—Polka, Polka, Polka — and More (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Some family photos, mostly from my parents’ recent visit. Similar:A pleasant find: somebody left a painted rock by the side of the road.AestheticsChess with my son. As usual, it didn't go well for me.GamesBird flight simulator. The boy goes for altitude and distance, the girl does stunts.In…
“Rock is so important to me,” Harris said, gesturing to a cabinet where he files articles concerning all of the live shows he attends and detailed transcriptions of interviews with artists who live only blocks away. “If I couldn’t write about music and collect music, I have no idea what I’d do instead.” The social…
In Georgia this week, the campaign manager for a candidate for governor resigned amid allegations he doctored the Wikipedia biography of an opponent in the Democratic primary. Morton Brilliant was accused of revising the entry for Lt. Gov. Mark Taylor to add his son’s arrest last August in a drunken driving accident that left his…
When I find significant errors in student writing, I chalk it up to one of three reasons: they don’t care, they don’t know, or they didn’t see it. And I believe that the first and last are the most frequent causes of error. In other words, when push comes to shove, I’ve found that most…
I have written about how traditional chess engines are constructed and about how they go about figuring out what moves to make. I have speculated on how Rybka, a new and powerful chess engine is constructed. I have written a software specification for a new way to estimate the value of a chess position, or…
Congressman John P. Murtha will be the keynote speaker at this year’s commencement, Saturday, May 13 at 11 in the Katherine Mabis McKenna Center on Seton Hill’s Greensburg campus. —Alexandra Nseir —Murtha to speak at May commencement (Setonian) I have heard both faculty and student grumblings about Murtha, who is, depending on who’s talking, either pro-labor…
At Shards O’ Glass Freeze Pops, we believe in doing the right thing. Our products are intended for adults and as such, we only market to them. While some studies suggest that over 80% of our adult customers started eating Shards O’ Glass Freeze Pops before the age of 18, the intent of our marketing…
She was supposed to slam the door, but Baldwin held the door so tight, she couldn’t close it. “He made a drastic change in the blocking,” she said. “He was showing me the door, metaphorically. The stage management apologized to me about it later.” Baldwin said, “If, in one show out of the scores of…
The 23 blank pages, which literary experts presume is a two-act play composed sometime between 1973 and 1975, are already being heralded as one of the most ambitious works by the Nobel Prize-winning author of Waiting For Godot, and a natural progression from his earlier works, including 1969’s Breath, a 30-second play with no characters,…
The Connections class for fall 2006 is going to do a session on SHU etiquette centering around how students can appropriately present themselves to faculty and staff on campus. E-mail, phone, meetings, classroom, verbal encounters are all open for discussion. With this in mind, will you please give your replies to the following so that…
This world premiere will blend Rock, Tango, Jazz and Punk music with contemporary dance to re-imagine Karel Čapek’s original 1921 classic, R.U.R (Rossum’s Universal Robots). Čapek’s play that started it all, introducing the word ROBOT into the world’s lexicon and into our fantasies, is reexamined for the 21st Century. —R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots): A Futurist…
Dear Candidate: Thank you again for meeting with us at the American Historical Association’s annual conference. We have narrowed down the applicant pool to three very strong candidates, yourself included, but we just can’t decide among them! We hope you would be willing to come to the campus, along with the other candidates, and fight…
When people drink they become totally different people and I do not feel that I should put myself in that situation because if something were to happen, I would mostly likely have no chance to protect myself from a 200 pound kid, who isn’t even thinking rationally. Next thing, I’ll wind up dead in a…
I’ve had some difficulty with this last paper, no doubt, but I finally think I’m on the right track. However in my oral presentation, I wanted to include some goals, not only for this paper, but also to outline what I hoped to take from this class, once it’s over. —Matthew Hampton —Achievable goals for…
Agent Marks and I were uncertain how to end it, but thankfully, our undercover agents came to our rescue. They mounted a joke insurgence and effectively re-took the NJZ. It started off with each undercover agent coming into the zone, one after another, telling jokes in a town-crier fashion. —Guerilla Improv: No Joking Zone (Improv-Abilities) A…
In my review of Once and Future, I made the erroneous statement -“Just like video killed the radio star, graphics killed the parser,” and embarrassingly called interactive fiction a “dead genre.” I was wrong. Five years after I typed those lines, interactive fiction games continue to be produced, even commercially. —Terrence Bosky —Something about Interactive…
A member of a WOW guild suffered a stroke in real life and died. Her guildmates, knowing her only through the game, but nevertheless wanting to offer some remembrance for one of their own, decided to hold a memorial service in the game. A rival guild decided that would be a great time to show…
—Dad shoots at computer, saying son spends too much time playing games (Tampa Bays 10 News) Guns don’t kill video games. Angry parents with guns kill video games. Similar:The Teen Brain “Shuts Down” When It Hears Mom’s CriticismWired summarizes an egghead study for th…CultureWhat the ‘Grievance Studies’ Hoax Means As the hoaxers explained in Areo, they …AcademiaTesting out my new greenscreenFriendly…
Worried that I would not like him, my victim had used his humor to engage me, to make me laugh, to join in his witty barbs, and because I did like him, I had joined in. But we were not on equal footing and my comments contained a much more powerful threat because I did…
A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty — the 2001 novel “Sloppy Firsts” and the 2003 novel “Second Helpings.” […] Little, Brown signed Viswanathan to a two-book, $500,000…