Also from jill/txt (yep, I’m behind with schoolwork and thus behind on my blog reading and my own blogging again) comes this article, “Steps toward a successful classroom blog.” This reminds me that I really REALLY need to start getting my act together in terms of both planning English 516 (“Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice”) online for the Winter 2007 term and getting a proposal together for an online version of English 444 (“Writing for the World Wide Web”…).
Grand Theft Auto Scholarship
Via jill/txt, I cam across this reference to the book The Meaning and Culture of “Grand Theft Auto”: Critical Essays. I’m going to guess that Hilary Clinton doesn’t have a piece in here….
Stupid Dead TV…
So:
We were hanging around tonight, nothing out of the ordinary. Annette and I and Will had previously enjoyed the movie Fun with Dick and Jane(which Annette and I thought was better than we had anticipated, though I think Will thought it was boring). After that, I was kind of channel-surfing around, looking for something to watch, when the television just stopped working. I mean just freakin’ died, like in the middle of the space from one channel to the next.
I’m standing there going “What the fuck is going on here?”
Annette was staring at her laptop and trying to get a picture to show up on her web page and thus is engrossed in Dreamweaver and such. “Why won’t this work?”
I go over and fix her problem with a few keystrokes and then point to the broken television, as if to make it clear to her that this is the real problem in the room. I am quite sure she was not convinced.
Anyway, I thought it was the weirdest thing. Previously, the problems I’ve had with televisions presented themselves gradually. You know, the color starts to get strange, the picture isn’t shaped quite right, it loses its vertical/horizontal hold, etc.. etc., etc. But this thing just stopped working, somewhere between one of the HBO channels and the Comcast “On Demand” selections. Poof. No more TV. Just like that.
Well, one thing that is comforting is that this, this, and this review(s) suggest, it would appear that the TV we bought is/was a piece of poo. Of course, it might be an issue that TVs aren’t built the way that they used to be built.
Anyway, it looks like Will and I are going to do some TV shopping tomorrow. I suppose what I should do is read some reviews and such (which I have done a bit, and, generally speaking, it would appear that Sony and Samsung are the way to go) and buy the best TV for the money. But what I am also tempted and indeed likely to do is simply buy the cheapest TV we can get that meets our needs. As I type this, I am half-watching a 12 or so inch TV that we bought about three or four years ago for less than $50 (I distinctly recall we bought it and a DVD player for less than $80) that has nothing wrong with it. Someday, I’d like to buy a big screen and/or projection TV set-up, but that wouldn’t make any sense in the house where we live right now. So the combonation of these two things make me think to just get non-name brand cheapo TV and be done with it.
But it ain’t gonna be a Phillips, I’ll tell you that….
Ask a Ninja Reviews Pirates of the Caribbean
Annette turned me on to this site, askaninja.com. Specifically, this review of Pirates of the Caribbean. Apparently, the Ninja didn’t like it.
Cursive drying/dying, and that's okay with me
From the Madison, Wisconsin The Capital Times (and really, I think it’s a reprint from something that was in The Washington Post), comes this article, “Cursive is drying out; Pen not mighter than the keyboard.” A quote from the opening couple of paragraphs that I thought was interesting:
The computer keyboard helped kill shorthand, and now it’s threatening to finish off longhand.
When handwritten essays were introduced on the SAT exams for the class of 2006, just 15 percent of the almost 1.5 million students wrote their answers in cursive. The rest? They printed. Block letters.
And those college hopefuls are just the first edge of a wave of U.S. students who no longer get much handwriting instruction in the primary grades, frequently 10 minutes a day or less.
To me, that 10 minutes a day or so (and I think my son spends more than that in his fourth grade class, but I could be wrong about that) is just fine. As one person in this article says, the only place adults use cursive in our society is to sign their names.
Delayed Dan Bern Post
This is very late because of various things going on here in the last week or so. Anyway:
Annette and I had a lovely evening out last weekend to go and see a Dan Bern concert at Ann Arbor’s “The Ark” on Friday night. Who is Dan Bern, you ask? Well, he’s kind of “alternative rock meets folk rock singer” of a sort of guy. There’s a picture here– I took one at the concert with my cell phone, but it was pretty lame so I thought I’d link to a “real” picture from Bern’s web site.
Somewhere a number of years ago, I came across Dan Bern’s CD (a self-titled release), and I have to say that it remains one of my favorite CDs in my collection. So, I found out that Bern was going to be in town and a) I immediately went out and tried to buy more of Bern’s CDs (I bought Breathe and My America II) and b) I listened to these Bern recordings before the show– to get ready, doncha know.
Anyway, Annette and I had a lovely meal and then went to the show. In brief, Bern’s show was an example of how and why it almost certainly always worthwhile for anyone reading this to go and see a concert put on by someone who puts on– oh, I don’t know– 300 gigs a year. Because here’s the thing: I don’t care how you feel about Bern’s music or even that type of music. For pure “perfomance value,” you’re better off with the likes of someone like Bern than about 90% of the people on the radio nowadays.
It wasn’t a very crowded show, and that’s even in the Ark, which isn’t exactly a huge theater venue. Most of the folks there were probably about our age and temperament, though there were a few somewhat younger types. There was one table of groovy young young people right up front, and they were a bit of a show in and of themselves. One of them, a white girl with dreadlocks (and btw, white people– dreadlocks is really not a good look on you), was passed out in her chair by the end of the show. Another got a little too into Bern’s last song, Jerusalem (and to the extent that Bern has a “big hit,” this is probably it, though I actually prefer the song “Marilyn” on this album, which he didn’t sing). There’s a lot of cool lyrics in this song, but the passage I will reproduce now for the purposes of the story later on is toward the end of the song:
I spent ten whole days in Jerusalem
Mmmm Jerusalem
Sweet Jerusalem
And all I ate was olives
Nothing but olives
Mountains of olives
It was a good ten days
I like olives
I like you too
Anyway, this particular extra-special fan didn’t so much sing along as shout along, and since she was right up front and we were all in a small space and she was really loud, she kind of succeeded in drowning out Bern and the two guys who served as his band. I think everyone was a little disconnected on that one.
And then there was hat girl. After the show was over, I was waiting around for Annette to get out of the line in the women’s room, and there was this young woman– like sophomore or junior in college tops– clutching a cowboy hat. She was telling anyone who would listen (including me) “It’s his hat! It’s his hat!” Indeed, it did look like the hat he was wearing at the beginning of the show.
“Well, you should probably give it back,” I said.
“Oh, I will, I will. I want to meet him and give him back his hat. It’s his hat!” She was an attractive girl and didn’t look disturbed overall, but her eyes had a little bit of that crazy look to them.
“Uh-huh.”
“I love Dan Bern! I want to meet him. Look at this, look at this!” and she showed me the cloth or hemp choker necklace she was wearing; it had these green things in it. “Olives! Nothing but olives! See? I made that!”
“Okay…” and that’s when Annette came back and it was certainly time to go.
All in all, a great evening out, one not quite as weird as these toward the end of the show events might suggest.
Google buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion
From iPod Observer (and I am sure other places), news that Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion (that’s a B, my friends) in stock. From the story:
Google on Monday announced the acquisition of YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock. The company said in a press release: “Following the acquisition, YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community. YouTube will continue to be based in San Bruno, CA, and all YouTube employees will remain with the company. With Google’s technology, advertiser relationships and global reach, YouTube will continue to build on its success as one of the world’s most popular services for video entertainment. “
Dang, why can’t I come up with some crazy idea for displaying videos of people mixing mentos and coke?
The Internet Versus The Research Paper
Via boing-boing:
"Our Story" (or, can online scrapbooking catch on?)
A former student/current friend of mine sent me a link to this article a couple weeks ago, “True Story: Online expression evolves from blogging to multimedia storytelling–and it’s not just for bedtime.” The service this article is about is called OurStory.com, which, as far as I can tell by looking at it for about 3 minutes, is a kind of web-based and interactive scrapbook, one that you can also export to a DVD.
Kinda interesting, and worth talking about in either Writing for the World Wide Web or my grad class on computers and writing. But on my computer, the concept of electronic scrapbooking is called iLife.
WPAing, so far
We held our first meeting of this year’s first year writing committee the other day, which is basically a group of folks who a) are teaching first year composition and/or b) who care. Mistakenly, I didn’t invite faculty to this meeting because faculty don’t really teach first year composition. But the folks who were at this meeting were actually okay with me being the only tenure-track-type person there.
Anyway, that got me to thinking about my WPAing so far this year. Here’s a list of thoughts on how things are going so far, in no particular order:
- I have come to describe my place as the “accidential WPA,” or the “tourist WPA.” The circumstances as to why I’m doing this work are complicated and a bit of a coincidence, but I won’t go into that right now. But one way or the other, I have been working on lowering expectations about my work as the temporary WPA. I think it’s working….
- A big part of my job is working with the new graduate assistants teaching for the first time, and that has been both interesting and rewarding. It simultaneously makes me feel old and young. Old because I realize that I went through the things these people are going through right now about 18 or so years ago. But young because I recall my experiences as a new graduate assistant way back when quite vividly.
- I am actually learning about the course that my graduate students are teaching, English 120, pretty much as my interaction with these students goes along. And I have to say– I really want to try to get a chance to teach this next year. I think it sounds like a lot of fun.
- Compared to some of the other political bullshit going on in my department right now (which is unusual, btw–things here are generally a bit more happy-go-lucky in our department) and the pretty stupid-ass stuff happening with the board of regents and administration with the strike (this post and this post, both on EMUtalk.org, give a flavor of what I’m talking about), being the WPA is a complete love fest/walk in the park. I’m not entirely sure if that is typical, and I am not convinced that this will last too long.
- One of the mantras I keep repeating over and over is this is not rocket science, and this is not brain surgery– meaning this is not that complicated, and lives are not at stake. That seems to help.
- I have learned a lot and I also have much better people to work with at EMU in my role as the interim WPA than I did when I was thrust into the position of being a version of the WPA at Southern Oregon 10 years ago. But maybe that’s a story for another time….
- One addition I should have included before: Because I am doing two related by different pseudo-administrative jobs this term– the director of the first year composition program along with my previous service work, as the coordinator of the undergraduate and graduate majors in writing– and I think I have have already learned what sort of work like this I am willing to do in the future. It’s pretty straight-forward: first, I would do either of these jobs in the future, but I wouldn’t do both of these jobs at the same time again. It’s too much work and too schizophrenic. Second, this work (combined with all the strike junk and the current departmental politics) makes it crystal clear that I never ever never ever never be a full-time and honest-to-goodness administrator, certainly nothing like a dean or associate dean or in the provost office or whatever.