February 2005 Archive Page

Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in journalism the newsrooms were still full of old guys with blue collar backgrounds who got genuinely indignant when the Governor lied or somebody turned off the heat on a poor person's apartment in mid-January. They cussed and yelled their ways through the day, took an occasional sly snort from a bottle in the bottom drawer of their desk and bit into news stories like packs of wild dogs, never letting go until they'd found and told the truth. If they hadn't been reporters most of those guys would have been cops or firefighters. It was just that way.

Now the blue collar has been fully replaced by white ones in America's newsrooms, everybody has college degrees. The "His Girl Friday" romance of the newshound is gone. All too many journalists seem to mistake scandal mongering for tenacious investigation, and far too many aspire to make themselves the story. --Laurie Garrett --Laurie Garrett's memo to Newsday colleagues (PoynterOnline)

I don't think this site offers a permalink to the individual memos, but this one was dated 28 Feb, 2005.

At Kansas State University, the contracts of all faculty members were terminated after a Populist victory in state elections in 1896. Many professors were hired back, but Republicans were removed from the economics department and senior administrative posts. A few years later, Republicans regained control of state politics and did their own purge of the university. -- Excerpt from The Development of Academic Freedom in the United States, Hofstadter and Metzger. --Ward & Newt & Tenure (Inside Higher Ed)

This article examines Newt Gingrich's recent cry for the abolishment of tenure, in light of the Ward Churchill controversy (which continues, with the sighting of a buyout trial balloon).

Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass of its prey in the dingo-eat-dingo world. --Travis Tea --Atlanta Nights [Will PublishAmerica Publish Any Old Thing?] (Digital Medievalist)

The above is an excerpt from a novel that was given a contract with print-on-demand publisher PublishAmerica, which claims to be a selective, legitimate publishing source. Once the authors of the novel announced it was a hoax (get it--- "Travis Tea"?) designed to test the selectively of PublishAmerica, the publisher revoked the contract. Digital Medievalist links to the relevant documents and other coverage of the story.

What is "a strand of moltenly hair"? That's brilliantly bad.

Instead of just putting my CV on the Web like everyone else, I kind of think I would like someone to make a fan site for me, possibly something like the one created for Hasselhoff. Oh, yeah! Check out my experiments with facial hair in the 90s. Instead of building temples to ourselves -- which is something best left to academic administrators -- maybe professors should all have "Web shrines" developed and maintained in our honor. --"Thomas H. Benton" --A God in Colchester (Chronicle)

--Drive-by Blogging (Google)

Weblog portfolios are due soon, so there's more activity than usual on my students' weblogs. Moira mentioned that fellow student Evan Reynolds had used the term "drive-by blogging" to describe the sudden rush of blog entries that fill in the gaps and fulfill the requrements of the weblog portfolio assignment. That was a new one to me.

For the uninitiated, FUD stands for ?Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.? It is a term popular within the free software community, used to describe the use of lies and deceptive rhetoric, aimed chiefly at free software projects. It is an accurate term. In brief, the goal of FUD is to make money when the free software competition cannot be defeated fairly in the marketplace. This can be done by scaring consumers through wild propaganda, or more recently, confusing courts through more subtle arguments. --Aaron Krowne --The FUD-based Encyclopedia: Dismantling fear, uncertainty, and doubt, aimed at Wikipedia and other free knowledge resources (Free Software Magazine)

Krowne is responding to Robert McHenry's critique of Wikipedia: The Faith-Based Enclyopedia. While Krowne's open-source lenses are rose-colored, he makes the very good point that Wikipedia's editing process is transparent, while the process of deciding what gets into a traditional print encyclopedia and what is left out is completely inaccessible to the end user. Via KairosNews (which features a responsible rebuttal by John Walter).

If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you can be sure that sooner or later, somebody's going to do a B5 movie. The only thing I can say without equivocation is that when that day comes, as the rights-holder, I will make darned sure that it's done right, because I'd rather have no B5 movie than one that doesn't live up to what fans and I myself would want to see. --J. Michael Straczynski --[Babylon 5 Movie Project Tanks] (JMSNews)

I've been following hints about this project for a while...

While I was thrilled by the DVDs of Farscape that Charlie Lowe loaned me last year, Babylon 5 was the last TV show that I actually made the time to watch on a regular basis, so this is sad news for me.

A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of "web log.") Until recently, I had not spent much time thinking about blogs or Blog People. --Michael Gorman --Revenge of the Blog People! (Library Journal)

Gorman's op-ed piece isn't easily accessible online, but I've found someone's cached PDF copy.

Gorman writes, "When it comes to recorded knowledge, a snippet from page 142 must be understood in the light of pages 1 through 141 or the text was not worth writing and publishing in the first place." He is talking about Google's plan to digitize the contents of some huge libraries and serve them up to online searchers. The original material that was initially published as books, so from that perspective Gorman is correct. Still, there are queries for information that don't logically have to lead to a patron's request to check out a book. And while I, too, find it distressing when my students habitually click the "full text only" option when they are using the library catalog on campus, literally across the street from the library's stacks of printed journals, today's students have developed the digital literacy that helps them to multitask much more efficiently than their sequentially-working elders. Thus, it's hardly productive to sniff at the information-processing skills that students have developed through their entertainment and social uses of the internet.

I don't think it's a bad thing that Google will let people idly peek at a fact in a book that they would otherwise never see. At the very least, they'll have had that peek. And I bet that some of the dusty books that would otherwise have never been found will get more readers than they have now.

I have some sympathy for Gorman's position... for anyone to claim that Google reveals God's mind is ridiculous. Still, I'm stunned that the president-elect of the American Library Association and Dean of Library Services at a major university would brag in the year 2004 that he knew barely anything about weblogs.

--Dennis G. Jerz (IF Wiki)

My entry on the IF Wiki. Thanks, Dswxyz, for compiling it.

Has it been that long since I entered the IF Comp? I miss Troy Sterling and Melody Sweet (characters from my game, "Fine-Tuned: An Auto-mated Romance").

Incidentally, I just found this SynTax walkthrough for Fine-Tuned, which was reviewed and included in issue 82.

Checkmate in Four (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

My seven-year-old son whipped my butt in chess last night.

He's beaten me before... once when I was paying attention to fending off an attack deep in my territory, and he suddenly popped his rook out from behind a row of pawns, pinning down my king.

I'm embarrassed to say that he did the exact same move on me yesterday, so he actually beat me twice in the same day. In my defense I don't play as aggressively as I could. He often doesn't protect his queen when he launches into an attack mode, and although he knows rooks, bishops and knights are worth more than pawns, he often makes bad sacrifices. So at some point I will focus only on blocking his attacks, keeping the game going as long as possible, unless he makes an obvious mistake.

If he plays well, I will let him get a pawn to my end of the board, and once he's gotten an extra queen I'll shift into fighting for my life. The two times he used his rook to pin down my king I was surprised, but since I had deliberately held back at an earlier stage, I didn't think much of it.

But last night, I moved the king's pawn forward and didn't guard it or cover the gap with another piece, so that he was able to get his bishop off to one side and take out the pawn with his queen. There I was, slack-jawed.

"I got that from a book," he chirped. "But you moved your knights differently."

My boy, who will dance in front of the mirror for fifteen minutes with one sock on if I don't remind him to put the other one on, made eye contact, leaned very close, and whispered, "Daddy, you should really watch the whole board."

The other day, after reading a few blog entries I've recently posted about Peter, my wife said, "Peter's getting old enough that he might want some privacy. I wonder if he knows that you blog his whole life."

"Not his whole life," I mumbled.

Peter chimed in: "He doesn't know the future!"

Headline writers have other duties. They tend to be overworked and underpaid, given the power their wield. And while I'm sure the headline writer in this case had no qualms -- thinking he or she was capturing the flavor of the issue -- this is a small but telling example of how a headline can twist readers' views, even before they know what the story is about. --Dan Gillmor --A Biased Headline Twists a Story (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

Blogging this so I can fish it out the next time I teach journalism. A great example.

Larry Summers is no more free to pop off at the mouth about a vexed academic question than George Bush is free to wander around the country dropping off-the-cuff remarks about Social Security or Islam. Of course both men are free in the First Amendment sense to say anything that comes into their pretty little heads; but the constitutional freedom they enjoy is freedom from legal consequences, not from consequences in general. (Can anyone say, Trent Lott?) --Stanley Fish --Clueless in Academe (Chronicle)

I'm very much in agreement with the reservations Joe Harris has expressed about the personal essay -- the worry that grading, in some ways, becomes an evaluation of the self that the student represents on the page -- but after reading the MetaFilter thread, one of my responses to the Personal Essay assignment has become a recognition of and revulsion at my own voyeurism. --Mike Vitia --Life-Changing Experiences (Vitia.org)

Vitia is reflecting on a runaway Metafilter thread, in which members are submitting life-changing experiences. I didn't get all the way through the list (possibly because I followed the link via Vitia's blog entry, and thus I was conscious of my own voyeurism, but also because I've got stacks of papers to return). But this one has haunted me since I read it yesterday... so I've got to blog it to clear my head.

In the last couple years of elementary school, and junior high school, other kids knew that I was very ticklish, and that they could get a rise out of me by tickling me, poking me, or even making sudden threatening moves towards my midsection. This stopped when I got to high school, but by then, I was nervous about letting anyone touch me, or even get near me.

Just before my 15th birthday, my mother had a large number of leftover peppermint candies. She gave me a big bag of them to share with fellow members of the school choir on the way to a concert.

There was one particular girl in the choir, Dovie, a senior, who had always been kind to me (and to everyone in general). When I gave her a mint, she looked at me as if it were the nicest thing anyone had done for her in a long time. And she gave me a hug.

It took me a second to realize what was going on, and hug back.

Because of how I had been treated before, I had forgotten that letting someone touch you can be a good thing. Over the course of that year, I talked to Dovie some more, and occasionally, I hugged her. But even though I knew that she was a very nice person who enjoyed hugging her friends, I kept a certain distance from her, because I was afraid. I didn't want to take any chances; I didn't want to risk imposing on her or wasting her time.

At the end of the last day of school, I realized that I would probably never see her again, and that I had squandered an opportunity to get to know a really nice person.

After crying a bit, I resolved that I wouldn't let that happen again. I now knew that there were some very nice people out there, and if I met one, I wanted to get to know her. I knew that being touched could be a positive thing, and decided that I would hug any friend of mine who wanted a hug.

I haven't fully overcome my shyness, and I'm still a bit nervous about letting others near me, but I'm a lot better than I was back then, and knowing her was what motivated me to change. To this day, when I meet a woman who is sweet and affectionate, I say to myself, "She reminds me of Dovie." --CrunchyFrog

When I think back on high school, I can conjure up vivid memories of rivalries and alliances and accomplishments and setbacks. But I have to work to get those memories out of deep storage. The moments from my past that leap out at me unbidden are perfectly ordinary moments of kindness (and sometimes cruelty). That makes me wonder how many of my daily actions will be remembered years from now by somebody to whom they became somehow important.

"If you're on one side or the other of the gender-wars debate, you could pick a specific indicator to buttress your case," said Kenneth C. Land, a professor of demographic studies and sociology at Duke University, senior author of the study. "But if we take a step back a little and look at what the data say overall, we find that the two genders have tracked pretty closely."

The study drew immediate criticism from advocates and researchers on both sides, with many saying it glossed over crucial gaps between the sexes or used criteria that biased the results. But several experts praised the work, saying the findings could bridge the often bitter, polarized debate that occurs whenever the sexes are compared.--Rob Stein --Boys, girls fare equally in U.S. (WashPost/MSNBC)

Here's an example. A professor was asked to send weekly e-mail messages to students who had done poorly on their first exam for the class. These students were divided into three groups. The mail to one group of students included only a review question. A second group received the review question plus some advice--along the lines of "study harder." The third group received (in addition to the review question) a classic message for self-esteembuilding--"You're too smart to get a D," or words to that effect.

And the results? The students who got the "self-esteem injection" performed notably worse on subsequent tests. --Superheated 'Steem Can Burn You (Photon Courier)

A blog entry from 2003, that I came across recently via Comrade Snowball.

And so the darkness touches the links, and the darkness tastes their power, and the darkness broods and breeds in its desire. The dragon of the night rises, corporations tangled in its wings. It leaves the links powerless, the search-engines crippled, and the readers lost as the rankings swell like rivers and the paths of cyberspace are flooded.

The name of the darkness is marketing economy, and all it touches turns into tinned, cold meat. --Torill Mortensen --Ragnarok will see no blogs (Thinking with my fingers)

Amusingly oblique but poignant prose.

I shake my angry fist at tinned meat!

Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide. --Robert Weller --Writer Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself (AP/My Way)

Some student bloggers beat me to this news.

Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek'srevelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements (or not); and the news that BzzAgent, a 3-year-old Boston company, has enlisted thousands of volunteers to generate buzz for clients? products, sometimes in ethically questionable ways.

The ground is shifting so rapidly that the Word of Mouth Marketing Association last week released a draft Code of Ethics to help define the rules of the road. (The group invites the public to participate in the process.) --J.D. Lasica --The cost of ethics: Influence peddling in the blogosphere (Online Journalism Review)

The two researchers, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke, do think they may have evidence for methane in Mars' atmosphere. Methane cannot last long without being replenished, and it's not easy to replenish it. There are non-biological ways (for example, sunlight + C02 plus water, which can be found on Mars), but life is the easiest way we know of. As the story went, they had a secret meeting -- with whom, we don't know -- and they were discussing releasing this bombshell to either coincide or predate an article submitted to Nature, a premier scientific journal.

But -- and this is the important bit -- there was never any meeting! Nor is there a Nature paper. --Phil "The Bad Astronomer" Plait --Basically, the [Mars] story is, now get this, a fabrication. (Bad Astronomy)

I had blogged the original report under Science Fiction. Good work, Phil!

Paradox though it may seem--and paradoxes are always dangerous things --it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced Life that whenever one goes to a private view or to an artistic salon one sees, here the mystic eyes of Rossetti's dream, the long ivory throat, the strange squarecut jaw, the loosened shadowy hair that he so ardently loved, there the sweet maidenhood of The Golden Stair, the blossomlike mouth and weary loveliness of the Laus Amoris, the passionpale face of Andromeda, the thin hands and lithe beauty of the Vivien in Merlin's Dream. And it has always been so. A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. Neither Holbein nor Vandyck found in England what they have given us. They brought their types with them, and Life, with her keen imitative faculty, set herself to supply the master with models. The Greeks, with their quick artistic instinct, understood this, and set in the bride's chamber the statue of Hermes or of Apollo, that she might bear children as lovely as the works of art that she looked at in her rapture or her pain. They knew that Life gains from Art not merely spirituality, depth of thought and feeling, soulturmoil or soulpeace, but that she can form herself on the very lines and colours of art and can reproduce the dignity of Pheidias as well as the grace of Praxiteles. Hence came their objection to realism. They disliked it on purely social grounds. They felt that it inevitably makes people ugly, and they were perfectly right. We try to improve the conditions of the race by means of good air, free sunlight, wholesome water, and hideous bare buildings for the better housing of the lower orders. But these things merely produce health; they do not produce beauty. For this, Art is required, and the true disciples of the great artist are not his studio imitators, but those who become like his works of art, be they plastic as in Greek days, or pictorial as in modern times; in a word, Life is Art's best, Art's only pupil. --Oscar Wilde --The Decay of Lying (EServer.org)

"What if I were to collect your papers without names on them, and then -- after grading them all individually -- averaged the grades and gave everyone the same class average grade? How would things change?"

At first, the response was incredulity. "That wouldn't be fair," sums up the initial reaction. Naturally, those who assumed that they would get A's and B's were hostile to the idea, because the "average" would pull their grades down. But I asked them again -- "How would things change?" --Mike Arnzen --All for One (Grade) (Pedablogue)

I really like how Arnzen describes the way he gets the class to work through their assumptions, parrying their responses, feinting attacks, and finally pulling their hats down over their eyes and clonking them on the noggin by invoking the meaning of "C".

This term, I've been using a "Discussion Reflection Worksheet". I don't pass it out at the end of every class, but in my large American Lit section (30 students) and my much cozier freshman comp course, I feel the need for a little documentation to help make the evaluation of classroom participation more meaningful.

It feels too mechanical and awkward to cut off productive discussions in order to make sure I call on every student during every class period. I want students to know that even if I didn't call on them, they are still responsible.

The five students in Media Aesthetics have to contribute heavily to each class discussion, and so far I've been delighted by the depth and quality of their discussions. All are asked to blog their responses to readings before class.

I'm a bit disappointed that they're posting their responses just before the class meets, which means they don't have time to read and reflect on each other's points before class meets. But in all honesty the classroom discussions have been stimulating and productive enough without that extra layer of pre-discussion. There is enough time for each student to present her blog entry during class.

Bowing to faculty demands, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers on Thursday released a transcript of his controversial remarks on women and science. He did so while releasing yet another apology for those remarks and as the head of the Harvard Corporation released a statement backing Summers. --Scott Jaschik --What Larry Summers Said (Inside Higher Ed)

I'm blogging this not only because it's timely and this blog has hosted discussions on women in science before...but because the article demonstrates the quiet power of links.

The article would make perfect sense if printed out, but the online version offers a newcomer links to click on for background. Someone who's been following along the whole time can find raw data. I had seen a link to the full transcript of the speech online, and I read it quickly to see what the fuss was all about. Jaschik knows what he's doing, when it comes to online journalism.

Regarding the women in science controversy, it amazes me that Harvard took so long to publish this transcript.

It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward as fact information that is incorrect, specious or cooked. You lose status and respect if your take on a story that is patently stupid. You lose status and respect if you are unprofessional or deliberately misleading. And once you've lost a sufficient amount of status and respect, none of the other bloggers link to you anymore or raise your name in their arguments. And you're over. The great correcting mechanism for people on the Web is people on the Web. --Peggy Noonan --The Blogs Must Be Crazy  (Opinion Journal)

An excellent assessment of the power of blogs, written by a MSM ("mainstream media") insider.

The New York Times Co. has agreed to buy About.com from Primedia Inc. in an all-cash deal valued at about $410 million. --NY Times agrees to buy About.com (New York Business)

About.com is a collection of free resources compiled by "experts" in a format that resembles a blog. The About.com authors are part-timers, enthusiasts who post brief articles and recommend links, within the structure of a website that serves up a lot of annoying advertisements. The About.com "guides" get a commission on the ads.

A few years ago, before there were blog-indexing sites, the fact that About.com let you search through so many articles and links made the site valuable. Now that there are good, reliable ways of finding the most current information posted by thousands and thousands of webloggers, many of them with credentials that exceed those of the About.com "guides," I'm turning to About.com less and less frequently (especially after they mothballed their interactive fiction category). It is too easy for people with valuable expertise to post their material on their own, rather than depend on About.com to do it for them.

The NY Times has credibility, but its content has little visibility on the internet, since its URLs expire.

Update: A half hour later.

From Peggy Noonan's editorial, "The Blogs Must Be Crazy"

Some publisher is going to decide that if you can't fight blogs, you can join them. He'll think like this: We're already on the Internet. That's how bloggers get and review our reporting. Why don't we get our own bloggers to challenge our work? Why don't we invite bloggers who already exist into the tent? Why not take the best things said on blogs each day and print them on a Daily Blog page? We'd be enhancing our rep as an honest news organization, and it will further our branding!

About.com isn't a collection of bloggers. It probably looks desirable to the NYT because the content is more tightly controlled than an equal number of blogs would be. Everyone who agreed to provide content for About.com is comfortable with the idea of working for The Man.

The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceed value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags and gloves would occupy more space in a landfill than the two bottles. Without realizing it, the third graders had beautifully reproduced the results of a grand national experiment begun in 1987-the year they were born, back when the Three R's had nothing to do with garbage. That year a barge named the Mobro 4000 wandered thousands of miles trying to unload its cargo of Long Islanders' trash, and its journey had a strange effect on America. The citizens of the richest society in the history of the planet suddenly became obsessed with personally handling their own waste. Believing that there vas no more room in landfills, Americans concluded that recycling was their only option. Their intentions were good and their conclusions seemed plausible. Recycling does sometimes makes sense-for some materials in some places at some times. But the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environrnentally safe landfill. And since there's no shortage of landfill space (the crisis of 1987 was a false alarm), there's no reason to make recycling a legal or moral imperative. Mandatory recycling programs aren't good for posterity. They offer mainly short-term benefits to a few groups-politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organizations, waste-handling corporations-while diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems. Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources.--John Tierney; New York Times, 30 June, 1996.
--Recycling is GarbageNY Times)

A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water. --Brian Berger --Exclusive: NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars  (Space News)

The link is very slow... I gather it's getting a lot of attention. The evidence is all indirect, so let's not get too carried away. To his credit, reporter Brian Berger notes in the second paragraph that the paper describing the findings has not yet been peer reviewed. The article does mention that "many researchers" doubt earlier claims about microbial life, but it doesn't offer quotations from any naysayers.

For now, I'll file this under "science fiction". Whatever the result, NASA will file it under "great PR."

We, the guests were already disgusted with the whole affair when Trimalchio, who, by the way, was beastly drunk, ordered in the cornet players for our further pleasure, and propped up with cushions, stretched himself out at full length. "Imagine I'm dead," says he, "and play something soothing!" Whereat the cornet players struck up a funeral march, and one of them especially---a slave of the undertaker fellow---the best in the crowd, played with such effect that he roused the whole neighborhood. So the watchmen, who had charge of the district, thinking Trimalchio's house on fire, burst in the door, and surged in---as was their right---with axes and water ready. Taking advantage of such an opportune moment . . . we bolted incontinently, as if there had been a real fire in the place. -- from the Satyricon --The Banquet of Trimalchio (Fordham University)

At one point, F. Scott Fitzgerald wanted Trimalchio as the title for the book we know as The Great Gatsby. Trimalchio is a former slave, who inherited his master's great wealth. Gatsby, too, comes from a humble background, but he earns his wealth (in what way, Fitzgerald never quite says).

Gatsby's parties certainly resemble Trimalchio's grand affair described in this text (what the editor calls "a[n] excerpt from a comic romance probably composed during the reign of Nero"), but Nick (the narrator) describes Gatsby as standing off by himself, not partaking in the debauchery that he supplies to his guests. Gatsby is hoping that his parties will attract Daisy, the girl he loved, but who didn't wait for him to come home from the war.

At Trimalchio's party, singing slave boys clean the feet of their guests (an action that Christ undertook at the Last Supper). Trimalchio himself arrives late, carried in by slaves while the orchestra plays a fanfare. The guests are served lavish food, including wine with a label on it that says it's 100 years old (something that cultured guests would know and appreciate -- the sign suggests that Trimalchio wants to impress even those who wouldn't know the difference).

It's not hard to think of that one talented cornet player as a jazz musician -- that would have fit perfectly into Fitzgerald's world.

Still, I can't help but think of Michael Jackson dancing on the roof of a car outside the courtroom where the judge waits to convene a hearing on his child-molestation charges. And, of course, the idea of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

The mock funeral I quoted above is significant in light of the Gatsby's funeral -- nobody attends it.

Note also the pun -- after consuming all that wine, the guests bolt "incontinently" out the door. Was that joke in the original, or was it added by the translator?

Playing off the self-esteem theme, digital artist David Sullivan's contribution to the show is the Ego Machine, a project that uses Google to project Sullivan's soul into the future and puts the fun back into funeral. --Michelle Delio --Immortality Through Google  (Wired)

If it has anything vaguely to do with technology, Wired is there.

--Name Voyager (The Baby Name Wizard)

Very cool site, that illustrates the popularity of baby names over time, from 1900 to 2003.

For every million babies born in 2003, about 1600 were named "Xavier," while about 84 will go through life with the head-scratch-inducing label "Xzavier."

Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

To prove his point that the commons is under attack, Bollier has filled Bullies with example after example of how corporate lawyers have swooped in on artists and consumers who have tried to use products and logos in ways other than those prescribed by the corporations themselves.

As an example, Bollier presents the case of "AiboPet," an enthusiastic owner of one of Sony's robotic pets. When AiboPet set up a website that showed other Aibo owners how to make their pets dance, Sony quickly notified him that, by manipulating the Aibo software, he was violating provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In other words, even though AiboPet had full ownership of his Aibo, Sony could still control how he modified it and whether he taught others to do the same. Rather than face a lawsuit, AiboPet quickly shut down his website. --Amit Asaravala --Are Bullies After Our Culture? (Wired)

More than two thousand years ago, the Roman poet Horace claimed that literature is "sweet" and "useful." Since then, literature has been traditionally understood, at least in Western cultures, as having the dual purpose of entertaining and educating its audience. Literary texts are constructed in effect as objects of beauty, sources of pleasure and as conveyors of messages and information. While authors often claim no practical purpose for their works, all literature constitutes an attempt at persuasively conveying certain values and ideas. The entertaining and beautiful aspect of literary works acts in reality as part of the appeal and attractiveness which the work tries to attach to the ideas which it seeks to convey. The beauty of literature is therefore a part of its rhetoric, a device intended to strengthen the overall persuasiveness and influence of the work on its audience. While the entertaining aspect of literature may be rather obvious, understanding the ideas or values which a text advances is not always a simple task. Part of the problem is the fact that the ideas of a literary text are almost always presented in indirect or "symbolic" form. --Fidel Fajardo-Acosta --Understanding Literature (Creighton University)

Humans specialize in distraction, especially when the task at hand requires intellectual heavy lifting. All the usual "Is it lunchtime yet?" inner voices, and external interruptions like incoming phone calls, are alive and well.

But in the era of e-mail, instant messaging, Googling, e-commerce and iTunes, potential distractions while seated at a computer are not only ever-present but very enticing. Distracting oneself used to consist of sharpening a half-dozen pencils or lighting a cigarette. Today, there is a universe of diversions to buy, hear, watch and forward, which makes focusing on a task all the more challenging. -- Katie Hafner --You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention (New York Times)

I was going to blog this earlier, but I got distracted.

Actually, I realized that blogging this article was an attempt to distract myself from another, higher-priority task that I was putting off at the time.

The "Third Bridge" is the nanotechnology and artificial intelligence revolution, which Kurzweil predicts will deliver the nanobots that work like repaving crews in our bloodstreams and brains. These intelligent machines will destroy disease, rebuild organs and obliterate known limits on human intelligence, he believes.

Immortality would leave little standing in current society, in which the inevitability of death is foundational to everything from religion to retirement planning. The planet's natural resources would be greatly stressed, and the social order shaken.

Kurzweil says he believes new technology will emerge to meet increasing human needs. And he said society will be able to control the advances he predicts as long as it makes decisions openly and democratically, without excessive government interference. --Never Say Die: Live Forever  (AP/My Way)

Peter's First Chess Tournament (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I can see part of my son's shoulder, and almost all of the board. His opponent looks about three years older. I've seen her try to slip her white bishop through an empty black square... the judge asks her to put it back.

"Excuse me," says a voice at my side. "We ask that the parents not crowd around in front of the doorway."

I look around. All the other parents are sitting on benches around the corner, or in another part of the library. Nobody else is near the door.

Crowd?

The librarian waits patiently for my reaction. I consider quibbling over her choice of words, with the idea that, by doing so, I will be able to stall long enough to witness a bit more of the tournament.

"You can walk back and forth in front of the doorway, if you like," she says, smiling. "I know it's hard."

I'm not actually worried about whether Peter is winning or losing. He's still only six (though his birthday is tomorrow), but he's tall for his age, so people often expect his behavior to match that of an older child. I'm mostly worried that he'll disrupt the other players, or start stomping around in a snit after losing a game.

The Rules:

No electronic gadgets or books. No telephones, no getting advice from or giving advice to other players.

Perfectly reasonable.

No parents in the room.

Hmm… I wasn’t expecting that.

If you touch a piece, you have to move it. If you touch an opponent's piece with your piece, you have to take it if the move is legal.

Woah -- that’s a bit more strict than what we had practiced!

And no talking during the tournament.

No talking? Peter?

Well, of course they can't have twenty little kids jabbering on and on during the tournament. But if I can’t even be in the room to give him the evil eye when he needs it… well… I knew this would be an interesting day.

* * *

Around the corner from the game room, a parent sits on a bench, wielding a highlighter over a textbook. She doesn't seem all that absorbed in the material. In fact, she's extremely annoyed with what she’s reading, and she doesn't mind telling everybody about it. I overhear that she's a teacher, and she's taking a correspondence course for some kind of re-certification.

"I have to send in a final paper," she says to a neighbor. "Though I wish I could just take a test and get it over with."

She flips through her textbook, "They use four paragraphs to say what they could say in just one," she scowls. "It's like they feel they have to put in all this theory and personal opinion."

I figure now is not the time to mention my profession, so I stroll away.

Meanwhile, in front of the used-book sale tables, another woman pokes through the display methodically. I find a used copy of Vonda McIntyre's Enterprise (a Star Trek paperback I've wanted to read for several years... Gulp! Was it really published in 1986?), Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, and The Strong-willed Child, by Dr. Dobson, who I understand is a spanker, but may still have some worthwhile advice. For a quarter each, what the heck?

I note that the browser next to me has collected a stack that includes a biography of Sir Francis Drake and a book on nuclear energy.

"With a selection like that," I say, "I'm guessing that you home-school."

My deduction is correct -- and how. Sherri is a mother of nine, with 18 years of home-schooling behind her, and another 13 ahead of her.

"Your son is Peter," she says, not really asking a question. Because I hiss “Peter!” all the time when we’re in public, I’m perfectly used to strangers knowing his name. "My boy is Peter, too. Here he comes."

"I won two games and had a stalemate," the boy says. He inspects his mom's books.

"Look... Queen Elizabeth's personal pirate," she says.

"Oh, yeah," says the boy. "Sir Francis Drake... he took gold from the Spanish galleons."

Her boy is well-mannered and quiet, about my boy’s size, though he’s ten years old.

More kids are coming out of the game room. My Peter is with them, smiling. Two wins and one loss.

"Are you remembering the rules?" I ask.

Peter shrugs evasively.

A judge gestures to me. "I've got to talk to you a moment about your son."

Peter runs off and starts talking about videogames and Star Wars with the other kids.

The judge takes a deep breath. "We've asked your son to stop talking about ten times." A stream of conciliatory statements, apologies and regrets pours from the judge’s mouth. He’s practically wincing. "He's doing very well, but if he doesn't stop talking... we're going to have to... well... we might have to..." he takes a deep breath. "...disqualify him."

I shrug. "Okay."

The judge exhales.

I call Peter over and ask the judge to repeat what he said.

Peter listens. "What does 'disqualify' mean?"

I rub his thick, crazy hair. "It means you lose, Mr. Boy."

"That game," the judge interjects. "We wouldn’t kick him out of the tournament."

When Peter runs off to play again, the judge offers more explanations and apologies.

I actually have to put my hand on the judge's shoulder to calm him down a bit. "It's all right,” I tell him. It would teach him a lesson he needs to learn. I wouldn't get mad at you."

Now the judge starts defending Peter… he keeps finishing his games early, and then instead of leaving the game room, he wanders around to watch the other players. And he won’t stop talking.

I ask whether Peter can have a lollipop to keep his mouth busy during the rest of the tournament, and suggest that the judge to send Peter out to me as soon as he’s finished playing his next game. Everyone agrees.

Peter has found a second-grader named John, who does an excellent imitation of Yoda walking. They soon collect a little army of boys, who swing their imaginary light sabers, then hop into their X wing fighters and zoom down the corridors, supplying enthusiastic sound effects.

Librarians walk past, mumbling and scowling. Now that both Peter and I have gotten warnings, I figure I’d better do something.

“Boys,” I cry. “Put your DVD on ‘slow’ and push the ‘mute’ button!”

It works… not for very long, but it buys us a little time. Soon, the judges invite the kids in for a practice game. Peter pilots his X-wing through the doors, dismounts, and starts to play.

It’s very quiet out here now.

* * *

“Rosetta Stone? What’s a Rosetta Stone?” It’s the teacher again, jabbing an accusatory finger at her textbook. “Now they’re talking about a Rosetta Stone. How am I supposed to know what a Rosetta Stone is? Does anyone know what a Rosetta Stone is?”

The parents sitting near her look at each other and shrug.

The teacher scans the room, practically gloating to have found this evidence of unnecessary complexity in a graduate-level textbook!

Since I don’t have a lollipop to keep my mouth quiet, I can’t help myself.

“The Rosetta Stone was an artifact that contained the same passage of text in Egyptian hieroglyphics and two other languages – I forget what they were, but they already knew how to translate them. Without that stone, they would never have been able to translate hieroglyphics.”

The teacher is listening. She seems to welcome the help, but she’s still frowning.

“In a more general sense, a Rosetta Stone is a key to understanding something difficult.”

She glances down at her textbook. “That makes sense!” she says, with a surprised laugh. “Yes, that makes sense!”

Sherri, the home-schooling mom, has found a cache of Robert Louis Stevenson books, and one title in a series of classic biographies that are popular with home-schoolers. She shares her discovery with me.

Sherri’s boy Peter comes out. “Now my score is 3-1/2,” he reports.

I must have made a puzzled look, because he and Sherri start explaining the scoring to me. A win earns a point, and a stalemate earns half a point. I had assumed that they would factor in the number of turns or the number of pieces taken. Chess is such a complex game that it seems to me that reducing it to that level seems almost unfair.

My boy pokes his head out of the doorway, an almost-gone lollipop in his hand. “Victory!” he says.

”Did you remember to shake your opponent’s hand?” I ask.

Peter blinks twice, thinking, then ducks back inside.

“Peter!” I hiss. “Don’t go back inside!” I catch the door before it closes, and peek in.

He’s is in the middle of the room, spinning around in circles, looking for his vanquished opponent. Sort of. He’s actually going “Woah! Woah!” as he spins, happily oblivious to his surroundings.

The judges exchange glances.

“Peter!” I hiss again. When I catch his eye, I do the “come here” finger.

“I’ll get my coat!” he says, his whisper as loud as a shout.

Sherri is watching, smiling. “My Peter used to be just like yours,” she says.

“But your boy is so calm!” I sputter.

“I’m sure if we put him in the public school system, they’d have put him on Ritalin. We adapted to him. He learned. He grew out of it. Maybe yours will, too.”

We’re waiting for the final game. There are no more lollipops left. “I’ll just hold my lips closed,” says Peter.

I alternate between grabbing him and hugging him tight and letting him hop around. Now he’s leading a crew of boys on a mission to destroy the Daleks who have invaded the TARDIS.

Sherri is smiling. “Wouldn’t it be interesting,” she says, “if the final game were Peter vs. Peter?”

The boards are set up again, and the judges start announcing the pairings. Lo and behold, Peter and Peter head for the same table.

“It’s homeschool vs. homeschool!” says Sherri.

I laugh. ”May the best Peter win!”

Mine is literally pinching his lips to keep them closed.

* * *

I pace, eat a snack, fiddle on my PDA, and chat with Sherri.

Soon, I see her Peter coming through the doorway. He’s smiling a smile and walking a walk that tells me he won.

But the first thing out of his mouth when he gets to his mother, with his thumb jerking backwards towards my boy, is “He’s good!”

Peter follows along behind, hopping and jumping. His mouth is red from the pinching. I ask the judges how he did. They smile and nod. “He was much better – he was obviously trying very hard to keep quiet!”

Okay, so I guess his behavior this time wasn’t perfect, but he wasn’t thrown out of his first chess tournament -- that’s good enough for me! I give him a bear hug. “I am so proud of you!”

We need to make a run to the store, so I consider ducking out before the awards ceremony. All the kids are supposed to win certificates, but we come to the library so often I’m sure they’d just hold it for us.

”Do you have my chess board?” asks Peter. “Let’s play!”

The store can wait. We plop in a quiet corner and start setting up the pieces.

* * *


At home, in the garage, I coach Peter a little on what to tell his mother.

He bounds up the stairs. “I won three games and lost two,” he says. “And I got a certificate!”

“A certificate?” my wife gushes. “Let me see! Oh, Peter! I’m so proud of you!”



Peter is holding his hands behind his back. “And there’s something else I have to show you… my second-place trophy!!”

* * *

Round 2 is March 19. Sherri and I have exchanged phone numbers. We hope Peter and Peter can get together and practice before the big day.

Update: Peter finished with two wins (one of them a forfeit) and three losses. A photographer snapped a photo of another kid's face just as Peter beat him, but the image didn't appear in the Chess Tournament Kicks off in Greensburg story.

For the past hour, Peter (who is not yet seven) has been giving the instructor a bit of a workout. He planted himself on his carpet square directly in front of her. His hand has been up almost constantly. Whether he has been called on or not, he offers answers and finishes her sentences with unflappable confidence -- but spotty accuracy.

He correctly identifies a four-foot-tall picture as an emperor penguin, and knows the difference between a king penguin and a macaroni penguin. He knows the difference between the Arctic and the Antarctic, and knows where you won't find penguins.

He has pondered the cold fate of emperor penguin chicks, hatched far inland, away from shoreline predators, huddling for two months in a warm pocket under their father's belly, while their mothers make the long trip to the water and back, bringing a welcome meal for the little one. He has waited all week to tell someone his idea -- the scientists who live in Antarctica could feed the penguin chicks, so the won't starve during the winter.

The class is geared to the attention span and activity level of little kids, though they didn't have Peter in mind when they designed the course. He is entertained by the "pretend you are a penguin carrying an egg on your feet" station, but he can't wait for the lecture/demonstration to resume.

After the fourth or fifth time I hiss "Peter!" and make an intense "mouth closed" gesture, one of the other parents gives me a sympathetic smile.

"I wish I had a tenth of his energy," she says.

"There are times," I sigh, "when I wish he had a tenth of his energy!"

For several days, he has enjoyed informing us at the dinner table that there are seventeen penguins at the Pittsburgh Aquarium: two king penguins, one rock-hopper, and fourteen macaroni penguins. As the classroom portion of our excursion is ending, our instructor wants to know whether there are any final questions. Peter, who has noticed the instructor never actually told the class how many and what kind of penguins we are about to visit, sees his chance.

"Everybody! Everybody!" he shouts. "I have a quiz for you!"

"We don't have time for a quiz," says the instructor. "Let's go see the penguins now."

Peter, as usual, keeps up a constant stream of chatter.

In a service corridor at the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium, Sukey, a two-year-old macaroni penguin, waddles around inside a loose circle of wide-eyed kids.

An employee scratches and pats the pudgy little bird, who curls and shakes with delight. "Sukey, are you going to talk to me?"

Sukey throws back her head and squawks, sounding something like a turkey. Peter shrieks with delight.

"Talk, Sukey!" says Peter. "Are you going to talk?"

The bird waddles around, every bit as cute in real life as in any cartoon version.

The penguin squawks... and attacks!

Peter, white in the face, backs away. Sukey pursues.

"Alright, who's next?" gobbles Sukey, lunging towards another kid. "You want a piece of me, too?"

Peter holds tight to my hand -- very, very quiet.

As we file out, one of the parents gives me a sympathetic smile. "Now you know somthing that'll leave him speechless!"

(I wrote this out a few weeks ago, but I only got the photos out of my camera today.)

Search engines are some of the most commonly accessed Web sites online. Millions of people turn to search engines daily to find information about news, health concerns, products, government services, their new neighbors, natural disasters and a myriad of other topics. At the same time, recent trends suggest that the search engine market is shrinking, with fewer large players guiding users? online behavior than ever before. Despite the crucial role that search engines play in how people access information, little attention has been paid to the social, political, economic, and cultural dimensions of large-scale search engines.

This special issue will explore the social implications of large-scale search engines on the Web. It will bring together experts from the fields of communication, sociology, political science, economics, business, law, and computer and information sciences to consider what we know about people'ssearch engine uses and what recent trends suggest for the types of content that will be most accessible to users in the future.

The following are some questions papers might address: Who uses search engines and for what purposes? What are the effects of search engine use on mass- and interpersonal communication? How do users? communication practices influence search engine functionality? How skilled are various population groups at the use of search engines? How do search engines shape identity management and representation online? Are all search engines created equal? Is all content created equal in the eyes of search engines? Is there a viable public alternative to the search engine market dominated by private actors? These are just some of the possible questions papers in this special issue may address. --The Social, Political, Economic and Cultural Dimensions of Search Engines (Journal of Comptuer-Mediated Communication)

I was talking about Wikipedia, and he launched into a rant about its failings. In particular, he complained about the several inaccuracies in an article about a topic with which he was deeply familiar.

"So," I asked, "did you fix them?"

"No," he responded, "I don't have time for that kind of thing."

Talk about not getting it. --Dan Gillmor --Google, Wikipedia and More (Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.)

In this entry about Google's recent interest in Wikimedia, Gillmor offers this anecdote about a Big University Professor.

The poets made all the words, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses For, though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolizes the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes one step nearer to it than any other. This expression, or naming, is not art, but a second nature, grown out of the first, as a leaf out of a tree. What we call nature, is a certain self-regulated motion, or change; and nature does all things by her own hands, and does not leave another to baptise her, but baptises herself; and this through the metamorphosis again. --Ralph Waldo Emerson --Essays: Second Series [1844]: The Poet (American Transcendentalism Web)

I was inspired to find this quotation in response to a comment Eric Mayer left on something I blogged this morning about the English language.

Ten presidents and chancellors of prominent research universities, in a report written with the American Council on Education and released Thursday, called for innovations such as giving young academics more time during child-rearing years to complete research before being put up for tenure. --Study Calls for Tenure Flexibility (AP/My Way)

See the PDF exectuive summary of the full report.

Many students having difficulty understanding Shakespeare would be surprised to learn that he wrote in modern English. But, as can be seen in the earlier example of the Lord's Prayer, Elizabethan English has much more in common with our language today than it does with the language of Chaucer. Many familiar words and phrases were coined or first recorded by Shakespeare, some 2,000 words and countless catch-phrases are his. Newcomers to Shakespeare are often shocked at the number of cliches contained in his plays, until they realize that he coined them and they became cliches afterwards. "One fell swoop," "vanish into thin air," and "flesh and blood" are all Shakespeare's. Words he bequeathed to the language include "critical," "leapfrog," "majestic," "dwindle," and "pedant." --A (Very) Brief History of the English Language (WordOrigins.org)

And don't forget the insults, as dished out by the Authentic Shakespeare Insults server... or, construct your own to send to some roguish tickle-brained malt-worm, at the (not quite so authentic) Shakespeare Insult Server

Playwright Arthur Miller, the creator of The Crucible and Death of a Salesman, has died at the age of 89. --American playwright [Arthur] Miller dies (BBC)

Thanks for sending me the sad news, Rosemary.

I wrote on All My Sons and Death of a Salesman in my dissertation-turned-book.

NASA -- Last year was the fourth warmest year on average for our planet since the late 1800s, according to NASA scientists.

To determine if the Earth is warming or cooling, scientists look at average temperatures. To get an "average" temperature, scientists take the warmest and the coolest temperatures in a day, and calculate the temperature that is exactly in the middle of those high and low values. This provides an average temperature for a day. These average temperatures are then calculated for spots all over the Earth, over an entire year.

Scientists use temperatures taken on land and on surfaces of the oceans. Weather stations provide land measurements, and satellites provide sea surface temperature measurements over the ocean. These data are computed by NASA. --Earth Gets a Warm Feeling All Over (Red Nova)

OMG! Look, Ethel, at that big red blob over North America! We must be frying in hell!

The article doesn't tell us what we're looking at, but one assumes from context that the hotter colors on the map show areas of increased heat. But another map, the "2004 Annual Mean Surface Temperature Anomalies," shows that the area over North America to be anywhere from .5 to 2.7 degrees cooler in 2004 than it was five years earlier.

The article is fine. The pictures are cool. They don't go together, however.

Imagine how different the visual rhetoric would be if this image of the globe instead showed mostly pale green, with a slightly more yellow green indicating raised temperature. The red creates an emotional reaction.

James Guckert, who reported from the White House for the Talon News Service under the name "Jeff Gannon," announced he was quitting the business "in consideration of the welfare of me and my family." --White House reporter's credentials questioned (CNN)

Hmm... I interned at a radio station where one of the news reporters went by a catchy, alliterative, macho on-air name, but the station owner called him by his real name, which was rather mousy, and less pleasing to the ear name.

Since Talon News Service does not seem to have much of an identity outside of reproducing GOP press releases, Guckert's alternative identity is a more troublesome matter.

What is Tenure? (The Good Morning Show -- KFAB)

This morning at about 8:40, I spent about 12 minutes as a telephone guest on a morning talk show on KFAB in Nebraska, where I was brought in to provide context for the Ward Churchill controversy at the University of Colorado. My role was to explain tenure.

A Google search for "tenure" brings up an informal "What is Tenure" handout that I created in 2000 and posted to the "Frequently Asked Questions" of my website. When the host first contacted me, he mentioned having found my work online.

I presented myself on-air as a guy who happens to earn a living being a college teacher, and tried to described the process in simple terms. When discussing how tenure might differ at different kinds of institutions, I managed to work in some good references to SHU's faculty-student interaction and small class sizes (I mentioned that I teach one class with 30 students, three with about 13, and one with five). In response to a hypothetical question about how my school would respond to the presence of a holocaust denier on our faculty, I worked in a reference to our National Catholic Center on Holocaust Education.

At one point, I noted that there are some cold and insensitive people who are great teachers; there are some kind and loving people who are not; and there are some people who say offensive and odious things who meet the terms of their employment contract. That was the main thing I tried to emphasize – that tenure is a contract, with terms that both ends have to hold up. I noted that tenure would not protect the employment of a faculty member whose scholarship and teaching did not continue to meet the appropriate criteria.

After one of the hosts offered the hypothetical scenario of a rich donor saying that he would donate $10 million to SHU, but only on the condition that Dr. Jerz be fired for voicing an opinion that he finds offensive, I explained the importance of academic freedom.

When I noted that there's a line in our faculty handbook that specifically states that tenure will not be revoked as a way of clamping down on academic freedom, I heard music start to play in the background, and the host thanked me for my time.

Personal Reflection

During the interview, I was consciously thinking of a Salon article I blogged about years ago, "Ambushed on Donahue," in which MIT scholar Harry Jenkins describes being invited on the show to have an intellectual discussion about videogames in culture, but instead found himself facing angry mothers who had been spooked by Donahue's repeated screening of video clips showing the most violent, out-of-context scenes in Grand Theft Auto 3.

Jenkins kicked himself afterward for not sticking to a simple point and hammering it at every opportunity. So I offered a quick answer to the direct questions posed by the host, and then tried to shift as soon as possible back to the narrative I had prepared in advance. I was delighted to hear that music in the background just when I got to the line about the faculty handbook, because I had aimed for that to be the climax of my prepared remarks.

I had a few things in reserve, in case I needed them. The station has a lot of sports programming, so I was also going to use the analogy of a pro team paying big money in order to recruit and retain superstars, or colleges offering athletic scholarship for a similar reason. Had the environment become a little hostile, I was going to say “Hmm” thoughtfully, and then suggest that someone in Nebraska start a university that doesn't offer tenure, and publish a report on what other benefits they needed to offer in order to recruit and retain qualified faculty members. But the need never arose. In fact, the hosts gave me a few generous softballs to speed things along, and when it became clear that I wasn’t going to speculate about Ward Churchill, they offered some hypothetical questions in order to keep me talking.

I tried to record it via the station's website, but I couldn't get through. Perhaps angry mobs called in to mock me after I went off the air, but I’m satisfied with the experience.

You arrive for your interview at the most posh hotel in town, where you're met by the local chapter of Plutocrats R Us -- millionaire alumni, billionaire builders, all dropping by on their private jets to meet you. Their female companions, dripping diamonds, whisk your wife off to fashionista spas -- while you are wined and dined and begged to consider a job paying a measly $3-million. Plus, of course, the summer house, private schools for the youngsters, and Jaguars for all.

And you didn't have to submit references.

And you didn't have to publish a thing.

Because you're a top-of-the-line football coach.

Such wooing and swooning won't happen to Laird or Neo. Stellar acts of teaching and lit crit won't net the bucks or the prestige that Nick Saban brought to Louisiana State University (until the Miami Dolphins stole him for $5-million).

Football also gives its fans a history of ecstatic moments, like Doug Flutie's miraculous Hail Mary pass at the end of Boston College's 1984 season. But no one thrills the young with tales of "my interpretive breakthrough with Foucault" ("I was polishing the ceramic swan when I had a flash of blinding insight. ...").

And so, when you apply for a job in academe, and you're not Nick Saban, you have to follow the rules. Every year thousands of Ph.D.'s seek tenure-track jobs in English, and only an estimated 40 percent will ever get them. Many, like Ms. Mentor's correspondents, will get sent to the showers early. --"Ms Mentor" --Sometimes You're the Problem (Chronicle)

While Churchill has been reviled outside academe, many professors -- even those who find his views revolting -- have defended him, saying that for a public university to dismiss a tenured professor for his writings would violate the First Amendment and erode the principles of academic freedom. So the debate over Churchill's research may have the potential to shift the broader discussion about whether he deserves support. --Scott Jaschik --A New Ward Churchill Controversy (Inside Higher Ed)

Churchill is the professor who called victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack "little Eichmans" (a reference to the Gestapo leader who masterminded the "Final Solution" -- the execution of Jews).

Hmm...

While Jaschik is only reporting on a debate that is already happening online, I think it should be noted that the essay that provides most of the evidence against Churchill's scholarship has itself not been peer-reviewed.

Since I haven't been following the Churchill controversy closely, I'm not aware of whether Churchill's statements about 9-11 might have violated something in his university faculty handbook, but by shifting the focus from what he said to the credibility of his scholarship, those who want Churchill out probably have more leverage -- if they can prove that Churchill's scholarship is shoddy.

Tenure is supposed to protect scholars with unpopular views, but this is a different matter.

(Full disclosure... I wrote an editorial for Inside Higher Ed, but on a completely unrelated subject.)

Many thanks for responding to my brief survey. My name is Ashley Holmes, and I am conducting some descriptive research as part of my M.A. thesis in composition under the direction of Dr. Chris Anson at NC State University. Most of my work has involved collecting and describing cases of blogs used for the teaching of college composition. I am interested in cataloguing and analyzing the various uses to which blogs are being put. To enrich the information I have gathered, I would greatly appreciate your responses to some brief questions about your use of blogs in your teaching. The survey below should take you only a few minutes of your time, but your responses will be enormously helpful to me in my project.

When you submit your responses, they are sent only to me in email format. If you would like more information about my project or this survey, please contact me at ashley_holmes@ncsu.edu. Many thanks in advance for your help. --Use of Blogs in the Classroom: A Very Brief Survey (North Carolina State University)

I used to love routines, particularly the way they allowed life's more mundane aspects to slip into the background, removed from conscious decision making. Before becoming a dad, my mornings began with a predictable sequence. Coffee. Bagels. NPR. But with a newborn, routines are constantly at risk. You put your hand to her little forehead. Fever. Bye-bye, plans.

Now, with more than three years of fatherhood behind me, something has changed. My den at home was always my intellectual sanctuary, the place to which I withdrew to write and, as my wife says, "think lofty thoughts." The change is the way those lofty thoughts now mingle more easily with the mundane ones.

Today I write with the door to my den open, something I never did before my daughter was born. She often wanders in while I'm working for a hug or a laugh or a quick spin in the big leather chair that sits in the corner. Though she's getting better at avoiding the carefully arranged stacks of books around my desk, she's knocked more than one weighty philosophic tome from its comfortable perch.

The increased commingling of the lofty and pedestrian that my daughter brought to my life has changed my writing. --Jeffrey Nesteruk --Fatherhood, in Theory and Practice (Chronicle)

If you're designing a website aimed at teenagers, you'd better not make the text too small. That's not because teens have bad eyes, but because teenagers tend to lean back in their chairs when they're at their computers. That advice and much more about how websites for teens should be different from those for adults can be found in a study recently completed by Jakob Nielsen, a principal at the Nielsen Norman Group. --Daniel Terdiman --What Websites Do to Turn On Teens  (Wired)

Another intersting passage, since students dont' blog anonymously at SHU's site:

Also important, [Susanna Stern] said, is enabling teens to explore their identity by providing them with an environment in which they can experiment with ideas of style, the way they talk, the way they dress and the way they think about the sensitive issues in their lives -- all anonymously.

I just don't know what it is about Jerz and Britney. Maybe he is the president of her fan club and he has to donwplay their connection in class because it just would get weird if we knew he loved her like we all do. I mean come on people the world wants to know. Get out there an investigate this mystery. --Leslie Rodriquez --Jerz & Spears...the hidden hatred (Roamer's Zone)

One of my students launches a grassroots journalism investigation of me.

This is what I get when I make pop culture references in order to make sure students are awake.

An overwhelming majority of the students who entered college and the workforce during the past three years said in the survey that, knowing what they know now, they would have worked harder and applied themselves more in high school. More than three-quarters of all graduates not in college (77 percent) and nearly two-thirds of those in college (65 percent) would have applied themselves more in high school. Moreover, more than 8 in 10 (81 percent) recent graduates said they would have worked harder if their high school experience had demanded more of them. --2 in 5 High School Graduates Feel Unprepared

In Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the eponymous subject keeps his youthful looks while the vagaries of age are visited upon his portrait in the attic. Now a digital version of Wilde's idea is being developed to show you what you will look like in five years' time if you take no exercise, eat too much junk food and drink too much alcohol. --Will Knight --Mirror that reflects your future self (New Scientist)

Of course, in the novel, the picture shows the effects of the evil in Dorian's past. I wonder whether the inventors of this technology applied the Dorian Gray analogy themselves, or Knight did that himself.

Population decline is by no means restricted to the industrial world. Remarkably, the sharp rise in American fertility rates at the height of the baby boom -- 3.8 children per woman -- was substantially above Third World fertility rates today. From East Asia to the Middle East to Mexico, countries once fabled for their high fertility rates are now falling swiftly toward or below replacement levels. In 1970, a typical woman in the developing world bore six children. Today, that figure is about 2.7. In scale and rapidity, that sort of fertility decline is historically unprecedented. By 2002, fertility rates in 20 developing countries had fallen below replacement levels. 2002 also witnessed a dramatic reversal by demographic experts at the United Nations, who for the first time said that world population was ultimately headed down, not up. These decreases in human fertility cover nearly every region of the world, crossing all cultures, religions, and forms of government. --Stanely Kurtz --Demographics and the Culture War (Policy War)

A review of four boooks that address the economic and cultural ramifications of population decline.

THE words of Pope John Paul II's Angelus blessing today were "probably recorded" after his voice faltered when he started to deliver the traditional blessing from his hospital window, Italian media reported. --Pope's blessing 'probably recorded' (The Austrailian)

Insert your "Ashely Simpson hoedown" reference here.

There was a little turtle.
He lived in a box.
He swam in a puddle.
He climbed on the rocks.

He snapped at a mosquito.
He snapped at a flea.
He snapped at a minnow.
And he snapped at me.

He caught the mosquito.
He caught the flea.
He caught the minnow.
But he didn't catch me.

-- Vachel Lindsay --The Little Turtle (Representative Poetry Online)

My kids (ages almost 3 and almost 7) like this poem.

Anyone know how to pronounce "Vachel"?

But political conservatives who read the story were convinced the judge must be a liberal activist intent on being politically correct. On the other hand, liberals said the judge and neighbor must be conservatives, who tend to see "terrorists behind every bush and on every porch," even in a quiet rural neighborhood just south of Durango. -- Electa Draper --After a crumby ending, donated dough rolls in for 2 cookie deliverers (Denver Post)

Interesting tid-bit from a follow-up to the story about the two teenagers who were sued by a woman and ordered to pay $900 for leaving home-baked cookies at the woman's front porch.

P.S. Electa Draper? Really?

--Wahoooooo! We're off and blogging, getting er done! (John Haddad)

One of my students demonstrates his enthusiasm for a new semester of blogging.

There were buttons and switches everywhere - buttons to call for food for music, for clothing. There was the hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid. There was the cold-bath button. There was the button that produced literature. and there were of course the buttons by which she communicated with her friends. The room, though it contained nothing, was in touch with all that she cared for in the world.

Vashanti's next move was to turn off the isolation switch, and all the accumulations of the last three minutes burst upon her. The room was filled with the noise of bells, and speaking-tubes. What was the new food like? Could she recommend it? Has she had any ideas lately? Might one tell her one's own ideas? --E.M. Forster --The Machine Stops

This short story was written almost 100 years ago, but this passage perfectly captures what I feel like after I've been away from the office for a while, and return in order to find new e-mails stacked up and messages on the answering machine. The story is full of the kind of moralizing one often finds in cheesey 1950s sci-fi movies, but this was ahead of its time. I'm teaching it for the first time today, in "Intro to Literary Studies".

The Literature, Arts and Medicine Database has a brief annotation on this story, and Marvin Thomas has compiled some other interesting links that examine this story. My favorite is the one written in 1998, which presents this story in the context of Y2K readiness.
While driving to work this morning, I had the crazy idea that it would make a good basis for an interactive fiction game. I've already got so much on my plate that I'm sure I'll never get to it, but thinking about it was an interesting mental activity.

It gave me ideas.

A book with one name on the cover may turn out to have a team of contributors. Most readers may never have pondered the difference, but a history book whose author alone has carried out all of the research and writing is almost always a more dependable work of scholarship than one whose multiple cooks can easily spoil the broth.

Exceptions to that generalization, as in the case of Michael Bellesiles, often involve misconduct far more insidious than simple plagiarism. -- David J. Garrow reviews Peter Charles Hoffer's Past Imperfect: Facts, Fiction, Fraud -- American History from Bancroft and Parkman to Ambrose, Bellesiles, Ellis, and Goodwin --Crimes of History (Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars)

The scene: A college classroom at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

The subject: Writing the newspaper column.

The question: "Can any of you name a columnist you read -- in a newspaper or magazine or online -- on a regular basis?"

In response: Dead silence.

[...]

"My generation is very visually oriented," explains Ryan Schreiber, a U-M Dearborn junior from Dearborn who -- like most in the class -- is majoring in journalism but doesn't read much of it. --Laura Berman --Nonreading generation of writers needs 12-step program (Detroit News)

A response from the student paper doesn't quite get at the core of the problem... but the site requires registration, so I don't think I'll bother responding in my blog.

Via Joanne Jacobs.

Though "1893" is a homage to bygone text adventures, the sophistication of the programming is a step up. In "Zork," commands more complicated than, say, "attack troll with rusty knife" would confuse the game. But "1893" can handle much more.

"The parser is pretty elaborate at this point," Mr. Nepstad said. "You can type 'get ax,' or you can type 'pick up the short-handled ax and put it in the bag.' It'll understand you." --Brendan I. Koerner --A Game With a Low Body Count (NY Times)

I didn't know that Enron's fate had anything to do with the production of this game... A good little article that goes beyond the nostalgic. Here's hoping Nepstad drums up some more sales -- his game really is an impressive accomplishment.

blogs.setonhill.edu Hacked (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Many of the pages on the blogs.setonhill.edu website have been taken over. As far as I can tell, the blogs are operating correctly and the data are all safe, but the hack is taking over the display. Very frustrating, I am sure, for SHU bloggers.

I'm seeking help right now.

Update: It looks like the blog entries and everything else that bloggers have put into the site are all safely locked away. The only files that seem to have been affected are index files. So if you "Rebuild" your site, all the functionality should return.

Rebuilding the site won't plug the security hole, which seems to be at the ISP that SHU pays to host blogs.setonhill.edu. More updates as soon as I get them.

I'm glad I wrote the column, though, even if I'm wrong, because it helped bring into focus something else that I've been wanting to say for a long time, which is that it's a sad state of affairs in our politics when people are so locked into being in one camp or the other that they can't review the evidence as it presents itself and adjust their thinking accordingly.

How else can you explain some local columnist with liberal intentions drawing so much interest just because he wondered aloud that maybe he had been wrong and that the other side had been right?

I don't ever want to be one of those columnists -- or commentators -- who just take all the information they receive and hammer it into their pre-conceived notion of the truth. --Mark Brown --What's so shocking about having second thoughts? (Chicago Sun-Times)

Brown reacts to the buzz that resulted over a column he wrote yesterday, in which he briefly suggested that the sight of so many Iraqis lininig up to vote was enough to make him entertain the notion that perhaps, just maybe, Bush might in some small way not be completely and utterly wrong about everything he has ever done, said, thought, and felt.

I'll save Brown's punchline for those who actually click on the link and read the whole column... (if it doesn't disappear behind a paid-subscription firewall, that is).

Update: Dan Gillmor offers this sobering flashback:

NY Times (1967): U.S. Encouraged by Vietnam Vote. United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.

Deni Rust, 34, of McCandless, continued her husband's journal after his death, using the Web site he created to immortalize his writings, to establish a guest book where friends and family can share memories, and to post her thoughts as each day passes.

A year later, Deni Rust still struggles to live with her grief. Her Web journal has become part catharsis, part weekly update, part cry for help. She has received e-mails from faraway strangers who offer support, and she believes the journal is, in a way, necessary for her to survive. --Alana Semuels --An online chronicle of grief (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

Very painful to read, and very human. Thanks for the link, Julie.