The BBC appended this to its coverage of the Mexico City explosion: Are you in Mexico City? Were you in the area when the explosion happened? Send us your comments using the form below: Send your pictures to yourpics@bbc.co.uk or text them to +44 7725 100 100. If you have a large file you can…
NPR’s In Character treatment of Willy Loman (from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman). “I can tell you anecdote after anecdote after anecdote of men — men, 50-year-old pinstripe-suited men dissolved in tears and shaking,” Dennehy says. “And telling me story after story about themselves, about their relationship with their sons, and so forth.” I…
Christian Science Monitor: During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company. Ten months into the experiment, he decided to quit after learning of an illness in…
Up Right Down already features over a dozen versions of the same story. What’s yours? (Via) THE PLOT: In a bistro in Paris a young woman (A) tells her three girlfriends (B, C, and D) about the affair she had with an American tourist, who returned home promising to write, and hasn’t. It’s been over…
A great series hosted by Heidi Ruby Miller, a recent graduate of Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction program. She has asked writers of genre fiction (fantasy, crime, etc.) to tell the story of their first publication. I’m just starting a career track unit in Introduction to Literary Study, and several of the students want to…
I just noticed that Google Maps has added Greensburg to its street view service. How long has this been available? Here’s a look up Seton Hill’s lovely sycamore-lined driveway.View Larger Map Similar:National Headline Contest 2011Great headlines from winner David Bowman…AestheticsCreate Engaging Infographics for your ClassroomSeveral of my journalism students have g…Aesthetics50 Years Ago: The World…
Interactive fiction author Emily Short offers a thoughtful analysis of the function of designing puzzles that permit the player to come up with original solutions. She refers to her game Metamorphoses, which includes a complex physical world model that includes such concepts as size, shape, weight, etc. For instance, you can beat down a door…
From the University of Toronto’s Representative Poetry Online: “Poems to be memorized and spoken to your sweetheart.” They came to tell your faults to me, They named them over one by one; I laughed aloud when they were done, I knew them all so well before, — Oh, they were blind, too blind to see…
Frighteningly sad story from a San Diego TV station. For 17 years Corcoran taught high school for the Oceanside School District. Relying on teacher’s assistants for help and oral lesson plans, he said he did a great job at teaching his students. “What I did was I created an oral and visual environment. There wasn’t…
Boing Boing interviews Bjarne P. Tveskov, a Lego designer who created many of the classic Space sets from the 80s. I still have all my space legos, and my kids and I regularly play with them. My LEGO career started when I was 17 years old; I saw an ad in the Sunday newspaper, they…
A somewhat silly, but still amusing piece from Live Science: Given that blondes generally have about 140,000 hairs on their heads, her hair should easily support the weight of many, many princes. However, there is more to this story. If Rapunzel simply let down her hair and the prince started climbing immediately, her hair would…
From the AP: Danish police said Tuesday they have arrested three people suspected of plotting to kill one of the 12 cartoonists behind the Prophet Muhammad drawings that sparked a deadly uproar in the Muslim world two years ago. Similar:Brought my in-progress #blender3d project into the #unity3d gaming engine. Plenty of frust… AestheticsSeton Hill's #CIO…
From the AP: The estate of “Lord of the Rings” creator J.R.R. Tolkien is suing the film studio that released the trilogy based on his books, claiming the company hasn’t paid it a penny from the estimated $6 billion the films have grossed worldwide. Similar:Twelfth Night Cast Photo (Prime Stage, May 3-12)My daughter can hardly…
Gettysburg College: Students create text-based “interactive fiction” games that are rigorously derived from archaeological data and filled with references to Viking and other cultures. The games describe a scene or object in detail, then ask players to make a choice, such as “go east” or “take sword.” Each decision leads to a new set of…
Random thoughts are exactly what they are, random! Anyone can say random words. It does Have favorable results. His attempts to woo — But never all the way — toward the cliff Conform to something so unlike yourself The other points are pretty valid. It’s A place to jot down information as Questions. For example:…
My students are working on showing and telling. It’s a difficult concept to learn, and I’ve found over the years it’s not that easy to teach. So as part of an upcoming short story assignment, I’ve started to introduce the concept of “pointless showing” to define the practice of avoiding clear language in the misguided…
Amanda Cochran, who was a student in my freshman composition class not too many years ago, went on to be the editor-in-chief of the student paper, and is now in grad school at NYU. She writes about taking on an assignment on short notice. I was nominated to cover the story yesterday by one of…
Good literacy news from the Washington Post: The share of kindergarten students in the county who can read simple books has risen from 39 to 93 percent in six years, according to school system data culled from reading assessments given each spring. Achievement is so high, and across so many demographic groups, that school officials…
I took a little break from evaluating a close reading assignment in order to look into the online chatter about George W. Bush’s interpretation of a painting called “A Charge to Keep.” Bush hung it on his wall because he identifies with the guy out in front, whom he sees as leading a tough climb…
Wired: A leading general and former top military spokesman in Iraq is pleading with the armed services to let troops blog and post to YouTube. Too bad the video site is banned on military nets, and Army rules squeeze military bloggers, hard. Greg Grant notes, politely, that Caldwell’s “recommendation that appears to run counter to…