Amusing: June 2008 Archive Page

Inside Higher Ed goes to hell.

Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one section of some courses). No official committee duties, but will be expected to contribute occasionally to departmental administrative work. Competitive salary, given local economy. Candidate must exhibit evidence of strong potential for both research and teaching, and significant flexibility in his/her expectations. For further information, repeat the name "Mizrakreth, Chair of Hiring Committee" three times.

Raymond stroked his chin thoughtfully. After a minute he began chanting "Mizrakreth..." After all, it couldn't hurt just to get a bit more information.

My six-year-old daughter is a very visual thinker, who absolutely adores her brother. About a year ago, I stumbled across a notebook of sketches I made in 1980, when I was 12, and I remember how much I enjoyed drawing gadgets and cityscapes.

So I bought a notebook and some mechanical pencils, thinking I'd encourage my daughter to express herself through art, and maybe in the process reawaken the visual part of my brain.

So, in my spare moments around the house, I started sketching web page layouts, or characters and props from the bedtime stories I've been telling my daughter. (Recently, I had a burning need to know what an engine room looked like in our ether-powered blimpship.)

Carolyn has picked up the habit from me -- we supply her with little notebooks which she happily fills up.  She drew this picture during church this weekend. There's Carolyn on the left (note the "C" floating above her head) snuggled up against her brother Peter.  Note also the little hearts inside the letters.

At the time she drew the above picture, I was sitting between Carolyn and Peter, and I wouldn't let her squirm across me to show this picture to her brother.  Blinking back tears, Carolyn sat down in the pew and drew another, very different picture:

That's Carolyn on the left again, with a heart hovering over head as before -- only now the heart is broken, and each broken half contains the letter "P". One finger points to herself, the other points pleadingly towards her brother (whose shoulders droop in sorrow, and whose own floating broken heart contains little "C"s).

I have been reduced to a vertical barrier -- an impersonal force separating the two siblings.

The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV:

You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car -- or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town where all the strippers hang out waiting for you to pick them up -- and see if you're tempted.

But not just tempted. Not just amused or excited by the possibility of becoming a dark hero of the criminal underworld. You need to determine if you're actually willing and able to act on those temptations. You need to determine whether it's possible for you to change from whoever you were into someone completely different, someone who no longer recognizes the conditions and regulations of a society that, until you played the video game, were all you knew and believed in. That is, you need to find out just how stupid you really are.

An amusing bit of neo-folklore.

Well, Paul Bunyan was always a sucker for a bet, and anyhow lumber futures were down, all the rivers he knew of had been tamed, there was no room for new Great Lakes, and frankly, life had been boring of late. So with a gigantic laugh that was heard as far away as San Francisco, Caracas, and Berlin, he took Sam up on that bet.

Naturally, just getting Paul Bunyan online was already no mean feat. There was no broadband available in the remote areas of the woods where they'd been working, so the first thing he had to do was string optical cable from the nearest T1 line, which was clear down in St. Paul. For anybody but Paul Bunyan, that would have been near impossible, but ol' Paul just ordered a couple flatbeds of the finest glass windows Minnesota had to offer, chewed'em all up in a single mouthful, and drew'em out between his teeth to spin three hundred miles of perfect fiber optics. Then he just coiled it all up in a loop, and walked all the way into town, stringing that cable all the way. So getting online wasn't a real problem.

An amusing post from Language Log, about the ill wind that blows for people who trust their spell checkers too much.

As you might have guessed, what Edwards actually said in the debate was "Highfalutin language is not enough." The word highfalutin should be in any decent spellchecker's wordlist, but if it is written as two words, high falutin, then the second element of the compound can go unrecognized.