I threw a muscle in my shoulder while furiously blogging a record of a committee meeting. Similar:Curse you, conference proposal word limits. I’m frustrated by these accursed c…AcademiaDr. Bobby Teaches Ferris Bueller as RhetorMy former student, Bobby Kuechenmeister,…AcademiaTapdance / jazz music outing with the girl. Tapdance / jazz music outing with …AcademiaThe difficulty is the…
A happy apple cyclops, with a marshmallow eye and banana teeth. My daughter’s creation. Update, 12 Feb: Carolyn, noting the condition of her apple creation, asked for “a good-bye picture of Poli-yumyum.” Similar:Canadians Love Poop, Americans Love Pizza: How Emojis Fare Worldwide The company SwiftKey analyzed more tha…Aesthetics"Shakespeare in Love" with the Westmoreland Symphony Orchestra…
This term, I teach two sections of “Seminar in Thinking and Writing,” the second course in our two-course freshman writing sequence. My sections both meet MWF, nicely bookending my lunch break. Since Seton Hill usually schedules committee meetings for Tue/Th, that means on MWF I usually have nothing else to do but prepare for, and…
Looking forward to a good discussion of a complex story. via Fitzgerald, “The Ice Palace”. Similar:I regularly teach A Raisin in the Sun but haven't seen a live production in decades. Looki… AwesomeI gave my class a Poem to read. The author's Name — I hid.I gave my class a Poem to read. The aut…AcademiaIn…
I work so closely with words that I sometimes have to force myself to remember that there are other ways to learn. I saw a DVD of Annie Get Your Gun for the first time, and was sort of struck by the lines sung by the backwoods sharpshooter, “Folks are dumb, where I come from,…
An unexpected and unwanted text message from a wireless company prematurely exploded a would-be suicide bomber’s vest bomb in Russia New Year’s Eve, inadvertently thwarting a planned attack on revelers in Moscow, according to The Daily Telegraph. via Would-Be Suicide Bomber Killed by Unexpected SMS From Mobile Carrier | Threat Level | Wired.com. Similar:Modern Masterpieces…
#BuckRodgers was fun. Looks like The Music Man is next. Shirley Jones, Robert Preston, Buddy Hackett.#TheMusicMan Cash for the merchandise, cash for the button hooks… Love the traveling salesman opening number. #TheMusicMan It’s like rap, but it’s white guys rhyming about credit and sales territories. #TheMusicMan Hats! Hats and bow ties. Go ahead, surprised and angry salesmen,…
Soon I’ll start live-tweeting part 2 of #BuckRodgers, “The Plot to Kill a City” Opening chase in a cubicle farm without cubicles.#BuckRodgers #BuckRodgers , my kids warned you guys not to split up. @devolved Arrgh, I can’t un-see that now! Oh, thank you Wilma, for pointing out to the flunky bragging about destroying Chicago that he…
It wasn’t quite the five-minute installation process that WordPress promises, but within a couple hours I had created a new database in MySQL, linked it to WordPress, twiddled my thumbs while uploading a lot of files, and before long, it was working. It took another hour to convert my installation of WordPress from a single-blog…
I was working from home this morning, when my late-sleeping son woke up and came into the study, wanting to tell me about a dream he had. I was only half-listening, and when after a few minutes he was still talking, I grumped at him and sent him away. A little later, I came into…
What does it mean to look at the code not just from the perspective of what it “does” computationally, but how it works as a semiotic system, a cultural object, as medium for communication? How does it organize itself, understand itself, think about its own representations, its own capacities and workarounds? Critical Code Studies is…
What happens in a literature discussion class is very different from what happens in a traditional lecture. In The College Fear Factor: How Students and Professors Misunderstand One Another (which I just finished reading this morning), Rebecca Cox describes what students expect of college instructors, such as the presentation of “informative,” essential facts and clear explanation…
Is Amy Chua a tiger mother, for forcing her daughters to practice music four hours a day, and denying them sleepovers? Â David Brooks thinks not:Â “Practicing a piece of music for four hours requires focused attention, but it is nowhere near as cognitively demanding as a sleepover with 14-year-old girls.” Chua is applying to her own…
When I teach “Intro to Literary Study,” I ask students to review their media consumption, and propose their own “media fast.” It’s not as simple as simply asking them to sign off of Facebook. For instance, I pointed out that I spend far more time on email than Facebook, so giving up Facebook would be…
Type professionals can get amusingly–if justifiably–overworked about spaces. “Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go,…
This is my “Super Earth,” about 2.75 times the volume of our planet, orbiting very close to a wimpy Class M star. (Thanks for the link, Jefe.) Similar:Edward Gorey illustrates H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, 1960 Edward Gorey illustrates H. G. Wells’s…AestheticsA tiny bit of rogue news leaked through the ads.Hey, Newsweek,…
One blogging convention that I really like involves making corrections by striking out mistakes, bolding corrections, and adding a parenthetical note or a footnote explaining the change. But when a journalist makes a mistake on Twitter, is it more ethical to delete the post entirely (thus keeping a mistake from spreading) or is it better…
(First published 27 May 2020, when I found it in my “drafts” folder.) In an article on consumerism in role-playing computer games, Garrelts explores a history that leads back to Adventure and Zork: “At this stage, while there were objects that could be manipulated that had use-value, there were no developed economies; in fact, there…
My students are usually captivated by “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and every time I teach it I get a paper or two with a thesis that argues the narrator’s husband is sexist, that the rest cure is demeaning, and/or that the narrator speaks for the author. That’s a bit like “proving” that the river is important…
Spooftacular stuff, from ladysisyphus. What are the plot-threads that clutch, what subplots grow Out of this pulpy rubbish? Son of James, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only Your third-person limited perspective, where your adverbs breed, And the caps lock gives no shelter, the chapter no relief, And the seventh book no sign…