Category: Uncategorized

In one of the more amusing postings I’ve seen on a blog I read which is regularly amusing, the writer of Ann Arbor is Overrated notes that in upstate New York, they serve a style of hot dog referred to as a “michigan.” Let me attempt to explain.

There are a few “unique foods” in Michigan– lots of cherries up north, and way up north, you’ve got pasties, the meat pies served with gravy oh so popular in the “U.P.” But in southeast Michigan, I don’t think there really is a distinctive food product. Oh sure, I suppose there’s a lot of good Polish and Middle Eastern food in this area, and Detroit does make a big deal out of the Polish jelly doughnut called a “Paczki,” but hey, when all is said and done, a doughnut is a doughnut. Unless, of course, it’s a Krispy Kreme, but that’s a whole different discussion.

The Detroit area does have these places called “koney islands” (or, sometimes, “coney islands”). “Koney islands” the places, are diners, and they almost always serve a food product called a “koney island,” which is a chili dog. No, I don’t have any idea why they call diners koney islands and chili dogs koney islands.

Anyway, AAO discovered this link to what he (I presume “he,” but I don’t really know) calls a “bizarro-world” in New York where they sell these “michigan” (with a small M?) hot dogs. Be sure to visit the comments– they’re more than half the fun.

All of this inspired a “Daddy-Will” dining experience on Friday at a Koney Island. Will didn’t have school, so we went to Briarwood Mall in Ann Arbor and lunched at Kerby’s Koney Island, which is a local chain. I suppose we could have gone to a more “authentic” koney island, like Abe’s Coney Island in downtown Ypsilanti, but that’s a bit too skanky and smoky for a seven year old, let alone me. We took the more white bread approach. Incidentally, across from the Kerby’s Koney Island in the mall is a California Pizza Kitchen, and down the way two stores is a sushi place. That seems so Ann Arbor to me.

Will had the chicken fingers (where did they ever come up with that name, anyway? it always inspires a vision of mutant birds for me) and I, of course, had the coney (or koney) island. How was it? Well, it was fried chicken breast and a chili dog. We ate it, it tasted like food (more or less), and I, er, “remembered” my chili dog pretty much for the rest of the day. I don’t think I would not go back, but I also don’t think it will become my regular place.

But at least I’ve been once.

I thought this was very amusing and a lot of fun to play with:

http://www.googlefight.com/

No, I don’t mean a remodeling of this space. I mean krause.emich.edu/blog, which is where I used to keep an official blog with MoveableType, a software that continues to haunt me from beyond the electronic grave. That includes all the archives of my previous blog.

Why, you ask? Well, despite the fact that I had gone so far as to delete the MoveableType application from my computer, I kept getting these email spam messages informing me that I had some sort of trackback ping from some sort of Texas Hold’em Poker web site. Some days, I’d get 100 of these email messages.

So that’s it. I pulled the plug on that site completely. At some point, when I decide to redecorate this blog, I will probably put up some kind site that includes some previous blog entries, particular the ones that have to do with my “Happy Academic” posts, which is where I was getting most hits on the old blog anyway.

For me, these new spam messages are yet another reason to not use MT. I used MT-Blacklist and all of that, but honest to God, I shouldn’t be spending the time I spend to blog as it is. I certainly don’t have time to spend a ton of time deleting junk.

Or let me put it this way: MT is cool and everything and it has some features (like categories) that I wish were available on blogger. However, since I switched back to Blogger back in June or so, I have not had one piece of blog spam in the comments. None. Zero. Nada.

I’m going through one of those classic bad behavior cycles as a result of stress. “What stress,” you ask? Well, I’m in no mood to be too confessional, but it mostly has to do with work and, when I think about it, it is mostly “success stress,” if that makes sense. There are issues with potential positive changes with jobs and/or moves to different places, there’s a bunch of stuff I need to do to stay afloat with my teaching, I’ve got various reports and paperwork to write, meetings and more meetings, etc., etc. Like I said, none of this is bad (it’s not like I’m worried about being laid off or fired or something), but good things can make you stressed out, too.

My “coping” mechanism is not taking care of myself (eating too much and eating badly, not getting enough sleep, etc.), which in turn makes me more stressed out, so I take even worse care of myself, which makes me gain weight, which makes me even more stressed out, etc.

I should probably stop that, shouldn’t I?

But that’s not really the reason for this post. The reason is some interesting stuff I’ve stumbled across about professional eating.

Victor at “Steamed Rice” seems to share my fascination with this “sport,” and he’s actually done the work of collecting a lot of links and even some reporting on a grilled cheese sandwich contest in the Los Angeles area and on the controversy surrounding a chicken wing eating contest. There are a lot of links on his site, and he has a category called “Gluttony and Food” where most of this stuff shows up. Great site.

I doubt I’ll have time in this life to do it, but at one point, I was contemplating an attempt at writing a novel that had professional eating as the backdrop to the action of the book. Professional eating is such a bizarre and fascinating thing to me, a perfect metaphor for contemporary times. I mean, this is taking one of the original “seven deadly sins” and turning it into a virtue, a contest, and (inexplicably) a sport. For some reason, all the top competitive eaters are thin and Asian (the guy who is considered the best competitive eater in the world is from Japan) and not the big fat slobs you would expect. This would add an “international intrigue/nationalist spin” to the book, I think.

Anyway, I just think it has the makings of a very funny and strange novel. Maybe I’ll write it, but if you are reading this and want to beat me to it, feel free….

I don’t have a lot of time or desire to post now (WAY past my bedtime), but I got kinda sucked into tonight’s episode of the Charlie Rose Show on PBS where he was talking to folks about blogs. Specifically, he was talking to people from blogs I rarely read: Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, Ann Marie “Wonkette” Cox, Joe “former Howard Dean guy” Trippe, and Andrew “Andrew Sullivan” Sullivan.

I didn’t catch the whole thing, and yet I don’t think I missed much. About five or seven years ago (I think), I remember seeing a documentary about the rise and fall of so-called “grunge” music, how it went from being this truly underground “happening,” specifically in the Pacific Northwest, to this International phenomenon featured on runways in Paris (flannel tops, torn jeans, etc.). Help me out with the name of that flick of you know it. Anyway, that international exposure was the beginning of the end of grunge.

Charlie Rose is hardly the same level of public notoriety as top 40 and high fashion, but are we now on the downward decline of blogs? Are they a victim of their own success? Hmmm….

See this, The Steve Perry Fan Fiction page. I haven’t read anything here, but these people look serious.

Sometimes, the sheer randomness of the stuff you come across on the web is just mind-numbing.

I’m not saying that Annette and I aren’t romantics, but neither of us have ever made that big of a deal out of Valentine’s day. She’s out of town until tonight, though I did get her a small little surprise for when she gets home– nothing too elaborate, but kind of cute.

Valentine’s day seems to be a pretty big deal in Will’s school, but in one fashion or another, all thoughts of romantic love have been pretty much completely drained from it. In the spirit of everyone being equal and above average, everyone in Will’s class gets a Valentine– no giving to just your friends or the ones you have a crush on. Just to flatten it out a bit more, kid Valentine cards are gender appropriate. In other words, the girls give Barbie doll Valentine cards, and the boys give Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle cards. Usually, there is some kind of candy involved, though not as much as Halloween.

Anyway, my witnessing of Will’s grade school experience has made this interesting recollection and critique about the grade school Valentine experience not surprising.

Two other V day links, one kinda cute, one of The Onion variety humor:

• The Acme Heart Maker allows you to put your own lettering on a candy heart. You are kind of limited in the number of letters, though. Here’s the one I made:

• The Onion love coupons. Coupons include “Entitles bearer to pick the porn movie” and “One dinner at restaurant with silverware.”

Yesterday, I received two emails within about three hours of each other about the dangers of blogging and keeping your job. One came from the Tech-Rhet mailing list about this guy in Great Britain who was fired from his bookstore job because of his blog. This is actually old news to me– more on that in a second. The other post, which came from a student of mine, is a Yahoo! news article called “Free Expression Can Be Costly When Bloggers Bad-Mouth Jobs.” It’s sort of a summary of the various ways that some well-known bloggers have been canned– though, according to the article at least, the “totally hip” term for this is being “dooced.”

Anyway, four thoughts:

• I actually posted about this back in January, and I feel pretty much the same way then that I do now. I certainly believe in free speech and academic freedom, but at the same time, I’m not sure that gives one the right to say just anything they want.
• I think that one of the problems that these employee blogs have is they just can’t seem to keep their identities hidden, I suppose because they like the attention, and maybe they kind of actually want to be “caught” in some way. It’s kind of like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime. Here’s a telling passage from that Yahoo! article:

  “At first, he [the author of Waiter Rant, which is a pretty well-written blog] said, he did not tell anyone about the blog. He especially didn’t want his mother to read it. But he became frustrated the blog was getting no attention so one day he sent a link to a popular blogger in England. Today, the anonymous waiter has more than 1,000 readers a day.

  “‘At some point, I started to care who read it,’ the waiter said. ‘Anyone who produces anything, you like feedback.'”

  And, I would submit, an appropriate synonym for “feedback” here is “attention.”

• It seems to me that the two uniting factors in the kinds of posts/writing that get people fired are personal attacks and talking about contractual trade secrets. Calling your boss an “asshole” is never going to endear you to management, even if you disguise the identity of your boss with some pseudonym. And if you work for a company/organization where you are specifically not allowed to write or talk about “X” and you write about “X,” then you’ll probably end up fired.

  While I’ve written critically about some things here at EMU, I don’t think I’ve made personal attacks. I mean, I had plenty of gripes about former EMU president Sam Kirkpatrick, but he was certainly a “public figure” when I was complaining about him. In fact, everything I posted was pretty much my take on what had been reported in the newspapers.

  I would never post something mean about individual students or faculty colleagues or whoever. That would be completely unprofessional, and I suppose it would arguably cross the line of academic freedom, too.

• Which leads me to my fourth thought: tenure, academic freedom and the rights of professors to speak their mind (e.g., Ward Churchill) is different situation from folks “in the real world” getting fired from jobs for writing the wrong thing, and it’s different in subtle but important ways. To quote from the Yahoo article I link to above:

  “‘In most states,’ said Gregg M. Lemley, a St. Louis labor lawyer, ‘if an employer doesn’t like what you’re talking about, they can simply terminate you.'”

  In academia, the concept of tenure and academic freedom specifically allow faculty to say things that might be controversial and/or “not liked” by an employer and lots of other people. At most places (including the University of Colorado), this concept is literally documented– in other words, tenure and academic freedom are more or less contractual. This is why Churchill wasn’t simply fired and why his ongoing status as a tenured professor is being reviewed right now.

  Now, for most academics (as is the case for most everybody else), the concept of “academic freedom” never really becomes an issue. I mean, I don’t think any of my ideas or scholarly writings are controversial enough to land me in Churchill-like trouble, and I can’t think of anyone I work with who might have a “freedom” problem either. But it’s always the extreme cases that test ideals, and I think that upholding the academic freedom of someone like Churchill ultimately benefits more “middle-of-the-road” academics like me.

As I mentioned a few days ago, I sent an email to the members of the Colorado Board of Regents about Ward Churchill– not so much in support of him (in my mind), but in support of the cause of academic freedom, free speech, and tenure. Here’s what I received back this morning from something called “CU General Distribution List:”

SUBJECT: Response Concerning Professor Churchill
FROM: Philip P. DiStefano, Interim Chancellor
SENDER: Pauline Hale, UCB Communications Executive Director
DATE: February 10, 2005

On behalf of the Board of Regents and President Hoffman, I want to thank you for taking the time to comment on Professor Ward Churchill. While the issue is difficult, we can only be served by having an open and honest dialog as we move forward together.

Let me state unequivocally that Professor Churchill’s views are his own and do not represent the views of University of Colorado faculty, staff, students, administration or Regents.

As you may suspect, we have received comments from concerned local and national citizens expressing viewpoints that range from urging for his dismissal from the CU-Boulder faculty and other disciplinary measures to supporting his right to express his opinions.

At the Feb. 3 Board of Regents meeting, I announced a course of action that provides due process. Over the next few weeks, I will oversee a thorough examination of Professor Churchill’s writings, speeches, tape recordings and other works. The purpose of this internal review is to determine whether Professor Churchill overstepped his bounds as a faculty member, showing cause for dismissal as outlined in the Laws of the Regents.

At the conclusion of this examination, I will determine whether to issue a notice of intent to dismiss for cause, other action as appropriate, or no action. If a notice to dismiss for cause or some other action is issued then the subsequent process will be governed by the Laws of the Regents.

Before such a decision can be made, the University must observe due process as required by the U.S. Constitution and the Laws of the Regents. The University is obligated to carefully balance the protections afforded by the First Amendment, as well as follow very specific University rules and processes for faculty discipline. Our processes will guide our actions in the most thoughtful and equitable manner.

I am hopeful that you will consider the actions already taken to deal with this matter that strikes so deeply at both our national conscience and the core tenets of any institution of higher education.

President Hoffman has stated, “The rights afforded those of us in the academic community to pursue our scholarly work come with a heavy responsibility to behave with integrity and professionalism and to meet the highest ethical standards our disciplines demand. These standards create the boundaries within which academic freedom rests.”

I encourage you to visit the CU-Boulder News Center Web site at for additional information and updates on this situation.

Again, we thank you for your interest in the University of Colorado and for expressing your opinion.

Sincerely,

Philip P. DiStefano Interim Chancellor

Just a few thoughts about this:

• I hope this doesn’t mean I’m going to start getting other emails from the “CU General Distribution List” about Colorado things I’m not that interested in. I get enough junk/spam as it is…
• It sounds to me like DiStefano is preparing to do what I would describe as the right thing. I’d hate to have his job though.
• It’s kind of interesting that CU folks decided to set up a specific web site to deal with this Churchill stuff, the title of which is “Background Information for Special Regents Meeting 2.3.05 (Ward Churchill) | Special Report | News Center | University of Colorado.” What’s that they say, even bad publicity is still publicity?

As you can see by looking down the column to the right here, I’ve been playing around with this service Flickr a bit this evening, It’s kinda fun, but I was hoping to upload a whole bunch of pictures tonight, but it turns out I’m already up to my limit to the month. Bummer; I didn’t even upload much.

Anyway, if you want to skip the “zeitgeist” show, you can see my pics directly by clicking here. Had I known this was all I was getting this month, I would have prioritized better, but more (and better?) pictures are coming soon.