1. Let’s make an NCAA March Madness bracket-pool for bloggers. 
   Takers?  No monetary gambling.  The stakes will be comments on the
   winner’s blog.  Don’t figure I have a chance at picking the
   victors of many games.  I like Stanford, Illinois and Memphis this year.  First-round
   dancer: Illinois-Chicago.
2. I appreciate the privacy
   argument for athletes who are subject to drug testing.  But I also
   contend that we can’t trust the sporting arena unless controls ensure drugs
   aren’t affecting sports.  I generate the random lists and help organize
   one of the few random drug testing programs in small college
   athletics.  We hear plenty of arguments about the invasiveness of the
   test (a standard, five-panel DOT screening).  We also hear a fair
   amount of praise for challenging drug use head on and affirming the
   performative integrity of our student-athletes.
3.  At a two hour follow-up meeting with the document-imaging people
   today, I noticed that the five laptops at the conference table corresponded
   in quality to the authority of the personnel using the equipment. 
   There were five reps from the doc-imaging company, five reps from the
   University.  To my left, the person with the most authority sat at a
   glitzy IBM Thinkpad; her assistant plunked in notes on a newish Dell; the
   three others moused around on run-of-the-mill Compaqs.  Should we be
   concerned at their hardware disunity?  Or the irony in leafing through
   an eighty-page paper plan for paperless workflow?
4. Ph., who will turn 13 in ten days, asked me what I thought about
   helping him start a weblog.  His older friends have been carrying on about ejournaling. Dunno, I said.  Just plain don’t
   know. *Can I read it?* 
5. I think my C’s carpool evaporated today. One of the riders ducked out
   because of too much other travel in the weeks ahead.  Plan B? 
   Damn, it’s going to cost a lot of chips to catch a flight at this late
   date.  It was going to be a long drive from KC to San Antonio (but a
   comfy one, thanks to good friends at the car rental place).  I planned
   on taking in a few sessions, bumming up and down the Riverwalk,
   maybe blogging the conference a bit, for the heck of it.  What now?
6. Halfway through Spring Break now, so why am I more tired and more
   disorganized than I was on Monday.  Theoretical down-time gets turvied into catch-up time, time to work on my long list of stuff to
   do.  I’m getting a lot done, and idle time makes me stir crazy, so I
   guess there’s no problem with having a week off from teaching to get a few
   other things in order. 

Did you see Capricorn One–the movie about the staged mission to
Mars?  I looked it up, learned that it came out in 1978, that it got mixed
reviews.  It was one of the only action movies on laser discs at the house
of a childhood friend where I often slept over on Friday nights.  We
watched Capricorn One probably thirty or forty times.  Thinking
back, I can’t remember anything about the quality of the movie (granted, I was
nine or ten by the time we were watching it on disc).  But I do remember
the premise: the mission to Mars was faked, and the government and the media
were complicit in the scheme.  McLuhanesque, eh?

The movie has come to mind a time or two in recent months, reminders brought
on by an actual Mars
landing (it did happen, right?), the whole WMD spinabout (audio-taps
detailing uranium
transactions), and now, the launch of Bush’s
ad campaign.  Notably, his first ads are generating considerable hubbub
because they make full use of staging and arrangement.  Because they’re foregrounded
by the President’s voice making promises about his belief in the American
people, there builds a complex problem of discernment: how much to
believe.  I came across this from MSNBC (via I
Know What I Know. I Sing What I Said.):

Another less-publicized aspect of the ad flap: the use of paid
actors–including two playing firefighters with fire hats and uniforms in
what looks like a fire station. "Where the hell did they get those
guys?" cracked Harold Schaitberger, president of the International
Association of Fire Fighters, which has endorsed John Kerry, when he first saw
the ads. (A union spokesman said the shots prompted jokes that the fire hats
looked like the plastic hats "from a birthday party.") "There’s
many reasons not to use real firemen," retorted one Bush media adviser.
"Mainly, its cheaper and quicker." ^FULL
ARTICLE

Cheaper and quicker, indeed. So how do we whittle out the believable,
authentic bits from the spin? Of course, I don’t find the ads the least bit
compelling.  They’re politically unmoving.  I watch them out of
curiosity because they’re defining pop culture and creating a media stir. 
And they’re funny.  I laugh aloud at the line, "I’m George W. Bush and
I approved this message."  I know it’s become a mantra of ownership
among the leaders politic, but it’s so flimsy.  Does it mean the Prez
previewed the ad?  Revised its content?  Levied critical, reflexive
input to its production?  Whatever the case, it’s hard to regard it as
serious, responsible and emblematic of the best national leadership we can drum
up in ’04.  Don’t want to seem jaded, but voting is beginning to feel more
like damage control than a championed, contributory process.

In a coffee shop this morning, I waited patiently while the Fordists (hey,
it’s a Ford, where else am I going to take it) tapped and prodded my vehicle,
changing out the oil and detailing it through a DMV inspection. Need to
renew the tags, and someone with authority and license has to sign the paper
affirming everything (except the driver) is road safe. Torn wiper
blades and a burnt-out tail light. WTF! You’d be sick on my behalf
if I told you how much they charged. I had to have the
inspection–today.

But I was at a coffee shop walking distance from the car shop. I was
sipping on some exotic, way-too-strong coffee. You know the kind that’s so
potent it makes your tongue feel dry? That’s the kind of coffee I was
drinking. Empty place, since it’s Monday morning, eight o’clock. I
was reading Scholes. Chapter four: A Flock of Cultures. All about
the etymology of canon and Hegel’s brand of history and problems with
Great Books and conceptions of Western Civilization. It turns to
suggestions for curricular design, and I’ve been meaning all day to write about
it, to expand the few notes I scribbled down. Maybe tomorrow.

It was an empty place, but a dad and his young daughter (guessing at the
relationships) took seats at the table next to me. The girl was two-ish,
chiming through songs (like the one about a crowd of monkeys jumping on the bed–see entry title). The dad was fumbling with a huge brownie (breakfast?),
dividing it into adult and child-sized portions. Now that I’m writing
this, I can’t remember exactly why I thought this was relevant to Scholes, to my
day, the oil change, or you.

So I think it was the daughter’s sense of unfairness in the brownie
apportionment. She was really young, but she knew immediately that her dad
was eating the bigger piece of the brownie. She kept asking him, "Da,
why you eating da big one?" And he tried to answer, "Because I’m
hungry." And she asked again. He tried a different answer,
"Because it is yummy." She kept asking. Geez. So I
was eavesdropping, but they were only four feet away, and I was still reading
Scholes with most of my attention. Her curiosity was incredibly
persistent, and it became more emphatic on the word "big."
"Da, why you eating da big one?" He didn’t say,
"Because I’m big, too." You know, spatial relationships,
proximity, size: early (and lasting) understandings of social justice.