McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.

PROUSTZAC Enhances and enriches remembrance of things past. Can lead to increased carbohydrate consumption. McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Banned Performance Enhancing Substances in Literary Competitions.. Similar:The Toulmin model for analyzing arguments came up at a faculty pedagogy workshop today. I … AcademiaTexty Cloak of Darkness in ProseBelow is a snippet from “Texty Cloak of …GamesLoved part…

Len Deighton’s Bomber, the first book ever written on a word processor.

The talented and insightful scholar Matt Kirschenbaum tells a wonderful story. Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. “Standing in…

“Godspell” is sure to entertain audiences of all ages and faiths

That’s me in the white shirt, with a tie around my head. The show opens tonight. Anthony Marino, artistic director for the performing arts group and professional theater company Stage Right! in Greensburg, has played the role of Judas in the classical musical, “Godspell” eight times. He is about to take stage for the ninth…

I don’t usually post animal videos on my blog…

But when I do, it’s because they are this adorable. Saving this for the next time my daughter is crabby and needs some comfort. Similar:Senior Tech #1: How To Master TextingIt’s funny because it’s true. http://…AmusingThe girl sank her brother's last ship with the homophonous cry "I-1."AmusingMy understanding of biased polls is… (choose one) AmusingWhen In…

40% Say Internet Best Way to Get News, 37% Say TV

The article is short, but I particularly like the links that show the wording of the questions and the survey methodology. Bear in mind that this survey does not check o see which form of news is more accurate, comprehensive, unbiased, timely, profitable, etc. The survey just asks for personal preference. More Americans turn to…

Stage Right spreads the gospel of music with ‘Godspell’

The Tribune-Review is very dependable in its coverage of the local arts. (That’s me kneeling in the white shirt, with a tie around my head.) It’s not always the adults who are the teachers. In Stage Right’s production of the Broadway musical “Godspell,” director Anthony Marino says it’s the youngest performers who spread the word…

Loaded Words: How Language Shapes The Gun Debate

Here’s a great article I’m asking all my journalism students and all my lit-crit students to read. Words do more than just describe the world. They literally define it. They shape and frame it. “Most people don’t understand this,” says linguist George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley. “Most people think that words just…

The Incredible Shrinking Ad [The Future Web Is Mobile]

Is higher education ready for the switch to mobile technology? It’s kinda cool to be working at a university where the Luddites are the ones who are attached to their laptops, but I’m conscious of our need to do more. When I put a ton of work into a website for a performing arts school…

Gerald Green Incorporates Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’ Into Slam Dunk | The Onion – America’s Finest News Source

While competing in the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest Saturday, contestant Gerald Green reportedly incorporated characters, dialogue, and set design from 16th-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus into his elaborately choreographed dunk routine. “Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee/Faustus hath cut his arm, and with his…

Adventure Before Adventure Games: A New Look at Crowther and Woods’s Seminal Program

Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here). I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of…

Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester

Apparently these are two famous and physically attractive celebrities who are popular enough that lots of people will wade through lots of words in order to look at pictures of them doing things that celebrities do. Which presumably does not usually include talking about the federal budget. Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester.…

Why Drag It Out?

The ways that the informal speech of women impacts the language is soooo underexplored. For the past five years, Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto, has been gathering digital-communications data from students. In analyzing nearly 4 million words, she’s found some interesting patterns. “This reduplication of letters, it’s not all crazy,” she told…

Surprise! ‘Star Trek’ gold shirts more deadly than red shirts

Fascinating. Barsalou then goes all math geek and applies to the data the Bayes’ Theorem formula for calculating conditional probabilities. After a little mathematical shake and bake, he determines there is a 61.9 percent chance that any given casualty is wearing a red shirt. That still sounds high, but it’s not really once you consider…

“All for the Best” Rehearsal

Here’s a brief clip of a rehearsal of “All for the Best,” from the Stage Right! Greensburg production of Godspell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8Kje6PvHg (I’m in the back on the left, wearing a tie as a headband.) Similar:Vanessa Otero's Updated Media Bias Chart (Liberal/Mainstream/Conservative; Facts/Analysis/…Otero goes into great detail describing …CultureNerd-buddies”He likes Lord of the Rings, Star Wars…

Students boycott final to challenge professor’s grading policy (and get As)

Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person…

Sorry, but I am done hearing about the “Cruise from Hell” story. Done.

Okay, so yeah. One of these describes a very unpleasant, completely ruined vacation. The other sounds like hell. Similar:White antiracist hero: "A hired killer fired a bullet right at Cassius’ chest… just as Cas… What a story! Sharing sto…CultureWrite instructions for busy grouches.Updating the graphic for a writing hando…Academiafrom “The Poet” by Ralph Waldo…

From the Philosophy of the Open to the Ideology of the User-Friendly

Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely…

The Need for a Digital “New Journalism”

Journalism without the sourced quotes from eyewitnesses is weak. Opinions with shoehorned-in-because-the-job-description-requires-it quotes is weak journalism. But this is an interesting challenge to the traditional assumptions I have been passing along to my journalism students. I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have to…

I Find Myself in Another Show

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=517BhV1j0uU Similar:Sinéad O'Connor's open letter to Miley CyrusI was never a fan of Sinéad O’Connor, bu…AestheticsYork Corpus Christi Pageant, Toronto, June 7I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe …AcademiaEpic Game of Thrones pun battle. Carolyn Jerz Vs. Greg KerestanHere is the transcript the girl provided…AmusingThe Surprisingly Savvy Weird Al Internet Machine When he talks…

Kindle App Vs. iBooks. (Spoiler: They’re Virtually Identical Now!)

I noticed with interest that Kindle now lets you highlight text in different colors. It’s also very easy now to tweet a brief quote. Is it time to revise the blog-based pedagogy I’ve developed over the past 10 or so years, and ask students to tweet a few passages while they read them for the…