On road trips in my youth, watching the Bob’s Big Boy signs transition to Shoney’s Big Boy was often part of the adventure. As the franchises close, the cheerful burger-wielding statues have been rounded up and corralled, presumably for their own safety. Source: The Big Boy Graveyard Similar:A Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5,…
Culture / Current_Events / Cyberculture / Ethics / Fact Check / Journalism / Religion / TechnologyPope Leo XIV, in his first address to journalists at the Vatican, called for the release of imprisoned journalists, championed the free press, and urged caution about AI. My social media feed is full of memes that purport to represent the words of Leo XIV. Legitimate news sources have already published stories about Pope Leo…
Rewatching ST:DS9 A duo of knobby-faced macguffin-hunters, bantering like the crooks from Home Alone, rough up a bumpy-foreheaded alien, then vaporize him. In Quark’s, Bashir is happily casting his friends Dax and O’Brien in his next unnamed-for-copyright-reasons British superspy holodeck adventure, Operation Nudge-Wink. Odo declines, looking uncomfortable. I had never seen this episode before. What…
…I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response…
Aesthetics / Art / Culture / Drama / Humanities / Writing“Aw, man, you know the brother um takin’ ‘bout. He always be up at Eddie’s, light skin, heavy-set, like a fly-on-the-wall, be greasin’ secondhand tweeds, that ol’ newsboy cap, slanted to one side, pencil stub behind his ear. “Wylie to Elmore…. wit’ them empty side pockets, his corduroys be singin’ the blues, cues Bessie on the…
Former Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes — who resigned in January over the paper spiking a cartoon that depicted the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, and other tech titans bending the knee to Donald Trump — won the Pulitzer Prize on Monday. At the time, Telnaes said she had “never had a cartoon killed because of who…
The newest and most powerful technologies — so-called reasoning systems from companies like OpenAI, Google and the Chinese start-up DeepSeek — are generating more errors, not fewer. As their math skills have notably improved, their handle on facts has gotten shakier. It is not entirely clear why. Today’s A.I. bots are based on complex mathematical systems that learn…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Quark watches with detached bemusement as Rom backs out of declaring his interest in Leeta. As O’Brien celebrates a win over Bashir at darts, Dr. Zimmerman, a hologram researcher (whose face Star Trek fans will instantly know from the then-contemporary Trek series Voyager) says he’s here to make Bashir “immortal.” Starfleet has chosen…
Similar:Stop sharing those unsourced memes about "be woke" and "God doesn't need soldiers" — here…This 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsWashington Post Cartoonist Who Quit Over Bezos Cartoon Wins Pulitzer PrizeShakespeare did not leave his wife Anne in Stratford, letter fragment suggestsNotes on Teaching August Wilson's Pittsburgh CycleBy Inferno's Light #StarTrek…
It has long been assumed that William Shakespeare’s marriage to Anne Hathaway was less than happy. He moved to London to pursue his theatrical career, leaving her in Stratford-upon-Avon and stipulating in his will that she would receive his “second best bed”, although still a valued item. Now a leading Shakespeare expert has analysed a…
Some 50 years ago, my father took me to his office in Washington, DC. I believe he was working for the Social Security Administration as a technical writer. I remember he held tightly onto my hand as we used a moving lift like this. The event was notable to young me for two reasons. One,…
I first taught Wilson’s Pittsburgh Cycle during an intensive 3-week online course during the 2020-21 winter break, during the Time of Covid. The nature of that course was such that I could only reasonably require students to read 6 of Wilson’s 10 plays; I think I required everyone to read 4, and then split the…
A federal judge ordered the White House on Tuesday to restore The Associated Press’ full access to cover presidential events, affirming on First Amendment grounds that the government cannot punish the news organization for the content of its speech. U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, an appointee of President Donald Trump, ruled that the government…
Rewatching ST:DS9 After the recap of last week’s “In Purgatory’s Shadow,” we see the Defiant, a couple of runabouts, and Dukat’s Bird of Prey lining up against the huge Dominion fleet. But instead of attacking, the invaders head for Cardassia which (we learn from an even smugger than usual Dukat) has joined the Dominion. In…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Kira helps Odo re-adjust to life as a shape-shifter, obliviously but brutally friendzoning him in the process. Upon learning that someone on the other side of the wormhole is sending encrypted Cardassian military signals, Sisko calls on Garak. The enigmatic tailor downplays the event, telling his found family (Dr. Bashir and Ziyal) the…
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Similar:The Big Boy GraveyardThis 1960s teenager knew the neighborhood that inspired August Wilson’s playsWashington Post Cartoonist Who Quit Over Bezos Cartoon Wins Pulitzer PrizeA.I. Is Getting More Powerful, but Its Hallucinations Are Getting WorseDoctor Bashir, I Presume #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 16) Smarmy hologram des…Pater Noster Passenger Elevators
I have a daughter who does things. Her next is ensemble/musician/understudy for Mary Magdelene in Jesus Christ Superstar, Pittsburgh Musical Theater Apr 3-13. Similar:The Big Boy GraveyardStop sharing those unsourced memes about "be woke" and "God doesn't need soldiers" — here…A Simple Investigation #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 17) Odo falls for a femme…Pope…
Rewatching ST:DS9 In a cave (again with the caves) Sisko, in civilian clothes, seeks an informer, but is instead met by the rogue security officer Eddington, who uses the plight of the refugees in the cave to justify his treason against Starfleet. Eddington claims the moral high ground, but Sisko is unimpressed. Eddington beams away…
I planned ahead pretty well this term. I like the pace in all my classes.
I always enjoy my visits to the studio. This recording was a quick one!
After marking a set of bibliography exercises, I created this graphic to focus on the kinds of citation errors I found in submissions that students clearly aren’t proofreading. I’m amazed that students don’t correct the capitalization errors (often caused by the keywords the student was searching for) or when they don’t notice that entries repeat…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Odo walks stiffly into the infirmary, where Bashir scolds him for not taking better care of his recently-acquired humanoid body. Quark presents a bottle with what he says is a dead changeling. Odo, entranced, says it’s alive. Bashir manages to mostly unflabbergast the creature’s cellular jimberjams, and there is certainly no plot significance…
Imagine a society that engineers its highways so that ordinary people who make mistakes, and even people who intentionally break the law, are less likely to kill people with their cars. On 22 May 1997, the Swedish government presented Bill 1996/97:137 to parliament. It cemented zero deaths as a long-term goal for road fatalities. It reiterated that…
My years of watching MacGyver definitely paid off. (Not that my GenZ students got the reference.) I’m doing a lot more in-class work with paper, giving students handouts to annotate in class, asking them to write in copybooks. For the midterm I gave students a short academic article, excerpts from a play we haven’t read…
