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The last day of school is the best ever

Per my out of town’s wife command to blog about the Estabrook carnival, here are some pictures and comments. Though yesterday was about much more than the annual Estabrook Elementary carnival; oh, so much more than that…

Annette has been in California since Wednesday for a conference, so it’s been just me and Will around here and it’s pretty much going to be like that until Sunday night. I know Annette’s had a lot of fun out in LA, and while we miss her of course, we’re actually having fun of sorts, too.

Thursday was Will’s last soccer practice of the season (his last game is today– more photos etc. to come of that), and the coach asked parents to come to practice ready to play. Considering the fact that I’ve never played soccer before and I was playing against of eight-year-olds, I think I was able to move my fat-assed body around the field pretty well. And it’s something we should have been doing all year– the kids played harder than ever, I think because of the motivation to beat the parents.

Yesterday, Friday, was the last day of school. It started with a rocket launch in the morning. Will knew that as a kid I had done some stuff with model rockets, and so he wanted me to come. Long story short: some faculty from EMU came and did a demo with tiny but still impressive Estes rockets. I hadn’t really been a part of rocket launch in about 25 or 28 years, but what struck me was the “current” model rocket technology is pretty much identical to what I used way back when– same engines, same launch pad, same igniters, same quick and dramatic effect. Go figure.

Anyway, school was out early, so we went out for a special lunch typical of all rising fourth graders, I assume: we had sushi at Yotsuba.

And then, of course, the capper of the greatest day ever, the Estabrook Carnival.

Will Wall ClimbingTo be honest, I have loathed the carnival in the past, and still kinda found it unpleasant this year. But since Will is older (yes, a year makes a big difference at this stage), he doesn’t require a whole lot of supervision. So I spent much of my time chatting with friends and/or the parents of Will’s friends, including my friend and work colleague Jim K. who “volunteered” to work the carnival this year. (Interestingly, he was “bumped” from his presumed role at the duck pond to the much more lame job of supervising the shooting of basketballs in the gym.)

Water WarHighlights included the minigolf (pictured above); a win at the cakewalk (and where Will seemed to exhibit some of the characteristics of gambling addiction since he kept going back and wanting it more after each loss); a less than successful climb on the wall thing, and an exciting water war with friend Gage. For me, the moment that kind of summed it up was Will’s mishap in the “Water War,” captured here as a 2.3 MB mov file. You gotta love a kid who loves having a water balloon blow up in his face….

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"Datamining" with Google advice

Here are a couple of sites I will want to come back to later when putting together some various syllabi: “Google Guide: Using Search Operators” and this entry from a blog called CyberWyre, “Data Mining on the Internet with Google.” They both outline a lot of special search operators that you can use with Google that I had certainly not heard of before.

BTW, I came across this site via the del.icio.us/popular page, which has become a part of my morning coffee reading. It took me a while to figure out the point of a service like del.icio.us, but now I’m all for it. I think I need to start playing around with this digg thing next…

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The rise of YouTube…

I was actually looking for something else, but I came across this page on NPR’s web about “Viral Video and the Rise of YouTube.” This is one of those things I’ll need to come back to later when I start planning English 516 for the winter…. Well, that and maybe the next round of the Writing for the World Wide Web class, too.

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What not to eat

I’m not entirely sure why, but this guy who keeps a blog called The Last Angry Young Man has embarked on a week where he has decided to eat nothing but monkey chow. He is keeping track of his adventures (complete with videos!) at a web site called The Monkey Chow Diaries. Funny stuff, and it is another one of those things to write in a memo to myself: don’t eat monkey chow.

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Buzz-kill

I went to an informal workshop/discussion this afternoon held by some folks in Continuing Education about audio files, podcasting, and some other multimedia technologies for teaching, mostly for teaching online. Mostly, a good time was had by one and all– mostly. I think the tech support guys for CE did a good job, and, while I was very much non-prepared and experienced some technical problems (which, on the plus side, gave me a chance to mock Windoze), I think at least some people got something out of what I said. So it was mostly good.

But not completely. Thus the title of my post.

Here are what I saw as the problems:

  • Podcast frenzy! Podcast frenzy! Not all but many of the faculty at this event were there because they had heard of this thing called Podcasting and, based on the buzz, they figured they had better get on the band-wagon and get on right now. But it seemed pretty clear to me that many of these folks– again, not all, but many– really did not know what they would do with a Podcast or if they would ever Podcast or, really, at the end of the day, what a “Podcast” was. I didn’t ask, but it might have been interesting to ask how many of the attendees had actually heard a podcast.
  • Tangent-Land. Somewhere along the line, someone brought up one of those issues, maybe the issue, that always comes up at sessions that involve teaching with technology: what about copyright, what about fair-use? For me, the main reason why these issues are always so frustrating are because no one— certainly no one has not made IP and copyright their full-time business– knows the answer. Furthermore, no one– certainly no one in academia– wants to admit that they don’t know the answer. So what ends up happening is people talk about things they may (or may not) know about IP and copyright, at least until someone says something like “we can’t solve that now, so let’s just move on.” Ultimately, I think this fear of the rules and not knowing them and being afraid of some unknown consequences are enough to chill innovation. But that’s kind of a tangent in itself, so let’s move on.
  • We can’t do that, real and fake. Okay, there is a lot of things we really can’t do with online classes and with things like podcasting. We can’t assume that all of the students have a high-speed internet access (though most of them do). We can’t assume students have this or that kind of computer, which is also probably true. But then there’s the fake can’t due. For example, it became clear after a while that there were any number of things that were just a lot easier to do with a Mac. So someone asked at one point “So, does that mean we can’t do this stuff if we don’t have a Mac?” (And, of course, my answer is why don’t you have a Mac already?)

    The most troublesome “we (or really, you) can’t do that” of the afternoon for me is I was told that it was “against the rules” for me to use a non-EMU server space to host teaching materials, as in any of the pages available here. The conversations I had after this event with various folks suggests this is just wrong, but again, it’s another example of a knee-jerk “we can’t do that” for no good reason sort of rule. Sounds like an administrator to me….

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MySpace losing the "cool" factor

See this article from the June 3 NYT, “MySpace No Longer Their Space?” Basically, the article reports that, while MySpace is still enormously popular, its use has fallen off since April. Blamed in the article are the fact that MySpace is “going corporate” (Ruppert Murdoch bought it a while back) and is thus no longer a “cool” activity for teens; users are realizing that it might not be a good idea in the long-term to post drunk pictures of themselves; and users are starting to realize that it’s annoying to browse web sites that blare bad music at you and that are cluttered with eyeball-numbing graphics. (I’m paraphrasing here).

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This Week at the Movies

I don’t normally write movie review-type posts, but we had the experience of seeing the X-Men: The Last Stand in the theater and The Squid and The Whale at home the other night. Here are some thoughts, complete with spoilers, so if you don’t want to be, ah, spoiled, quit reading.

First, an extra credit question: name the Academy Award winning actress who is in both movies (see the end for the answer).

Okay, first the biggie, the X-Men movie:

  • This was a “family movie night” since we had rented the first two earlier in the winter and they seemed to go over well. I think this third one was perhaps a little more intense than the other two, but Will seems to have survived.
  • On the plus side: the effects are cool, shit blows up real good, it’s damn loud, etc. In other words, it’s certainly a big theater movie, which is perhaps why the box office has been so big. But I was once again reminded of just how unpleasant it can be to go see a movie like this in the theater. The place was packed and so, of course, sitting behind us was a family of idiots narrating the film to each other. It wasn’t so bad during the loud parts, but the quiet parts could have been a bit more, well, quiet. Anyway, if I were to do it over, I would have seen this at about 11 am on a Tuesday instead.
  • I’m sorry, but I could never get over the fact that Kelsey “Fraiser Crane” Grammer is in this one. Fraiser I mean Grammer plays Dr. Hank McCoy (what does this say about mutants and/or the likes of me that about half of the mutants are doctors or professors?) who is the U.S. Secretary of Mutant Affairs (or some dumb title) and whose mutation is that he looks like a big blue gorilla— though, I will grant you, he does turn out to be a bad-ass fighter. The voice is bad enough; what makes matters worse is that Fraiser –oops, I mean Hank– spends much of the movie wearing a suit and tie and even reading glasses. So basically, Grammer’s portrayal here is exactly like a big hairy blue Fraiser. I half expected to see David Hyde Pierce make a screen appearance as a mutant who looks like a yellow turtle or something.
  • There are more mixed metaphors here than an eskimo fire fighter watching a rattlesnake convention in St. Peter’s Basilica. You’ve got the whole mutant=terrorist kind of thing, the idea of viruses, diseases/disabilities that aren’t really diseases/disabilities, etc., etc., etc. Best not to think about these things too much and just enjoy shit blowing up and Fraiser as a blue gorilla.
  • An example of a bad metaphor: I heard some NPR report where one of the writers was claiming they were trying to make the mutant’s right/choice to a decision to being “cured” analogous to women’s rights/choice to have the choice of abortion. Which is why, said this writer, there were protests outside the clinics where mutants were being vaccinated. This just doesn’t work for me. I mean, it seems obvious to me that if you’re a mutant and you have a cool mutation (you can control the weather, fly, shoot flames, turn stuff to ice, make the world blow up, etc.), then you don’t want to be cured. On the other hand, if you have a mutation that sucks (you kill anyone you touch, you’re a big blue gorilla, etc.), then you’d want the cure. I don’t see how this is a metaphor for the more complex decision about abortion.
  • Given that about half the characters get killed off (the professor, Scott, Mystique, in the end Jean, etc.), it seems to me that there must have been some sort of contract negotiation where the actors and the suits got together and the actors said something like “Okay, okay, OKAY already. We’ll do one more. But JUST one!”

I have much less to say about The Squid and The Whale. This is most certainly not a family film– we watched this the other night after Will went to bed. It’s a very good movie about a washed-up novelist who is in the midst of an ugly divorce from his wife, who just happens to be an up and coming writer herself, and also about their two sons who have quite different perspectives on the whole business. It’s one of those comedy/drama flicks– a dramedy? a comrama?– that really was kind of “Oscar bait” in the way it was performed and filmed and paced. Now that I’ve seen it, I’m kind of surprised it didn’t get any nominations– at least I don’t think it did.

And, once again, it’s an example of a movie not to see in the theater. Since it isn’t damn loud and since shit does not blow up real good, this is the kind of movie that can really only be ruined by a family of idiots seated behind you. Unless seen at a more “serious” movie venue like the Michigan Theater, this is the kind of movie best experienced on DVD in the comfort of one’s home. Go rent it if you haven’t seen it yet.

Extra credit answer: Why, it’s none other than Anna Paquin, all grown up.