Month: September 2008

This might be the way I spend this weekend…

The original plan for this weekend was camping at the Pinery Park in Ontario, a really beautiful and very tent-friendly campground and park about three or so hours northwest of here. We (meaning us and Jim and Rachel and fam) arranged this trip months ago, and– of course– the weather is not cooperating. We’ve had stunning weather this week and next week looks acceptable, but of course it has to rain this weekend.

Anyway, I am thinking I might interact with a whole different kind of “nature” this weekend, Spore. I’ve seen various commercials and such, but I have to say that Will Richardson’s post about playing the game has kind of sold me. Here’s a quote:

It arrived yesterday, and I’ve spend a total of about 90 minutes playing so far, and I’m pretty much blown away. I have little or no idea what I’m doing, I’m sure, but my herbivore (you didn’t really think my spore would eat meat, did you?) paramecium has now evolved into a two-legged, funky-eyed, green, fruit-eating creature who’s growing a family and trying to figure out how to survive in a world with equally funky looking creatures who might be friend or foe. And while getting past the cell stage was pretty easy, this creature stage is already proving to be much more challenging. Just a few minutes ago, I was killed by some purple dudes who ganged up on me and seemed to chew my head off. Luckily, rebirth is almost instantaneous.

Interestingly enough, Will posted this a couple days ago, and he hasn’t posted since. Perhaps a bit too much Sporing?

Dress-up day

Will in suit Here’s Will all dressed up for dress-up day at Greenhills. This was actually apparently the first of several dress-up days. I completely applaud the idea of making the kids present themselves nicely once in a while, though it did represent some shopping challenges for us. Happily, Will and I snagged the jacket, which was probably unnecessary (most of the boys just had nice shirts and ties) for $10.

It’s quite the adventure moving on to a new grade, a new school, a new system. We’re all getting up an hour or more earlier. Yesterday, Will was at his first drum lesson. Today after school, he’s going to tennis practice. And then tonight, it’s soccer practice. Oh yeah, Annette and I still have work too.

Another example of the fine line defining plagiarism

This is being talked about on WPA-L right now, but the thing that makes it most interesting to me is that it might fit into a discussion of plagiarism in English 516 next winter: “In the Words of My Speechwriter…” by David McGrath in the Washington Post. I think that McGrath’s purpose here is to criticize politicians– especially the most recent batch, and most especially the speech that Sarah Palin gave at the Republican convention. Here’s a passage:

All those years ago, Harvard’s lawyer referred to the implicit understanding between teachers and students. Isn’t it even more important that there be a contract of honesty between candidates for high office and voters?

(and skipping ahead a paragraph)

Can voters this year be sure they learned something about the real Sarah Palin from her GOP vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last night, considering news that it was originally written by speechwriter Matthew Scully over a week ago for an unknown male nominee? The commissioned draft was subsequently customized by Palin and a team of McCain staffers in the 48 hours leading up to its presentation.

Now, I think McGrath is interested in a kind of authenticity that I don’t think is necessarily possible, at least not through writing alone. But what is a better question to me is the flip-side of this: do politicians (or much of anyone else) absolutely have to claim each and every word in a text in order to claim some form of “authorship?” I’m reminded of this post I had about a Friday afternoon about plagiarism at U of M and Chris Anson’s example of an often repeated phrase on braking. Is that plagiarism?

I don’t know. But my point/hope is to get people to contemplate that a bit and to recognize that plagiarism is anything but clear. And that would be the point of having something like this in 516.

Why not enjoy some Scream ice cream?

I would post something interesting or relevant, but a) I’ve been pretty busy with the beginning of the Fall term, and b) I haven’t thought of much lately that would be all that interesting or relevant. So in the meantime, why not enjoy this Scream ice cream, an image my friend Chris sent me quite a while ago?

Scream for Ice Cream!

Daily Show pegs the hypocrisy issue

After Pallin spoke last night, I switched over to The Daily Show, which was absolutely brilliant. Boing-boing agreed and posted this fantastic segment:

This was followed up with a chat with that night’s guest, Newt Gingrich, and the whole thing with Palin’s pregnant daughter came up. Stewart pointed out that Palin said that keeping the baby was her daughter’s choice, which, hypocritically enough, would not be a choice at all if Palin had her way. After all, she supports the most extreme of anti-choice positions where women couldn’t get an abortion under any circumstances– rape, incest, endangering the life of the mother, nothing. If Palin’s view of the world was the way things were, there’d be no choice on the matter at all.

McCain presses along in a drowsy manner. Some protesters were removed early on. His education policy sounds a lot like the failed “No Child Left Behind” to me. Everyone got very excited about “drill now,” which might have some unintended connotations.

As I brace myself for Sarah Palin….

I am typing this just as Sarah “the Moose Hunter” Palin is taking the stage at the RNC. I have braced myself for the affair with a cocktail.

I’m not going to bother any live blogging– perhaps there will be a little reflection afterwords depending on how it goes. But I thought I would instead share a few videos I came across. First, there is this one, which I came across via Daily Kos but which is a straight-up mainstream media report on Palin:

It’s been pretty interesting seeing the mainstream media going after McCain lately, especially on Palin, and which is especially ironic since McCain and the media have had quite the lovefest over the last couple years. This has been reported in a couple of places, but McCain has apparently pulled out of a few interviews with CNN over this interview by Campbell “cute as a button” Brown with McCain spokesperson Tucker Bound. Here’s some entertaining video on that:

And then there’s this funny and “not safe for work”/filled with potty-mouth parody that might be a little too true about how the Palin choice really came to pass:

You got to watch it through to the end where Palin yells out “who wants to go polar bear hunting?”

Anyway, her speech so far has been kinda boring, at least to me. I am sure she is still exciting the base, but I doubt she’s changing minds out there in undecided-land, and there seems a lot of people in St. Paul who don’t look that excited either.

McCloud’s comic about Chrome

Google is releasing a browser soon, which may or may not be an interesting thing– elearnspace has an interesting post here speculating about that– but for the time-being, what I am more interested in is Scott McCloud’s comic about the release of the software, which is here. We’ll see what happens as we get closer to the “visual rhetoric” part of things in both English 328 and English 505 this fall, but I could see this as a potential teachable text.

Will started school today (and all is well); tomorrow, Annette and I go back to the classroom. Will and I were at a store after his school today and we ran into a friend of his. I was explaining that I had to start teaching on Wednesday; he asked me what grade I taught, and Will said “college– he teaches 15 to 20 grade.” Sort of, I suppose.

This one goes up to 11

Will turned 11 today, which capped off a fine weekend of birthday oriented activities for the boy. Things got underway in earnest on Sunday with a trip to Zap Zone. Basically, it’s a place where you play laser tag, and, when not involved in combat where you shoot people on the other team with beams of light, you play arcade games. The web site says it is a “family fun center,” but it seems more like a teenage boy who hasn’t quite caught on to the whole girl thing fun center– though to be fair, there were several women/young mom-types playing in one of the rounds. I thought it was kind of fun; Will and his friends thought it was fantastic.

During the day today, Will and I took some time and went on a bike ride/picnic through Gallup park. We went out to this island of sorts in the river that Will and I had “discovered” on a previous ride. The idea was to have some quality time in a quiet place, but the park and the island were both pretty busy on this last day of the summer. Still, a nice time.

And then this evening we went with the DeWapps to Ichiban, a Japanese Steakhouse and Sushi place between Ypsi and Ann Arbor that Will is especially fond of. This is one of those places where they do the whole performance in front of the grill– probably not as good here in Ypsi-Arbor as it might be in the big city or in Japan, but still a lot of fun.

Here’s a minute’s worth of video highlights from the cake scene at the end of the Zap Zone party and from Ichiban:

I didn’t get the singing at Ichiban, but it involved more gong playing. As I think the video shows though, Will was pretty thrilled with the whole thing, so that’s all that matters. That and no one got hurt.

And tomorrow, it’s off to school. Finally.