In California, the governor’s office reacts to hearing of a vulgar message hidden vertically in the first row of letters in this gubernatorial veto. As The Swamp puts it: “My goodness. What a coincidence,” a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. “I suppose when you do so…
What can be learned from Fitzgerald’s tax returns? To start with, his popular reputation as a careless spendthrift is untrue. Fitzgerald was always trying to follow conservative financial principles. Until 1937 he kept a ledger–as if he were a grocer–a meticulous record of his earnings from each short story, play, and novel he sold. The…
A few years ago, my daughter was thrilled to receive a hand-me-down fanny pack. (See the price tag hanging on my spiffy new one?)Earlier this month, when my wife took the kids on a family visit for about 10 days, my daughter cried for me at night. Similar:What would I get if I added powdered…
Will I miss Geocities? No, not really. In 1998 or possibly 1999, I was teaching web authorship as part of a freshman composition class, and this page from a student project made me keep the “make a Geocities home page” and “make a creative hypertext” project around, even though every semester, a certain chunk of…
Looking forward to this promising resource. I’ve wrapped the blogs up, tidied them up, corrected & updated them and put them into 1 handy ebook for you to download and take home. It means you have have an all-in-one desktop reference to giving your multimedia journalism more spark, and getting in the entrepreneurial mindset. Chapters…
Our decision to homeschool began when we moved from Wisconsin to Pennsylvania with a five-year-old, and found there was no option for half-day kindergarten. We decided the move was stressful enough, and since school attendance wasn’t mandatory until age 7, we decided to handle the afternoon naps, storytimes, and playing-with-blocks ourselves. As long as our…
From Awful Library Books. For more schadenfreud, see Cake Wrecks, Photoshop Disasters, and Fail Blog. Similar:Do Black Holes Create New Universes? Physicist Lee Smolin InterviewCan’t wait until we get this end-of-year…CultureBeowimp (spoof I wrote for my high school lit magazine c. 1985)I got an email this morning from someone…AmusingCollege bookstores adapting to changing times with…
Great stuff from Mark Marino… not only is the content fascinating, but the blog-sized presentation, for discusison, of a fundamental theoretical concept is a great example of what the blogging medium can do for (and to) scholarship. Item for today: = In Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo‘s article on the history of computers, the…
I’m gearing up to introduce my journalism students to a news project that requires a basic knowledge of math. I don’t want to make it too frustrating to them, but I do want to emphasize how easy it is to be misled by the math. Margin of Error deserves better than the throw-away line it…
I assigned book one of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale to a “Writing About Literature” class, the designated writing-intensive course for our English majors. The students discussed the abrupt ending, the use of ethnic stereotypes, and of course the comic book medium itself. One student’s “Hearing through Yiddish… Seeing in Ink…” is particularly thoughtful. About a…
Clearly, the computer re-energized Bukowski and gave him new life as a writer. Yet much of Bukowski’s late writing was about old age and death. The computer fit into this. In poems, letters, and in The Captain, Bukowski chronicled his struggles with the computer. The shutdowns, the lost poems, the time at the shop for…
Movie critics are sometimes asked why all movies cost the same to view, even though some may have cost $100 million to make, and others $500,000. It’s a reasonable question. I suppose the reasoning is that you get about two hours of movie either way. Now 3-D has provided exhibitors with a subterfuge to force…
Don’t hate on the TV media just because they helped the nation fall for the Balloon Boy Hoax. Back in the day, the print media were the obvious target. On April 13, 1844, Edgar Allan Poe wrote an article in The New York Sun, chronicling how Monck Mason, leaving England for Paris drifted off course…
When Heene appeared, he instead simply displayed a box into which he invited the media to submit questions, to be answered this evening. —CBS Well, he’s managed to extend his fame by another 15 minutes. Similar:Man arrested in DC with weapons is released; says he made a mistakeA man arrested at DC checkpoint yesterda…CultureJournalism isn’t…
A fascinating twist to the complex story behind the legal battle behind the iconic Obama “HOPE” poster. New filings to the court, he said, “state for the record that the AP is correct about which photo I used…and that I was mistaken. While I initially believed that the photo I referenced was a different one, I discovered early on in…
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Although I explained how I track and archive my students’ Twitter activity, I didn’t describe what they actually do on Twitter. That’s because I wasn’t sure myself what they do. I mean, of course I’ve reading their tweets and sending my own, but I hadn’t considered in a systematic way how my students use Twitter.…
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In a bid to save money, the station is planning to reassign the technicians who operate the electronic prompters that feed scripted news copy to the anchors while they’re on the air. Instead, the station wants its anchors to do the job themselves. […] “Instead of orchestrating coverage, fact-checking, handling breaking news, paying attention to…
When people can more easily fire off all sorts of messages–from updates about their breakfast to questions about the evening’s plans–being able to figure out which messages are truly important, or even which warrant a response, can be difficult. Information overload can lead some people to tune out messages altogether. Such noise makes us even…