“A TextArc is a visual represention of a text-the entire text (twice!) on a single page. Some funny combination of an index, concordance, and summary, it uses the viewer’s eye to help uncover meaning.” W. Bradford Paley —Text Arc (Literary Concordance/Word Association Thingy)TextArc.org) Extremely cool visual/spatial representation of an entire text… I want to play…
Young scholars have expressed their rapture for the Bronze Lullaby, the Taco Bell Cannon, Beethoven’s Erotica, Tchaikovsky’s Cracknutter Suite, and Gershwin’s Rap City in Blue. In defining musical terms, they also demonstrate that they know their brass from their oboe. Music sung by two people at the same lime is called a duel; if they…
“Put your hands in your laps. Close your eyes and ask yourselves: Is the e-mail I’m about to send necessary? And if not, is it at least fun? If you cannot answer yes to either of those questions–don’t hit that send button.” Stanley Bing Bing offers an interesting list of guidelines, on which I’ll comment……
JENNY JONES: Boy, we have a show for you today! Recently, the University of Virginia philosopher Richard Rorty made the stunning declaration that nobody has “the foggiest idea” what postmodernism means.[…]JENNY JONES: Tell us how you think postmodernism affected your career as a novelist. ALEX: I disavowed writing that contained real ideas or any real…
“[A] new trend is oxygen-fortified drinks to replenish your body with oxygen. It shouldn’t surprise you that breathing works better. Oxygen best enters the bloodstream through the lungs, not the stomach. You would need to drink about a litre of oxygenated water every 30 seconds to get a deep breath’s worth of extra oxygen, and…
“These are desperate times, and desperate times call for desperation. Therefore, it is with a heavy heart that I am duty-bound to alert America to the clear and present danger posed by Mel Brooks. I first became suspicious of Mr. Brooks when the Enron scandal broke. My suspicions only grew as other examples of “aggressive…
Have you ever noticed that the letters “Tri” in cursive look an awful lot like “Fu”? Patricia Breen apparently didn’t when she designed this “???ck or Treat” Christmas ornament. —They Should Have Used Another Typeface (Nieman Marcus) This is better than the urban legend about the Nieman Marcus cookies.
Most of my students probably know about my odd fascination with the Gund toy “Rainbow Hector.” My sister sent me the above link, which includes a story about a musical group in Trinidad, which includes a member named Gary Hector, who has a 10-year-old daughter named… you guessed it… Rainbow. (See the caption at the…
“I confess I sometimes don’t know whether to be happy or depressed when I dip into Sims world. Sometimes you get the sense that these Sims fanatics are compensating online for the needs that aren’t met in their real lives…. But the other and more positive sensation you get in Sims world is that some…
“Would I open a huge document-say a PDF book chapter from Amazon? I don’t know. What do I want on my computer versus what do I want bookmarked access to? I don’t know. Here’s what I do know: I need help in managing my attachments and getting more value from the megabytes of media material…
“Developing fixed-size Web pages is a fundamentally flawed practice. Not only does it result in Web pages that remain at a constant size regardless of the user’s browser size, but it fails to take advantage of the medium’s flexibility. Nonetheless, Web site creators continue to develop fixed pages.” James Kalbach —The Myth of 800 x…
“The book describes a bizarre situation in American universities in which academics in various (mostly new-minted) fields such as Cultural Studies, Literary Theory, and Science Studies, plus a few more familiar ones such as Sociology, Comparative Literature and the like, make a career of writing about science without taking the trouble to know anything about…
“Two Columbia University undergraduate students were arrested Monday for allegedly using high-tech transmitters and walkie-talkies to cheat on the Graduate Record Examination.” —2 Students Arrested for Alleged High-Tech Cheating on GREChronicle)
“[O]nly about one in seven — 13 percent — of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military warriors, could find Iraq. The score was the same for Iran, an Iraqi neighbor.” That’s bad enough, but 11% couldn’t even find the United States! —Global Goofs: U.S. Youth Can’t Find IraqCNN)
Here’s a good introduction to a famous controversy over the discovery of the structure of DNA: “The victors were James Watson and Francis Crick, who together with Maurice Wilkins shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for crossing the finish line first. The loser was Rosalind Franklin, who produced the x-ray data that most strongly supported the…
“To feed my craving for modern first editions, including my beloved Williams and Jenningses, takes a fifth of my income – more than I spend on food or my children. I have lost entire weekends in a haze of book fairs and pilgrimages to remote bookshops (which typically prove to be closed). Friends and family…
“[W]hen The New Yorker called him out on how he can say that other people’s aging mothers should be put down like old horses but that his own should receive only the very best care in an expensive nursing home, [bioethicist Peter] Singer replied, ‘Perhaps it’s more difficult than I thought before, because it is…
“Only William Shatner, who exists in the strange non-realm of absolute self-importance and constant self-mockery, could impart that marvelous unconscious irony to what would otherwise be a dull-witted, mechanical loser.” Tom Maxwell —Officer Down! A Deconstruction of T.J. HookerMorphizm)
You’ve “seen” them. Maybe on a sign at the “grocery” store, maybe in an ad in your “local” newspaper. Perhaps even in a “memo” that circulated throughout your company. They’re quotation marks, and they turn up in the strangest of places. —Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks“Found”) Found “on” Jenny Anderson’s link “page”.
“Americans have had a latent fear of catastrophic computer attack ever since a teenage Matthew Broderick hacked into the Pentagon’s nuclear weapons system and nearly launched World War III in the 1983 movie WarGames. Judging by official alarums and newspaper headlines, such scenarios are all the more likely in today’s wired world. There’s just one…