Keats can keep his urn with its leaf-fring’d legend. I’ve got a much better slice-of-life to share. When I called my parents tonight, my father reminded me of an exchange he had with my daughter when she was about four. My Daughter (to her grandfather): This is my teddy bear. My Father (to his granddaughter):…
News about a free-speech dust-up in the department where I used to work at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire: This fall, the English department, the publication’s then “administrative home,” voted unanimously to sever its ties to Flip Side, citing, in a statement, interest in “fostering the responsible use of free speech and the mutually respectful community…
My brother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey, is a Steelers fan. He asked for a keepsake issue of the local paper, so I sent out an e-mail to my colleagues to beg for their used copies. The truth is, I wouldn’t even take a free subscription to the print edition, since it would mean more junk piling…
What appears to be a smiley winks out from an 1862 transcript of a speech by ==|;o)> NY Times City Room Similar:Blue Feed, Red FeedFacebook is designed to keep your attent…CultureBird flight simulator. The boy goes for altitude and distance, the girl does stunts.In the bird-flight simulator at the Pitt…CybercultureEditors and editorial board quit top…
A nifty little primer, compiled by Nate Piekos. CROSSBAR I This is probably the biggest mistake seen amongst amateur letterers. An “I” with the crossbars on top and bottom is virtually only used for the personal pronoun, “I.” The only other allowable use of the “crossbar I” is in abbreviations. Any other instance of the letter should just…
Great piece from Ben Kuchera at Ars Technica. Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew, and I asked if they had one or more video games in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after…
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:Pipe Trouble’s government woes highlight gaming illiteracyInteresting discussion of a political ho…CultureSmith College Protesters Bar Journalists From Covering Sit-In Unless They Support the Caus…Reporters planning to cover the sit-in a…AcademiaBar Association #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 16) Rom Inspires Quark's Employe…Rewatching ST:DS9 As The Defiant return…MediaWhen Robert Pinsky…
“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:The Soldier Formerly Known as Bradley ManningHere is the entry on it from The Times’s…Current_EventsDuring a modest snowfall, I’m passing the…
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…