About four years ago I bought an electric mower that was quiet enough that I could listen to audiobooks while doing my suburban adulting duties. The battery held enough charge that I could get about 1/2 of my lawn done at a time so that summer I bought another battery. A couple years later I…
Business / Cyberculture / Ethics / Psychology / Science / TechnologyAs much as I love escapist science fiction, the way to get to the future for real is to avoid killing each other and ourselves in the present. We can’t count on capitalist techbros selling joyrides to billionaire tourists. People tend to liken space exploration to expansion on Earth—pushing the frontier. But on the edge…
Academia / Culture / Design / Drama / Education / Empathy / Humanities / Literature / Personal / Poetry / WritingAfter starting my 200-level “Shakespeare in Context” students on a few sonnets, I assigned Twelfth Night (most had never read a Shakespeare comedy before) and Othello (they loved Iago), and then asked them to sample four different plays — The Taming of the Shrew, The Merchant of Venice, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, and Jonson’s…
Academia / Humanities / Literacy / WritingIf you are writing an academic paper that quotes from an author that uses the ellipsis in a way that differs from MLA style (such as the script of a modern play that uses “…” to indicate when a speaker is interrupted, or a graphic novel that might use “…” to indicate a meaningful silence…
Rewatching ST:DS9 A haggard O’Brien, with a scraggly beard, is released from an alien prison. He seems disoriented… “I can’t leave. Where would I go to?” A concerned Kira watches as smug aliens infodump that they punish offenders by inserting extended memories of incarceration — twenty years, in O’Brien’s case. Sisko explains to Keiko that…
Rewatching ST:DS9 After a nightmare featuring dead Klingon children, Worf wakes up in Odo’s security cell. He’s clearly in trouble. A Vulcan admiral convenes a Federation hearing called to explore allegations that, while commanding The Defiant, Worf destroyed a Klingon civilian transport. A Klingon prosecutor, Ch’pok, intends to prove Worf’s negligence, thereby stoking sympathy for…
In September, 2003, I was blogging about What the NY Times called the “campus fad” of Internet plagiarism. “What Does a Professor Do All Day?” (Clearly we are wasting our time whenever we are not standing in front of a classroom.) “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables“ Leni Riefenstahl Dies (although she distanced…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Bashir reluctantly helps O’Brien clean up before Keiko is due to return after an extended absence. At the family reunion, little Molly points to her mother’s belly and announces she has a little brother. At the request of Kira and her mentor Porta, Sisko blesses a young couple. He’s not thrilled with his…
For the past 2 weeks I have slept a lot, coughed a lot, and one of my four classes is a week behind where I had hoped to be, but I guess I’ll be okay. Still dealing with some heavy eldercare and other issues that I just don’t have the energy to write about here,…
Rewatching ST:DS9 As The Defiant returns from an uneventful jaunt in the Gamma Quadrant, Dax teases that Worf is in love… with The Defiant. Bashir and O’Brien, dressed as medieval Irish warriors, prepare for a holosuite adventure. Rom, exhausted and overworked, collapses at the bar. Leeta is concerned, but Quark is just annoyed. Bashir confirms…
I’ve enjoyed human-written A/V Club articles in the past. I see no reason to seek out articles written by bots that copy existing material word-for-word and add no value. The company G/O, mentioned in the clip below, owns the A.V. Club and is behind the shift to bot-authored articles: “A/V Club [sic] licenses content from…
Jaw-dropping. So creative and joyful.
Rewatching ST:DS9 Worf wins a furious sparring match with Dax, but she discombobulates his composure, first by accusing him of trying to flirt with her, and then by actually flirting with him. A drunken Klingon arrives on the station, calling for Worf. It’s his brother Kurn, come to ask for a ritual death due to…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Played for laughs, Kira gets many inoculations as she prepares for a diplomatic mission to a Cardassisan outpost. Her pilot is none other than Dukat, who has been demoted and ostracized after acknowledging his half-Bajoran daughter, Ziyal, who now lives on his clunky freighter. Dukat smugly flirts with Kira at dinner, clearly enjoying…
Sometimes when I’m driving along lost in thought, I flinch. If my son or my daughter asks me what’s wrong, I’m rarely able to articulate an accurate response like, “I just thought of a time before you were born when I should have been kind, and I can’t remember whether I was.” So I usually…
Though I always preferred a different franchise, I loved the first Star Wars trilogy. The other trilogies? Not so much. And I haven’t followed any of the Star Wars TV shows, but the Shakespeare reference in this review of Ahsoka really caught my eye. Ouch! More pressingly, it’s just exhausting to sit through yet another…
A very fluffy article that does a good job diving into an everyday thing and sharing expert opinions. While some of these sources are simply random people, others have specialized skills and training that makes their opinions newsworthy enough to provide some substance to a not-exactly-hard-news story. Some of us just can’t get our thoughts…
