All touching — not only fighting or inappropriate touching — is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: “NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!” […] It isn’t as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from…
“General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” —Reagan’s ‘tear down this wall’ speech 20 years later (USA Today | AP) Similar:My meeting was cancelled, so…
BioShock will be Ken Levine’s magnum opus. It will be his career defining game. It’s ambitious, unusual and aggressive, mixing the high polish expected of a “next generation” shooter, with equal parts storytelling, politics, and philosophy, all wrapped up in a bloody, underwater, 1940’s bow. […] The most prominent character in BioShock — Andrew Ryan,…
The Pentagon is setting up a civilian Language Corps, a cadre of some 1,000 foreign-language speakers who can help the government in times of war and national emergencies. In a three-year pilot program, the Defense Department will recruit volunteers and do testing to see if such a program would work. If successful, a permanent corps…
This article from The Week has statistics that bolster and weaken arguments frequently used by people on both sides of the debate. —How other countries deal with gun control (BoingBoing) Blogging this for future reference. I’ll be teaching a news writing course in the fall, and one of the most challenging units involves getting students to…
Digg Takedown, Obama Takeover, Army Blog Squeeze (Jerz’s LIteracy Weblog) This is the last week of classes, and I’ve got deadlines galore (3 conference proposals, an annual report, a departmental proposal, and an article submission that I’ve been sitting on for a week). So I won’t have much to say, but I still thought it was…
Getting shot hurts. — Ronald Reagan —Reagan diaries reveal president’s private musingsYahoo! | Reuters (will expire)) As an American who started drinking tea the English way while in Canada (brewed in a pot and poured into the cup, not made in the cup with a single-serving tea bag), I enjoyed the anecdote about Prince Charles.…
A cameraman for the NBC affiliate in Houston was captured on home video sporting a Mexican flag on his camera while covering a rally in the Texas city that supported illegal immigrants, drawing angry shouts from counter-protesters. In the first of two clips posted on YouTube.com, a counter-protester with a bull horn can be heard…
At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.” In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States…
Every culture has its pathologies, and ours is self-reliance. From some mix of our frontier past, our Little House on the Prairie heritage, our Thoreauvian desire for solitude, and our amazing wealth we’ve derived a level of independence never seen before on this round earth. We’ve built an economy where we need no one else;…
White House Secret Service Agent Anthony Panucci is being called a hero after intercepting what could have been a critically damaging question aimed directly at President Bush during a press conference in the Rose Garden Tuesday. —Heroic Secret Service Agent Takes Question Intended For Bush (The Onion (Satire)) I love the graphic that indicates the question…
We walked out of the dealership, but not before learning that none of my personal data which was copied and recorded would be returned to me or destroyed. It’s going to be kept on file for 7 years. Policy, you see. It goes in the same file where they keep the fingerprints. So now I’ve…
With presidential campaigns now poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising that will blanket television before November 2008, this seemingly home-produced video — created with software and a laptop, and likely without the benefit of a team of expensive political consultants — opens a new window, Rosenberg said. It has dramatized a…
The music-master of George III said to his royal pupil, “There are three classes of violin players; those who do not play at all, those who play very badly, and those who play well. Your Majesty has already succeeded in reaching the second class.” —Constructive Exercises in English (Boogle Books) Now that’s tact. Similar:Books vs. Kindles:…
The human population has swelled so much that people alive today outnumber all those who have ever lived, says a factoid whose roots stretch back to the 1970s. Some versions of this widely circulating rumor claim that 75 percent of all people ever born are currently alive. Yet, despite a quadrupling of the population in…
Politicians and other moral crusaders frequently create “folk devils,” individuals or groups defined as evil and immoral. Folk devils allow us to channel our blame and fear, offering a clear course of action to remedy what many believe to be a growing problem. Video games, those who play them, and those who create them have…
Administrators at the Louisiana public university directed editors of the weekly student newspaper, the Gramblinite, to suspend publication this month, citing a range of reasons. Grambling officials said that the newspaper was rife with errors and misspellings and that advertisers and local groups had complained about its lack of professionalism, and they cited a sports…
Here, Bullet If a body is what you want, then here is bone and gristle and flesh. Here is the clavicle-snapped wish, the aorta’s opened valves, the leap thought makes at the synaptic gap. […] —The horror, the horror of Iraq, in poetry (SF Gate.com) Fascinating reading. Similar:Desk blotters, with procedural leather and wood materials by…
The recent conference on the Holocaust held in Tehran should be viewed by the world as exactly what it was: nothing more than a propaganda effort by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to bolster his own political agenda and image as someone willing — even if ignorantly — to confront the United States and Israel. While…
The lunch took place just a couple of days after the Democrats crushed the Republicans in the midterm elections, regaining the House and the Senate. Mr. Bérubé, to his credit, kept the gloating to a minimum. It’s worth noting that, even though they’ve been writing about each other for years, the two men had never…