Crisfield, a crabbing hub on the southwestern tip of Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and Smith Island are separated by just a dozen miles of choppy water known as Tangier Sound. But Smith Island has a distinct identity. An archipelago of fiercely independent villages, it is so isolated that many residents still converse in an Elizabethan-era dialect…
In 1990 women around the world gave birth to 3.3 children on average, the report says. By 2002, the average had dropped to 2.6 children – slightly above the level needed to assure replacement of the population. The bureau’s projections show the level of fertility for the world as a whole descending below replacement level…
Ronald Reagan, the 40th president of the United States largely credited with ushering in an era of conservative politics and pursuing a foreign policy that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, died Saturday at his home in California after a 10-year struggle with Alzheimer‘sdisease. He was 93. […] Born into poverty in 1911,…
Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’? —Michael Mateas —Feds can’t tell art from terrorism (Grand Text Auto) I’d heard about this story in passing, but now that I see how few degrees of separation I am away from the artists in question, I see the situation in a…
Unscrewed: Finding Replacement Screws for Palm Tungsten T3 Â (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) A few weeks ago, I was comparing PDA’s with Josh Sasmor (a Seton Hill math professor), when Josh noticed that one of the four tiny screws on the lower body of my Tungsten T3 was missing. I forgot to bring the charger home one…
”Students felt more empowered,” said Frank Klapak, an education and communication professor at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, one of the schools participating in the study. Klapak let his students help decide how to structure the course as a way of showing them the results of democratic involvement. The study also found that…
I recall seeing a number of my high-school teachers, all with master’s degrees or Ph.D.’s, painting houses and cutting lawns during the summer. This kind of thing still happens all over the country, and it’s a disgrace. When teachers are forced to tend the yards of students’ homes, to clean houses, or to sell stereos…
There is no greater mark of the gap that separates writers and English departments than the question of value. The very thing that most matters to writers, the first question they ask of a work – is it any good? – is often largely irrelevant to university teachers. Writers are intensely interested in what might…
In a comedy of errors, Dasch proceeded to call the New York office of the FBI to explain that he was a German citizen who had arrived in the U.S. the previous morning, that he had a statement to make about the nation’s security, and that he wanted to meet with J. Edgar Hoover. The…
But time has slowly killed these loops and the pastoral (and ambient) ideals they once represented. What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the…
—American Drama and Theater from the Beginnings through 1960 A detailed bibliography, by Udo Hebel. This isn’t a mechanically generated collection of web pages that turn up after keyword searches for “american drama” — this is a hand-edited list that reflects some actual editorial work. It deserves PageRank karma, so it gets my link. Similar:Take…
Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez’s comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art — “sprites” in programming jargon — along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game…
A history of videogames, just as a history of any software “type” or “genre,” will reveal an open-source origin and a legacy of “borrowers” and “derivers” hoping to capitalize on what was originally free, whether through buying up copyrights or creating enhanced commercial versions. With an increase in the size of a software corporation comes…
I doubt anyone could accuse me of literature. Online text games tend to have quite a different emphasis than a book. I am not trying to tell a story as much as I am trying to describe a location and an atmosphere. I try to make the descriptions detailed and interesting enough for people to…
A 14-year-old Indiana boy mastered “autochthonous” to win the National Spelling Bee Thursday, outdueling 264 rivals, including one who fainted on stage but recovered to take second place. —Ben Feller —14-Year-Old Indiana Boy Wins Spelling Bee (AP|MyWay) Also worth noting: the comment about the environment at the bee (“[c]ourtesy reigns”), and the story of Ashkay Buddiga,…
Associated Press editors were forced to retract an earlier report that a meteorite might have hit near Olympia, Wash., this morning after discovering that a source, one Bradley Hammermaster, claiming to be an astronomy professor, had perpetrated a hoax. —Joe Strupp —AP Meteor Crash Report Was a Hoax (Editor and Publisher) Similar:Sweet Lenten RegretsThis Lenten…
To paraphrase Matt Barton‘s hyperbolic words playfully, let’s remove our lips from the poisoned suckbottle of proprietary software and switch to the wholesome breast of open source. —Clancy Ratliff —Taking Copyfighters to Task (CultureCat) Beware, open-source activists, if your praxis is not as pure as your theory! In the theater world, it turned out that the…
Writers are supposed to be on TV to tell people what to read or to explain how to clean up television, period. When a writer is a regular on television, his or her writing craft has to suffer because you’re in make-up when you should have been trying out sentences. Pretty soon, your writing starts…
“I was treated like a god,” the former Nebraska quarterback says. “I had pretty much everything given to me out there from the start. | “I never thought I had to work for anything. It was pretty much understood, ‘Hey this kid is going to take over the program.’ I don’t like things given to…
Since the best way to make a good choice is by using the Internet, I ask all my readers to reach out to a senior citizen who doesn’t understand computers. Clip this column and invite a senior — perhaps a relative or someone who lives in your neighborhood — to line up his or her…