Monday, January 31, 2005

Retromediation and Novelty

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Frankly, as I read "Remediation, Genre, and Motivation: Key Concepts for Teaching with Weblogs," by Brooks, Nichols and Priebe, all of NDSU, I wondered about the consequences of framing weblogs as remediations of older forms--the journal, the notebook and the filter.  What results from a setup of weblogs that calibrates their potential in terms of paper-based corollaries?  It's difficult to know exactly how this was framed beyond the evidence we find in the article (the framework, the research narrative, the questionnaire, the data-sets, the conclusion) and in the related links (the weblogs themselves, a syllabus, a reading list, adjacent assignments) so I'm reluctant to respond to the essay with firmly resolved skepticism, especially considering that it reflects some of the earliest uses of blogs to teach writing. Yet through this limited lens, I have doubts about why we need to liken blogs to paper counterparts.  What's gained?  Is it a way to legitimate composition pedagogy adventurously (inventively, imaginatively!) straying from long-recognized forms, forms often occupying the lion's share of weight in the event-oriented syllabus or program-wide curricular design?  Is it a way to call up, for students, a sense of the familiar?  Although it is, perhaps to a lesser degree than resonates in this article, necessary at times to present students with a grounding in the familiar, when Brooks et. al. tell us, "we wanted to balance the novelty of the activity with a grounding in familiar literate practices," my initial thought is that a high stakes flattening/deadening/adequation is inevitably brought about.  And this, I think, must bear on motivation, if only subtly, tacitly.

What do I suggest instead?  Well, it depends on the broader aims of the course. For collective course blogs, I'm less and less inclined to model exemplary entries for the whole class, and rather than talking about what blogs enable by connecting them to the written forms they (more or less) resemble, I prefer to introduce blogs to students in terms of their impact on how we think (sure, paper variations impact thought, too), develop and write with/about ideas and so on (more to this, but I'll let it rest here).

Me me me

In the footsteps of M. and K.:
What time did you get up this morning? 6:40 a.m.
Diamonds or pearls? Pass.
What was the last film you saw at the cinema? A Series of Unfortunate Events
What is your favorite TV show? Family Guy
What did you have for breakfast? Two coffees, toast and eggs (would've done PB&J on toast, but we're low on J).
What is your middle name? Norton (after maternal gram's maiden name)
Favorite cuisine? Berbere sauce on injera. Where's my mail order of berbere powder? I placed it nearly two weeks ago!
What foods do you dislike? Eggplant
What is your favorite flavor? Vanilla.
What is your favorite CD at the moment? Velvet Underground and Nico.
What kind of car do you drive? Mostly hoofing it these days. Honda Element when it's available.
Favorite sandwich? French--aguacate, jamon, turkey, tomato, mayo, mustard on wheat. Hmm. Or ruebens. Ruebens are tasty. And bratwurst--if you'd call it "sandwich."
What characteristic do you despise? Bossiness and arrogance are tied.
Favorite item of clothing? Grey sweatshirt.
If you could go anywhere in the world on vacation, where would you go? Ottawa?
What color is your bathroom? Caramel? Something tannish.
Favorite brand of clothing? If it fits, I'm thrilled.
Where would you retire to? Huatulco or Xalapa.
Favorite time of the day? Now.
What was your most memorable birthday? I can't remember.
Where were you born? Michigan. What, are you trying to find out my password?
Favorite sport to watch? Basketball.
What laundry detergent do you buy? Um, is that for washing clothes?
When is your birthday? Fifth of May, '74.
Are you a morning person or a night person? Switches around, depending on obligations.
What is your shoe size? 14
Do you have any pets? None. And it's very disheartening. Next question.
Any new and exciting news you'd like to share with your family & friends? Miss you much, and sorry I haven't called lately.
What did you want to be when you were little? A tomato farmer.
What are you doing today? Reading, tracing themes, contemplating a shower.
If there was one thing you could do right now, $ is no object, what would you do? Open a restaurant and declare myself head chef.
If you only had a few days left on earth, what would you do? Panic. What the hell happened?

Sunday, January 30, 2005

Only Slightly Less Burdened

In case you were wondering, I've been fending off a stalwart northeastern head cold.  That explains (no it doesn't, yes it does--okay, only partially) recent entries at EWM.  I've also been buttoning down the canvas for a wild week ahead; the reading load has spiked (an entire January Sunday getting to know Emig's Web of Meaning), and, in another course, I'm first into the fray as presenter of chapter one from White's Tropics of Discourse on Thursday morning.  Knees high, leading the parade.  And so I've been prepping obsessively, combing over stuff I think I mostly get. 

And since I felt apprehension throughout last semester about bringing academic work into this blogspace, I'm turning over a new leaf and issuing an exclusive early release of the summary that goes with that presentation of White's first chapter here, before it's circulated anywhere else.  And then I'm going to eat; after that: give two-thirds of the house members free haircuts (that'd be me and Ph.).  I'd love feedback on the summary, if you're up for it.

Oh, and one other thing, dear blogosphere, I need a CCCC room-share in SF.  The west coast swank-elite wants dang near 200 clams each night, and for that, I can probably stay awake for three days.  But seriously, low needs room-share, 50:50. NCTE used to offer a web-board for practical matches such as the one I'm seeking; where is that now?  The only alternative is to re-draw the strapped personal budget for conference travel. Ideas? Folks known to be in the same bind?

White, c.1, "The Burden of History," Summary

White, Hayden. "The Burden of History." Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978. 27-50.

In his 1966 essay, "The Burden of History," Hayden White speaks of at least two burdens: the burden felt by the historian who works awkwardly from the middle-space between the imaginative, creative arts and the hard sciences, and the burden of history itself, bearing its conditionally drawn lessons on contemporary thought and action (41). From the outset, White seeks to account for the domains of art and science which have openly expressed contempt toward the historian's enterprise because of its soft methods, crude metaphors and ambiguous suppositions about the human sciences (27). He cites a literary tradition that culminates with Joyce's Stephen Dedalus who, in Ulysses, refers to history as the "'nightmare' from which Western man must awaken if humanity is to be served and saved" (31). This Nietzschean disavowal (32) of concerns about establishing a record of the past extends directly to the philosophical climate of post-WWI Europe, when, though clashing in gross juxtaposition, Hitler's nihilism and French existentialism--figured primarily through Camus and Sartre--held similar views toward the prospect of history-making: it was worthless. The inexplicable surrounds of war-torn civilization pointed to history's limited explanatory power; as historians sought to account for what happened, their failure to explain widespread destruction and atrocity was exposed (36). Only in rare cases, such as the work of Norman Brown (39, 45), do we find historiography set on sorting through the influence of "outmoded institutions, ideas, and values" on the current "way of looking at the world" (39). Consequently, historians, who, according to White, can be distinguished by their methods (42), deserve a share of the credit for the proliferation of ahistorical attitudes; accountability extends particularly from history's privileging of a limited range of artistic forms, such as the 19th century realist novel and, on the other hand, the rigidly positivistic proofs associated with the physical sciences--both of which mistakenly regard recorded history as an end in itself (41). To correct this quandary, White contends that historians might rethink their procedures in terms of the literary artist's use of metaphor and the scientist's use of hypothesis, both of which are tentative, experimental schemes used to guide ideas beyond tentative speculation (47). Resolved as such, the historian could negotiate the truthful/imaginary binary (46), and, drawing upon the orders valued by literary artists and scientists, the "historical account could be treated as a heuristic rule which self-consciously eliminates certain kinds of data from consideration as evidence" (46, emphasis in original). Furthermore, White argues that historians need to learn how to take seriously and engage contemporaneously with the questions driving other fields. He also urges reconsideration of narrative bias (43) toward "an awareness," conveyed by Hegel, Balzac and Tocqueville, "of how the past could be used to effect an ethically responsible transition from the present to the future" (49), underscored by "dynamic elements" (49) and "the essentially provisional character of the metaphorical constructions" (50).

Burr-words: cultural palingenesis (41), hypostatized (48), Fabian tactic (27), heuristic rule (46)


Said today, less context

Honey is fruit.  Honey is too fruit.

I saw it fall.

Mandarin oranges, mandarin oranges.

Saturday, January 29, 2005

Oh And I Guess That I Just Don't Know

lou reed
You're Lou Reed. God, you are cool, can I touch you so the magic will rub off? You are perceptive, witty, and badass. You wear cool shades, even at night, and probably wear black more than most people. You don't give a f'ck what other people think, but you are also very sensitive in the way that you pick up on things that others don't. Sometimes you come off as an asshole, but that's what makes you cool. You are a poet, and you embody New York City. You will still be hip when you are old, and artists love you.

Which rad old school 70's glam icon are you? (with pics)
brought to you by Quizilla

A crucial part of today's work is beginning to think like an exam-taker because I have at least one final testing event this semester (others are seminar projects, essays, distributed products and so on). What better place to brush up on answering tough, reflective questions than Quizilla?  Yah, I'd say this is a generous match (esp. on cool quotient, wearing black, poetic rating, a-hole-ness, depending on who judges), but I answered the questions honestly.  Can't tell what the other outcomes might have been (maybe everybody's L. Reed), but I'll take this one.  Fitting that I've had a Black Angel's Death earworm violining my head all day long. 

To the cozy brown snow of the east
Gone to choose, choose again

Friday, January 28, 2005

Goes Round and Round and Round

Now that I'm on with the more serious and alert segment of my morning (up next, summing up c.1 of H. White's Tropics of Discourse), I have to point you to a bit I landed via Metafilter on proposed legislation to fine drivers of spinner-adorning autos in Iowa.  Spinning hubcaps can be misleading, you know; they give off the appearance that the vehicle's wheels are moving when they aren't. When the vehicle stops, the wheel covers keep moving.  When the vehicle's moving, the wheel covers could be rolling in reverse motion. They're perceptually dishonest.  Unethical.  Basically, expensive lies. And so to curb rampant wheel-cap mendacity among Iowa drivers, the fine would charge ten bucks for the offense.  I'm sharing this just because the comments are a riot, from comparisons of spinners to moonwalking (which also should be banned, yes?) and rear-view mirror danglers.  And definitely scroll down to the Jetta collapsed under the load of wood (in the linked entry, not the MF comments).

Open in a different tab:  Slate's Ed-in-Chief on "Blog Overkill." Gist: you be careful fetishizing new media, and journalists are s l o w e r than bloggers:

The biggest difference between me and conventional bloggers is that I usually pause between first thought and posting. Inspired by the slow food movement, I like to think of myself as a slow blogger. Sometimes I'm so slow--as this Wednesday dispatch from a Friday-Saturday conference proves--that I resemble a conventional journalist.

And

I'll send a U.S. dollar to the first who writes "Shafer doesn't get it."

For a dollar? Shafer doesn't get it.  If not getting it means overgeneralizing about the thoughtfulness and care girding most writing in the blogosphere or, in another spot, suggesting that new media merely mimic the work of old media, then it deserves more nuance.  But subtleties aside, the essay offers insight to the tensions between clashing info-economies--the flows and mediums and controls and values tangled together.  And that's worthwhile, especially if such attempts bring about dialogue that pushes any of us beyond revolution/stagnation cliches.

Thursday, January 27, 2005

Heliostatic Bounce

BendAlpine townsfolk in Rattenberg, Austria figured out one way to promote "psychological well-being" despite resting in the shadow of sun-blocking mountain (Statberg Mtn.). To deny the ominous rock-face one consequence of its presence, a redirect, a mirror-refraction from nearby Kramsach. (via)

Dr. Peter Erhard: "Erecting mirrors to shine a bit of light on our village is a great idea." Redirect.

Here in Syracuse, we don't live at the foot of the Alps, but Thornden Hill obscures sunrays in the neighborhood.  Well, the hill and the clouds, and the standpipe. On overcast, frigid winter days, I've started thinking about ways to bring such a device to Westcott (E. Syracuse).  But even more than an application for lifting the shadows with eight-foot mirrors, I dig this setup for its figurative applications. Redirect. Shine a bit of....

If all of this is unusually off-balance, the break I deserve is that I've been in just more than seven hours worth of class time devoted to prefigurative tropes, blog issues, RSS feeds, Bloglines, OPML imports with 205ers, Hayden White, transclusion.  To relax this evening: a quick game of Operation.  Guess the part nobody could get.  Yeah.  Wrenched ankle. Gets me all the way from naive metaphor to self-critical irony.

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Tech Distribution

Last week at Worldchanging, Alex Steffen posted a few links to InterConnection, an organization actively improving technology access.  By no means am I an access expert.  I am, nevertheless, familiar with some of the commonplace arguments: if we (teachers/scholars) privilege particular forms of knowing and performing, we must take stock of the factors affecting widespread, democratic access to the apparatuses/devices that make such forms of knowing and performing possible.  Put on the brakes...tap them gently.  Or abandon.  Give it the ol' Luddite hammer. Drive it off a cliff.  Without being curt, this is, more or less, a usual way of taking up questions of access. 

Unfortunately, because access pre-conditions everything we might do with technologies and particularly electronic devices (no access means no next step, right?  Anybody have a pen to lend?) access rationale often curb whatever might follow.  And that's a problem.  I can't think of anyone who would say we should *not* be cognizant of access issues, but I can think of arguments I've heard that until access is corrected, we must withstand pushing technology's ends, exploring limits, developing pedagogies around them, etc.  I tend to disagree with the || pause || model for addressing access limitations.  For this reason, I'm always watching (passive, huh?) for actual practical change--organized resolution--toward correcting the distribution of, access to and training toward uses of electronic technology.  Too often, I think I stop short (in our interchanges on access) of seriously taking up what must happen to change who gets to use computers and how such uses are prefigured by material privilege.  But InterConnection seems to be doing something about it--a good enough reason for me to circulate links to them. 

From another entry at Worldchanging, this link to community-centered sites/projects.

Tuesday, January 25, 2005

Li-li-logging

Van Dijck suggests that we might think of a weblog as a journal or diary nouveau--the result of digital media and the internet blending to enable linked writing spaces.  I like the genealogy she traces: the long (papery) tradition of daily record-keeping from the confessional, lock-n-keyed entries of a teenager to the "communal means of expressing and remembering"  we find in the nautical records of S. Pole explorers.  And yet I'm uneasy with the correlation between blogs and diaries, perhaps because "that's just journaling, right?" often comes with a sneer meant to infantilize/trivialize the medium of weblogs (or perhaps that's just my own sensitivity to such suggestions, which I have, at times, thought to be pejorative, aimed at demeaning that which bloggers claim to find so meaningful).

I don't want to go blog-wild with this entry, but I do want to register one half-formed idea: the label genre, while it might be appropriate for the "varied and heterogeneous" category of diaries, seems to work less well when applied to blogs.  Half formed...perhaps less...that idea. Genre, as I think of it, imposes a kind of hard edge to the scope of what's being defined.  And, because blog, as Mortensen and Walker point out, can be understood as an action (verb), I like to think of blogs as considerably more varied and blog as infused with doing/performance more than any genre (genera/kind) designation affords.  So that's all: differentiating blogs by genre always makes me pause, as it did in Van Dijck's article.  As well, on the correlations of weblog types to "link-logging" and "life-logging," I find the clusters to overlap, rather than to function discretely.  (I'd have to review again whether Van Dijck is explicit about this point, too).  I only mean to say that weblogs consisting primarily of entries reporting on links and weblogs consisting primarily of entries reporting on life rarely deny the encroachment or interference of the other.  As guiding definitions, they quickly deteriorate or blur, I think. For such rules (and rule-minded blogs), there are as many exceptions, and exceptionality is--for me--one of the more fascinating dimensions of the blogosphere.

I want to put this entry to rest, but before I do so, here are two more gems from Mortensen and Walker's article (which is, I think, full of simple, glowing bits).  First, they say, "I think better when I write" (269).  I really like what this says, mostly for what it does to remind me about my own habits of reading, writing and thinking.  I think I think better when I write, too, and it's been especially engaging to write in a blogspace where various folks can read into my writing to whatever extent their own interests compel them.  Second, they note that blogs have a discrete topoi: memory and meta-reflection (270)--another interesting piece I'd like to return to, explore, etc.

Cross-posted to Network(ed) Rhetorics.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Booking Social Nostalgia

Thursday's Daily Orange ran a feature story on the steady decline in sales of yearbooks to Syracuse seniors. SU students tend to live in campus dormitories; fraternities and sororities, academic and social clubs, and a relatively compact campus (among other factors, I suppose) combine to make the social patterns of each year's undergraduate cohort more encapsulable, as has long been the case in the annual memento of the yearbook, which, I'd say, works well at some colleges and universities and less well at others.  FWIW, I held off on posting these few notes about the fade of yearbooks and the coincident emergence of thefacebook.com, social software, and other network-enabling mobile technologies because I thought there was a slim chance the story, "Shelved books," would pop up on DO's web site.  So far, it hasn't.  But I was impressed to find that the DO offers an RSS feed.  When I didn't find one a few months ago, I sent the editor a quick email.  Never heard back, but at least the RSS feed is available now, even if many of the stories are late to filter to the web site or the syndication channel.

The story about waning interest in yearbooks coincided with my (teacherly) discovery that two distinct facebooks reach out to SU students, storing away profiles, tagged interests, class schedules and photos.  The university circulated an email in the fall encouraging students to sign up with SU Facebook.  I went ahead and signed up because I'm curious about self-defining tags as network indices, and I wanted to have a sense of the connective interface agreed upon by the administrators concerned with student life as well as the various uses to which such services were being put by SU students.  Then, as I developed WRT205 for this spring, I knew I wanted to talk about the ways in which such networking interfaces might serve more than social purposes.  What would it mean to carry social software over to other spheres, such as the semi-social arena of the writing classroom? When we met on Thursday (two days after I asked, on Tuesday, for them to log profiles in SU Facebook), we convened a brief discussion of social software.  After a few minutes, it occurred to everyone that we were talking about two separate spaces: SU Facebook (the site sanctioned by the university) and thefacebook.com (the original, more popular site, it turned out).  As it operates beyond the institution's domain of authority, as far as I can tell, thefacebook includes social "poking" and groups such as "I hate WRT105."  Only three or four 205 students (out of 20) didn't have profiles set up in thefacebook.com.  One cause for declining sales in yearbooks? The DO article didn't mention emerging technologies or new media, but clearly the new facebooks have redefined the static, single-class (only senior photos) and annually produced old facebook.  I now have profiles in both online facebooks, and yes, I enrolled in the group for 105 haters, though--ho hum--I still don't have any friends as of yet.  Even ran across the profile of a student from one of my sections of 105 in the group.  Heh.  Small(er) world.

 From the DO article, this passage reminded me of the relative price tag of the school's yearbook against the *free* profile in the facebooks:

Even if the yearbook staff somehow managed to have every SU student get his or her picture taken and placed in the yearbook, the final product would be four times its current size and be much more expensive than its current $80 price-tag--and cost is one of many SU students' complaints about it already.

And this bit, works on the "type of memories" ordinarily made static by the old print model.  Social software enables lesser networks to form and flourish in ways chronicles of any school's central/normative social pulse could never accommodate. 

But some students may wonder who exactly those buyers are, since they're not sure they will want to capture the type of memories found in the yearbook.  Students who claim they are not actively involved in on-campus school-spirited life--attending speaker events, Homecoming parades or becoming members of organizations--find no reason to buy the yearbook because it documents exactly those things.  It tends to only show images of those students involved in activities as well, Defilippo [an SU student] said.

Put together the implications of new media on an old media are abundantly clear, and to elaborate to this length probably seems like overkill, particularly for folks who are already thinking about networks and social software.  Thursday's mix of yearbook/facebook issues got me thinking about the curricular consequences for yearbook classes (and this probably applies to high schools more than to colleges and universities).  Following a network logic, we might begin to think of the charge in a yearbook class in terms of lesser network documentaries--multi-mediations of the social/intellectual interplay among active-minded, interested groups.  This way of thinking about the yearbook as a project would, I suppose, depend on more complex approaches to layout and design (where the web of relationships dictate form rather than the confines of the page), and the intervention of extra-institutional social software apps has, perhaps, already stripped the practicality from older efforts at nostalgic memorabilia.

Kisser's Lips, Blow Hard

Via Boing Boing, Corey Doctorow posts this trill-iant link to the Whistler's Delight--a mix from DJ Riko that works together The Bangles, Sweet Georgia Brown, J. Giles Band, Otis Redding, G 'n R, Andy Griffith theme and several others into one. Good listening for your happy Sunday.

Saturday, January 22, 2005

Patch Footography

 

Warning

Warning: nasty ankle photo herein.

In the spirit of nearly copying (but not quite) my esteemed professor who has dangled brightly manicured toes on her internet weblog, I'm showing you what I've been doing all day with my sprained ankle, the (naturally) purple balloon of inexorable pain that it is.  Cranked it while landing with a rebound (from my own missed shot) during the usual Friday afternoon basketball workout.  And we were winning, too: ahead 9-3 in a game to 11 (it matters, this is no loser's limp).  Was me, Ph., J. (math education prof) and C., an undergrad we'd just picked up to take on four other students in the last game of the day. But now I've got healing to do.  Here's how. 

1. From the yard, gather one plastic storage bin half-full of cold, cold snow.  Make that cold, clean snow, please.

Snowtub

2. Mash the sprained ankle into the snow for twenty minutes, until numb (longer will make it swell worse, shorter will be ineffective).  Repeat every two hours. Wrap, prop and do not disturb during the in-between.

Twisted

3.  After 48 hours, start the hot/cold/hot/cold contrast baths (wrenched extremity only). 

4.  Pain killers, college hoops muted on TV, reading for coursework, relax.  Been through it a zillion times before.  And the snowfall outside will reduce all the swelling my bum ankle can produce.

[Note to studious-minded self: Is this link-logging or life-logging?]

[Added to clarify | 7:25 p.m.: D. and Ph. harvest the snow, not me. The foot photo is slightly skewed because of the contorted position I was in (from the recliner) to accomplish a photo of the outside of the right ankle. My dogs are not normally so crooked.]

Friday, January 21, 2005

Frigid Trending

trend.jpg Trending Record-setting cold today in Syracuse. Awoke this morning to something like -8 F, and now the temps have steadied at -1 for the rest of the day, according to weather.com's trender. The winter weather warning running through late this afternoon involves the cold air more than the snow. D. and Ph. are celebrating cancelled school due to cold temps; the city school district tends to cancel because of the number of walkers.

I know: cold day in Syracuse--big news. (!) It's January. Actually, I wanted to note the morning's household debate over the threshold beyond which it's too cold to sled. See, we live just two blocks from Thornden Park, the largest city park in Syracuse, inside of which is Thornden Hill (yeah, I made up the name)--the best public sledding/snowboarding hill around. On the weather report earlier, the meteorologist warned of a wind chill as low as -30 F, which, when met with exposed skin, he said, renders said skin frostbitten in 15 minutes. About that debate: Ph., bundled up, sled in hand, seeking family-wide approval to venture to the hill, doesn't agree with the meteorologist (who I, more or less, have begun to sound like in my frequently imitative style). Back and forth for a few minutes before we decided to let the weather prove itself. Makes me cold just to think of it.

Wednesday, January 19, 2005

The Other Bone Collector

D.'s busy modeling pellet-gogy.  You know, pellet-gogy?  Owl pellets?WhoBone-bits

Turns out the timeless icon of wise (How many licks does it take to get to the center of the TRTP?) chows small animals whole...then returns the too-bony-to-pass bits in a hardened furry ball.  She tells me most of the kids are eager about the put 'em back together project, which involves picking through the dried gunk, finding resemblances, bringing them to the frame (a paper outline) and so on.

She's hot-glue-gunning the intricate bones of rodents, piecing together--femur by rib cage by skull--the outline of a tiny skeletal structure, all to show the school kids what it might look like, provided the dense hunk-o'-burped-up by the owl indeed consists of a like specimen. Sure it's disgusting; after that, however: research methodology.  Sorry for crossing signals; I'm tuning 205 stuff.  But what if we thought about about a metaphor for research that makes use of the pellet topos--reconstituting once-unacceptable bits into something tangible--restoring robbed coherences?

Just Augural

If, like me, you missed yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioning of Sec'y of State nominee Condaleezza Rice, Fred Kaplan's Slate column offers a nice run-down.  Even with a free day, I wouldn't have watched the session (all nine hours) in its entirety, but I am interested in the ways the next Sec'y of State talks about what is happening in Iraq.  And the exchange between Kerry and Rice--where the two jostled for distinctive ways of framing the causes and complexities involved in Shiite and Sunni dispositions--and this representation of Kerry's re-made role make it worth the read:

One remark in particular raised the possibility that Kerry might emerge, in Bush's second term, as an insistent critic of the president's war policy. "Our troops are stunning, superb," Kerry said, but "they're going on missions that are questionable in terms of what they're going to achieve." Was it by chance or intention that this statement--more than anything Kerry has uttered publicly in the last 30 years--stirred memories of the famous line during his testimony before this same committee in 1971, as a protesting Vietnam veteran: "How do you ask someone to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

On the immanence possibility of "regime change" in Iran:

Rice replied that the administration's goal is to have a regime in Iran that's responsive to U.S. concerns. She then noted that the current regime stands "180 degrees" in opposition to those concerns--on nuclear weapons, relations with al-Qaida, and support of Hezbollah. She added, "The Iranian people, who are among some of the most worldly that we know--in a good sense--do suffer under a regime that has been completely unwilling to deal with their aspirations."

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

TR

Met 205ers this evening.  I'll probably jinx the whole dy-nam, but all in all, it was one of the more encouraging first classes I can remember teaching (which might only indicate that my memory is on the fritz).  We broke the ice, socialized until it was too noisy, rolled through the syllabus, and set up the more general premises of what we'll attempt in the next 15.5 weeks.  No need to elaborate, really, but there is something energizing about it.  Teacherly snap.

Heard one Yike! Not that! comment about McLuhan, which sent me back to everything I took for granted in deciding it would be a good fit for the course. Re-composed, though, and we agreed to give it a whirl. Later, a small ugh-rumble when I said that our only work for Thursday was to build self-profiles in the Facebook.  Serves as a minor tech-proficiency measure and will set up later discussions of tagging, links, and so on.  Might help me learn names more quickly, too.  Granted, it is a bit experimental, but this group definitely has opinions about it, and they're willing to share them.  Perfect for a here-ending first day of Semester.

Monday, January 17, 2005

Para-site's Fair

I'm getting ready for Semester, and I don't have much to say (or blog) right now.  Spent quite a while today balancing my checkbook from the last several months. Same vein: why not tidy up some of the kept new stuff cluttering Bloglines?  Good as anything, right?  On with the show then.  Here, in no particular order, stowed for no particlar reason, are ten links green-checked as "Keep New" from the last month.

Feedspeaker (RSS into digitized voice, I think)
Photospace
Building a better blog
Bubblewrap
Crumpled paper toss
Museum of Food Anomalies
Money Wallet
Botablog (wuh?)
Google Suggest
Comixpedia

1-3, credit to unmediated; all the rest from metafilter

And now I'll go back to reading the last of four essay-articles on the formation of composition's multidiscplinary, many-armed fieldish-ness.  Bingo. I'm still reading the never-ending one, and it's up for discussion tomorrow morning.

Friday, January 14, 2005

Crud Breaker and Other

Foul weather in th'days ahead?  Get this album melting on high volume.

<^>

Or Bowie: But the film is a saddening bore
'Cause I wrote it ten times or more
It's about to be writ again
As I ask you to focus on

<^>

Glimpse of what's coming together in the course I start teaching on Tuesday.
And three I'm taking.

And now I'm going to shoot hoops.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

Scrapbook

Over the past few months, I've come to appreciate the many fine features of Firefox.  Until today, the CSS editor (sidebar panel, where code-tuning reveals its effect immediately) and the Web Developer (good for revealing tags, splitting out different strata/backgrounds from a page) topped my list of favorite extensions.  I'm also fond of Linky, Quicknote and Flowing Tabs--the abundance of ease they bring into my net-tled life. But just now, I downloaded Scrapbook.  Is everyone else already using this?  It's brilliant really, allowing multiple sites and pages of notes to be tucked together into a custom folder--all at the sidebar.  It enables in-tab note-editing and HTML coding of the note (for whatever that might be worth).  And searchable.  Best extension yet for my needs.  Works great for the dilemma of a bundle of sites to return to that aren't quite worthy of del.icio.us or other bookmarking.  Shuttling them into the scrapbook is a cinch.  Granted, not as social as del.icio.us, but sometimes the mess I collect wouldn't be polite to share, you know?

Picked up on one other web development today.  In this entry, Will Richardson at Weblogg-ed pointed me to MSN's beta search engine with adjustable search criteria.  Just select "build a search," designate your preferred conditions, and it will run the search.  But--and here's the bonus punch for me--add "&format=rss" to the end of the URL generated by the search, and you have a live RSS feed, good for keeping up with the search criteria as a subscription in Bloglines, for example, or your aggregator of choice. We'll put it to the test in WRT205 in the term ahead, I think.

Growth Agents

Finally, Major League Baseball's union and owners have agreed to a drug testing policy bent on absolving the sport of steroid use (and, noted one Sportscenter talking head, the agreement came without giving anything back to the players).  I'm interested to see whether the policy has any teeth.  With so many conflicts of interest in policing performance-enhancers in athletics, I remain skeptical, a skepticism rooted in a few challenges from days playing the part of drug testing coordinator, although by and large we were running one of the most comprehensive random testing schemes in all of the NAIA.

The lessons from Mothra (and co.) on the dangers of mysterious growth agents, lost. (See, the energy field beaming from the satellite dish is like baseball's drug policy, metaphorically.)

Other bits, pieces, orts...

From apophenia, a link to this list of bloggers who have been terminated from their jobs for keeping weblogs.  Needed work: a list of bloggers who have been hired for keeping weblogs (or projecting into a linked webspace).

From Steve Krause, a link to a user-friendly database query for the San Fran C's.  It includes a savable record; much better than the PDF schedules from recent years.  Now I just have to figure out how to get to SF for less than one month's TA salary.  Might have to convene a family hug tonight just to let D. and Ph. know that we're getting through March on laundry soap and a gallon jar of pickles (oh yeah, with boiled eggs, potatoes for a treat).  Oof! And it is a two-birthday month (both of 'em).  To the side: I'm only semi-serious about the strain.  I've been fortunate enough to pinch a couple of different forms of support together from here and there.  But it's still damned expensive to travel to the conference.

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Serendipity and a diccionario

Serendipitous text day, today.  Started yesterday actually, when one of the cohort at SU distributed an email to the grad list asking if anyone was interested in a scattershot of duplicate journals she had--JAC, Composition Studies, Business something or another, CCC.  Excess copies of a smattering of non-sequential, eight-year-old journals.  I clicked on reply, politely accepted the copies of JAC and Composition Studies.  Already had the copies of CCC (maybe), and decided the business items wouldn't get any time because my reading list has grown immensely in these four months.  I 'd swear the heap of reading grows by four books every day and reduces only by a chapter or two--the pattern of my low-effort break, anyway.

I lumbered up to the office for some pre-term PDFing around noon today, grabbed the journals from my mail slot in the lounge, and set to leafing through the tables of contents.  First pick: JAC 17.1 1997.  A couple of interesting finds, but most notable was a review of JoAnn Cambell's edit of Gertrude Buck's work, Toward a Feminist Rhetoric: The Writing of Gertrude Buck. What. have. we. here?  See, I just signed up to give an overview of Campbell's book on Buck for CCR611.  Actually, the bit will cover the historiographic method employed by Campbell.  Picked it from a generous list of histories of comp; grabbed up this text even though I read it late in the last century (spring of '99) for EN555M, a seminar in feminist composition history.  The review, by Virginia Allen, introduces several sharp bits on "excavating our disciplinary roots."  Allen's review is duly generous to both Campbell and Buck; jogged my memory, too, about Buck's vexing "organic scientism"--tendencies to lever metaphors of nature and evolution (growth?) against the logics of biological and human sciences.  No need to go farther with this just yet, and, of course, I've said very little about Campbell's method, so that remains--among many other busy-makers--for the weeks ahead.

Ph. wrapped up the ELA testing at school today.  Stands for something like English Language Assessment, I think.  Basically, it's the New York battery for assessing reading comprehension and writing proficiency among the state's eighth graders.  Typically, Ph. is resilient when treated to school pressures, but before setting out on Tuesday, he expressed nervousness, mentioning that the teachers have kept saying over and over how important the test was.  No surprise.  The local TV news even ran a report on Monday night urging parents to make sure their eighth graders went to school on Tuesday.  Interview with a local school administrator: "If your eighth grade student goes to school only two days this year, Tuesday and Wednesday should be those days."  Reported (with images of a shiny glassed-in showcase filled with CD alarm clock radios and televisions) that the students had been enticed to prepare for the language test with raffle tickets in recent weeks.  Notably the exam fails to invoke any of the intelligences led on by the poor odds of winning cheap electronic gadgets.

But that's not what I meant to write about.  I wanted to say something about the Spanish-English dictionary...my Spanish-English dictionary from ninth grade--a cheap, plastic-backed edition, pocket sized.  Ph. had been using it for Spanish class.  Before break, he took the small book to school where, well, it disappeared.  No trace.  I fussed and fumed, a mundane parental ritual over stuff that gets lost without explanation.  "Better find it!" (or something nearly as serious).   So today, two weeks past the formal infraction and processional of loud-voiced how-could-yous, Ph. said he was walking past an open, unattended locker and there, among the clutter at the bottom, was the dictionary.  Aqui!  Rather than latch on to it, he continued to class, set his books down, and returned to the locker where, now, the girl whose locker kept the book, now stood, readying for her next class.  Ph. took the book, kindly explained that the book was his.  How do you know?  "It's got my dad's name on it."  And so he made away with the lost book, now found.

I asked about the signature.  "My name was on the book?," I said. "How's that?"  Ph.: I wrote it there.  Good thinking: my name, in scribbled pencil, there, on the rough top edge of the pages. Buen provecho.

Monday, January 10, 2005

Rock Chalk Canaries

"Birds are really sensitive to smoke." From the Lawrence (Kan.) Journal-World, a story from last week on a late morning fire at Pet World.  I figured since you maybe hadn't read much news of Kansas over the weekend (other than No. 2 KU's first road win of the season at No. 8 Ky. yesterday by six points), you'd be interested. Picked it up over at unmediated (once removed from Reiter's Camera Phone Report) where yatta  wrote about the "camera phone" credit in the photo bi-line as an instance of "citizen-photographers" capturing images later used in publications.  My first thought was yeah...that's interesting, even though the story is hum-drum, non-newsy inasmuch as none of the animals were hurt, and nine of the first-responders look on as the one who drew the short straw scopes out the building's roof. Back to feeding the fish and cleaning cages at the Pet World.  Cell phone images in the newspaper, very

But then, wait a second.  The credit for the cell phone shot goes to the same person who wrote the article.  A full fledged, story-writing "general assignment reporter" shot the photo with a camera phone, which means that the journalistic scene--a futurasm of citizen-reporters--confronts us with new discord.  I'm wondering, for example, why didn't the reporter have any other sort of camera.  Is the LJW sending its reporters to cover happenings around Lawrence with merely a cell phone (~3.1 megapixels, no less)? Out of film?  Was the reporter merely being resourceful (having left the Nikkon at home)?  And since when do newspapers give bi-line mention to the device, the photographic apparatus used to grab the image? Odd it ies.

Relieved the birds were okay.  

Coded

I'm mucking around all morning with MT RSS tags.  I was using a chunk of javascript to pull in delicious bookmarks before, but I wanted a bit more flexibility. Figured MT RSS would deliver. So I read around the net--mostly old entries from the 2.+ days--and came up with a few plugins I thought would do the trick: MT RSS and MT List.  Quasi-teaching-aims motivating me; been plugging away at a syllabus, rest of the pre-term drill. It's a course in critical research; we're going to aggregate like mad.

Now the plugins are running fine.  Together, they pull the feeds through a db cache on my server so as not to drain the site of origin site with each visit to EWM. But I can't figure out how to grab the date tag from the XML.  The dates are nested in Dublin Core tags.  I can't figure out how to tell the plugin to draw the date into the entry you see here (lower right). So I'm stuck.  Gonna quit before I overheat (or make this brand new nagging cold/s.throat worse).  Here's the code, culprit in bold, just for the helluvit:

 <MTList name="feeds">
http://del.icio.us/rss/dmueller
http://www.earthwidemoth.com/mt/index.xml
http://dwlt.net/tapestry/ripleys.rdf
</MTList>
<MTListLoop name="feeds">
<MTRSSFeed>
<div class="sidetitle"><a href="<$MTRSSFeedLink$>" target="blank"><$MTRSSFeedTitle$></a></div>
<div class="squish" align="center">Reassembled <lastBuildDate><$MTDate format="%B %d, %Y %I:%M %p"$></lastBuildDate><br/></div>
<ul><MTRSSFeedItems lastn="7">
<li><$MTRSSFeedItemElement name="date"$>: <a href="<$MTRSSFeedItemLink$>" target="blank"><MTFirstNWords n="4"><$MTRSSFeedItemTitle$></MTFirstNWords></a>: <MTFirstNWords n="7"...><MTRSSFeedItemDescription></MTFirstNWords></li>
</MTRSSFeedItems></ul>
</MTRSSFeed>
</MTListLoop></div>

Thursday, January 6, 2005

Unicycle

Aver, a yare.

Cap and corn, auditor, interest and exertion, aim and audience, interest and earnest and outside, inside in inside. Alarm no sun, alarm is thinking, alarming is determination an earth wide moth is something. Price in curving is weeding.  There is an undetermined super division.  There is the percolating bread stuff, the window is thickening. -G.S. | Braque

Again.

Wednesday, January 5, 2005

The Start of More?

The "new" Blockbuster has riddled us with promises of abandoning late fees. The slogan says, "The end of late fees.  The start of more."  Good enough.  We rent movies from Blockbuster, and we have returned them to the store late, paid the fees, felt stupid, absolved our delinquency.

So when a postcard showed up in the mail the other day telling me we owed twelve bucks in late fees to Blockbuster, you can imagine my surprise.  I was stunned.  But your ad campaign, I thought, it promises the end of fees.  Is this the start of more?  According to the notice, we'd returned The Day After Tomorrow five days late when we picked it up in mid-November.  And my memory isn't the sharpest (still working on getting the new phone number right every time), but I'm sure The Day After Tomorrow was a week-long rental.  We only rent movies one or two times each month; the infelicity of a late return is generally fresh with us.  We usually expect the late charge. But not this time.  "The end of late fees.  The start of more."

When we rented Hero and I, Robot the other day, D. and Ph. went to the new release wall while I wandered up to the counter (at the store on Erie Blvd. here in Syracuse). 

"Can I talk with somebody about this late fee notice?  It's for a movie we rented in November.  Says we returned it five days late, but I'm almost certain it was a week-long rental."

Clerk looks at the note card, eyebrows furrowed accusatorily.  "Yeah, The Day After Tomorrow was returned five days late. It's [something incoherent involving long division] per day."

"We're generally good about returning movies on time [granted, a fuzzy assertion].  Is it possible that the DVD case said 'one week rental'?  When we were in here a few weeks ago renting Supersize Me, I saw that several of your new releases were shelved in mixed cases.  Some of the cases said 'two day rental,' others 'one week rental.'" 

Clerk: We run out of cases, but all the new releases are two-day rentals.  If it's in the wrong case, you have to read the slip inside.

"The slip?  Is that the same as the receipt?"

Clerk: Yeah.  You should read the receipt to be sure you're getting it for a full week instead of two days.

Friends, read your Blockbuster receipts. 

*~*

Denouement: To delay the charges, sleep on it, etc., we rented on my card rather than D.'s.  Then, to clear our names, salvage our fragile credit ratings, and restore decency to our lives, D. slinked back to the store a few days later and coughed up the twelve bucks.  But insult to injury, those goldang ads.  "The end of fees.  The start of more."

Monday, January 3, 2005

Gauging Winter

Grand gap in the living room since D. and I dismantled the Christmas tree earlier today.  Pulled it apart limb by limb by limb, crammed its needle-shedding tangled-ness into the old cardboard box, smacked it all with tape, then lifted it to the attic.  Now I know artificial trees aren't supposed to shed needles, but this one's recycled--the hand-me-down conifer from D.'s former boss back in KC, who'd upgraded to something more grandiose, tall, magnificent.  Free tree.  Tried to unload the tree at the garage sale last summer: ten bucks?  four bucks?  Both yellow stickers still mark the face of the box.  Didn't sell. (If interested, please send email.)

We'll fill the space left behind by pulling up the exercycle from the basement.  Never been resolute enough to keep with all the habit-altering involved at the first of the calendar year (although there was the time...), but I'll hop on the machine a few times throughout the winter, break a sweat, pretend it's not miserable outside.  If not, the work of moving exercise equipment makes up for extended periods of non-use.  Up and down the stairs a few times or across half of the U.S.--punch it in the calorimeter. 

[8:46 p.m.] Whoa! Just about missed Who's Your Daddy? on the Fox Network.  Nah, not really. I wasn't about to watch that crud.  I've felt the hook of reality television at times--rare times, and I know that for a fraction of the amount it would cost to cast David Hasslehoff, the major networks can rustle up an enclave of real people who'll vie shamelessly for a chance at a pot of money.  Dangle the money, attach it to any of life's vexation--housing, smoking, diet, extreme careerism, fear, dating and now absentee parenting: film-edit-air:  wine and cheese parties over the ratings and ad revenue.  Please tell me if it's way more complex than this.  Please. Any more slop on the television and we're all going to need these (via worldchanging).  Except that CNY's been unusually balmy, we might need them anyway (keep warning of winter weather around here...been calling it out for months).  Yet I remain skeptical that the gizmo--for $119--impacts the shoveling of snow.  Will hold off until I see the neighbors using one, then borrow it.

tangent n: At the NS (aka work), D.'s planning an after school event later this week involving Shrinky Dinks. She's got the authentic shrinks--the plasticine sheets for drawing and baking, yields the warp-distort surprise every time!  But have you ever heard of make-shift Shrinky Dinks, the kind where you color on styrofoam cups then bake-melt them into variforms?  Sounded dangerous to me (toxic fumes?).  Anyone heard of improvising with styro-cups as low budget shrinkies? 

Sunday, January 2, 2005

Bookmarks

For the reading I'll likely fail to get through before 'tween-semesters break dwindles to its end.

Too much ludology research on LOR Third Age.