Skin of Evil (TNG Rewatch, Season 1 Episode 23)

My rewatch reflection on the Star Trek:TNG episode “Skin of Evil,” in which the crew encounters a malignant oil slick. Some good character moments with Worf and Yar, and some good solo acting from Marina Sirtis as Troi psychoanalyzes a disembodied voice. While I appreciate the Roddenberrian argument against playing along with a power-mad enemy’s sick games, dramatizing a that philosophical concept is not enough to carry a full episode. If you’re a fan the final holodeck send-off scene is worth watching but overall it’s a weak episode.

First Day in the Theatre for Twelfth Night (May 3-12)

Daughter: (is sad her “first day in the theatre” post got fewer likes than her “felt cute” post) Me: (makes this meme) Similar:The Way of the Warrior #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 1) Worf joins the station…Rewatching ST:DS9 We cold open into a…MediaSeton Hill discontinues mask requirement for vaccinated individualsThe pandemic is not over.…

Furious Trump orders officials to boycott correspondents’ dinner

Trump spent the morning insulting the news media on Twitter, calling MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough a “Psycho” and musing about New York Times reporters getting “down on their knees” to apologize to him after his 2020 re-election victory. Around the same time the president was tapping out those tweets, White House Cabinet Secretary Bill McGinley, who…

Sweet Lenten Regrets

This Lenten evening / Your orphaned feast occasioned / My penance haiku.

Elmo? Yes, I do mind. I learned far more from Bert.

Like plenty of people my age, I grew up watching Sesame Street. As a parent of kids born in 1998 and 2002, the new-to-me dominance of Elmo was notable (and annoying) when I showed Sesame Street to my kids. We purchased a handful of videos and games, and regularly cycled through the videos and games…

I’m Gradually Losing My Hearing. (It’s Part of Aging.)

During a department meeting today, I noticed I was feeling very disengaged. I was having trouble following what my colleges were saying, unless They were speaking one at a time They were projecting (no sotto voce or vocal fry) I could see their lips. I could usually get by with 2 of the 3, but…

This 8-Year-Old Chess Champion Will Make You Smile

In a homeless shelter in Manhattan, an 8-year-old boy is walking to his room, carrying an awkward load in his arms, unfazed by screams from a troubled resident. The boy is a Nigerian refugee with an uncertain future, but he is beaming. He can’t stop grinning because the awkward load is a huge trophy, almost…

Why teens need live theater in the age of YouTube

A good article from the Boston Globe. The plays I saw with my dad handed us a script on every uncomfortable topic parents and children both painstakingly avoid and desperately need to discuss. If YouTube’s current teenage audience is anything like my teenage self, they won’t take kindly to their parents telling them to get…

What Can Science Tell Us About Dad Jokes?

Beyond making the audience cringe and, hopefully, bring a father a little closer to his son or daughter in a healthy manner, puns have given researchers insight into how the left side of the brain engages with the right side. Researchers showed that the brain’s left hemisphere processes the language of the pun first, while…

Enjoying my “Dystopia in American Literature” class.

After a kind of prelude in which we looked at Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” as proto-dystopias, my “Dystopia in American Literature” class looked at Jack London’s post-apocalyptic “The Scarlet Plague” last week. Because it’s an online class that never meets face-to-face, I’ve been posting regular 15-20m context lectures,…

Lessons from the Covington Catholic Flashpoint

My social media network includes people who fully supported the narrative voiced by Phillips and magnified by social media outrage, who now feel the shifting narrative proves how hard “the media” work to excuse the misbehavior of smirking, entitled, racist bullies. (But they might agree the Hebrew Israelites went too far.) My social feed also…

Angel One (TNG Rewatch, Season 1, Episode 13) Sexist Amazon chief flips Riker leitmotif, that’s a-facepalm

Rewatching Star Trek: The Next Generation after a 20-year break. The Enterprise visits a sexist planet run by women, where… well, that’s about it. There’s nothing particularly science-fictional about the plot, except that the Enterprise is tracking a space-freighter and looking for space-survivors who disappeared years ago near this space-planet. There’s nothing strategic about the…

I just finished “Beyond Eyes” and I think there’s something in my eye.

My 20yo son, who plays a lot of Star Wars battle simulations, was very taken with the music and story. I had read about this game when it came out, so some plot points were spoiled for me, but I still teared up at the end. You can find it for a very reasonable price…

SHU Commemoration of September 11 Terrorism Attacks — Looking Back After 10 Years

Come to listen. Come to share. Come together. Memories, reflections, and inspiration from SHU community members. Candle-lighting ceremony; prayer (Sister Maureen O’Brien; Campus Ministry) Musical meditations (Ted Disanti; Balazs Tarnai) First-hand accounts of NYC on 9-11-2001 (Jack Ciak; Dan Bernstein) Archival materials on Seton Hill’s community experience (William Black) Contributions by Attendees (Do you have…

Passage: a Gamma256 video game by Jason Rohrer

Grand Text Auto introduced me to the excellent indie mini-game Passage. Play it. It takes a few minutes to download and about 5 minutes to play. I’m misty-eyed. Play it! Similar:ink: Inkle's open source scripting language for writing interactive narrativeGearing up to teach “Digital Storytellin…CybercultureA comic about Seagulls. If you feel like this… A comic…

I’m Humbler than You Are! Na na-na na-naah!

I’m Humbler than You Are! Na na-na na-naah! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve been thinking a lot about improvization in education, thanks in part to recent posts on Pedablogue, but also due to Mike Rubino’s occasional blog entries about The Cellar Dwellers. Kids offer great material for improvisation. I’m immune to the “Are we there yet?” question,…