Steven D. Krause

I shit you not. Here’s the story:

We have (or perhaps “had”– more on that below…) a 98 Plymouth Voyager minivan. It’s purple– I think the official color name is “lavender” or “lilac;” anyway, it’s a light purplish color. For two or three years, it was our only vehicle; actually, we bought it to replace a Honda Civic hatchback we had that was totaled in a parking lot flood. That’s another long story.

Anyway, I got up this morning, and, still in my half-asleep/pre-coffee haze, I looked out the window onto the street in front of our house, and it took me a moment to register the fact that the van was gone. At first, I thought to myself “well, maybe Annette went out to get some coffee or doughnuts or something,” but then I as quickly realized that she wouldn’t have just left without telling me. So I called out “Annette?” and I heard her from the back room “What?” “Where’s the van?” I asked. And we realized that it was really gone.

So we called the cops, they asked us routine questions over the phone about it possibly being towed, etc., and then they sent someone out. When the cop came out, I met her on the curb and she pointed out to me that there were still wet tire tracks on the pavement, leading from muddy water on the curb and then turning left at the corner. That means somebody took this thing just a few hours before. The cop took down all the relevant info and she said that the thieves were probably just looking for a ride and something to party in.

What blows me away about all this is that a) the van isn’t exactly a “desirable” vehicle; b) it was locked up (I always lock the car) and they must have gotten into the thing without breaking a window because there was no glass on the street; and c) my neighbor has a real nice Ford Mustang convertible parked out on the street. And these knuckleheads take a crappy minivan!?

What happens next? Well, the cop more or less suggested three different scenarios: a) they might find it pretty quickly, just someplace on the other side of Ypsi or something, with no real damage; b) they find it in the next few days, anywhere between here and Detroit, and it’s pretty much trashed;) or c) they never find it. “B” is the most likely choice. Fortunately, we never got around to changing the insurance status so we still have “full coverage” on it, which means that we’ll get money for either “B” or “C.” Well, we assume… that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get to it.

I’m not happy about this of course because even though I’ve always had a “hate/well, it’s okay I guess” relationship with this thing, it’s gonna be a pain in the ass to deal with this and it’s going to cost us a chunk of money.

And besides that, I had kind of settled into my “it’s okay I guess” feelings about the van. For the first couple years, when it was our only vehicle and we were putting lots and lots of miles on it, it ran like crap. We ended up dumping a lot of money into it for dumb things. We had to replace the air conditioning system, we had a lot of other minor and miscellaneous things that had to be repaired, typical used car stuff. Actually, I think a lot of the problem had to do with the Dodge dealerships where we were taking it. But since we got our other car (a Honda Civic, which we like a whole bunch), we don’t drive the van near as much. Last year, I think we put a total of 5,000 miles on it. And the van also started running a whole lot better once we started taking it to a local mechanic, which is a lesson to learn regarding at least some dealerships mechanics.

Anyway, while this sucks, it could be a lot worse. Annette and I will frequently leave piles of books and student papers and such in the car for one reason or another, but neither of us had anything too significant in the van. They didn’t take the Honda– probably because it would have been harder to steal. Nobody here was hurt, though it is a bit unnerving that someone stole a car from the street right in front of my house.

So we’ll see what happens. In the mean-time, if you see a light-purplish van with a bunch of left-wing bumper-stickers on the back, drop me an email….

My ticket– er, appearance on the program– to the CCCCs in 2005 is participation on the Creative Writing Special Interest Group (SIG) where I’m going to talk about blogging as a tool for creative writing. This isn’t as odd as it might seem because, before I became a “comp rhet guy,” I was a “fiction writer guy.” I have an MFA in creative writing, I’ve published a few stories in very little magazines and such, and I still write some “creative” things once in a while.

Anyway, I decided to do a little light Google research this morning, and one of the sites I came across was The National Novel Writing Month web site. What is “National Novel Writing Month,” you ask?

National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing. Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30.

Why November is considered a good month for NNWM is beyond me.

Anyway, Blogger has already published articles about blogging and novel writing here and here, and a simple search of “creative writing blog” yielded plenty of results. I’ll have something to talk about in March, probably….

… but I knew that already.

You are 27% Aries

Annette (well, and others) have commented against the previous redness. So how’s this?

I like this site which provides some alternative blogger layouts, and I like the look of this blog (and I want to point out that this is awfully red). I really like the look of the Feministe site, which is always changing, and I like the looks of Martini Republic, too. I could go on, but I think you get the point.

I believe there are three morals to this. First, I am a writer and not much a designer. Second, my skills with CSS in particular and higher-end computer junk in general are pretty limited. Which leads to number three: I have to either accept that I’m gonna have a kind of generic and/or crappy-looking blog, or I am going to have to school myself on design and higher end computer stuff. I’ve been thinking about this on my official blog, too, but that’s a different space.

Anyway, is the purple at least a little better?

Annette and Will and I (and a friend of Will’s, along with his mom) all went to see the new Spongebob Squarepants Movie late this afternoon, and all I can say was that it was indeed excellent. Of course, I’ve been a fan for a long time. Spongebob is a cartoon in the tradition of Ren and Stimpy, and I suppose of Rocky and Bullwinkle, too: cartoons made for kids that are subversive enough to be interesting to adults. NPR has been all over this thing this week, with an interview of the guy who is the voice of Spongebob on the Terri Gross show Fresh Air, and a positive review of the movie this morning on Morning Edition. Of course, there is actually a NPR joke in the movie….

I don’t want to give any spoilers, but it was pretty darn funny in a lot of different places. It was interesting (especially given Annette’s research as of late) that a lot of the plot involves Spongebob and Patrick being interested in not being “kids” but being “men” and there is a lot of play with the concept of masculinity here. There is a whole lot about the mysterious appeal of the Krabby Patty, and David Hasslehoff makes a key appearance toward the end of the movie. Funny funny stuff.

If you’re not a fan, you could probably wait to see it until it comes out on DVD. But if you are even an occasional watcher of the Nickelodeon show, it is well worth seeing on the big screen. I would recommend going to a show that is less likely to be populated with the target audience of little kids. Right behind us in this screening there was some little kid compulsively rattling around a candy wrapper or potato chip bag. Sounded a bit like a forest fire throughout the movie.

See Innovate, a new peer-reviewed online journal about online education. It looks pretty interesting, though I am worried that it might really be just a sort of “cheerleader” publication for the online biz. It’s published/sponsored by Nova Southeastern University, which is a school I haven’t heard of and it appears to offer lots and LOTS of online degrees.

Don’t get me wrong– this doesn’t automatically make it bad. NSU might be the best school in all of Florida, I have no idea. And the articles in this inaugural issue of the journal look interesting, the sort of information on how to approach distant ed teaching that I think could help faculty who are on the verge of teaching online for the first time. We’ll see.

Yesterday was the grand opening of the Clinton Presidential Center in Little Rock, and it got me to thinking about the whole Clinton thing. Not Hillary, really– more about Bill. As an aside: my initial reaction after Kerry lost was “Hillary 08,” but I heard some commentator/talking head on some news show, and this person pointed out that the people who seem to be talking the most about Hillary as the Dem candidate in 08 are Republicans. Hmmm… maybe the Dems should try taking cues from someone other than the conservative majority.

No, I was thinking about Bill. And I was thinking about how we need another Bill because when Clinton stands up and talks– or really, just stands up and looks out at the crowd– he seems like a… like a… human. I wrote about this a couple weeks ago, but why we need someone like Bill is because he passes the “who do you want to drink a beer with” test, and he passes it in flying colors. Sure he’s a Southerner, but only by birth, really. Don’t forget Clinton has degrees from Georgetown, Yale, and Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, not the typical pedigree of a NASCAR dad. I don’t think it matters where he’s from, really. I think his real talent is he could talk and relate to people that really did bridge differences.

Just a simple example: I was talking with my mom after the election in November, and we were talking about the whole “moral values” thing, which she says was one of the reasons why she voted for W. She was concerned about Kerry and his “pro-choice” stance, which she somehow interpreted as a sort of “pro-abortion” stance. I said to her, “well, I subscribe to the Clinton line on abortion: it ought to be safe, legal, and rare,” and she said to me “oh, I agree with that.” See what I’m getting at? Kerry and Clinton have the same position on abortion; Clinton figured out how to present a pro-choice position in a way that appeals to at least some moderate pro-life voters, like my mom.

At the same time, we don’t need another Bill Clinton. Besides all the sex scandal/impeachment thing, Clinton also presided over a Democratic party that became a lot more conservative in its “moderation” over eight years, and a Democratic party that held majorities in both the Senate and House in 1992 and (of course) that is in the minority in both now. If we get a Dem in the White House in 08 but we do it by caving in to the red state moralistic nutjobs, then we ain’t gonna be any better off than we are with W.

See 3 November Theses. Go ahead, take a look. Oh, and it turns out they have a blog, too.

Like I said, I think these are good points, but the various reflection pieces about what to do next with the Democratic Party remind me that I’m really a whole lot more liberal than most Democrats. I mean, I haven’t thought about this stuff too much yet, but I kinda think that the Dems shouldn’t worry about appealing to “moral values” or whatever, but rather, the Dems ought to worry about picking up two or three more “border states:” Ohio, Florida, Iowa, New Mexico, Nevada, etc. Screw the rest of ’em.

Of course, this attitude is perhaps the reason why I am unlikely to be a Democratic party operative anytime soon. But basically, I agree with these Theses.

See “High-tech school program gets high grades,” an article about a laptop program that appeared in the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. Essentially, it’s another story about a school district that initiated a laptop computer program that resulted in marked success in student test scores of one sort or another.

In my graduate class, we’re reading Hawisher and Selfe’s Literate Lives in the Information Age: Narratives of Literacy from the United States,
which I think is an excellent book. Among other things, it picks up the argument that Cindy Selfe has made elsewhere about the problems of just dumping computers in schools. She’s right– that doesn’t work. But at the same time, there does seem to be at least some evidence (like this article) that there is something to be said to the idea of getting some hardware into the hands of students and teachers who want to make use of them.

I also wonder if there isn’t something to the laptop element of things. Dumping a bunch of desktop computers in schools might not be a good idea, but what about computers (iBooks in this case) that can follow students around the school, that can be taken home, that can connect to the ‘net wirelessly? Hmmm….

See Blogging Across the Curriculum, a web site by Pattie Belle “CyberMommy” Hastings, who is a multimedia designer and assistant professor at Quinnipiac University.

It’s a good sort of introduction to blogging that looks really cool and has a bunch of good links, though there isn’t much that will be “new” here to folks who have been blogging for a while. I guess that’s not who it’s for, though. I also think it would have been interesting had Hastings included some links to student blogs, though I can understand why she didn’t do that.

Anyway, worth a look, and also a fun site to poke around.