A must-see I came across via Boing-Boing: Star Trek meets “Knights of the Round Table:”
Okay, okay, I’ll go mow the lawn. Finally….
What do hoboes and John “I’m a PC” Hodgeman have in common?
I wasn’t aware of this:
John Hodgeman, of The Daily Show and those Mac vs. PC commercials fame, wrote a book called The Areas of My Expertise, in which, among many other things, he discusses hoboes. This hoboe discussion lead to this web site about hoboes and hoboe issues.
Who says that the Internet is a waste of time?
Jon Stewart, John Hodgeman, and the Internet as Tubes
Given my previous mention of Ted Stevens’ description of the Internet as a series of tubes, this seems like a very useful and necessary link here:
You call that a kneebrace? Now this, this is a kneebrace
As a preface, let me say that this is exactly the sort of reason why Annette (and everyone else, for that matter) needs a blog. But since I’m the one who has one and this seems to be the outlet for news in our household, here we are.
Second, let me also say that I am certain I will have some of the details about what exactly Annette has wrong and what she is/will be going through incorrect. My bad in advance.
Okay, with that out of the way:
As loyal readers will recall, Annette had an unfortunate and rather badly timed spill at the end of June that ended up with a trip to the emergency room and all sorts of fun. Originally, the thought was it was just her ankle, but as the ankle has gotten better, the knee seems to have gotten worse.
So, it was back to the doctor who called for an MRI, which took place last Sunday at 10 pm. Apparently, they run these machines 24/7. In the nutshell, Annette reported that the MRI experience was uncomfortable, generally unpleasant, and very loud, but at least she didn’t have to go headfirst into one of those big tubes.
Today she went to orthopedic surgeon to get the results. It seems that she has messed up her knee sehr gut (trying out my German for our European vacation, doncha know). The list that she’s given me includes:
- A torn ACL (which is not good, btw);
- A bruised bone (she thinks it’s the tibia); and
- A torn tendon (or perhaps other tendons would be more accurate).
So, what’s going to come of all this? Well, Annette starts physical therapy tomorrow with the short-term goal of getting her to a place where she can hobble around in Italy and Germany in about two weeks. Long-term is to avoid surgery, which, since she is not a high performance athlete, is probably pretty possible.
Oh, and she also got this totally bitchin’ and custom-fitted leg brace:
Very high-tech and Darth Vader-like, if you ask me. Lord only knows how much it actually costs; fortunately, since this was prescribed and since we have good insurance, it was all paid for.
Now of course, the bad news is that this will ultimately be a long recovery, certainly longer than Annette (or me or Will, for that matter) would have preferred. It’ll be hard enough getting her ready for tourist stuff in a couple of weeks. But the good news is that she’s gotten a more definitive answer as to what is wrong and she has a more clear course of action: lots and lots of physical therapy for the next two weeks.
So stay tuned. Unless Annette uses this experience to finally start a blog of her own….
Seriously? The Who?
I got a notice from Ticketmaster alerting me to the availability of tickets for the upcoming tour of The Who. This raises a couple of questions for me:
- If half of the original members of a band are dead, can you really call the band the original name? In other words, I could go with “Roger and Pete on tour,” (which is kind of what Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did a few years ago), and I was willing to go with The Who sans Keith Moon (mostly because that is how I was introduced to The Who as a youth), but also without John Entwistle?
- It seems to me that if you are a band known for (among other things) breaking stuff on stage and in hotel rooms, wishing in a song to die before getting old, and other generally childish bits of behavior, then you shouldn’t be allowed to go on tour when you do indeed get old.
- Having said all that, I really liked The Who as a kid. It was my first big rock show, the first time that they were over-the-hill…. 25 years ago. Am I going to this round of shows, which will be making a stop in Detroit? Won’t get fooled again, baby….
9/11 Comic Book
I read in the Ann Arbor newspaper yesterday about a comic version of the 9/11 commission report and I found this morning the amazon.com link, which is where I might be ordering this book from. Or I might be waiting until I get back from my upcoming summer break.
Anyway, this is the sort of thing I need to get for both my teaching in English 328 and in 516, especially the undergraduate class, Writing, Style, and Technology. For a whole bunch of reasons I won’t go into now (but which boil down to the process EMU as an institution is now going through to accredit secondary school teachers), visual elements have become a lot more important in this course in the last year or so. Because Scott McCloud was on campus at EMU in winter 2006, I incorporated some readings and activities from Understanding Comics in my version of the class last year, and I am totally sold on the value of getting students to think about “the visual” as it relates to “the textual.”
At least at this level and for this class; I’m not as sold on this for fy comp. But that’s another story.
In any event, this new 911 comic looks promising. Besides as a potential teaching tool, I am interested in reading it myself.
Just in case the home beer brewing doesn’t work out…
… there’s always this advice for making cheap wine. As the writer emphasizes, this is “hobo wine.” No doubt.
Strange little IQ Test
A couple of days ago, I found this little card, about the size of a business card, stuck under the windshield wiper of my car. The front of it looks like this:
Okay, now try working through it before looking at the other side.
Keep working….
Keep working….
Finished?
Okay, flip it over:
Weird, huh? I think I got this little gift as a result of the various lefty bumper-stickers on the back of my car….
Electronic Academic Publishing Inevitable (or I told ya so….)
On various occasions in this blog and elsewhere, I’ve argued that it seems increasingly obvious to me that almost all publishing for fields like English studies and composition and rhetoric will be done electronically. This is perhaps most likely with journals– heck, even the less than techno-savvy CCCC now is available electronically before the paper copy arrives– but I also think it’s going to happen with books too.
Anyway, not that I’m the only one who has had this crazy notion before, but you’ve heard it here before. Now, according to the July 14 issue of Inside Higher Ed and the article “New Model for Scholarly Publishing,” it turns out I’m right. Maybe.
It’s a good piece, one you should read for yourself and one that would probably make good reading in my graduate course on computers and writing (which reminds me: I need to start doing some of the set-up work for that….). A few highlights:
- “Rice University on Thursday announced a plan to shake up those interconnected problems. Rice University Press, which was killed in 1996, will be revived. But unlike every other university press, it will publish all of its books online only. People will be able to read the books for no charge and to download them for a modest fee. Editors will solicit manuscripts and peer review panels will vet submissions — all in ways that are similar to the systems in traditional publishing.” They go on to say that since the editing and vetting process for these books will be the same as for traditional, “on paper” books, the folks at the reborn Rice UP believe they should “count” the same as traditional books.
- “And Rice also announced plans Thursday to take on the textbook industry, offering print-on-demand textbook versions of scholarly resources it has been assembling — generally for less than $25.” Hmmm…. perhaps they’d be interested in a little textbook project I’m slowly working to publish electronically….
- “The home for Rice’s new publishing ventures will be Connexions, the university’s open source site that has been gaining more and more users with its compilation of course and scholarly materials, prepared by professors from all over the world and provided for anyone to use.” What’s interesting to me about Connexions is, at first glance at least, it’s just a Plone-driven CMS with a lot of content.
- “The Rice press plans also arrive at a time that some scholarly associations are pushing for more recognition for digital scholarship. The Modern Language Association has a special committee working on a proposal to change the tenure process in many ways, one of which is to provide more recognition for work online. English professors have been particularly concerned about the decline of monograph publishing, which has made it especially difficult for them to earn tenure.
“Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, is a member of the MLA tenure reform committee, and he said Thursday that he was very encouraged by the Rice announcement. ‘This sounds like a fascinating model,’ he said.” So perhaps even the MLA is on board with this one? See, I am right!
"The Internet is a series of Tubes:" the dance song
Via boing-boing, I came across “DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix: ‘A Series of Tubes'” just now. Senator Ted Stevens said in committee that was debating a law (which, as boing-boing put it, would allow the phone company to charge you for a Google search) that the Internet was a series of tubes. Among other less than tech-savvy things.
Anyway, I thought I’d post these things here because it might make for some good info in an English 516 class. And in a way, it points again to the discussion going on at places like the WPA-L mailing list, where I think the general sentiment there is that yeah, the Internet is kind of a series of tubes….