Author: Steve Krause

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One hundred push ups: it’s worth a shot

I’m getting ready for a series of endings and new beginnings around here.  The spring term is wrapping up, and at the end of that, I’ll be passing the baton of writing program coordinator to my colleague Cheryl Cassidy– more on that another day.  Anyway, that seems as good as time as any to start getting back to exercise and losing weight.

I don’t want to make this about sharing too much information here, but basically, I was able to work out pretty steadily in the fall term, even if I wasn’t able to really lose much weight.  In the winter and the spring, I’ve been quite a bit lazier.  So I’m primed for a restart here.

Which leads me to this link, one hundred push ups.  The premise is very simple:  it’s a six week training program designed to get you to a point where you can do 100 pushups at one time.  Given that the training sessions don’t take that long, hey, what the hell?  I might as well give it a try.

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What debate was like

When I was in high school and a bit when I was in college, I was on the debate team. Without a doubt, it taught me more about reading and research than any class I took in high school, maybe even in college. But it’s kind of a hard event to explain/describe to people who haven’t been a part of it. I don’t think my parents ever “got it,” and I think the same is true for everyone I have ever known who wasn’t involved in it.

Well, thanks to a link I received from a friend through another friend (all former debaters, btw), I found out about a documentary that I’m going to have to watch, Resolved. Here’s a YouTube preview:

THis looks like the kind of thing that might make it to the Michigan Theater, and if it does, I’m there.

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The second of a couple of animal videos: Hippo swimming in Toledo

I took this video of a hippo swimming in the “Hippoquarium” at the Toledo Zoo:

Two “fun facts” about both this and my previous animal video of the turtle on the golf course: first, I shot both with my Canon PowerShot SD 850 IS. I’ve been very pleased with this camera– I’d recommend it to anyone. Second, I tried to upload these videos to YouTube and I ran into errors with both of them. They’re just .mov files that opened right up in QuickTime and that uploaded in a matter of minutes to Flickr. I don’t know what the deal is.

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Not that stupid after all

For reasons too complicated to go into, I found myself with about a half-hour/forty minutes to kill, which was not quite enough time to go on the “power walk” in a nearby park or to go to the gym before picking up Will. So I took the quasi-lazy way out and decided to catch up on some email, a bit of teaching work, and some web reading. This included the recent Atlantic Monthly article with the provocative title “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. I was all set to be angry about it because, frankly, the title itself is kind of stupid.  “Um, no, stupid,” is basically my answer. But I guess the folks at the Atlantic didn’t think an article with a title like “What Google has to do with previous technologies of the mind and artificial intelligence” wouldn’t sell a lot of magazines.

I don’t agree with everything that Carr is saying here, but I actually do agree with a lot of it and I think this will be a good addition to my “invent your own technology” assignment in English 328.  Carr makes specific references to folks like McLuhan, Nietzsche’s reflections on the typewriter, Alan Turing, re-mediated ala Bolter/Grusin, and even Plato’s Phaedrus, and throughout the whole thing, I hear a sort of “back-current” of Walter Ong on the shaping power the external technology of literacy on human consciousness.

Not stupid at all, but like I said, stupid sells magazines.

I think this will certainly be something I include in the revamped version of English 328 I hope to roll out in the Fall term.

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The first of a couple animal videos: turtle at Eagle Crest Golf Course

For father’s day today, Jim K. and I played golf at EMU’s Eagle Crest Golf Course, which is described in this web site as being part of the “Eagle Crest Resort.” Well, if a corporate hotel and a golf course count as a “resort,” then I guess this is what this is.

Anyway, in the midst of my rather terrible play, we encountered a turtle on the fairway of number 15:

Note that this first video (one or two more animal videos are coming) were posted on Flickr, which I haven’t experimented yet with video. The preference for the service is clearly for short videos.

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Yummy….

Here’s a 1968 ad for a food product that must be the inspiration for other various “foods in the form of a bar” on the market nowadays:

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Even more flooding news

My father tells me that the local news in Iowa is nothing but flood and more flood. The water surge/battle against the river has moved on to Iowa City and the University of Iowa. Here’s a picture from this Des Monies Register article about the impact of the flood on the University of Iowa. The Iowa River (which comes off of the Cedar at some point) runs right through the middle of campus, and these folks are passing up 500,000 books from the storage facility in the basement of the main library, which is normally quite safe, on higher ground about two blocks away from the river. My guess is that my old stomping grounds of the “English Philosophy Building” (EPB) is pretty soaked right about now.

My father also told me that FEMA and the Red Cross (or some kind of combination) set up a center in this giant Hy-Vee grocery store about 1.5 miles from my parent’s house in Cedar Falls to feed people who have been put out of their homes and otherwise displaced by the floods. He said that I-80 and I-380 are closed through Iowa City and Cedar Rapids, which basically means that if you are traveling east-west through eastern Iowa right now, you aren’t going anywhere. Yikes.

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Flooding in my homeland

I haven’t been able to watch much news today, but I did come across this AP article via Google News, reported out of Cedar Falls: “Flood evacuations ordered along Iowa’s Cedar River.” And then there was this even more inspiring article from the (Cedar Rapids, I think?) Gazette: Volunteer sandbagger saved downtown Cedar Falls. Well, that should have been volunteers, but I get the point. Good article about folk pitching in.

There are also more articles about evacuations in Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and other various points up and down Northeast Iowa. My parents, btw, are in a very “high and dry” area; I would bet they have some water in the backyard and the sump-pump may be running, but they are no where near the rivers.

Stay dry, my fellow Iowans….

A slight update:

I’m from Cedar Falls, where the downtown (my father reported to me in an email)  stayed dry.  On the other hand, Cedar Rapids, which is a much bigger city about an hour south of Cedar Falls/Waterloo and down river on the Cedar, is very very wet.

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The new style manual is here! The new style manual is here!

How big of a nerdy English/writing type of person does one need to be to appreciate the fact that the MLA has come out with a new edition of the style manual?  And does it make me an even bigger looser enthusiast that the first thing I want to look at in the newest issue of The Journal of Electronic Publishing is a review of this new style manual?

Regardless, it’s an interesting piece by Kevin S. Hawkins, who is an electronic publishing librarian over at the University of Michigan.  The rest of the journal looks interesting this time around too.  Based on what Hawkins is saying, it sounds like MLA has made some advances in dealing with electronic resources and in acknowledging the fact that almost all of the writing/editing done in academic/humanities-type journals involves computers.

And for me, this observation brought back unpleasant memories:  “I’m glad to see that two holdovers from the days of the typewriter have finally been put to rest: underlining and double spacing after periods are out, and italicization and single spacing are in.”  Twelve years ago, when I was trying to wrap up my dissertation in the summer before I began my first tenure-track job, I was in an epic (well, for me) battle with a thesis/dissertation reader in the Bowling Green State University graduate college.

In those days (I assume this is still true, though I don’t typically have to deal with such things at EMU because our graduate students do “projects” and not “theses” that adhere to such strict rules), this was the final stop for a dissertation, a hoop soon-to-be PhDs had to jump through even after a defense.  The staff in this office was made up mostly of MA students on an assistantship, and their job was to proof-read for your run-of-the-mill errors and for adherence to a style manual– in my case, the MLA style manual.  This reviewer did catch a number of errors I was able to tidy up, but this person (who was always anonymous to me) also tried to argue that I had to eliminate all contractions (I dare you to find that rule in the MLA style manual) and to change all italics into underlined text.  I had a lot of italics in my diss, both for book titles but also for emphasis— probably a little too much emphasis– and I thought then (and think now) that underlining is ugly.

Well, long-story a bit shorter, I actually went back and forth via email with this person for a while, and I ultimately had to get a “supervisor” involved in order to remind this office that I had successfully defended my dissertation.  I ended up presenting this person with a quote from that edition of the MLA style manual (the second?) which said italics were at least an acceptable substitute for underlining.  I finished, went on with my life, and became the tenured professor you see before you today.  I don’t know whatever happened to this reviewer, but I am guessing they are not happy with these new MLA changes.

Depending on what happens with English 328 next year, perhaps this could be a reading for that class….