Thanks for the suggestion, Matt.

"Celebrities in rehab, political punditry and a mauling at the zoo - this is what we're calling news these days" at JibJab.

Great little tool from bookrags. Use a drop-down list to construct your own sonnet, using lines from Shakespeare's corpus. This might be a good tool to ease students into constructing their own sonnets.

Shakespeare Sonnet Shake-Up

(start a new sonnet)

Who would think of working a casual reference to Aliens into a blog entry about a trip to Disneyland. Nobody but James Lileks, that is.

Usually I hate turbulence, but I was too tired to care, and I slept through it like Hicks on the drop down to LV-426.

Thank you, Rosemary, for sending me this interesting visual essay on the persistence of digital memory, from Instructables.com:

Want to make a flash drive that nobody in a modern office would even think about taking? Hide it in a pink eraser and it's secure in this digital age.

A few years old but, worth a few yuks, from McSweeney's.

In his nine years with the department, Dr. Jones has failed to complete even one uninterrupted semester of instruction. In fact, he hasn't been in attendance for more than four consecutive weeks since he was hired. Departmental records indicate Dr. Jones has taken more sabbaticals, sick time, personal days, conference allotments, and temporary leaves than all the other members of the department combined.

The lone student representative on the committee wished to convey that, besides being an exceptional instructor, a compassionate mentor, and an unparalleled gentleman, Dr. Jones was extraordinarily receptive to the female student body during and after the transition to a coeducational system at the college. However, his timeliness in grading and returning assignments was a concern.

If your father is an English professor, how do you respond to poorly written signs in a kiddie park?

Everywhere I go, I like taking pictures of signs with mistakes that make good classroom proofreading examples.

Shortly after I moved to Western Pennsylvania, I learned that Idlewild Park is the regional version of Disneyland.  Every year we get season passes, and a regular stop for us is Storybook Forest -- which my wife remembers visiting when she was a little girl. 

Who knows how many generations of children have seen this sign and wondered about the anonymous dwarven sign-maker who claims ownership over the familiar seven?

More cruel jokes to play on literal-minded people.

Not the best spoof I've ever seen, but if you really want to see a spoof of a trailer of a documentary about text adventure games, you might be somewhat amused. (Here's the original.)

I'm mocked in this, if that's any incentive to anyone...