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A bit of a miscellaneous post here, more or less trying to catch up on readings and stuff to come back to:

• From the NYTimes Lens blog, “Chop and Crop,” which is a complaint by photographer David Hume Kennerly about how Newsweek reframed/reworked a photo he took of Dick Chenney.  Basically, the original photo was a family picture of the Chenneys where Dick was cutting up a hunk of roast or some other sort of beef.  The re-cropped photo,which appeared in Newsweek and accompanied a quote from Chenney about torture and such, zooms in on Chenney cutting up bloody meat.  An extensive and interesting discussion, too.
• “Is the Internet Melting our Brains?” is an interview in Salon with Dennis Baron about his book, A Better Pencil.  Spoiler alert:  Baron’s answer appears to be “no.”
• Here and here, Henry Jenkins has a long interview with S. Craig Watkins about social media (especially Facebook) and about his book The Young and the Digital. Just skimming through the interview (which is in itself enough of a text to include in a class, especially something like 516 or 444), it seems like Watkins’ analysis is pretty interesting.  Say, speaking of stuff like Facebook:
• The John Seely Brown Symposium at U of M on October 13 is going to feature an open to the public speech and panel presentation with danah boyd as the keynote speaker.  I think I’m going to let my 12:30 class out early and head on over there.

I like book stores, and I was pretty bummed out when Shaman Drum closed up in Ann Arbor in the spring.  In my estimation, it was clearly the best bookstore in the area and one of the best academic/independent bookstores in the country.  And I also like the “big box” stores like Barnes and Noble and Ann Arbor’s own Borders for the variety, all the extras (CDs, coffee shops, etc.), and, of course, books.

Still, there is a reason why Borders (and I presume Barnes and Noble, right?) are losing money hand over fist and why I end up spending a lot more money on books at amazon.com nowadays.

I went into Borders today while running some errands to buy Crossing the Finish Line:  Completing College at America’s Public Universities and The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics. Initially, I can’t find anyone who actually works there to help me, so I head to the computer system to look up the Crossing the Finish Line book.  I learn the book is “likely” in the store in the “Education and Parenting” section, though I have no clue where the “Education and Parenting” section is in the store.   So I wander around for a while (is it near psychology?  self-help? business?), and I finally find someone, who tells me it’s back in the children’s section.  I find the shelf, which is a mish-mosh of books on stuff like potty training, Hirsch’s “cultural literacy” books, and high schools today, and remarkably, I do find this book (which is a somewhat controversial book about graduation rates at universities in the U.S.) stuck in there.  So I picked it up, comfortable enough with the $27.95 price.

Then I decided to look for the other book.  Again, I tried it on the computer system, but the answer I got was confusing, so I asked for some help from the person who helped before.  She actually logged into a completely different computer system and was able to find the book, which was in the store (though not anywhere close to the children’s section).  But it was priced at $40, and I knew that I could get it on amazon.com for $26.40, and it wasn’t going to cost $13 to ship it.  So I took a pass on that.  And in hindsight, I should have left Crossing the Finish Line on the shelf too because I would have saved $10 buying that via amazon.com.

Oh, and just to add to it, there was but one cashier at the register, so it took me about 10 minutes just to pay my bill.

So, let’s review:

• Buying online would have been faster, easier, cheaper, and more convenient, by far.
• It would have been easier to find what I was looking for online.
• On the other hand, actually going to the store allowed me to communicate with a human and to make an impulse buy (in this case, a different anthology of comics).  That’s certainly a plus of “real world” shopping, but it’s also one of the reasons why I wish Shaman Drum was still open.

The ever-readerly Nick Carbone posted this link to some of the usual mailing lists:  “We are all writers now,” in More Intelligent Life and by Anne Trubek. It’s a nice piece, especially in response to that old “we’re going th hell in a handbasket with writing and reading because of these dang computers.”  Here’s a quote:

Go back 20, 30 years and you will find all of us doing more talking than writing. We rued literacy levels and worried over whether all this phone-yakking and television-watching spelled the end of writing.

Few make that claim today. I would hazard that, with more than 200m people on Facebook and even more with home internet access, we are all writing more than we would have ten years ago. Those who would never write letters (too slow and anachronistic) or postcards (too twee) now send missives with abandon, from long thoughtful memos to brief and clever quips about evening plans. And if we subscribe to the theory that the most effective way to improve one’s writing is by practicing—by writing more, and ideally for an audience—then our writing skills must be getting better.

BTW, I wish there was an easy way for me to post the same post to two or three different blogs…. Anyway, this one will come in handy for things like 516 for sure.

Fine advice, from Orange Crate Art.

Unfortunately, my wifi access has been sketchy at best in our hotel room in Washington,D.C. On the one hand, it’s rather irritating because we’re staying at a very nice hotel that ought to be able to provide decent access. On the other hand, we are on a vacation of sorts (even though Annette and I are both working quite a bit), and we at least have the iPhones. I actually started this post on my iPhone, and thanks to it, I have been able to check my mail, post a few things on Facebook, etc. But it looks like I’m going to have either wait until I get home, get better internet access, or figure something else out before I can upload any significant amount of photos to Flickr.

The short version of the trip to date:

• We’re taking it mainly because we can. This is the first time ever in which our break from EMU lined up with Will’s teaching. Since we didn’t have a parental visit of obligation and since we had been in warmer climes this past Christmas, we decided to take a family trip our own.
• Our first stop was in middle of no-where, Pennsylvania. Light snow the whole time, which added that extra wang to driving on the turnpike.
• The first day, Will had a fever just around 102 or so. I’m happy to say (skipping ahead a bit) he recovered fine, though it made for a bad day and a half for him.
• Went to dinner ridiculously early on Monday because of travel, a sick kid, and generally tired parents. Had Ethiopian food at what I swear was the same restaurant where Annette (who was just pregnant with Will) and I had with some Southern Oregon folks when I was working for them way back when. Good stuff, and, in another weirdo twist, we ran into an Ypsi neighbor/friend of sorts. The person in question does lobbying/environmental activism stuff in Michigan and comes to D.C. on a regular basis. It was a weird and small world event.
• We were awoken last night by what I thought was a group of young and drunk people but which Annette thought was an angry couple arguing. Other than that and the sketchy internet service (which seems like it works better early in the morning), it’s been a nice place to stay.
• Got up unnecessarily early to get to our previously reserved U.S. Capitol tour, which was also unnecessary– the reservation, that is. The place wasn’t empty, but close. We got a chance to help break in the posh new Capitol visitor center, which opened this past December.
• The Capitol tour was so-so. The group was too big, the tour guide not very good, it included lousy audio equipment, and you didn’t really see much. The intro movie in the new visitor center was pretty good, and the highlight was our tour ran into Speaker of the House Nancy Poloski on the way back to her office.
• We went to the Natural History Museum, which was a must for Will but kinda boring for me, personally. Seen one dinosaur, seen ‘em all.
• Went to the American History Museum, which I think I enjoyed more than the rest of the group. They did a nice job restoring the “original” flag that inspired the “Star Spangled Banner,” and I very much enjoyed seeing Julia Child’s kitchen.
• By this point, we had walked for what seemed like 12 or 15 miles, so we took a cab to the Lincoln Memorial/Viet Nam War Memorial area. Both were very nice, of course, but also over-run with high school kids.
• Got to a metro, grabbed a quick bite at an okay Irish pub (Annette had her last bit of chocolately goodness before giving up sugar for “lent”), came back to the hotel, watched Obama, who was speaking that evening very close to where we were this morning.

I’ve seen these sorts of stories/videos about the offices that Google has around the world before:

They are inviting and cool and groovy and everything, and believe me, I’d rather work in a space like this than the shit-hole that is Pray-Harrold Hall. (BTW, if you the time, do follow that link to the “EMU Historic Tour” entry on Pray-Harrold. I think its pretty darn funny. Notice the “earlier”– presumably when they building opened in 1969– picture is not a whole lot different than the “today” picture, except that it looked a little more shiny in ’69. It’s like that on the inside– once shiny and new, and now kind of overcast and harshly lit. And the architecture style described as “International;” is that code for “Orwellian?”) Education at all levels might work better if it was a bit more playground-like, though frankly, I’d settle for just a window, a reasonable heating/cooling system, and a space that didn’t smell like old building.

But as inviting and cool and groovy and everything that this Google office actually is, I have to wonder if it would actually be a good place to work in the long-run. I am sure that someone has done some kind of study or analysis of this, how spaces in these “don’t be evil” corporations like Google actually are kind of, potentially at least, evil. One obvious draw-back of this design is that it’s set up this way so you never have to or want to leave– all the toys to play with, the slides, the exercise facilities, the free food, etc. Besides the fact that this is also the premise behind prison– though prison is obviously a lot less comfy and a lot less voluntary– isn’t this a problem for people who have families and lives outside of work? And don’t companies like Google want workers who have some kind of outside of work lives? Or if they don’t want those kinds of workers, isn’t that kind of a problem?

I have to wonder if I could get anything done in there. If I had to work there, I’d be the old man yelling “hey, turn down you damn X-box and stop playing ping-pong– I’m trying to freakin’ WORK here!” Damn kids…. And thank you, but stairs and elevators work better for me than poles or slides in going from floor 2 to floor 1.

Woman sits on boyfriend’s toilet for two years. I can’t really add to this.

Honestly, I really do believe that Sophie enjoyed this:

We had quite a bit of snow last night, but it looks like the additional 5 or 8 inches we were supposed to get today isn’t going to materialize.