Then one night Lisberger went to visit his in-laws, and everyone was crouched around the TV, playing Pong. “They kept referring to the games, ‘Play the game,’ and since I had been working on a project called “Animalympics,” the idea of games to me meant more than that. It meant Olympic or gladiatorial games,” the…
Singer says he plans to use the late Marlon Brando in the new film. Brando, who played Superman’s father, Jor-El, in the 1978 Superman and died in 2004, will return in the same role. Singer says he found stock footage of Brando shot by director Richard Donner in 1978, which will provide Brando’s voice. Special-effects…
“Oh, no,” I exclaimed several years ago, when a student in a composition class stepped out afterwards to explain that she had been absent because her grandmother had died. “Another dead grandmother!” The girl immediately burst into tears. Of course I wished I was dead. The student’s grandmother really had died. Or else her granddaughter…
No, not Nachos, Naches. That’s yiddish for…naches. Ok no good English translation (as usual). Not quite pride. More like a feeling of ease or peace for the spirit. Something that makes you go, “..ahhh…” Though it’s usually meant as pride. Specifically, the pride you get from one of your kids when they do something good.…
It’s Not Monday, but I Hate Garfield. (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I started writing this as an example, on the paper of a student who put a bit of plot analysis in the spot where an academic thesis should have been. While this isn’t quite as good as the story of J.R.R. Tolkien writing down the opening…
Taking our previous analogies for punctuation, what happens when it isn’t used? Well, if punctuation is the stitching of language, language comes apart, obviously, and all the buttons fall off. If punctuation provides the traffic signals, words bang into each other and everyone ends up in Minehead…. The reason to stand up for punctuation is…
Think back to John Henry racing a steam drill and forward to Garry Kasparov trying to outmaneuver IBM’s Deep Blue in 1997 to the Onion tweaking the genre with its accountant battles Excel story. But the latest twist on the meme takes it to the meta-level by raising the question: in the future, will you…
When former Gizmondo executive Stefan Eriksson wrecked his million-dollar Ferrari on the Pacific Coast Highway last month, it simply seemed like a fitting metaphor for the death of his hapless handheld – the destruction of one expensive piece of machinery to mark the end of another. —Gizmondo Bizarro (Game Revolution) If all the news reports are…
Thanks to a comment a former student added to last week’s post, I found some pleasant, lush models of trees, along with numerous other realistic residential items. I’ve added the fluorescent light fixtures and wall sconces inside, and some pretty trees outside. I also started working with a street model (curbs and sidewalks), but ran…
“We also wanted your cubicle to give you a little shred of dignity and recognition and acknowledge you exist because you’re probably not getting that from your co-workers or your boss. So we’ve built in a mechanical flower that’s acoustically activated. When you’re gone, it’s wilted. But when you come in, it’s acoustically activated and…
The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. —Julie Schlosser —Cubicles: The Great Mistake (CNN Money.com) Similar:Jeff Bezos Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon ProductFor the past few months, a group inside …BooksLego signs multi-million-pound deal with BBC to create Dr Who setThe concept…
Welcome to World of Warcraft: The Text Adventure. You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully. There is an elf with an exclamation point above her head here. >Talk elf “Alas,” she…
The Food and Drug Administration today approved the sale of the drug PharmAmorin, a prescription tablet developed by Pfizer to treat chronic distrust of large prescription-drug manufacturers. —Wonder Drug Inspires Deep, Unwavering Love Of Pharmaceutical Companies (The Onion (Satire)) Similar:Why the Internet Isn’t Fun AnymoreI used to spend time in class teaching s…BusinessThe Girl's Obsession with…
Colleges keep complaining that students are coming to them unprepared. Instead of raising admissions standards, however, they keep accepting mediocre students lest cuts have to be made in faculty and administration. —Patrick Welsh —For once, blame the student (Yahoo!/USAToday (will probably expire)) This essay is written by a high school teacher frustrated by the lack of…
In complex reading passages, organization may be elaborate, messages may be implicit, interactions among ideas or characters may be subtle and the vocabulary is demanding and intricate. The ACT isolated reading complexity as a critical factor by analyzing the results of the 1.2 million high school seniors in 2005 who took the well-known ACT college…
In late 1982, my best friend had a Sony TCS-310 Stereo Cassette Recorder. Audio cassette tape was the affordable recording media at the time and one wintery November day while on our way to the arcade ‘Just Fun’ in Ithaca, NY, we came up with the idea to record video game sounds. —Daniel P. Hower…
The first fully-automated performance of the 1924 Futurist/Dadaist/Cubist composition “Ballet mécanique” by George Antheil takes place this weekend in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, on the Mall in Washington, DC–in conjunction with the larges exhibit in history on Dadaist art. Programmed by composer/author/music technologist Paul Lehrman, and using robots built by…
My Half-Life 2 Mod, Week 2: Custom Textures, Glass Window, Tree (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) A week after I began a serious attempt to create a Half-Life 2 mod, I’ve made some good progress. Early last week, I did manage to add the hinged door that was the next thing on my agenda. I’d been going crazy…
“He’d tell us, ‘Now, 20 rows down, the accounting’s hard as granite — it’s the hardest thing an office man can stand,’” said Huddie Ledbetter, one of Peters’ former trainees, “‘but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It’s the life of a numbers-crunchin’ man.’” Sources say Peters, who was born…
To be a true Cookie Monster vocal, said Mr. Conner, who signed some of the subgenre’s biggest bands, including Sepultura and Fear Factory, “it’s got to be really, really guttural. It should sound like they’re gargling glass.” —Jim Fusilli —That’s Good Enough for Me: Cookie Monsters of death-metal music. (Opinion Journal) New to me. Similar:Professoring.…