Cantina The current management of this rather seedy venue doesn’t much care about appearances, apparently. Nonetheless, it’s become one of the hottest spots in the area, attracting surly alcoholics from all around. A variety of local acts, the vast majority unrelentingly terrible, play here every Tuesday night. Coincidentally, it’s Tuesday night. A host of unsavory-looking…
Part of a list of jokes the president told at the Alfalfa Club Dinner. This set made me laugh. “In just the first few weeks, I’ve had to engage in some of the toughest diplomacy of my life. And that was just to keep my BlackBerry. “I finally agreed to limit the number of people…
As I was putting my 10-year-old son to bed tonight, as usual we had a long, free-ranging, unrushed conversation. Somehow I mentioned the missing Doctor Who tapes. Peter got very thoughtful. “If I had a time machine, I could go back to the moment those tapes disappeared. And I could bring them forward in time,…
In my Literary Criticism class, next week we’ll be looking at The Yellow Wallpaper — most of us probably for the umpteenth time. Here’s a comment that just appeared on the course website, that reminds me why I spend six hours straight re-configuring a server from scratch because it got infected with a virus 12…
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a horde of the undead in possession of insatiable hunger for the brains of the living must be in want of a Jane Austin remix.(via) Pride and Prejudice and Zombies covers the same ground as the original masterpiece – only that ground is full freshly-vacated graves. The “strange…
When I sat down in the middle of January with an Arabic-language translator to look through Facebook, we found one new group with almost 2,000 members called “I’m sure I can find 1,000,000 members who hate Israel!!!” and another called “With all due respect, Gaza, I don’t support you,” which blamed Palestinian suffering on Hamas…
Yesterday at the opening meeting of “Media Lab” (a one-credit class that students take when they wish to get credit for working on the school paper), I told my students that I love print and I always will. I held up a printed copy of the school paper, told them it was a good issue…
He thinks that he will never see A poem lovely as a tree. But poems charm and poems please, And many are lovelier than “Trees.” A tree whose hungry mouth is pressed Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast, Can hardly look at God all day, While lifting leafy arms to pray. Where are her eyes,…
The URL says it all. www.whitehouse.gov/blog Similar:My college writing students are out making short videos responding to a prompt.While my students are out of the room ma…AcademiaCNN Profiles Former White House "Chief Calligrapher"Today was the last day of the manuscript…AestheticsThe joy of text – the fall and rise of interactive fictionAlthough the IF community first…
“The Zoo and the Carnegie Science Center are my two favorite places in the world!” chirps my daughter from the back of the van. “Can we go to the Science Center instead?” “No, honey, we’re driving to your penguin class,” I tell her. She grabs her brother’s arm. “Both of us?” she asks. “The two…
A wonderfully readable, thought-provoking article about the intersection between the worlds of words and computer programming — both ways of modeling and human capabilities, experiences, and desires. It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds…
The Freytag Pyramid Concocted 146 years ago by a German philologist, Freytag’s pyramid was long held aloft as the one-size-fits-all narrative template, despite the fact that it describes the tidy Aristotelian side of storytelling (Ben-Hur) far better than its frayed quantum fringes (Memento). Techniques like open-ended conclusion, audience interactivity, and nonlinear chronology “were part of…
A snip from the Washington Post’s brief piece on how high-profile news magazines have changed along with journalism: Many of the recently laid-off staffers, Stengel says, “were people whose jobs really didn’t exist anymore.” Similar:Gen Z Never Learned to Read CursiveWhen I used to teach a “Media and Cultur…AcademiaFantasy football and the cold future of…
On October 10, 1765, an Annapolis printer changed his newspaper’s title to the Maryland Gazette, Expiring. Its motto: “In uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life again.” Later that month, the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s-head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the…
The College Media Advisers issues a censure of Western Oregon University for firing its newspaper adviser in the wake of a student report that publicized a computer security breach. See the press release amd the letter of censure (PDF). Wickstrom’s firing followed the June 2007 Journal publication of a story concerning a university computer security…
Bring on the bongo drums and the black turtlenecks — this looks like fun. Students in a poetry class were asked to write their poetry on a piece of fruit, and then share their text with the class. Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick’s skull in her left hand and…
An informative tribute, from the BBC. It’s remarkable how many of the genre’s classic elements can be traced back to the feverishly fertile imagination of one man, Edgar Allan Poe. Once you start looking, the clues are everywhere. Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his gloomy gothic tales Born 200 years ago, on 19…
Educated Americans have a tendency to think that (i) intelligence can be directly assessed through the surrogate of compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar, and that (ii) compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar can be checked quickly and easily by glancing in Strunk and White’s brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar…
Here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the Seton Hill University alumni magazine, Forward. Page 1 | Page 2 Similar:Simon Newman Resigns as President of Mount St. Mary’s Simon P. Newman resigned on Monday eve…AcademiaTimescape (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 25) Time bubble aliens lay eggs in…
I made this slide up for a conference presentation a few years ago. (Of course, it applies to the procrastinating professor, too.) Similar:4 Skills to Help You Stand Out In Any Job InterviewAn employer will never ask you to write …BusinessJournalism: Muzzle your biases. Seek out diverse but credible sources. You’ll be criticize…AcademiaHumans Aren’t Mentally…