Author: Steve Krause

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And thus ends many of my new school year resolutions

I was originally going to write– briefly, since I do have things I need to do– about how I was about to break one of my new school year resolutions and comment on a batch of student essays. But then, when I went back and looked at my new school year resolutions entry at the end of August, I realized I am/I have broken resolutions. In fact, have I kept any?

Let’s see:

  • Take my own damn advice and at least “touch” the book project every work day. Ha! What book project? Okay, it’s not that bad, but I certainly need to reacquaint myself with that project one of these days, hopefully next week after this first wave of papers passes.
  • Do not twist and turn my schedule too much just to attend a meeting, and do not go to my office on Tuesdays and Thursdays for any reason whatsoever. Actually, I’ve done pretty good at this one. I went to one meeting on a Thursday a couple weeks ago under protest, and I have a meeting of sorts on Tuesday. But since the meeting Tuesday is small and not in Pray-Harrold, I am not going to count that one.
  • Get to the gym, get in better shape, lose some weight. Pretty good, up until this weekend. I’ve kind of been a bit more lazy about weights than I should be though.
  • Take these things called “weekends.” I was able to do so until this weekend. But I collected the first essay projects for two sections of English 328, and while I realize that I don’t have a ton of students and these essays aren’t that long, it is taking me a lot longer than I had hoped to read them. And getting a cold and such threw me off on time/schedules/etc. during the week.

So here I am on a Sunday, about to start commenting on student essays. But don’t feel too bad for me. I’m still able to do this while sitting in my backyard on a shockingly beautiful October day.

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matoes

This is the sort of email a married couple made up of English professors send each other– specifically, my literary wife to me Wednesday. In this poem/note, “man cave” refers to the basement, which also serves as my sprawling office/headquarters. “Electric guitar” is an item I often add to lists Annette is putting together, inspired by some friends from the past who used to do something similar.

matoes

This is just to say
that I have taken the last
can of tomatoes.

They were sitting,
inexplicably,
atop a pile of paper
on the ping-pong table
in your man cave.

You were perhaps
saving them for dinner tonight,
or reminding yourself
to make a shopping list:

tomatoes,
milk,
electric guitar . . .

And yes, finally, yes
a Costco trip is in order.
Perhaps
this Saturday.

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A sort of “opener” for the debate tonight

Lord only knows Joe Biden knows how to say some pretty dumb things, but you have to give Palin credit for so many dumb things in so few interview opportunities. Here’s some greatest hits from Talking Points Memo:

And of course tonight’s VP debate is going to get huge ratings. But I would suggest that most people watching tonight (myself included, at least up to a point) are less interested in seeing how this debate impacts the race since it is still McCain versus Obama. Rather, I think most people will be watching today to wait for/hope for the crash, and the crash from either podium.

After the debate:
The winner was your candidate, though some of the polls posted later on Daily Kos suggest a bit of a win for Biden. To me, it was a tie; it was just cars turning left again and again.

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Yes, but where is my flying car?

Not much time to blog or read blogs today, but I did come across this nugget via elearnspace I thought I’d post: on the official Google blog is this post written by Vint Cerf, “The next Internet.” Provocative stuff, some of which strikes me as true, some of which strikes me as scary, and some of which strikes me as, um, goofy. For example:

A box of washing machine soap will become part of a service as Internet-enabled washing machines are managed by Web-based services that can configure and activate your washing machine. Scientific measurements and experimental results will be blogged and automatically entered into common data archives to facilitate the distribution, sharing and reproduction of experimental results. One might even imagine that scientific instruments could generate their own data blogs.

Of course, maybe I’ll have no need for washing my clothes at all in a decade. Yoda says, “Always in motion the future is.” Or something like that.

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My tour to the Food (W)hole #2/Naughty grocery store pictures

Whole Foods Ann Arbor, with typical shopperI had to run a few errands and/or wanted to stall on starting commenting on student essays, so on my way home, I swung by the new Whole Foods in Ann Arbor– or, as the web site says, Cranbrook, which is really the name of a shopping center on the other side of Ann Arbor. It’s a good location for the chain because it’s close to lots of upscale west AA neighborhoods, and it’s also reasonably close to Saline and Dexter. But since we live completely on the other side of town, this visit to the Food (W)Hole was more or less just a field trip.

So, what’s the new store like? Why, it’s like a grocery store–or, to be more specific, it’s another location for one of the “world’s leading natural and organic grocer and we’re passionate about healthy food and a healthy planet,” a place that is “lucky to have a whole bunch of smart, passionate people doing incredible things in areas like organics, supporting local growers, green practices, fair trade, micro-lending and all kinds of food related stuff.” Pretentious? Sure. Am I a loyal customer? You bet.

The new store is pretty much the same as my regular Food (W)Hole: the usual large seafood selection and grass-fed or otherwise organic meat selections, supplements and herbal things, a coffee bar area, etc. Besides the layout (the space is much more narrow and long), I noticed at least four differences with this new store:

  • An even larger prepared/take away food section, and one that features a special gelato and ice cream counter. This strikes me as kind of funny because this strip mall also features an Old Country Buffet. So now you can fatten up either for cheap or for not cheap.
  • A sushi counter, where you can get fresh (and not packaged earlier that day) sushi. I suspect Will will require a visit.
  • A wine/beer/cheese tasting bar. I’m not quite sure about this arrangement (I didn’t ask and I wasn’t around long enough to find out), but it appeared to me that you could buy a glass of wine or a beer on tap and from our own Arbor Brewing Company (made in Ypsilanti), and then perhaps continue your shopping. This is what this video says about a store that opened in Rochester Hills, MI with a similar wine bar arrangement.
  • A rule against taking photographs: at the store’s entrance and next to the “no smoking” and “no roller blades” signs was “no photography.” Now, perhaps this is a policy at all Whole Foods, as this photo and the discussion about it suggests. One of the reasons discussed here says this is so other stores can’t steal design ideas, but it seems pretty easy to get around this. I mean, just go in and look around.

    In any event, I was feeling naughty, so while sitting at the coffee bar at the front of the store, I took this picture of the store behind me with the little camera on my laptop:


    Whole Foods Ann Arbor, "against the rules" inside pic

    Remarkably revealing, isn’t it?

The only down-side of the store for me was the wifi access in there was very spotty, but I suspect that’s something they will work out later.

By the way, I took the picture at the top of this entry after I left. How about my timing in capturing the transportation used by a typical Food (W)Hole customer?

Oh, and while I’m at it, I came across this pretty cool set of grocery store pictures when poking around on Flikr for this post.

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A bailout I do understand

I don’t want to dwell too much on the $700 billion bailout/buy-in/rescue package to save the markets and the economies of the world, mainly because there are plenty of other places to read all about it. But I will say this:

  • I think this is an excellent example of poor explanation, communication, and/or rhetoric. I consider myself to be a reasonably smart guy who keeps up with the news, though I will freely admit that money and economics are not exactly my strong suit. But as far as I can tell, no one has really explained just what the hell this money is for, why this is necessary, why it would work, and why spending $700 billion (or so– as best I can tell from what I’ve heard, this number is essentially made up) on banks would be a better way to help the economy than spending $700 billion on nearly anything else. But I am planning on listening to This American Life this weekend because they are going to do a show that attempts to actually do what the politicians should be doing: explaining this to constituents.
  • What we’re seeing here, IMO, is what happens after we forced through the Patriot Act without debating/thinking about it, and after the White House flat-out lied to get us into Iraq, the most disastrous war in our history, and after Paulson, Bush, etc. are now saying “the sky is falling” when just a few months ago they were saying everything was hunky-dory. Every American toddler knows the story of Chicken Little and the boy who cried wolf; why the current administration doesn’t understand that is a mystery to me.
  • The only bailout I have understood lately is Charles Bernstein’s proposed poetry bailout. Bernstein writes:

    As we know, lax composition practices since the advent of modernism led to irresponsible poets and irresponsible readers. Simply put, too many poets composed works they could not justify. We are seeing the impact on poetry, with a massive loss of confidence on the part of readers. What began as a subprime poetry problem on essentially unregulated poetry websites has spread to other, more stable, literary magazines and presses and contributed to excess poetry inventories that have pushed down the value of responsible poems.

    Though I think going all the way back to 1904 to clear out the glut of poems might be a few years too far.

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Who won?

I thought last night’s debate was a draw, but this was a very interesting clip that I found via dailykos:

Now, if the very conservative pollster Frank Luntz on the very VERY conservative Fox News suggest Obama won, then maybe he did.

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Do you need another reason to be scared of McCain?

Are you sure? Okay, check out this from Paul Kurgman; I’ll quote him quoting from an essay that McCain wrote for Contingencies Magazine, which is published for/by the American Academy of Actuaries (yeah, my subscription ran out):

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Yes, because deregulation has worked out so well for the banking industry. And btw, this article where McCain says this just came out– this isn’t something he said a year or two ago.

A slight addendum:

I came across this via Mark Maynard’s blog:

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Technorati doing some of my homework (sort of)

Via Collin’s blog, I came across the latest in blog stats: Technorati’s annual “State of the Blogosphere” for 2008. I will have to spend some more time over the next week trying to figure out what these people are saying, but I guess I have two thoughts for now. First, is this bit from my skimming of the report:

The majority of bloggers we surveyed currently have advertising on their blogs. Among those with advertising, the mean annual investment in their blog is $1,800, but it’s paying off. The mean annual revenue is $6,000 with $75K+ in revenue for those with 100,000 or more unique visitors per month. Note: median investment and revenue (which is listed below) is significantly lower. They are also earning CPMs.

Seriously? $75K a year?

The median revenue numbers are indeed significantly lower– if I understand the chart/stats correctly, the “revenue” is more like $200 annually. But even that seems to me to be kind of high, especially relative to the blogs/bloggers I’m surveying for my study.

In any event, this is still potentially useful data for my project since my much smaller survey takes a slightly different tact and also because of the case studies coming out of my study. Of course, I still have to write this all up one of these days….

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Judge says MySpace suspension okay

I found this via Sarah Robbins Facebook news feed: “Judge: School can suspend students over fake MySpace profile.” Basically, a couple of knuckle-head middle school kids created a really offensive (and really fake) MySpace profile of their principal. Somehow, the principal found out and suspended the kids. The parents (where they were before all this, I’m not sure) found out and filed a first amendment case, and the judge ruled in favor of the school district.

This kind of reminds me a bit of a local story I posted on my previous academic only blog in May 2007, where an area (Saline) superintendent Beverley Geltner held a “safety” session about Facebook/MySpace after a group of students formed a group called “new superintendent = bitch.” But I think the two differences are that in this new case, the kids created an entire fake profile/identity for the principal. Plus it was a lot more offensive. And plus the school has a code of conduct that makes it clear that it’s way against the rules to make false accusations about staff members. It’s one thing to say that so-and-so is a bitch; it’s another thing to say that so-and-so is a pedophile.

In any event, I’m sure this will come up in English 516, but I wonder if students in winter 2009 will have the same kind of “reservations” about MySpace and/or Facebook that some of my students have had in the recent past.