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:Could…
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:The Media Bubble is…
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…
A survey of 1,309 pupils aged between 10 and 14 and from 24 different schools found alarming levels of ignorance about the invasion of Normandy 60 years ago. —Hastings and Henry —D-Day 1899 and President Denzel Washington is leading liberation of New Zealand from the Nazi’s (Telegraph) One teacher at Great Addington Church of England Primary…
A parody helps change a corrections policy at The New York Times. An online critic’s query ends a career at the Chicago Tribune. Bloggers’ scrutiny is making its mark on traditional journalism. —Mark Glaser —To Their Surprise, Bloggers Are Force for Change in Big Media (Online Journalism Review) Another great suggestion from Rosemary. Similar:One of the…
As an example of the new pricing plan, suppose you posted an entry to your blog reading, ?I had a cheese sandwich for lunch today. Then, I got behind the slowest woman in the grocery-store line! Grrrr!? By my count (TypeKey will handle the sentence diagramming automatically in MT3.0014d), this entry contains 6 adjectives/adverbs, 4…
THE world’s newspapers enjoyed buoyant advertising sales in 2003 but overall reader numbers were in marginal decline, according to a report on the state of the industry delivered at the 57th annual World Newspaper Congress today. —Christine Pouget —Newspaper advertising up (Daily Telegraph) An interesting detail buried in this story: “The distribution of free newspapers –…
On 19 September 2001 the Federal Minister for Aged Care the Honourable Bronwyn Bishop MP launched the National Public Toilet Map. The National Public Toilet Map identifies the location of more than 13000 public toilet facilities in Australian towns and cities, including rural areas, and along major travel routes. Useful information is provided about each…
“They struck his head with a reed and spat on him.” — Mk 15:19 —The Crucifixion (in Lego) (The Brick Testament) This site, by “Rev” Brendan Powell Smith, features Lego illustrations of Biblical passages — including many that you don’t often see in kiddie books, including the Dueteronomy passages on rape, bestiality, incest, homosexuality, transvestism, and…