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:Another very rough day. Students are cheerful and patient, obviously happy to be here.Another very rough day. Students are che…AcademiaEnjoying the “Science of…
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:Most Americans have a high opinion of the humanities, and 81% use at least one humanities-…While some survey respondents were unfam…AcademiaOne of my undergrad lit papers. Dot-matrix printed, with hand-written instructor annotatio…AcademiaIn December 1999, I Was Blogging About Joseph Heller,…
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:The Pentagon…
#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? David Brooks thinks not: “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:Your Students Learn by Doing, Not by ListeningToday one of my students gave a final pr…AcademiaMeet the 12-year-old boy who makes games instead of going to schoolTurning on…
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…
Yesterday, my eight-year-old said, “I don’t like math, but I’m good at it.” This is a huge improvement from the math-related tug-of-wars we’ve encountered almost daily for the past year and a half. Yesterday, she also finished a “Star Wars Math” game, where the idea is to play a Trivial Pursuits style game, spaced-out versions…