Archive for February, 2007
February 26, 2007 11:31 pm
Go to Car Talk’s website. (Yes, the flashy Rubix cubes are an eyesore, I’m sorry — but that’s Car Talk for you.).
Read or listen to this week’s puzzler. I am intrigued, but have no ideas yet. Do you?
Categories: books
14 Comments »
February 24, 2007 6:56 pm
Poke brought this to my attention a while back on her blog (last paragraph); here’s the most recent development: A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source.
First reaction: Uh…duh? Like I said in the comments on her blog, trying to use Wikipedia as a source for a research paper is not only a poor choice of source material, but also incredibly lazy. I wasn’t allowed to cite encyclopedias in my high school essays; college students should be digging much, much deeper than that. Wiki is a great tool, but not a scholarly tool.
I do think that the idea of assigning students to create Wikipedia entries is pretty nifty, though.
My great joy in the NY Times piece is that Jimmy Wales seems very calm about it and says pretty much the same thing I did. Awesome guy.
Categories: college, in the news, technologia
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February 22, 2007 11:52 pm
Get Fuzzy. Foodar the cat (yup, that’s food+radar) is hilarious, but it’s Bucky’s comment in the last panel that I love. It’s funny becasue it’s true.
FFN. Props for the phrase “Rod Serling hat.” I love Twilight Zone.
Sally Forth. The girls have spent the last few strips looking down at Hilary’s mom’s 40th birthday party and commenting on how dull it seems — just a bunch of adults standing around. I love the simplicity of the last panel.
Any thoughts on what we’ll be like at forty?
Categories: comics
3 Comments »
February 21, 2007 2:23 pm
This morning I’ve been catching up on book publishing newsletters that one of my profs forwards to us. Most of it is business-y (mergers and appointments and one heck of a mess with a distributor going bankrupt), but in between the cracks you can find the fun stuff. So here are three tidbits to make you say “huh!”
1. Bookstore tourism. That’s right, independent bookstores are becoming tourist destinations. It’s a little kooky, but I think it’s cute.
2. Viggo Mortenson founded an independent press (and they have a very strange main page). I knew he was a poet and an artist, but this was news to me! This blog has a nice piece all about it.
3. This year’s Newbery Award winner is causing a furor among parents and librarians. Apparently it uses the word “scrotum,” which, you know, is completely inappropriate for nine to twelve year old children. Because of course children are entirely asexual and we wouldn’t want them to learn the scientific words for their genetalia. It would be much better for them to be completely embarassed by their own sexuality and become repressed or repressive adults who freak out when scientifically appropriate words like “scrotum” appear in children’s books.
Whether the book is any good or not I don’t know (though now I intend to seek it out) — reviews are mixed, though as noted, it did just win the Newbery.
Categories: books, grad school
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I was greatly disappointed by my poetry class last night. Situation was that I had to turn in a paper, give a presentation, and submit a poem for discussion, so rather than stress about three things, I used a poem that I wrote for the poetry class I took a year and a half ago. It was a piece that I didn’t think all that highly of, but which my professor liked, so I had some confidence in it, but I also knew it had problems. So I sent it off to my classmates and went to work on the paper and presentation which didn’t go all that well, I thought, but I’m just glad it’s over. Yik.
This particular poem is a description (of sorts) of a night at Furman when I was walking to my apartment one evening, probably going home at ten from a CCLC shift. It was a foggy night and I came around the corner into a slightly wooded area around the apartments and a little way ahead of me was this girl who was practicing for a kickline or something — literally taking three steps and then throwing a leg up over her head, three steps, kick, three steps, kick.
Well, strange thing that my brain is, it comes up with the Saggy Baggy Elephant, who goes around the jungle dancing one, two, three, kick! one, two, three, kick! Is this ringing a bell to anybody?
Show me more… »
Categories: bag stories, books, grad school, music, scribblings
9 Comments »
This was funny.
There needs to be a story about this.
Which reminds me! Liz, I saw The Ghost and Mrs. Muir last week, which was good fun! Thanks for the recommendation.
Categories: miscellany, movies
2 Comments »
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