Steven D. Krause

Just to amuse myself this evening, I was looking through the “stats” pages on this server space. Most of it means nothing because software like blogger must do something screwy with how hits work on a page. Anyway, one of the common search strings I discovered folks were using and somehow coming across my blog was “krispy kreme drinkable doughnut.” So I tried it myself, and I was lead to this article with the headline “Krispy Kreme introduces glazed doughnut frozen beverage.”

BTW, I assume that my site turned up because of previous references to Krispy Kreme doughnuts.

Now, my first reaction to the doughnut beverage is “eww, gross.” But I must say that Krispy Kreme does have excellent coffee and of course the absolute best doughnuts, so who knows? Maybe it’s good. However, considering that a small size of this beverage has twice as many calories and more than three times as many carbs as a single doughnut, I think I’ll have to hit the -20 pound mark before sampling one of these things.

Well, no, not really. But the yearly Art Fair days in Ann Arbor mean I will not be in downtown Ann Arbor until Sunday at the earliest, and since we’re going to Iowa on Wednesday, I suspect it will be longer.

For the few folks who might be reading this and not know what I’m talking about: every summer, Ann Arbor holds what I think is the biggest art fair in the country. If it’s not the biggest, it’s pretty damn close. It’s actually a series of art fairs, but they all kind of blend together. See the web site Artfair Home for more details. I don’t know how many people go to this thing, but it has got to be tens of thousands, and it more or less makes it impossible to do anything downtown (other than look at art booths) for four days.

The first year we were around for Art Fair, we went to it for an entire day and had a lot of fun. The second time we were around, we went just for part of a morning, and had a good enough time. The third time, it was a blazing hot death march. This time around, we are spending our time at coffee shops in the suburbs and book stores in strip malls. And at home, too.

See this article, “EMU faculty asks governor to step in.” From the article:

The Eastern Michigan University faculty union has sent a letter to Gov. Jennifer Granholm asking her to void President Samuel Kirkpatrick’s $514,000 agreement to resign and instead fire him for just cause.

The letter, sent by EMU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, also asks Granholm to replace Board of Regents Chairman Philip Incarnati and Paul Schollaert, provost and vice president of academic affairs.

And it goes on from there…

A couple of thoughts:

* This stuff is all available on the EMU AAUP Web Site, which I maintain for the faculty union. Sorta my little part in the effort.

* I have it on reliable authority that this decision to call for the ouster of Incaranti and Schollaert was a matter of some controversy among members of the union leadership. I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

* I completely agree with the call to cancel this golden parachute deal for Kirkpatrick and for the call that Incarnati be replaced. But frankly, I’m not sure I understand why the union wants to drag the provost into this. Schollaert is not the most popular provost ever (I’m not sure there is such a thing as a “popular” provost, frankly), but he didn’t have anything to do with this house mess. It was quite clear that Kirkpartrick had more or less cut Schollaert– and indeed, the entire academic operations of the university– out of the loop. Instead, Kirkpatrick and Incarnati both were interested in stuff like the football team (apparently, Incarnati used to play football at EMU so it’s important to him that EMU keep its division I standing, which it is in danger of losing since no one ever goes to the games), the house (of course!), hiring more administrators, and the new student union, which is currently under construction.

By the way, stay tuned for this student union thing, the next controversy at EMU, after the contract is resolved and/or we go on strike at the beginning of this coming school year. Kirkpatrick et al wanted a new student union so they can convert the old student union, which is a perfectly acceptable and useable facility, into administrative office space. Even though Kirkpatrick is gone, they’re going ahead with this. It might be haulted by the state because of funding concerns, or maybe some administrator somewhere at EMU will have a bit of common sense and try to slow this project down. But if they do go forward with this new union, expect plenty of articles in the Ann Arbor News about cost over-runs, problems with the way that EMU handled the funding, and discussions about how building a union is taking money away from things like maintaining and fixing classroom buildings.

Saw this super long post about how Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 wasn’t that good of a film today, while I was looking at some other stuff. I dunno. To be honest, I didn’t read Burke’s post as closely as perhaps I should have, but I have to say, I still liked the Moore movie. What I’m getting at is I’ve read/heard/seen a fair amount of criticism about Moore’s movie since I saw it a few weeks ago. A lot of it is even legitimate criticism, too. Moore isn’t really “fair and balanced;” but then again, the network that has a copyright on that phrase isn’t exactly “fair and balanced” either.

I’m going to stick to what I wrote on my old unofficial blog back at the end of June: sure, there are some things that are problematic about Fahrenheit 9/11, but I still think it’s Moore’s best movie and I also think the essence of what Moore is saying is dead-on accurate. Just thought I’d post a reminder of that.

There’s a good conversation over at the blog leuschke.org about anonymous academic blogs. This link was working earlier, but it doesn’t seem to be working now… Anyway, Leuschke (I think his first name is Graham) writes:

Is it as simple as fearing that your colleagues will find out you say the word “fuck�? Or believing that you’ll never get tenure if the dean knows you have a hobby outside the office? Or thinking that your students will respect you less if they know you didn’t really think Fahrenheit 9/11 was all that good a movie? What exactly is it that you and your department have agreed to pretend: that you’re a robot? No, of course not. But there must be something, and I’m starting to feel a little dumb for not seeing it.

Perhaps it has nothing at all to do with academia. Plenty of people have anonymous blogs, and plenty of people who don’t have gotten in trouble for their blogs. But today’s informal survey led me to wonder if I’m missing something. Is there a plausible reason to think that I, as an untenured professor in a new gig, could suffer from the existence of this here .org?

I posted to this thread– or I should say I tried to, because, as I mentioned, there seems to be some server glitch happening as I type this message. I wrote there:

I think some of the best blogs that I’ve read are anonymous; on the other hand, I also think that some of those anonymous blogs don’t/didn’t need to be anonymous. Invisible Adjunct comes to mind. I think she would have had a lot of good stuff to say in blogland if she had put her name on it, too, and I also don’t think she would have suffered any sort of retaliation from the “academic establishment” (whoever they are) because of what she had to say. Actually, I think just the opposite; look at the positive attention she got in places like the CHE, for example.

I guess one thing strikes me about these responses, and keep in mind I say this as someone who agrees with our host (I personally wouldn’t keep an anonymous blog either). It seems to me that one of the main reasons why people keep anonymous blogs is so they are free to bitch and/or complain. This strikes me as a bad reason to keep a public blog in general, and perhaps a good reason to keep an old-fashioned journal or diary. Perhaps with a lock.

Obviously, I’m not anonymous, but I think I maintain a blog about my life outside of academia for some of the reasons that other people decide to be anonymous. And I guess I don’t worry to much about my identity being out there because a) I’m tenured, b) I don’t really use my blog as a space to “bitch” about my colleagues or students (and truth be told, I don’t have much to bitch about on those fronts, anyway), and c) not that many people read my blog, about 20 or so on a good day.

-14 pounds

I’m a bit surprised that I have lost anything this week. We had a VERY big party at our house last weekend, a sit-down dinner of Indian food with about 20 people. Lots of fun, too much work, and not exactly stuff that is on the diet. Tuesday, we had over Jim and Rachel for “Indian food leftovers,” which was a lot of fun but, again, not on the diet. And then yesterday, I played golf with Jim and Steve B., which involved a hot dog lunch and a few carb-rich beers after the game.

But here I am, a half-pound lighter.

This is just a guess, but I think the reason why I’ve managed to lose a bit even with this naughty behavior is I have been forcing myself to eat less, especially if it is not South Beach friendly food. Tuesday was typical: I had a real big breakfast, not really any lunch (a couple cheese sticks and a handful of nuts), and then dinner. This seems to work well, and since I don’t have much of a lunch break at school while teaching this summer anyway, it works well with my schedule.

One other positive diet thing: the other day, while I was getting ready for school, I realized that I couldn’t wear a particular pair of pants because they were too big on me. They weren’t “clown pants” big– I mean, it’s not like I could have worn them for some weight loss ad, standing there grinning and stretching the pants out to show how I used to be twice as big. I haven’t lost that much weight. Still, the pants were clearly too baggy, even with a snuggly fastened belt, so I had to change. For me, it reminds me that I am both losing weight and sort of “shifting” weight around, too.

I don’t have time right now to think too hard about this, but I like what I can see from skimming the article “Show Me Your Context, Baby: My Love Affair with Blogs.” Yet another reading that might work for the grad class I’m teaching this fall.

I’ve been alerted to two pretty funny flash media sorts of presentations about the presidential campaign:

* The first is called “This Land.” As the description on the atomfilms web site puts it, “He’s a liberal wiener. He’s a right-wing nut job. See John Kerry and George Bush square off and trade insults in this can’t-miss campaign spoof of ‘This Land is Your Land.'” I guess it kind of depends on where you’re coming from, but I’d rather be called a liberal wiener than a right-wing nut job. Anyway, it is very very funny. It’s a big file (3.7 MB, I think) and it is a bit noisy, too.

* The second is a flash presentation of the spoofs of the Bush/Cheney Sloganator. The back story is this: The Bush/Cheney campaign had a feature on their web site where you could add slogans to a Bush/Cheney poster. Obviously, their intended audience was people who were for the Bush/Cheney ticket. But when correct/left thinking people got a hold of this thing, they started generating slogans like “We can detain you, you know” and “First retraded president!” Funny ’cause it’s true; it contains a probably unnecessary soundtrack, so be aware of that if you fire this thing up at work or something. These folks have a Yahoo Group web site here.

… called BLOG:CMS. I don’t know anything about it yet, ‘cept it is one I haven’t heard of before, it looks “feature-rich,” and it’s open source.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is in some trouble now for referring to democrats who opposed to his budget deal out there as “girly men.” He’s being accused of being a big ol’ sexist homophobe for the remark.

Okay, look: I’m a card-carrying, politically correct, pinko-liberal, gay/bi-sexual/trans-gendered embracing family man who would rather chew on shards of glass than vote for a Republican, let alone the Arnold. But c’mon here.

It probably is worth remembering that the “girly man” line comes from a Saturday Night Live sketch that explicitly makes fun of Arnold and his attitudes. So the fact that he used it as a throw-away joke line in a speech demonstrates that he has something resembling a sense of humor.

This is one of the problems of liberals, and one of the reasons why I’m such a big fan of Al Franken.