I panicked and tried to pat out the fire with my hands but the brittle, dry macramé cord was fully ablaze within a few seconds. All I could do was stand there and scream for help. The owl was now a fireball which was scorching my wall and dropping cinders onto the carpet. —Macramé Disaster (Catenema)…
Media studies students – sometimes stereotyped as studying “Mickey Mouse” degrees – are among the most employable of any graduates, says a major survey. —Media students ‘most employable’ (BBC) An interesting detail to keep in mind as I put together my plan for a “Disney Worldview” course for next January. Via Color in a Lurid World.…
For crying out loud, I‘m middle class. I went to a school most people would call posh. But if I came home and said to my wife that I wanted a beverage, or asked her to pass the condiments, she?d punch me. When I travel, I don’t need to be treated like Hyacinth Bucket. I…
If there is any general lesson about Bayosphere, it’s that citizen journalism at the community level needs less high-flown rhetoric and more street-smart testing. The model for what works in content remains to be finished. Citizen journalism is not a failure. But there needs to be a more engaged relationship between the proprietors and impresarios…
—Galleries — Bridge Drawings (Ex Astris Scientia) A very cool collection of cut-away schmatics of the various designs of the bridges for Star Trek. Starts with the bridge as it appeared in the Star Trek pilot episodes, the original series, the movies, and various refits of the same set for the various Federation starships encountered throughout…
We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.” —We will never forget them… (MetaFilter) A thread devoted to the 20th anniversary of the loss of the Space Shuttle…
So The Movies — set in an unnamed city where they make movies, decorate with palm trees and assign sycophants to celebrities — is a fictionalized simulation of a real place that simulates fiction while fictionalizing the real world. […] Activision and its partner Lionhead Films encourages the uploading and sharing of your creations, so…
Like any red-blooded hacker, Mozart adored mathematics as a child (and gambling as an adult), found word-play irresistible (email would have been perfect for him) and loved setting himself puzzles. His Musical dice game uses dice throws and pre-composed short fragments of music to form compositions created by random numbers; the challenge was writing fragments…
The first thing that occurred to me was the similarity between the bridge on the Enterprise and a small theater. The view screen made an obvious film screen and the seating centered around the command chairs and behind would fit well in the small space I had. I therefore decided to make my theater into…
“I love awakening the passion for drama and storytelling in the children,” Komarek said. “Nothing’s been finalized, but I’m eyeing Aristophanes’ Frogs. I love the dislocation of verse in the play’s stichic passages, and the kids love animals.” —Second-Graders Wow Audience With School Production Of Equus (The Onion (Satire)) Weird. Weird, weird, weird. Similar:We found a…
“Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news,” said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN’s NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show’s ratings closer to front-runner Fox News. Brown said…
Though there is a rich history of pseudonymity in American journalism, there is none of anonymity. It has long been understood that if the publisher of a reputable periodical grants a writer use of a pseudonym, then that publisher knows the writer’s true identity and takes responsibility — legal and otherwise — for that writer’s…
In 1985, Buckles wrote “Interactive Fiction: The Computer Storygame ‘Adventure,’ ” a scholarly look at the early text-based game Adventure and the people who played it. Buckles was hardly a devotee of the game herself, and the topic didn’t have a lot to do with her main area of study at UCSD, which was German…
Scientists recently have found a few rocky planets, including one last year just seven times the size of Earth, but all are very close to their stars and so extremely hot. The planetary discovery announced Wednesday and reported in today’s edition of the journal Nature is the smallest and coldest yet. —Ian Hoffman —‘Earth-like’ planets…
I‘m not saying that textbook companies don’t serve a valuable purpose in the composition community; there‘sa lot of textbooks that I have used in the past that I like a great deal, and I also know, that when I started teaching first year composition many moons ago, I learned a lot from the textbook that…
—Literature Quizzes and Crosswords (WSU) Just a collection of quizzes and crosswords on literary terms, grammar and usage, and figures from American literature. Hamlet’s in there too. Similar:T. S. Eliot and his Jellicle CatsLike Caryn Thurman, I came to Cats (the …CultureSchisms (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 5)Rewatching ST:TNG Riker is having troub…DesignStick to facts,…
Understanding the Abramoff pictures requires investigating the absurd Washington phenomenon known as the “glory wall.” Also called the “wall of fame,” “me wall,” and “ego wall,” the glory wall is where members of the establishment flaunt their connections by displaying photos of themselves with more famous people. —John Dickerson —”As I Was Saying to the…
Rule 7 seems both funny and serious: a Zen-like joke, abolishing all the rules that precede and follow it, and a statement that‘sabsolutely true, for makers of art and for anyone engaged in learning. Note that Rule 7 doesn’t say that the only thing to do is work. Rather, the only necessary thing is work.…
“We often hear the assertion that rising faculty salaries drive the cost of tuition,” he says, but data over 25 years show that is not the case. “One of the several sources behind rising tuition rates is investment in technology.” Facebook is not the sole source for those woes. However, it is a Janus-faced symbol…
Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups. Talk to the corporate hierarchs and you quickly elicit the thinking behind this pullback: Too many movies have been crammed into…