grilled mutton kidneys" had to do without. Quote of the day: "It's awfully hard to serve offal at all."

When Sandy called to tell me that she had been fired over the essay she had written for class, I felt like Joseph K. in Kafka's The Trial?arrested without charge, guilty of something, but uncertain of what. I had been teaching writing since 1971, and to my knowledge a student had never before been fired for writing an essay for class. After the phone call, I tried to convince myself that I had done nothing wrong, merely given an open-ended writing assignment. I wanted to believe that my sense of having been arrested was caused more by moral outrage over an abuse of political and economic power than by anything for which I personally could be held responsible. Now, nearly a year after Sandy's phone call, I still feel a sense of outrage; but I also recognize that I was culpable, that in my teaching I had perhaps not committed a crime of commission, but that certainly I deserved to be charged with a crime of omission: in my naivety, I had failed to tell students the whole truth about writing. --Michael Kleine, in an article co-authored by Sandy Moore
--Toward an Ethics of Teaching Writing in a Hazardous Context?The American University (JAC)

Via This Public Address.

After six years of regulations and restrictions that have cost builders, local governments and landowners on the western fringe of the Great Plains as much as $100 million by some estimates, new research suggests the Preble's mouse in fact never existed. It instead seems to be genetically identical to one of its cousins, the Bear Lodge meadow jumping mouse, which is considered common enough not to need protection.
--Research: Endangered mouse never existed (CNN/AP)

When young writers describe characters, they almost universally make them flat goodie-goodies who might have problems, but little psychological depth. Or they don't have enough conflict at all. Waggoner has students first write a character description, then pass that description to a neighbor. The neighbor is told to "do something mean to the character." Then they pass it back and the writer must work with the problem that's given -- often a violent one. --Mike Arnzen describes a talk by Tim Waggoner. --Waggoner on Teaching Creative Writing (Pedablogue)

In order to limber up brain-dead students (after they have turned in a major assignment) I sometimes use something similar -- a "tandem writing" exercise, modeled after what is almost certainly a fictional e-text that I first received in e-mail many years ago.

When I use it, I'm not so much intersted in what they do with their characters, but instead in getting them to see the value of having actual, significant opposition within their academic papers.

The Sound and the Fury. 75 years ago, William Faulkner finished his fourth novel. It was published later in the fall (October 7, 1929), and for the first fifteen years sales totaled just over 3,300 copies (an appendix was added in 1946, when most of Faulkner's books were out of print. Of course, a few years after that he was awarded the Nobel Prize). It was Faulkner's own favorite novel, primarily, he said, because he considered it his "most splendid failure".

--The Sound and the Fury [at 75] (Metafilter)

When I finished reading this book as an undergraduate, I immediately re-read the chapters in chronological order. I've got an XML version of the "Benjy" chapter, and had a graduate student mark up the dialogue and the multiple timeframes, and I created a few simple utilities to sort and sift through the text on those criteria. Maybe someday I'll do something with it, but thanks to the unholy alliance between Disney and Sonny Bono the text is still protected by copyright.

But when a piece of derivative fiction starts with a premise along the lines of "all the characters on Buffy are human EMTs in New York and vampires don't exist" -- or, less creatively, "in this story Angel dies in Season One and Buffy gets together with Xander because I always liked him better anyway" -- it is usually a lousy narrative on its own merits and always awful as fanfic, because it is almost never telling a story which can sustain any kind of relationship, nevermind fruitful tension, with the source narrative. --Naomi Chana is not too impressed by with reports from Troy. --In Which Woes Are Unnumbered  (Baritaria)

I was very surprised to learn that the recent movie Troy edits out all the gods from the plot.

The grading system for courses offered by CCS is focused on accomplishment, a combination of Pass/No Record grading and variable unit credit. For each course taken in the College, the student enrolls for a specific number of units of work that he or she plans to do during the quarter, from 1 - 6 units. (See Course Descriptions and ask your instructors regarding unit level guidelines in various courses). At the end of the quarter, the instructor of each course determines the number of units each student'swork merits (based on the quantity of work done at high quality level). If you earn no units of credit, the course does not appear on your transcript. You should request specific information from your instructors at the beginning of each quarter on what is expected in order to earn the number of units you desire. Though there are no letter grades in CCS classes, students are expected to maintain a high level of quality in all the work they do to fulfill academic requirements. --CCS Grading System (UCSB College of Creative Studies)

Fascinating. Students still need 180 credits to graduate, but a bright student could theoretically graduate in half the time.

I have done something like this on a small scale at my previous job, giving students some flexibility in setting their own deadlines. I did have some problems with students turning in no work for a month, then doing all-nighters to turn in three papers in the last week of class -- expecting me to get them back in enough time for them to revise and resubmit the next week. So I had to set some limits -- e.g. students couldn't submit paper 2 until I've approved paper 1; they couldn't submit first drafts of paper 2 and paper 3 in the same week (since the point of paper 2 is to give the student practice that will help them produce paper 3).

I spent a lot of time explaining this method, and I think it really did help me spend most of my time with those students who were most motivated to learn, but I'm not sure it helped those students who overestimated their abilities and only got serious about the course in the last month. Some of the same students who hated being nagged early in the term complained that I gave them too much freedom... and the more I tried to emphasize the importance of sticking to deadlines, the more negative my "welcome to the class" lecture got to be.

I really think the sequenced assignments were a beautiful thing, because they established a direct link between a student's academic habits and their consequences. Students who chose to take a little vacation ended up running out of time before they got to the major assignments -- and the class was designed to reward those who kept up... which is a polite way of saying it was designed to make sure that student procrastination didn't create extra work for me.

My thought is, in a writing class, I'd rather a student write and re-write two papers until they are A-level quality, even if it means they run out of time and can't even start the next two papers, than get Cs on all four papers without revising any of them. I greatly simplified my system when I came to Seton Hill, but I'd like perhaps to bring it back on a smaller scale.

Link found via Jocalo.

Men and papers who had opposed his policy and vilified him personally, now vied with his adherents and friends in lauding the rare wisdom and goodness which marked his conduct and character. --The Death of Lincoln (Harper's)

From an 1865 article.

Alzheimer's had done what many feminist leaders fantasized about doing themselves, if only they could get away with it.

Today, I am still pro-choice, and I still support fetal tissue research. But I now realize that those who disagree with me also have good points. I hope they reflect on their position as often as I do on mine, because both camps are on the razor's edge. I have made my commitment to women and reproductive freedom, while my compatriots on the other side of the fence, mostly because of their religious faith, have made a pact with what they call "the unborn."

We will have to agree to disagree, but only now do I consider those on that other side decent people -- as decent as I, but with a different focus. --Tammy Bruce --President Reagan Changed Me (FrontPage Magazine)

I have a policy of not permitting freshman to write academic research papers on abortion, because I've never seen such a paper move beyond one-sided rhetoric... students turn in papers full of slogans taken from activist websites on whatever side of the issue the authors already aligned themselves with before they started writing. (Next year, I'm probably going to add same-sex marriage to the list.)

Regardless of what you think of Bruce's opinion, this is a good example of an argument worth making. The author treats her ideological opponents with respect. A footsoldier who hates the footsoldiers on the other side is efficient and formidable; but leaders who simply hate, without understanding and respecting intellectual differences, end up losing, becuase they fool themselves into believing their own rhetoric.

This is a school with no set hours, no required classes, no grades, no parent-teacher meetings, and no rules except for the ones the people here make up and vote on themselves. It's a school where youngsters have a say on everything - from whether sipping soda should be allowed in the sound-proofed music room to which staff should be fired at the end of the year. --Danna Harman --This is School? (CS Monitor)

Microsoft, amid an IP spree that has won the company patent protection for everything from XML dialects to video game storage methods, mistakenly received a patent on Tuesday for a new variety of apple tree. --Microsoft patents an apple (ZD Net)

Hooray for ZDNet for not using the alarmist headline, "Microsoft Receives Patent for Apple". This is apparently a story about a clerical error.

The National Crime Squad announced today that it is working with the FBI, the Canadian Mounties and the Australian Federal Police to set up what they call "patrols" on the internet.

Officers will actively monitor chat rooms used by children where they think paedophiles are likely to be.

A logo will come up in the corner of the screen to show that the police are present - the National Crime Squad quite liked the idea of a flashing blue light - and they may even join in the conversation. --Stuart Tendler

--Q&A: Cyber cops for children's chat rooms (Times Online)

ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. --ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida)

Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note!

Huckleberry Finn opens with a warning from its author that misinterpreting readers will be shot. Despite the danger, readers have been approaching the novel from such diverse critical perspectives for 120 years that it is both commonly taught and frequently banned, for a variety of reasons. Studying both the novel and its critics with an emphasis on cultural context will help students develop analytical tools essential for navigating this work and other American controversies. This lesson asks students to combine internet historical research with critical reading. Then students will produce several writing assignments exploring what readers see in Huckleberry Finn and why they see it that way. --Critical Ways of Seeing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in Context (EdSiteMent | NEH)

I've taught Huck Finn numerous times... when I mentioned it during the job interview that led to my present position, one of my colleagues expressed surprise that I teach this risky book.

That colleague accepted another position over the summer, so I never did have a full-length conversation with her over the subject.

From an excellent collection of curricular resources. Blogging it in honor of Jason Rhody's new position with the NEH (and new URL for his Miscellany is the Largest Category).

The York Corpus Christi Cycle, a collection of brief plays that together tell Biblical history from Creation to Doomsday, was the most complex of the medieval mystery cycles. The surviving manuscript of 48 plays (with a combined length four times that of the longest Hamlet text) and the civic and guild records of the town of York give us much information on the nature of those productions, which took place annually on the feast of Corpus Christi from the late 14th century to the early 16th century. The scholarly debate over how the plays were performed has settled down in favor of what had been the traditional view -- that each short play, mounted on an individual stage-wagon, was pulled through the streets of York, stopping to perform for audiences that had gathered at predetermined "stations" along the route. --Dennis G. Jerz --The Staging of the York Corpus Christi Plays (PSim: York Corpus Christi Pageant Simulator)

This article is getting musty, but I like trotting it out as the Feast of Corpus Christi nears.

I update the home page fairly regularly, considering I did the programming 10 years ago (during the summer before my wedding) and got the article published 7 years ago. (Egad, what a horrid background image I used...)

We have often noticed, as we stroll down the hallways of academic buildings, how the doors of the faculty beckon to us -- with whispers and insinuations, exhortations and declamations, jeers and jests -- via a motley collection of decorations: cartoons, articles, quotations, posters, advertisements, photographs, and artwork.

What motivates such postings by that increasingly threatened species, the North American professor? How do those office doors reflect upon the professors or the disciplines in which they study and teach? --James Lang --Office Doors of the North American Professor  (Chronicle)

On my office door:

A printout of my home page (redesigned so it fits on one page).

A brand spanking new nameplate (everyone on the floor seems to have gotten one, which sends a nice unifying, inclusive message).

A small number of business cards, stuck by the corners in the windowpane and fanned out for the taking. They disappear at the rate of about one a month. (Every so often I rearrange them so it looks like one has just been removed, and then for some reason they disappear quickly after that... maybe because they fall out and get swept up... I don't know.)

To the side of my door:

Articles from The Onion: deconstructing a Mexican take-out menu, and "English Replaced to be New Syntax With." Maybe one more that I can't remember. (I'm blogging this from home.)

A feature from the local paper on Pittsburgh weblogs, forwarded to me by an administrator. (Two pages, with artsy pictures of computer keyboards and bloggers.)

Mr Crystal, a professor of linguistics at Reading University for 20 years, said Yoda - a Jedi master in the Star Wars films - was a good way to get children interested in how preferences in English word order changed from the Anglo-Saxon era to that of Middle English. --Finlo Rohrer --Yoda 'speaks like Anglo-Saxon' (BBC)

Now, I'm really not interested in just complaining about the fact that LeapFrog hasn't made this move. It's a massive strategic issue for them, and they do have shareholders to answer to. At the same time, I refuse to accept one justification I heard at the conference, namely that shelf space pressure was one reason to shrink from third party development -- LeapFrog products get a full aisle of shelf space in Target and Wal-Mart. Rather, I think the good folks at LeapFrog just need an outside perspective on the matter. And why shouldn't that perspective be a public one? --Ian Bogost --The Truth about Third Party Development on the LeapFrog Leapster (Water Cooler Games)

I've exchanged a few comments with Ian, who asked me, "What kinds of games might change your mind about the value of the Leapster as a supervised computer activity?"

The Amazon reviews of Leapster praised the concept and quality of the software, but there were more than enough problems with durability to make me pass on the hardware. Since I'm not really comfortable (yet) with the idea of letting my son have unlimited access to his games, I'd rather buy 3 or 4 edu-games for the PC we already have than risk a Leapster.

My son is not that picky about graphics, so he's happily playing some old (mid 1990s) games, and he prefers the 1994 (or so) Star Wars X Wing vs Tie Fighter to the more recent X Wing Alliance... So the fact that I can share with him games that I enjoyed means something to me.

In terms of content, what would it take to get me to change my mind? I don't know... I'll know it when I see it. We don't get cable TV, so he doesn't know who Spongebob or Dora the Explorer are, so the branded content is actually a liability in my eyes.

Some educational games make a funny blooping noise when you make a mistake or get a wrong answer. My son enjoyed trying to knock Curious George unconscious so much that he never paid attention to the letter-recognition game, and besides, he already knew his alphabet. So he got stuck on a level -- by his own choice -- for several days.

I would love to have been able to tweak the level of encouragement the game provides.

I know my son prefers games that feature a plot with an opponent to overcome... For several years he has been enthralled by Lego Stunt Rally, which has completely captured his imagination (to the point that we have to limit his access to that game, or he will make car brake squealing noises for hours at a time, re-playing races in his mind).

Sometimes I'd like to see the "plot" suffer an extreme setback if the kid is careless...

Oh wait -- I just thought of a game that might make me buy Leapster.

My son needs some work with penmanship... I had, and still have, terrible handwriting, so I'm senstitive on this issue.

If there were a game where you played... I don't know... a construction foreman, and you traced out shapes on a blueprint, and then construction teams built the roads according to the layout you designed, and then you had to drive on the roads, wrecking your nice cars if the wobbly lines drawn on the blueprint were too far from the norm. A game like that might also include map reading, simulation, basic math, and abstract thinking. Oh, and of course there would need to be random citizens with fruit stands to be smashed.

Throw in a villain with a handlebar moustache and a cool car that can spew smoke screens and drop oil slicks, and I'd buy it.

Planes, ants, Chewbacca making the calculations for a jump to hyperspace -- anything that moves in a boundary would work. It's drawing on the touch screen that would make the difference. But it's that touch screen that seems to be the source of a lot of frustration from consumers.

Some interviewers have been known to call job seekers at home and pose as telemarketers to gauge how those candidates react. Are they rude? Do they yell? Or are they polite but insistent that they don't want to purchase anything?

How a candidate deals with an annoying telemarketing call tells the company something about how you would deal with an annoying client.

One of Lance's favorite behavior tests is to drop her pen at some point during the interview and see how the candidate reacts. She makes sure to drop it an equal distance from herself and the job seeker.

"When they are telling you that they are customer-oriented and you drop your pen and they don't notice or they don't pick it up, it's a disconnect between how they are and what they are saying," she said. --J. D. Burrough --Interview twists, turns (AZ Central)

Interesting... in Death of a Salesman, when Willy is coaching his son Biff about what he imagines will be a life-changing business appointment, Willy says if something drops off the boss's desk, don't pick it up -- they have office boys for that sort of thing. Willy probably would have failed many other tests, too.

Two tales of gender, politics, weblogs, and cybercultureJerz's Literacy Weblog)

Both tales are pretty sad.

One is the story of Alexandra Polier, falsely accused of having an affair with Sen. John Kerry. According to Matt Drudge:

“In an off-the-record conversation with a dozen reporters earlier this week General Wesley Clark plainly stated: ‘Kerry will implode over an intern issue.’"

Polier painstakingly traces the sloppy reporting that led to her name being splashed across headlines. Polier had her editor call up the reporter who first named her, Bryan Flynn of The Sun, who brags smugly about breaking the story, but then when the phone is passed to Polier, he suddenly becomes too busy to talk to her. --"John Kerry intern scandal - Alexandra Polier's account"

The other is the story of Jessica Cutler:

...I posted my diary on a blog - the Washingtonienne - so my friends could read it for fun. As a young single woman, the diary was mostly about my sex life. I could not believe anybody besides them would want to read such a thing. But thirteen days later, it was all over Capitol Hill.... Then I saw my name and photo all over the internet. Type my name into Google and you'll find 32,600 results. I have read some of the racist, sexist comments about me posted on the internet with utter fascination. Unfortunately, these people can post anonymously, while I had to own up to all the stuff I wrote. But that is exactly what I love about the internet: expanding the social dialogue via the unrestricted sharing of ideas. Especially the ones that nobody wants to take credit for. -- "Senator Sacked Me Over Tales of Congress"

Polier shows superhuman restraint as she demonstrates the meticulous reporting skills that were so clearly absent from global reports linking her to Kerry. Cutler seems to think she's writing a Dave Barry humor column: "I opened mail all day (which is why you should never bother to write your representatives in government: somebody like me reads your letters). And then I either threw the letters in the garbage or I would make fun of them with co-workers. In retrospect, that job was perfect for me."

Assuming both women get book deals, whose will probably sell better?

Ditch the reader and have students purchase a choice game or two, or perhaps an anthology of classic games (which are also available for free). Have students play games and reflect on their experience rather than work with print texts. I would like to say to an incoming class, "We won't be reading any novels in this class. We don't be doing any reading, as a matter of fact. Instead, we're going to play videogames." Is this insane? --Matt Barton --Videogames in Composition & Rhetoric (KairosNews)

Er... yes.

While I agree that it's not necessary to read novels in order to learn freshman composition, students have to read essays if they are being asked to write essays.

I'd say about half of college students consider themselves "gamers," though many of those who don't say they used to play games. If there's a meaningful selection process, by which students can select a section with an emphasis that appeals to them, then a games-focused freshman comp course sounds wonderful.

In passing, Matt suggests that Quake could help students learn how to drive the Martian rover. The distance between Earth and Mars results in such a great time delay (about 20 minutes) that the skills one develops in a twitch game really wouldn't help much. Chess would probably be better (as it forces you to see multiple alternatives and plan ahead for them).

But, as Matt notes, the purpose of a rhet/comp course is not to train people for specific jobs. I think he's much closer to the target when he mentions political simulations and other ideological games. I also like his observation that there is a demand for slide presentation skills, but that we aren't doing a very good job teaching those skills.

While my school requires all students to demonstrate basic PowerPoint skills, I actively discourage slide shows in my classes, since I find them typically to be of such low quality and I haven't the time to teach how to use a slide presentation effectively. I'll be teaching a "Writing for the Internet" course this fall again... maybe that will be the right place to tackle this issue.

I felt one paragraph called for a more detailed response:

Perhaps videogames are the last tool available to modern compositionists that can actually inspire students to learn to write. Of course we could allow students to "play games" with the texts they produce, constructing choose your own adventures. I see things on a deeper level; teach programming (or at least a game making software tool) so that students may express themselves in the language of their generation.

The last tool? No, just the latest tool. And all that is playful is not games... that is, "playing games" with existing works of literature is completely different from what goes on when you interact with a computer game.

The narratological approach that Matt uses makes a great deal of sense in the particular branch of computer games that I study, namely interactive fiction. But I think it's probably too much, at this point, to ask the average student to learn a computer programming language and construct a game in a freshman comp course. At an engineering school? Sure! But at a liberal arts school? Sadly, no.

See also a recent blog conversation under "Theory vs. Craft in Computer Game Studies." Both kinds of scholarship are important, and I did spend one day introducing my upper-level English students to IF programming, but these were juniors and seniors, whom I could assume had already mastered the basic reading and writing skills that a freshman comp course is supposed to give them. But "user mods" and the "remix culture" are certainly valid and important topics to address, in terms of the attitude of today's youth towards the dissemination of intellectual property, and the open source philosophy (of which Matt is a devoted supporter).

A college writing class is a good place to get students to think about their own creation of intellectual property. And having a freshman comp class create and peer review wiki articles may be a useful way to get them to think about the function (and limitations) of peer review.

If videogames have not yet risen to the elite status of famous novels, it is no fault of videogames, but rather money-hungry developers, narrow-minded players, and traditionalist literary critics unwilling to replace their pen with a joystick.

Don't forget the importance of the cult of the author as celebrity. Modern videogames may be inspired by brilliant designers, but they are products of huge committees of highly-specialized workers and outsourced labor -- including many people who have no narrative skills at all, and whose daily activities aren't in the slightest comparable to what a novelist does. The people who do this work have to feed their families, so naturally a huge commercial videogame project is going to follow the corporate model.

Matt's doing some important work getting people to talk about the issues. He's not yet at the fist-shaking, "Fools! I shall crush them all!" stage, which is probably good for society in general.

I agree with him whole-heartedly when he writes the following:

It is of utmost importance that we teach people to see a videogame with the same critical apparatus they bring to bear on poems, novels, screenplays, and films.

You bet. But replacing the reader with videogames? That's going too far.

It seems that what we really need is a reader, geared towards college freshmen, that covers videogames intelligently -- along with reality TV, "cool hunting," weblogs, text messaging, and other cultural practices that our students know well.

Crisfield, a crabbing hub on the southwestern tip of Maryland's Eastern Shore, and Smith Island are separated by just a dozen miles of choppy water known as Tangier Sound.

But Smith Island has a distinct identity. An archipelago of fiercely independent villages, it is so isolated that many residents still converse in an Elizabethan-era dialect descended from the British who settled there in the 1600s.

Jenny, a lover of World War II books who has her eye on a law career, walked off the stage at graduation Thursday with an armful of medals, certificates and scholarships. She was accepted by her first-choice schools - the Naval Academy Preparatory School and Salisbury University.

So the lawsuit, she says, is about something more closely resembling hometown pride. She lost the chance to become the first Crisfield High valedictorian from Smith Island. --Suit exposes cultural clash (Baltimore Sun)

Geography and class combine to make this year's valedictorian lawsuit more culturally interesting than last year's. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.

In 1990 women around the world gave birth to 3.3 children on average, the report says.

By 2002, the average had dropped to 2.6 children - slightly above the level needed to assure replacement of the population.

The bureau's projections show the level of fertility for the world as a whole descending below replacement level by 2050. --World population growth 'falling' (BBC)

Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States largely credited with ushering in an era of conservative politics and pursuing a foreign policy that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, died Saturday at his home in California after a 10-year struggle with Alzheimer'sdisease. He was 93.

[...]

Born into poverty in 1911, raised in several small Illinois towns, Reagan turned a Depression-era radio sports-announcing job into a springboard to Hollywood fame and fortune. After a successful quarter-century career in movies and on television, at age 53 he turned his energies to politics full time and quickly became the inspirational leader of conservative Republicans nationwide. --40th President, Ronald Reagan, dies in California.

When Reagan spoke at U.Va. while I was a student, he confessed that he got mostly Cs in college. "I sometimes reflect that, I had applied myself to my studies, I might have gone farther in life" he quipped. The crowd responded with a polite chuckle, which quickly heated up into a full-fledged ovation -- this was the leader of the free world, after all. Of course, there were also protesters holding signs such as, "AIDS: The Reagan Vietnam" and the like. But he sure knew how to work a crowd.

Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall" speech is probably less famous now than his infamous "We begin bombing in five minutes" joke.

I just wrote a rather long blog entry reflecting on my high school years, so this news hits me at a time when I am perhaps a bit nostalgic for the time when Americans were obviously the good guys, and the Russians were so clearly the bad guys.

Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin'? --Michael Mateas --Feds can't tell art from terrorism (Grand Text Auto)

I'd heard about this story in passing, but now that I see how few degrees of separation I am away from the artists in question, I see the situation in a new light.

Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3  (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

A few weeks ago, I was comparing PDA's with Josh Sasmor (a Seton Hill math professor), when Josh noticed that one of the four tiny screws on the lower body of my Tungsten T3 was missing. I forgot to bring the charger home one weekend, and took the following week off, so my PDA's batteries died and I didn't use it for more than a week. When I picked it up again, I noticed that now, three of the four tiny screws were missing.

I hit the Internet, and found that I am not alone. Palm does not sell replacement screws, and in fact will not replace them at all unless you send in your PDA for servicing -- which costs $125, plus shipping and the time you have to spend without a PDA -- and that you might get somebody else's used PDA back instead of yours. A few posters in online forums mentioned finding replacements in out of the way places, so I was hopeful (though Finn never replied to my e-mail). One online poster said a railroad hobbyist eyeballed the screw, said "Looks like a #80," opened up a drawer, and presto -- problem solved.

After checking Wal-Mart, Lowe's (a hardware chain), three eyeglass stores, two jewelry stores and a Radio Shack, I was feeling pretty discouraged. The culture here in Pennsylvania is small-town friendly, so I didn't get the idea people were blowing me off; but nobody had a drawer full of odd screws, and nobody knew how to get in touch with a supplier who might stock such parts. "The parts I'm supposed to need just arrive from the warehouse," said one employee.

Today I was in downtown Greensburg, and found screws that fit at Bortz Hardware. They had about twenty in a little drawer; The part number: 0-80X 1/8, flat head Phillips, 64084. I bought seven. When I told employee Peggy Felton about the Tungsten problem, she looked in her drawer and said, "I'll order more."

Update, June 25 (photo added): The replacement screw, on the right, sticks out ever so slightly on the downslope edge, but it seems to fit tightly.

If you're looking for replacement Tungsten T3 screws, you might want to give Bortz Hardware a call at 724 834 3770. (I have no financial stake in the transaction... I'm just hoping I might be of some service to somebody whom Google throws my way.)

According to the chatter on user forums and an online petition, Palm's position is that the screws were lost due to user error, and thus the replacement is not covered by warranty. Many unhappy consumers note that they have owned countless electronic devices with tiny screws that do not need to be tightened regularly, and feel it is a design flaw.

Oh... the price Bortz Hardware charged for the screws? Eighteen cents each. That sure beats $125.

''Students felt more empowered,'' said Frank Klapak, an education and communication professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, one of the schools participating in the study. Klapak let his students help decide how to structure the course as a way of showing them the results of democratic involvement.

The study also found that by semester's end, students participating in the project showed greater improvement than other students in their ability to find compromises and make sound moral and ethical decisions. --Christina Gostomski --Cedar Crest looks to raise civic interest (The Morning Call)

Frank Klapak is a colleague of mine just two office doors away.

I recall seeing a number of my high-school teachers, all with master's degrees or Ph.D.'s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. This kind of thing still happens all over the country, and it's a disgrace. When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students' homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos on nights and weekends, the quality of education is diminished, the profession is disrespected, and we parody the notion that we hold our schools and teachers in the highest regard. --Dave Eggers --Reading, Writing, and Landscaping  (Mother Jones)

One rarely tells testimonials about the longshoreman data entry clerk or orthodontist who changed your life.

The teacher who had the most effect on my life was my high school English teacher and drama director. I had Michael Garcia for my first period freshman year, so he was my first exposure to high school academics.

• On Feb 3, 1983, Mr. Garcia gave us a homework assignment to write a journal. Maybe that was the date it was due... but it sticks in my mind because I kept writing in that journal for 10 years. While working on my Ph.D., instead of journals, I wrote long letters to friends. While wrapping up my dissertation, I started blogging.


• Mr. Garcia was also the drama club director. While my association with the drama crowd didn't exactly help my social status among the jock-and-cheerleader crowd, it was an activity that brought me into contact with upperclass students (with cars... that definitely improved my social life).


• In the summer of 1984, I wrote a Star Trek novel -- which I couldn't bring myself to read when I came across it while unpacking boxes just this past Monday. Mr. Garcia read and commented on it, though it had nothing to do with his job description.


• While directing me in the role of the theatre critic whose aunties kill old men in Arsenic and Old Lace, "G" got the idea that my character should carry around a little pad of paper all the time, and use it to jot down cutting remarks (presumably to use in future columns). I had fun ad-libbing with that pad. I started carrying that pad of paper everywhere. I've still got it (and several of its successors) in a box somewhere. When I went off to college, and started wearing T-shirts and other "civvies" rather than the Catholic school uniform with shirt pockets, I had nowhere to keep my pad of paper -- and I felt naked. Then, one day in 1997, I was walking past a computer store, and I saw a display rack that featured the Palm organizer. I found the pad I'd been missing for many years, and now I'm a committed PDA user. Mr. Garcia has no idea how profoundly his off-the-cuff suggestion of a prop affected the development of my thought processes.


• In high school, I usually worked as hard on the sets as I did on the stage, which was an early expression of my interest in both humanities and technology. I remember one year, "Mr. G." gave me a "schizoid award," and when presenting it he pretended to slap himself in the face with alternate hands, doing a Jekyl/Hyde routine: "I'm cast! (slap!) I'm crew! (slap!) I'm cast! (slap!) I'm crew!" My dual interest in the art and technology of theater eventually led to my book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950: Soul and Society in the Age of the Machine.


• For several years, Mr. Garcia worked a summer job at the stage door of Wolf Trap Farm Park, a national park devoted to the performing arts. The summer after my freshman year in college, I worked at the Wolf Trap stage door. Mr. Garcia wasn't working there that summer, but I worked with people who knew him well, and thus felt his influence. Stage door staff did everything from showing the stars to their dressing rooms to locking up the building at night. The job also involved keeping groupies from slipping backstage, to standing there looking contrite so that personal managers could yell at us and thus prevent the stars from thinking they weren't in control. I'd have to say the experience killed any interest to pursue a career in the entertainment industry, but that was an important thing to learn, and at any rate the job was a lot of fun for an 18-year-old. I'm not sure at the time whether it clicked that Mr. Garcia was taking this job to help pay the bills.


• On a drama club trip to New York, some friends and I managed to break a window in our hotel room. I had a great plan to steal a window from a stairwell and swap it with our broken one. Our antics attracted the attention of a room full of girls with honey-sweet Southern accents, who had been watching us from their room across the courtyard. While my buddies ran off to arrange an illicit after-curfew meeting with the Georgia Peaches (or whoever they were), my window swap plan fell apart, and I found myself choking out a confession at the front desk. At that moment, who should walk through the lobby but Mr. Garcia. He took me to his room, where I had a good cry -- not really about the window, just about adolescence in general.


• And of course, I remember all this stuff because it's all in my journal.

A couple years after I graduated, Mr. Garcia quit teaching to work for State Farm insurance. His wife was also a teacher, but obviously their salaries weren't enough to raise a family comfortably in Arlington (a suburb of Washington, D.C.). I've seen him on TV in commercials for State Farm, which show clips of him in our old auditorium, presumably volunteering with students. He's also been active in fund-raising for the school (where his kids were attending, when I last heard from him).

There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work - is it any good? - is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might be called aesthetic success: they have to be, because in order to create something successful one must learn about other people's successful creations. To the academy, much of this value-chat looks like, and can indeed be, mere impressionism. Again, theory is not the only culprit. A good deal of postmodern thought is suspicious of the artwork's claim to coherence, and so is indifferent or hostile to the discussion of its formal success. But conventional, non-theoretical criticism often acts as if questions of value are irrelevant, or canonically settled. To spend one's time explaining how a text works is not necessarily ever to talk about how well it works, though it might seem that the latter is implicit in the former. Who bothers, while teaching The Portrait of a Lady for the nth time, to explain to a class that it is a beautiful book? But it would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that, for most writers, greedy to learn and emulate, this is the only important question. --James Wood reviews The Oxford English Literary History, Vol. XII: 1960-2000: The Last of England? by Randall Stevenson --The Slightest Sardine (London Review of Books)

I felt a very odd sense of guilt while teaching a course on media aesthetics this year... it felt like a decadent indulgence to be able to talk about things like beauty, morals, happiness, and pleasure. I recall briefly talking about such topics while discussing The Portrait of Dorian Gray in Stephen Arata's class at the University of Virginia, but I recall getting upset that nobody was paying attention to the structure of the novel (which went through a revision in which Wilde added whole subplots, presumably to make it more marketable). The tone and philosophy of the added material was so different from that of the rest of the book. Was it better with or without that addition?

While I think the class was annoyed at me for wanting to talk about something so pedestrian, I do recall that he offered a few prompts that encouraged class discussion of the issue, for which I was grateful. Still, when I later asked him for a letter of recommendation, he politely declined. Oh, well -- them's the breaks!

(Which reminds me... I have a letter or two to write for former students.)

The other day, I finished reading The Hobbit to my son for a bedtime story.

On my own reading list for this summer: Galatea 2.2 and The Color of Money.

In a comedy of errors, Dasch proceeded to call the New York office of the FBI to explain that he was a German citizen who had arrived in the U.S. the previous morning, that he had a statement to make about the nation’s security, and that he wanted to meet with J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI desk agent duly noted the call in his log but decided it was not worthy of action. Not until several days later, when Dasch traveled to Washington, checked in at the Mayflower hotel, and called Hoover’s office directly, did the FBI "crack" the case.

With his usual flair for publicity, Hoover held a dramatic press conference emphasizing the FBI’s ingenuity and skill in bringing the German agents to book. --Jacob Heilbrunn reviews Saboteurs: The Nazi Raid on America by Michael Dobbs
--Plodders Plot (Commentary Magazine)

But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What's more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.

As with any natural occurrence, these individual loops all die very individual deaths. "D|P 3," for example, begins as a bright, bold, orchestral melody that, over the course of 42 minutes, is slowly reduced to a sputtering, churning blob of its former self. The melody disintegrates slowly, until, by the end, only portions are audible; the rest is silence and noise.
--William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV (Haunted Ink)

What makes this album review especially blogworthy:

William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate.

Via MGK.

I didn't have quite as dramatic an experience, but I do from time to time look back at the page of literary quotes about the Twin Towers and urban technology that I collected the afternoon the towers fell.

--American Drama and Theater from the Beginnings through 1960

A detailed bibliography, by Udo Hebel. This isn't a mechanically generated collection of web pages that turn up after keyword searches for "american drama" -- this is a hand-edited list that reflects some actual editorial work. It deserves PageRank karma, so it gets my link.

Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez's comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art -- "sprites" in programming jargon -- along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game with a minimum of artistic effort. --Lore Sjöberg
--You, Too, Can Be a Comics Whiz  (Wired)

A history of videogames, just as a history of any software "type" or "genre," will reveal an open-source origin and a legacy of "borrowers" and "derivers" hoping to capitalize on what was originally free, whether through buying up copyrights or creating enhanced commercial versions. With an increase in the size of a software corporation comes a decrease in the level of innovation one finds there, until finally, in 2004, gamers are confronted at the videogame store with hordes of cloned videogames and programmers are threatened at the courtroom by battalions of lawyers frantically protecting someone's "intellectual property." The protection that intellectual property law affords software developers is possible only by seizing the rights of the users of that software, even those who legitimately purchase it. As corporate lawyers, CEOs, and investors further entrench themselves in the software market, gamers and programmers will find themselves in the same dismal position as the ship in a game of Space Invaders. --Matt Barton
--The Videogame in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Armchair Arcade)

I left a few (unrelated) comments on Tetris, Galileo, and the open source philosophy on the Armchair Arcade site.

I doubt anyone could accuse me of literature. Online text games tend to have quite a different emphasis than a book. I am not trying to tell a story as much as I am trying to describe a location and an atmosphere. I try to make the descriptions detailed and interesting enough for people to believe they are actually there. I think this is one area the creators and I have tried hard to do well from early on, making the room descriptions very detailed. --David Bennett --Discworld MUD: Slinging Dirt with David Bennett (Armchair Arcade)

Bennett created a MUD based on Terry Pratchett's Discworld books.

A 14-year-old Indiana boy mastered "autochthonous" to win the National Spelling Bee Thursday, outdueling 264 rivals, including one who fainted on stage but recovered to take second place. --Ben Feller --14-Year-Old Indiana Boy Wins Spelling Bee (AP|MyWay)

Also worth noting: the comment about the environment at the bee ("[c]ourtesy reigns"), and the story of Ashkay Buddiga, who fainted, hopped up to spell his word correctly, was escourted off to rest, and eventually won second place.

Associated Press editors were forced to retract an earlier report that a meteorite might have hit near Olympia, Wash., this morning after discovering that a source, one Bradley Hammermaster, claiming to be an astronomy professor, had perpetrated a hoax. --Joe Strupp --AP Meteor Crash Report Was a Hoax  (Editor and Publisher)

To paraphrase Matt Barton's hyperbolic words playfully, let's remove our lips from the poisoned suckbottle of proprietary software and switch to the wholesome breast of open source. --Clancy Ratliff
--Taking Copyfighters to Task (CultureCat)

Beware, open-source activists, if your praxis is not as pure as your theory!

In the theater world, it turned out that the Marxist ideology was pretty much incompatible with modern theater -- the Marxist protagonist has to be spotless, blameless, and involved in no personal struggles or inner conflicts that cannot be resolved by the embracement of socialist doctrine.

The attention that Marxist purists spent keeping Marxist-friendly dramatists in line alienated some of the best playwrights, since even the ones that were most interested in Marxism were also interested in creating viable theatre, rather than pamphlets.

At any rate, my analogy isn't meant to be taken too far. I think "poisoned suckbottle" is a meme worth repeating. Well done, Clancy!

Writers are supposed to be on TV to tell people what to read or to explain how to clean up television, period. When a writer is a regular on television, his or her writing craft has to suffer because you're in make-up when you should have been trying out sentences. Pretty soon, your writing starts to read like what you say on the tube, your writing reads as though it had been dictated. --Jay Cronley --There's a reason they're called 'writers' (ESPN)

I have no clue about the sports controversy being discussed here, but I found it fascinating to read a sporting perspective on a more general media issue.

"I was treated like a god," the former Nebraska quarterback says. "I had pretty much everything given to me out there from the start. | "I never thought I had to work for anything. It was pretty much understood, 'Hey this kid is going to take over the program.' I don't like things given to me. I like to work." --NU football program fell short, Dukes says (Omaha.com)

A Nebraska quarterback transferred to Duke, where he still plays football, but feels better about the pre-med education he's receiving.

I subscribe to a Google News alert, which sends me an e-mail every time the words "Seton Hill University" appear in a news story. I'm getting a steady trickle of announcements that so and so from such and such a hometown will be attending Seton Hill. It's funny that these are almost all being published in the sports pages.

Are we as a society that disinterested in the future careers of the budding writers, artists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, teachers, and scientists? Of course, athletic scholarships can help to produce any one of these professions.

Since the best way to make a good choice is by using the Internet, I ask all my readers to reach out to a senior citizen who doesn't understand computers. Clip this column and invite a senior -- perhaps a relative or someone who lives in your neighborhood -- to line up his or her pill bottles and receipts so you can help with the online drug card selection process. --Terry Savage --Help a senior use Web to pick a drug discount card  (Chicago Sun-Times)

Another great suggestion from Rosemary, who observes, "The pocess should be easier and I hope there is phone number people without computer access can call to get help."

A survey of 1,309 pupils aged between 10 and 14 and from 24 different schools found alarming levels of ignorance about the invasion of Normandy 60 years ago. --Hastings and Henry --D-Day 1899 and President Denzel Washington is leading liberation of New Zealand from the Nazi's (Telegraph)

One teacher at Great Addington Church of England Primary school in Northamptonshire was amazed to find that one of his pupils had scored 100 per cent in the test.

He said: "I asked him how he knew material which we had not covered in school. He told me he had picked it up from a D-Day game he played on his computer."

Computer games: 1. Conventional education: 0.

Okay, that's an exaggeration, but you get my point.

A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic's query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers' scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism. --Mark Glaser --To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media (Online Journalism Review)

Another great suggestion from Rosemary.

As an example of the new pricing plan, suppose you posted an entry to your blog reading, ?I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. Then, I got behind the slowest woman in the grocery-store line! Grrrr!? By my count (TypeKey will handle the sentence diagramming automatically in MT3.0014d), this entry contains 6 adjectives/adverbs, 4 nouns, 3 articles, 2 passive verbs, 2 pronouns, 2 prepositions, and 1 interjection. Therefore, under the new license, your entry would cost a grand total of 84¢ -- no matter how many blogs or authors you have! Now, that'snot so bad, is it? --Six Apart announces more changes to Movable Type license (Apropos of Something)

Don't worry, it's just a joke.

THE world's newspapers enjoyed buoyant advertising sales in 2003 but overall reader numbers were in marginal decline, according to a report on the state of the industry delivered at the 57th annual World Newspaper Congress today. --Christine Pouget --Newspaper advertising up (Daily Telegraph)

An interesting detail buried in this story: "The distribution of free newspapers - not reflected in the overall figures - grew spectacularly in 2003, rising by 16 per cent."

On 19 September 2001 the Federal Minister for Aged Care the Honourable Bronwyn Bishop MP launched the National Public Toilet Map. The National Public Toilet Map identifies the location of more than 13000 public toilet facilities in Australian towns and cities, including rural areas, and along major travel routes. Useful information is provided about each toilet, such as opening hours and access for people with a disability.
--What is the National Public Toilet Map? (Australia)

Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.