Steven D. Krause

Nick Carbone posted about this on the Tech-Rhet mailing list (I think), the paper mill service Custom Research Papers. It’s a typical sort of service, one that strikes me as being far too expensive ($15 per page for “regular” delivery, $25 per page for 24 hour delivery), and I suspect you don’t really get what you pay for and such. But what’s interesting to me is the way that this site is trying to work the “ethical” angle here. To quote:

There are strong reasons WHY your cooperation with Custom Research Papers cannot be labeled as cheating:

• you DON’T STEAL anything from us
• you pay a FAIR PRICE for our services
• our writers get both financial and spiritual REWARD for their work
• you simply DELEGATE your tasks and focus only on those things that REALLY MATTER IN YOUR LIFE

At Custom Research Papers we believe IT’S ETHICAL to get an outside help and delegate your writing assignments to professional writers same as if you would get your watches fixed or car repaired by third party experts.

Of course, this is all horseshit, but I have to hand it to these people for trying this line of argument. I’d be kind of curious to know though what sorts of things “REALLY MATTER” in the lives of the students who partake in this service and who are kidding themselves into thinking that this is remotely ethical.

While on a long drive last night, with my mind wandering, it occurred to me that I probably did have an extra pair of glasses around the house. They’re pretty ugly and disturbingly dirty around the nose pad thing-a-ma-bobs, but they aren’t so far off from my current prescription. And there’s no duct tape involved.

I just wish I would have thought of this earlier….

Here’s just a short list of things going on right now (and these are just the things I can remember):

• I was distracted by and then out of town for some family matters the last couple days;
• I have a draft of an article for something I really need to send off some time today;
• EMU Faculty Council is meeting today (I am our department’s representative), and we’re voting for a new president (among other things), so that will probably be an “interesting” meeting;
• I have many things to grade/comment on, and I ought to do most of that some time today;
• Tomorrow, I have at least two meetings in the afternoon after I teach;
• Friday is the gathering to celebrate and honor graduate students in our department, and Monday afternoon is the gathering to celebrate undergraduate majors;
• April 19 is the last day of classes; and
• I am certain I am forgetting something. And never mind the fact that I need to do stuff around the house like clean out my gutters.

This is all my way of saying that it might take me a few days to get back in the swing with any relevant or interesting blog postings. Stay tuned for details….

Mistake #1: While at Will’s swimming lesson Saturday morning, I was sitting around, minding my own business, a bit bored because I had forgotten to bring the newspaper with me. Absent-mindedly, I was playing with my glasses, bending them a bit. I’ve done this for years because I have these flexon eyeglass frames, which are supposed to withstand pretty much any sort of bending you can inflict upon them.

Well, apparently, I bent them one too many times, for while I was absent-mindedly bending and watching Will swim, I heard and felt my glasses go “snap” right at the bridge. What once was one piece now was two, a lens in each hand.

Long story short: if you break your glasses right at the bridge, there’s damn near nothing you can do about it. Duct tape has been serving me okay, but krazy glue was a non-starter. I suspect I’ll have to endure the Harry Potter look for a couple of weeks until I can get new glasses from the place where my insurance will pay for most of the cost. I must say though that I have considered the laser surgery thing. I don’t think my insurance will pay for it, but if it paid for even a portion….

Mistake #2: I made a few of recipes from this magazine I picked up at the Food (Whole) called LowCarb Energy, and two of the things I made– salmon crusted with pine nuts and sun-dried tomatoes and a “taco lasanga” sort of thing– were quite good. But I tried to make this Thai Red Curry Chicken dish and it was about the worst food disaster I think I’ve ever had. It looked promising when I mixed it up this morning and turned on the crock-pot. The sauce included Thai curry paste, fish sauce, and coconut milk, and it looked nice and creamy and such. But by dinner time, it was just nasty-looking, all oily and watery. It tasted kind of metallic, and I thought it smelled vaguely like pee. Annette said that if she ate it, she was afraid she might be ill.

I don’t like tossing food, but toss I did.

The good news is that the weather was nice this evening, so I went back to the Food (Whole), bought some chicken breast on the bone, lump charcoal, fresh mozzarella, and a nice bottle of wine, and grilled chicken with a lovely cherry tomato salad was enjoyed by one and all.

I would have posted about this yesterday, but I don’t think people would have believed me about it (the whole April Fool’s day thing)….

Back in January, I had said I was going to get back on the diet bandwagon. I didn’t do that. It’s been a very stressful few months around here, mostly with things that revolve around work. I am teaching three different and mostly new classes this semester, Annette and I were both applying for different jobs, There’s been some time demands on some publishing projects, I’ve had trips to both New York City and San Francisco, etc., etc., etc. I think the result of all this was that I’ve been pretty “unconscious” about my diet lately, meaning that I pretty much didn’t worry about what I ate during all this time. This is the opposite of a diet.

Well, just about all of this dust has settled. At first, I thought that I should try to get “diet religion” with the South Beach Diet again, with the whole two week “no carb” induction phase followed by the “low carb” phase 2. But I think I’m going to try my own version of the “non-diet” diet plan instead. This is more or less inspired by a story I saw in the “lifestyle” magazine Real Simple. In the nutshell, here’s my plan:

• In general, eat less and exercise more. Pretty obvious.
• Be conscious and aware of what I’m eating. Also pretty obvious, but not as easy to do as you might think, especially when you’re stressed out.
• Eat as many veggies as I can stand, and follow it up with some fruit here and there.
• Don’t give up completely on carbs, but don’t fill up on them either, and steer toward things like whole grain breads and pasta, brown rice, etc. I made home-made bagels a couple weekends ago, and they’re simply too good to give up entirely, so they must be included in my non-diet diet. I guess the word I’m looking for here is “moderation.”
• Eat lean meats, but make veggies the center of the meal and meat the side dish.
• Cut down on snacks and sweets. This is a tough one because things like cookies are one of my weaknesses; I mean, what’s a nice cup of coffee at Bombadil’s without a white chocolate chip and Macadamia nut cookie? But I’ll try….
• Don’t eat at night. This one is harder for me than you might think because I teach two nights a week this semester and I always come home starving. Of course, this semester is over in about two and a half weeks.
• Oh, and one more time, get some more exercise, which I hope is going to get easier with better weather, a better work schedule, and an additional car.

There you have it. I’m going to try to do this non-diet diet as consciously as I can for this month and we’ll see how it goes. I’d like to lose at least 5 pounds this month; the more, the better. I’ll go get on the scale right now and then go for a brisk morning walk.

You should of course support your local public radio station. For me, this is WEMU— one of the few stations left out there that supports a jazz and blues format, along with NPR news and other things (“Car Talk,” “Wait-Wait,” etc.) Though I do have a confession: I also listen to Michigan Public Radio quite a bit, which is an NPR/PRI station that is an “all talk” format. But the way I figure it, WEMU needs my money more than the U of Michigan station.

But jeez, I hate fund raisers. I know they are necessary, but when public radio stations do fund raisers, I remember why I don’t like commercial radio too much. Fortunately, I recently received an iPod….

See this entry from Kairosnews. I know this is an April Fool’s joke, but I hope somebody out there hacks this together. I’d much prefer this to Clippy, that’s for sure.

It’s been a pretty crazy week around here. Besides all sorts of stuff having to do with work and with Annette’s work, Will wasn’t in school because of Spring Break. He was over at Rachel and Jim’s house on Monday, though I was on kid patrol on Wednesday this week. While Rachel entertained the children with wholesome time in the park, I took the kids to Chuck E. Cheese. Okay, we did that, but we went to the park after words.

Anyway, Will had a play date with another friend today, and, on a whim, I decided to go play a bit of golf. So I got the clubs out of the garage, and the first thing I discovered is that when the mini-van was stolen back in November, they got something else too: my golf shoes. Oh well; they weren’t that comfortable anyway.

I decided to go out to Hickory Woods, which is a silly little mom-n-pop 9 hole place. The course is surrounded by housing developments, and because the folks who own it stand to make a lot more money dividing the land up into housing lots than by running a golf course, they were going to sell. It was supposed to close up last year. They’re still open though, and according to the woman behind the counter, it’s because the township blocked the sale because of zoning reasons. “We’ll be here for a year, maybe five. Just depends on who comes up with the money to change the zoning,” she said.

I didn’t play a real round of golf per se– just practicing. I didn’t keep score, and I hit two or three balls on just about every hole. I’m basically about as bad as I was before, but not any worse, really.

See this entry on Weblogg-ed, “School Bans Blogs.” This is kind of old news (relatively speaking), but I thought it was worthwhile to post here since I can imagine seeing this kind of thing coming up again in one of my classes.

My initial reaction was the same as Will R.’s at Weblogg-ed: “outrageous!!!” Then I read the article in the Rutland Herald newspaper. It’s a little vague, but it seems that what is really being banned here is something called Myspace.com, which looks to me kind of like a sort of “singles” site. I tried to browse it for a few minutes, and it mostly seemed like a) women in underwear or bikinis, b) people who were looking for “special close” kinds of friends, and/or c) goofballs.

Anyway, I still don’t think the principal should ban the site from school, and parents should of course monitor their children’s use of the internet. That’s parenting. But what appears to be happening here is that the principal thinks that all blogs are along the lines of these things on Myspace.com. So we have a proverbial throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

Maybe somebody ought clue this guy in on Blogger….

I discovered this while surfing around a bit before my class last night:

According to posts on the blog “A Week of Kindness” that begin here and end here (at least for now), Nate Kushner writes that he was approached in an IM session by Laura K. “last name changed to protect the innocent/guilty” Kirshna” to write a term paper for a class about Hinduism. Kushner essentially pranked her: he strung her along, wrote a silly paper that (we learn later) Laura is silly enough to hand in as is, and then he collected a check from Kirshna for his services (though I don’t think he cashes the check). Then he put the whole sorrid affair up on this blog in a series of entries. Drama ensued. You really have to read it to see for yourself– hundreds of comments, most of them ready to feed the plagiarizer to the wolves.

Meanwhile, over at boing-boing, they are suggesting that the whole thing is a hoax. They say it is part of an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke (though the last I heard, April Fool’s day was in, ah, April) and, since the site “A Week of Kindness” says up front that it exists to promote a sketch comedy troop of the same name, it’s a publicity stunt (this makes some sense; follow the link for “Press” on the site asks folks to “Stop Calling Laura, Come See Our Shows”).

I don’t know if it’s true or not, but I do have two thoughts:

• It’s one thing to do something stupid or even (academically) criminal, like attempting to buy a paper from a complete stranger during an IM chat. If Laura exists (and as I typed that last sentence, I must say that I did get a twinge of a “this is just too stupid to actually be true” sort of feeling), then she certainly should be “caught” and punished by her school, whatever that punishment might be. Plagiarism, especially of the “buy a paper and hand it in as if it were my own” sort, is obviously a bad thing.

  But it’s another thing entirely to be humiliated in front of a gazillion people for your stupid action (and the fact that there are hundreds and hundreds of comments from hundreds of different people make me thing “there’s just too much here for this to be faked”).

  Ultimately, what Kushner is doing here is a form of vigilantism. I don’t want to make too close of a comparison here to a public lynching because, obviously, public lynchings were much MUCH more violent and serious affairs than this. But that is kind of what’s going on. Kushner saw an “academic crime” happening and took matters into his own hands. Worse yet, Kushner arguably entrapped Laura K., something that was common with real lynchings, too. After all, Kushner could have declined to write Laura’s essay, or he could have just left it at “telling” on her by contacting folks at her school. Instead, Kushner decided to take it a step further. He thought all this was funny, worthy of a cheap laugh at this plagiarizer’s expense, so he wrote it up on his blog. I believe him when he says he had no idea that this would snowball out of control the way that it has, but (again, something that happened with real lynchings, too) it has gone out of control and it has even become a form of entertainment at the expense of the so-called criminal.

  Kushner invokes his family members who are academics as justification for his vigilante-style blog rampage. Well, as a practicing academic who deals with a lot of potential plagiarizers in writing classes, I’d encourage Kushner and everyone else to leave dealing with these problems to the teachers and professors.

• Don’t Plagiarize. And for God’s sake, don’t solicit for plagiarizing help via IM.