Via boing boing, this might be kind of a fun thing to include in a class when talking about the whole history of writing technology thing: 1999 A.D. (shopping from home).
Soon I will create a category called “unicorns”
Via boing-boing, and found here.
Stephen Hawking on his role in The Simpsons
Via a blog I read often called this Public Address 4.0.
Congrats to Annette and Stuffed Jalapeños
Sorry I haven’t been around here much this week, but I’ve been busy with the start of school and with stuff around the house (much painting), not to mention preparing for Annette’s book party. Annette’s book, Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture, just came out and Will and I are obviously very proud, along with the great friends and colleagues we had over last night. I forgot to get out a camera to take some pictures, but no one did anything that was too photo-worthy anyway. The cake was very cool though– Rachel made it and it featured a picture of Annette’s book cover that was cool– there was good drinks and conversations, fine cheeses, meatballs, etc.
The biggest hit of the night though were the Stuffed Jalapeños, and I thought I’d share the recipe here. This actually comes from Annette’s mother, which I presume she picked up from her time in the south and not from her German heritage. They are spicy, but not as crazy-spicy as you would think because cooking the Jalapeños very much softens up the heat. Also, I’d recommend using some rubber gloves to prepare these; Annette found out the hard way one time that cutting up a bunch of jalapeños and getting that under nails or in a tiny cut is super-duper unpleasant.
Of course, there is absolutely nothing remotely healthy about these things.
Stuffed Jalapeños
22 to 25 Jalapeños
1 lb breakfast sausage (for example, Jimmy Dean)
1 package cream cheese
1 cup shredded parmesan cheese
1/4 tsp garlic powder
salt and pepper to taste
- Cut the jalapeños in half long-ways. Hallow out the seeds (I just use a spoon to scoop the stuff out) so you have little jalapeño boats. This is where the gloves very much come in handy.
- Cook the sausage, making sure that it is broken up into nice and little pieces. Let it cool a bit.
- Mix up everything else in a bowl. When all of that is well combined, add in the cooked sausage and mix that in well, too.
- Spoon the cheese/sausage mixture into each jalapeño half/boat/shell, about a half teaspoon per shell, depending on the size of your jalapeños.
- Put them in a baking dish or a cookie sheet. You can easily make these a day ahead of time and pull them out of the fridge when you’re ready to cook them.
- Cook them in a 350 degree pre-heated oven for about 12-15 minutes until the cheese on top of them is just starting to turn brown.
- Eat them.
Email advice (and the strange absence of teaching)
Via boing boing, I learned about this, “Write a perfect email,” on the Wired How To Wiki. It’s solid advice, and even though it strikes me as simplistic and common sense to the extreme, I know this is something I will pass along to students in my classes. In fact, I created a document similar to this a few years ago, “How to Send Krause Email.” I’ve been using it in my teaching, particularly my online teaching, for a while now, and it has been pretty effective. I assign it as reading early in classes. If a student sends me an email that is way outside the boundaries of these rules, I send the student a link to this little set of instructions. It’s surprising, but it really does seem to make a difference.
Ah, teaching. That is one of the strange things about the sabbatical lite experience so far. I’m still doing some light administrative work that has so far taken the form of a lot of emails and phone calls, but things next week will start getting geared up with meetings and such. So, for better or worse, I am still very much engaged in the daily life of the university and the department. On the other hand, I’m supposed to be working on scholarship things instead of teaching things. I say “I’m supposed to be” because this week, I have spent a great deal of time painting the front of my house, a project that is more or less weather sensitive: it will be too cold to paint sooner than later. And much of what I’ve been doing for the last couple days has had to do with a party we’re having to celebrate the publication of my wife’s book. But I digress.
Anyway, I guess what I am experiencing is what has to be a common sabbatical experience, which is the strange absence of actually teaching as part of my job. I’ve pretty much been teaching every fall for almost 20 years (I’m including my graduate school experiences here), so to just not do that for a term like this has been kind of odd. Not at all bad, I should point out– it’s nice to have a bit of a break. But it’s still strange, and I think that strangeness actually isn’t helping me in terms of scholarship.
Of course, I should probably get back to these sabbatical lite projects….
"Faking" the Palmer Method
As part of my always on-going interest in things like early writing technologies and teaching, I’m posting this article from the Cheboygan Tribune, “I was taught the Palmer Method, but mostly faked it,” a reminiscence about learning how to write way back when by Bruce Callander. The most interesting part of the article for me is Callander’s description of how Palmer came to be so popular in the early 20th century:
Palmer was good at fancy writing, which included drawing birds and leaping deer along with the letters. As a school teacher, however, he developed a less-complicated method of writing that retained the free-flowing letters but not all the embellishments. His basic idea was that you should use your whole arm, not just the fingers.
If he had stuck to teaching, things would have been easier for the rest of us, but he began to write out his lessons and publish them. By 1912, he was selling a million copies of the course per year. By the time he died in 1927, some 25 million Americans had learned to write by the Palmer Method. I was not one of them because, at that date, I was only 3 years old, but, along with thousands of other youngsters, I was soon to be exposed to his approach.
Thank goodness I type….
My spam blockers are failing me…
I’m not sure why, but I’ve been getting an unusual level of spam lately, and it is spam powerful/resilient enough to get through my usually robust spam blocking filters. I don’t know if anyone else out there in blog-land is experiencing similar problems or not, but as a result, I’ve turned on “must have a comment approved” as an option. It’s not that big of a deal in that I don’t get a lot of comments here anyway, but if you have a comment that is held, that is probably the reason.
"Disturbing Writing" Guidelines
In Inside Higher Ed today comes “When Student Writing Could be a Red Flag,” which discusses guidelines from the Virginia Tech creative writing program in light of the shootings that happened there last spring. I wrote about the shootings and the second guessing about “we should have known through his writing” arguments last spring in some detail here.
“Disturbing writing” is certainly not unique to fiction writing classes, and I guess I have some mixed feelings about the guidelines presented here. On the one hand, I am always nervous about guidance/advice to writing teachers about how to make judgments about the psychological state of their students since few of us (certainly not me) are adequately trained to make such judgments. I just don’t think that writing teachers should be practicing amateur analysis. On the other hand, as the new school year begins and I recall my experiences of last year when I was the Interim WPA, new college instructors probably could use the kind of calm and official advice offered in the Virginia Tech policy. BTW, you can get to that policy from a link in the IHE story.
Doctorow's "Free(konomic) E-Books"
Via boing boing, I found Cory Doctorow’s article “Free(konomics) E-Books,” published in Locus Magazine. Doctorow is, of course, one smart cookie and someone who seems to be able to write and publish in different venues an amazing amount of stuff– blogs, books, articles, etc., etc. He is also one of the pioneers in the idea of simultaneously publishing traditional/”for sale” books and electronic/”free” versions of the same books. Basically, what Doctorow does here is give reasons (most anecdotal, but reasons nonetheless) why he feels like the folks who practice this version of publishing actually end up selling more books.
It seems pretty compelling to me. As he says at the beginning:
I don’t believe that most readers want to read long-form works off a screen, and I don’t believe that they will ever want to read long-form works off a screen. As I say in the column, the problem with reading off a screen isn’t resolution, eyestrain, or compatibility with reading in the bathtub: it’s that computers are seductive, they tempt us to do other things, making concentrating on a long-form work impractical.
So, what online versions of books and longer works really do is entice (seduce?) potential readers into going out and spending the money on the more practical and, for the format, better technology, paper books.
wikirage
Via a blog that I ought to perhaps add to my RSS feed, Read/WriteWeb, comes this article, “Wikirage: The Wikipedia Zeitgeist.” To quote about Wikirage:
Wikirage is a zeitgeist based on the number of edits to Wikipedia articles. Wikirage shows the top 100 most edited articles over the past hour, 6 hours, day, 3 days, week, and month. For each topic in the top 100, the site also has a historical graph of edits for the past 4 weeks, as well as its relative ranking over time.
Obviously useful for teaching about wiki stuff for sure.