Youngest-ever National Spelling Bee competitor says fatigue, stress led to misspelling onstage

“Overall, it was just boring. Really boring! Really boring!” —The Washington Post. Similar:DCNF, TV Upfront Presenters Need to Understand That Content's Kingdom is ChangingToday’s viewers don’t differentiate betw…BusinessLetter to the editor: Setting record straight on Seton Hill newspaperHere’s my letter responding to an recent…AcademiaSpot of sunlight seems to be sliding down an escalator.   View…

National Headline Contest 2011

Great headlines from winner David Bowman. National Headline Contest 2011. Similar:Don't Be a Sucker (antifascist film from 1945)https://youtu.be/CXm3WxU–fM?si=E1BHac8J…CultureHow Russia’s Disinformation Apparatus Ran Aground in UkraineSkillful propagandists always leverage p…CulturePuns really matter to us over here in English.I swore I would wield my powers only for…AcademiaPeter's Evil Overlord ListPeter Anspach posted this list. Here are…AmusingWhen a…

Reading in the Morning

To qualify for a day at the local water park, my daughter woke up early, and is now happily reading. Similar:Force of Nature (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 9) A Space Thing leads to an en… Rewatching ST:TNG In which a comic te…EthicsAlice in Quantumland: A Charming Illustrated Allegory of Quantum Mechanics by a…

Updated Journalism Handouts

I updated the journalism portal of my online writing site, and touched up some existing handouts: News Story vs. English Essay Your English instructor carefully reads your essay to evaluate the depth of your knowledge, the breadth of your vocabulary, and the loftiness of your ideas. Joe Sixpack glances quickly at your news story to…

Stage Right! Homeschool Musicals

My daughter was recently in the Stage Right! Greensburg homeschool preteen production of Once Upon a Mixed-up Fairy Tale, playing Little Red Riding Hood. Here the girls are singing “Astonishing.” My son played Marshal Cord Elam in the teen production, Oklahoma. He’s wearing the vest and white hat. Similar:Please use the microphone at public events…

The Evolution of Adventure: Make Game – Asio City

In the early 1970s William Crowther worked for the high-tech R&D company BBN Technologies as part of a team developing the ARPAnet; a computer network predecessor to the Internet. Crowther has never shown any desire to court celebrity for his achievements. Aside from a couple of interviews from books, Where Wizards Stay Up Late and Genesis II: Creation and…

How and Why to Make Your Digital Publications Matter

My intuition is that, even for the wary, recalcitrant, or skeptical, the ways individuals connect now online and learn from one another’s connections no longer represent the pathological or aberrant (i.e. the shallow, distracted, lonely, asocial, unprofessional digital generation:  you know the litany!), but “the future.”  Since many are worried about “the future,” those who…

Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now

If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure (CYOA), probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us…

Is it time for a text game revival?

It’s also a cultural climate where audiences are increasingly used to thinking of books as media companions — popular film series like Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games, or TV series like Game of Thrones, all feel richer to fans if they read the books as well as enjoy the films. Designers of text-based…