Edgar Allan Poe’s most popular poem, “The Raven,” tells the story of a man who gets a late-night visit from a mysterious bird that speaks only one word: “Nevermore.” | Sounds like a pretty simple story, right? | Guess again! —Knowing Poe [Annotated Version of ‘The Raven’]Â (Maryland Public Television) Once upon a Tuesday weary, while…
The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters — peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit — who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people’s electronic mailboxes comes…
It begins to creep in, almost unnoticed. The levels are further apart. You begin to notice that newly acquired skills are carbon copies of the old ones, with a different coloured icon and a two percent damage increase…. You try out all the little distractions the developers have put in the game to make things…
Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature — old and new, from every culture — as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? —Thomas H. Benton —College and the Fall (Chronicle) I…
[B]ooks at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of…
Workers remodeling a 19th-century rehearsal hall at the Peabody Institute have found 10 dusty jugs of moonshine in an unlocked closet, where they apparently sat for nearly 60 years. Faded labels on the bottles suggest that the hooch was the handiwork of Gustav Strube, the first conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. —Heather Dewar —Maestro’s…
A high school freshman expelled for writing a fictional account of a student who falls asleep in class and dreams of killing a teacher can return to school Monday while officials reconsider the disciplinary action…. “It was a story about a girl who falls asleep in class, dreams she kills her math teacher, then wakes…
Microsoft’s menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it’s especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th “Inside PCMag.com” newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it’s still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was…
One of my classmates saw my wedding ring and asked if I was married. I said, yes, and she asked, “Happily?” Another student sneered, “Wow, married … how retro-hetero-normative.” Others snickered in approval. And so the seven-year assault on my values began. To avoid harassment, I learned to conceal who I was: my faith, my…
—‘The other phone’s a little…’ (No Media Kings) Jim Munroe is a new media generalist — a writer, interactive fiction designer, and video filmmaker. I enjoyed his video “>interactive,” and was Googling just now for something or other, and came across this short film, with a very dry, understated punchline that made me laugh out loud.…
And where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak? —Glenn Reynolds —Glenn Reynolds on Rumsfeld Memo and Plame Affair (Instapundit) A good collection of links exploring the media spin on the Rumsfeld memo. Reynolds argues that the leaked document, in which Reynolds critiques the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, could…
She singled out a campaign by Disney – “Remember the magic” – which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many…
It’s poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It’s failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A’s clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental…
Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it’s still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark…
Superintendent Wilfredo T. Laboy finally passed the Communication and Literacy Skills Test, reportedly with flying colors. —Lawrence schools boss passes language skills test (Boston Herald) It’s only fair to follow up with the good news, since I’ve already blogged the bad. Similar:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed [a Certain Political Slant] NewsOne day when I…
Brewster Kahle wants the world to know that old software is an important part of our cultural history and — like books, films and other media — should be preserved. —Daniel Terdiman —Fighting to Preserve Old Programs Problem? The DMCA prohibits the archiving of software, on the grounds that doing so violates intellectual property rights.…
..the most evocative and atmospheric experiences were conveyed entirely through text. Text adventures, with their terse locations, thrived on the role of objects, which were there to be discovered, smashed, used, examined and combined: you find the lamp, but now you need the oil to fill it and the match to light it. Only then…
At one prestigious university, a sophomore imported 30 biology books from England this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit. Next semester, if all goes well, he plans to expand the operation. | “The only difference is that they say `international edition’ in little print…
A professor agrees to review a manuscript that is under consideration for publication at a journal. He has promised to keep the paper and its contents absolutely confidential. When he reads it, however, he realizes that his student’s experiments will never work; the paper shows that they are futile. Does he keep mum, or does…
The author of one of the books I blogged wrote me an interesting reply, but sent it via e-mail. Can I place her comment in my blog comments without violating some written or unwritten code? —John SpurlockBlogging E-Mailed CommentsE-Mail) If I were to send a letter to the editor to a newspaper, I shouldn’t be…