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:You, Too, Can Have a Viral Tweet Like Mine: Demystifying Poetic MeterSaving for the next time I teach “Intro …AcademiaJournalists dream of puns like this.AmusingVisiting my parents. Admiring their original Hallmark…

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…

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…

“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:AmLit Rescue — Scratch GameA student in my “American Literature: 19…AcademiaThe Better Angels of Our WritingCopy editors are to the world…

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:The Liminal Classroom”What,” I asked, “are we to make of Plat…AcademiaBoth Sides in JournalismCultureNo, Trump's tweet about "Heritage, History, and Greatness" is not a quote from a speech Hi… Trump really did tweet “This is a ba…EthicsNASA…

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:Excited for Annette Vee’s visit. My journalism students have to submit a story by midnight…PersonalSTAR TREK's Still as Relevant on the 50th AnniversaryIn situations of change, it is natural f…CultureI'm not tired of @shu.pippin yet! Final performance is sold out.PersonalApparently Facebook Doesn't Know Me Very WellI’m actually rather happy at the thought…AmusingThe Price (ST:TNG…

Asteroid 2012 DA14 brushes by Earth

An asteroid is making the closest known fly-by for a rock of its size today, just hours after a meterorite crashed to Earth in Russia, with nearly a thousand people injured by space debris in an event unprecedented in modern times. Scientists insist the events are purely coincidental… Follow all the latest news, reaction, and…

Secrets of a 60 Minutes cameraman

They say polo ponies can run 35 mph and then stop on a dime. But how would you like to be the cameraman who’s forced to stand still, as a massive horse comes barreling at him? That’s exactly what 60 Minutes cameramen Chris Albert and Don Lee did to film “The Sport of Kings,” a…