Yahoo! Tournament Pick'em
Group: Brick-à-Brack (ID# 21100)
Password: ewm
Firm up your picks after the selection show on Sunday, March 14. The latest you can sign up is five minutes before the round of 64 tips off on Thursday, March 18.

Above all, I would like to see Ohio win because one of their freshmen, #3 Ivo Baltic, was on teams I coached in the KC area from 2000 to 2004. Now Ivo's a 6-9 forward who developed an impressive facility for basketball (although I got to know him because I coached his soccer team when he was even younger). Often Ph. and I would pick up him for practices; he was what my own coach approvingly called a "gym rat," would leave a practice asking about when would be the next time he could get in the gym. For perspective, and because I am proud of what he has done for himself, here are a couple of photos to contrast with the one below, which D. took after we saw Ohio play EMU at the Convocation Center five weeks ago.

So, easily, I am a fan. And I would greatly enjoy seeing his 9-seeded Bobcats beat the 3-seeded Zips.

The other side of the coin for me, as far as my personal interest in today's game, is that I once had a try-out in front of Keith Dambrot many years ago.

Our group has been up and down this year. We started 5-0, which was good enough to lock up a sponsor for the state tournament later this month in Midland (why it is in Midland, I have no idea, since all eight teams are from SE Michigan). We started the season with ten guys, more than most carry. One--the only guy older than me on our team or in the division--decided to quit for reasons I won't bother going into. That left us with nine. Several of our early games were 40+ point routes (against teams in a division below ours). One was a triple OT win against a team that later beat us by 40--our poorest outing of the season. The other two losses came to a close rival; we lost one of those by four points, the other by five. So: although we finished in a first-place tie, we wouldn't win any of the tie-breakers based on head to head matchups or point differential. So it goes. I don't know how they'll settle who gets the trophy.

Why was Sunday's game special? Well, aside from the eventfulness of playing against a "team" of 18 and 19 year-olds (i.e., babies who were born the same year I graduated high school), instead of having our usual nine players, we had five. Four didn't show up because of Winter Break, injuries, absent-mindedness, I don't know. We hadn't been short-handed like this before. I am too old to be nervous about basketball games in a recreational league. But: it was going to be difficult to hold off a team of fit, pressing youth for four quarters.

The game started off smoothly enough. We were down 31-29 at halftime. Nobody was in foul trouble. I had just one foul in the first half, and fouls are as you might expect the main concern when playing without a single sub. A couple of bad plays (or bad calls or both) can leave you in the unwinnable mismatch, four vs. five. Next, something terrible: in the first 1:24 of the third quarter, I was called for three fouls: two blocking fouls, which might have been charges were I willing to fall onto my back (I'm not), and an official's hallucination. The new problem: four fouls with 6:36 remaining in the third quarter.

We adjusted (put me on the right frontcourt corner of a 2-3 zone). And--this is why it was special, mostly--I managed to finish the game without fouling out. Also, we won by 12 or 13 points, entirely because our team defense was excellent. We held them to something like 20 points for the second half.

I'm blogging it because I'm pretty sure this is the last league game I'll ever play in. I will travel to Midland in late March for the state tournament. After that, the only basketball I play will be lunchtime pickup games with EMU's regulars twice each week. I still enjoy playing for fitness, recreation, and communion, but I like being able to skip a day when I want to, I like being able to go home when I'm done for the day, and I like being able to walk one building over from my office to play among people I know (and who are not absurdly competitive).

Here are a few impressions:

The program was eclectic, offering a mix of topics and viewpoints. They used double-projection: the rotating slide deck projected onto one screen, while a static title/presenter slide showed on the other. Double-projection offers flexibility for a program like this. Before the program and during intermission, organizers used both screens to display different Twitter streams (based on hashtags) associated with the event. Beyond the Ignite presentations, the evening included a rock-paper-scissors tournament (my scissors were obliterated by a rock in the first round; no two out of three?) and a funky laser light show the served as a segue between Mike Gould's "Running with Lasers" and the 15-minute halftime break.

Presentations ran a wide gamut: niche procedural (e.g., how to kill a mastadon, Bolognese, lasers), local flavor (e.g., lunch gathering, Ann Arbor's pitch for Google super-high-speed), activism (e.g., Washtenaw County foods, water council), progressive business infomercial (e.g., electronic vehicles, home funerals), and researched specialization or curiosity (e.g., early television, dyes, British slang, molecular communication).

Script/Notes/Extemporaneous
I expected most speakers to deliver from memory and impulse, but several did not. Had I to guess, I would say that two-thirds used some sort of note cards or more. The slide deck functions as a way-finder of sorts--certainly slides prompted the more extemporaneous speakers when they lost track of what they wanted to say. The most conspicuously scripted talk of the bunch--Gould's bit on lasers--also struck me as more rigorously done because the script, I suppose, allowed him to synchronize his delivery with the slideshow. It also seemed fine-tuned because the script allows a speaker to get words and phrases exactly right.

Knowing How vs. Knowing What
I had a more favorable impression of talks that shared procedural knowledge or that expressed some niche understanding of how to do something. That is, some talks were informative and also more clearly situated in the realm of personal knowledge, whereas others acknowledged working with outside sources to develop the talk. Ignites don't afford speakers much opportunity to incorporate elaborate evidence or to disclose much about working with sources. In at least two talks, speakers mentioned that they'd done research online, but in both cases they seemed to downplay those choices.

To put it another way, as I drove home, I felt more resolved in preferring talks about something I don't already know how to do or that I can't find out about by searching online.

Too Short to Establish Exigency?
I was chatting with a couple of people in the Blau atrium after the session let out, and a student from ENGL328 said she was surprised at how infrequently speakers set up the exigency for what they were going to talk about. The short-form presentation models (Ignite, Pecha Kucha, etc.) don't leave much time for an opening setup, yet, absent a brief setup (e.g., what is parkour, anyway?) a rapid delivery talk can be jarring or temporarily disorienting. This could be resolved in a few ways. The program could include a once-sentence abstract for each presentation. Or, the MC could read a one- or two-line intro to set up the talk. Would this reduce the impact of the presentations? I don't know. But a bit more Why this? Why now? would have helped in a couple of cases last night.

Which Leads Which?, Slideshow vs. Speaker
Yet another impression was that these talks touch off an intriguing tension between the slide deck's automatic rotation and the speaker's command of a deliberate message. In some cases, the message trumps the slideshow; other times, the slideshow is in the driver's seat. The tension is more clearly resolved in some talks than in others, and while I don't think I have finally a preference for one or the other, this speaker-slideshow tension to my surprise has become a point of noticing, even a point of fascination: Which leads which?

If my schedule allows it, I am pretty sure I will attend Ignite Ann Arbor 4. I haven't decided yet whether I will try to participate. To be sure, the evening left me with a richer sense of what is possible in this evolving genre of short-form presentations, and I now have many terrific examples recommend as students begin preparing their own Ignites as one of the final pieces in ENGL328.

For other impressions of last night's event, check out #ignitea2 on Twitter.

The article does a nice job of introducing, albeit with great simplification, Everett's research and setting it in relation to Chomsky's propositions about universal grammar. Pirahã language practices are, according to the article, a "severe counterexample" to Chomsky's famous theory. I won't attempt a full summary of the article here. Instead, I want to pick up just one line from the essay--a line that has grown louder and louder in my head this week since I read it. It comes up late in the essay, in a scene where Tecumsah Fitch, another linguist, visits Everett in the Amazon to corroborate his claims about the absence of recursion in the Pirahã language. Fitch ends up fumbling with computer equipment. The equipment acts up due to high humidity; Fitch leaves the lab-tent to attempt repairs, while Everett remains with the reporter and a young Pirahã man.

At this moment, according to the article, Everett says, "'But the problem here is not cognitive; it's cultural.' He gestured toward the Pirahã man at the table. 'Just because we're sitting in the same room doesn't mean we're sitting in the same century.'"

Same room, different century. For Everett, this identifies a methodological quandary: how to traverse discordant temporalities in a culture's language development, especially in light of popular, contemporary language theories. But the room-century line is suggestive of much more, even if it only points out the possibility of two people occupying common time-space when they are not in the same century. I find it to be a rich paradox, perhaps more for how well it generalizes to everyday encounters concerning technology. I mean, have you ever had a technology-focused experience in which you thought, "which century are we"?

I suppose that sounds judgmental. I don't mean it quite that way. Let me try again. Maybe it would help to revive, for these purposes, Alfred Korzybski's peculiar system of time-stamping words (I'm remembering that something like this comes up in Nicotra's RSQ article on Burke and the General Semantics movement, but my copy is at the office right now, so...remembering will have to do). Including the date in a superscript annotation offers us a different handle on a term's temporal shifts, helping us locate its valences in time. I have no idea if this impression of time-stamping aligns with its function for General Semantics; no idea at all. But it does help me think through the same room, different century problem. By reviving time-stamp markups, that is, we could more readily differentiate computers¹⁹⁹⁵ from computers²⁰¹⁰, the Internet¹⁹⁹⁸ from the internet²⁰⁰⁶, or composition¹⁹⁸⁵ from composition²⁰⁰⁹, or rhetoric¹⁹⁶⁵ from rhetoric²⁰¹². May be nothing more than a passing curiosity, a late winter thought experiment. And I doubt it would be much good in conversation: too fumbly, too parenthetical. But I can think of a handful of occasions, such as, say, in a course syllabus, when it would help position everyone in the same year to differentiate writing^thesedays from writing^{assumedtobeeternal}. Some day I²⁰⁵⁰ hope to look more deeply into time-annotation or time-binding (?) for the General Semanticists than I have here.

Lessig opened with an allegory: an extended narrative linking a dilemma facing cigarette smokers of yesteryear with a dilemma facing users of mobile devices and wireless internet, an allegory inspired by Christopher Ketcham's recent article in GQ. Just as early reports on the cancerous effects of smoking tobacco were speculative and contested, so are today's investigations into the insidious effects of wireless signals murky and tentative. Lessig cited Henry Lai, whose research on non-ionizing radiation has clarified a troubling pattern of self-interest: industry-funded research finds wireless to be harmless, while non-industry-funded research finds wireless to be harmful. The basic idea here is that research of this sort reflects the bias of its funding source. And this builds toward a crisis because 1) everyday people cannot know which research to trust and 2) the binaristic "debate" creates doubt such that reasonable people can think either way about the issue, rendering it undecidable.

From this, Lessig shifted to Part Two, a different debate concerning free culture. He credited a graduate student who "fed him" ideas from Aldous Huxley and John Philip Sousa about technologies threatening creative culture. Huxley worried about the ways broadcast media cemented audiences in read-only passivity. Sousa lamented similarly that the phonograph would hobble music creation. He expected that read-only (or listen-only) would thwart production and result in conditioned passive consumption. In the free culture debate, Lessig locates 2004 as a key shift: read-write culture was revived that year, with Wikipedia as its poster child. Lessig says "remix" is the best name to describe this shift.

In 2006, via YouTube, we witnessed another key shift, this time tied to video: the remix technique is further democratized. In numerous examples, we can see read-write in action. According to Lessig, "This begins to be precisely what Sousa romantisized." At this point in his talk, Lessig rehearsed the legal developments around copyright, albeit in fairly sweeping terms (Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act to courts more recently "getting it right"). Lessig was obviously quite wrapped up in efforts to persuade the Supreme Court to the merits of free culture, but he described the results as an utter defeat. Lessig went on in his talk to discuss the way Disney invokes copyright law and uses their copyright extension lobby to block efforts by others to do as they did to Brothers Grimm. His discussion of Disney included a thoughtful aside about the remix premise of Little Einsteins--a program I've gotten to know well in the last 18 months. Finally, Lessig tried to create some fusion between his work on free culture and his interests, more recently, in congressional reform. He explained that the read/write movement does not have in Congress a receptive audience, but that we must continue to imagine YouTube as a powerful platform for forcing these issues. Emphasizing repeatedly the value in fair and free codecs and fair and free use, Lessig concluded his talk, urging his audience to "Continue the work to build the tools to make this culture free."

I want to mention two things I was thinking of as the talk wrapped up and during the Q&A. The first is that this talk had all the markings of Lessig-in-intellectual-transition. It was abundantly clear that he is in a cross-over period, moving from his many years of hard work on free culture and Creative Commons, to something more directly concerned with Washington D.C. lobbying practices and corrupt politics. The appearance of this transition is not necessarily bad, but I think it created a muddle for a couple of key points, which brings me to the second thing I was thinking about. Lessig argued for the cultural force of YouTube, but it almost sounded like he envisioned in remixing practices a great political force, as well. In a fairly abstract way, I buy the premise that remixing can effect change, but I didn't find in Lessig's examples anything impressive enough to make an impact on the scale he seemed more genuinely interested in reaching (national government). I guess the question of impact circles back around to this: What are the most impressive or memorable examples of remix, and for whom are they impactful? Or else these: What exactly is the difference they are making in, say, political processes? How are they consequential? Other than something like a YouTube presidential debate (which isn't exactly remix), what is an example of YouTube impacting a political process? Then again, maybe I am looking for consequences too much in the remixes themselves and not enough in the slow rise of cultural creation by these means. In other words, perhaps their impact lies in their collective affirmation of free speech.

There's much more to say about the Wireside Chat, but these notes will do for now. I will be interested in revisiting this periodically to rethink the power of remix and whether we have in the months and years to come realized a different degree of impact in it than we have seen in YouTube's first five years.

In classes, we wrapped up a three-week unit on wiki writing today. The assignment went something like this: for twenty-one days, assume various roles in the production of a wiki--facilitation, discussion, research, entry writing, editing, and coding. Last semester I set up groups. This semester I didn't. My aim with the wiki assignment has always been to immerse in the mess, to dive in, or, for the more cautious, to wade through some quick compositional emergence, or distributed, self-paced, collaborative writing. All the while, we should keep in mind the question of what is stylistically available in wiki writing. There is no single answer to this, of course, but it seems like wiki writing often (I am tempted to say "always") returns to an "average effect," more studium than punctum.

I'm not sure we fully achieved the mess I had in mind. A snow day on February 10 threw off the early development of the project. Facilitation and early discussion was cut short. Twelve days into the project I brought graphs to class--a simple activity distribution curved, as you might have guessed, like a long tail. A few had done much work; many had done much less, just like on Wikipedia. Also, the graph reflected two data-sets, one for number of edits and one for frequency of logins. So that everyone processes the assignment by a distributed pace rather than a climactic pace, the prompt encouraged logging in and making identifiable contributions every other day or so. Halfway in, this wasn't quite working. But the graph confronted us with the problem, and, consequently, it moved us collectively nearer to the quick-writing messiness I had in mind. For the remaining nine days, the wiki came alive--to the tune of 38 contributors, an impressive blur of edits, revisions, and rearrangement.

Certainly we gained some experience with wiki writing--wiki writing connected with our continuing inquiry into style and technology. And, for the most part, I stand by this approach (i.e., will try it again), even if it still has a few wrinkles to smooth out. I prefer it to a common alternative, which is something like wiki-as-showcase, where the wiki functions as a platform for sharing individually authored pieces, where collaboration is predefined, where discrete contributions carry over into some kind of portfolio or autonomous collection of best works (many variations on this, to be fair). The showcase approach to wiki writing is fine, but I want to continue to think through the near-aleatory, massively collaborative chaos available in wikis and to think through the this chaotic approach for a school assignment and for the question of what is stylistically available. How? I'll begin by reading and commenting 36 or so reflective essays over the next couple of days.

This morning I noticed Google Reader's down-counting ticker kept hitching--stopping on a number and no longer counting down, no matter how many times I pressed 'N'ext. For months I've had Helvetireader working through Greasemonkey in Firefox; figured that must be it. But even after I deactivated Greasemonkey, the ticker continued to act up, firing only for the first few items and then sticking. The ticker would stop on a number (e.g., 80), and the fed RSS items would continue skipping down the page, many of them reruns. The service wasn't broken, exactly. But it was (and remains) up on the blocks. Somebody is tinkering with it.

I caught a few clues on Twitter during the day (Thurs., a day I usually spend at home, half fathering, half professing) speculating about whether Google had activated Pubsubhubbub, a nearer to real-time relay process for RSS deliveries. Then, a few minutes ago, both in Google Reader and via Will Richardson's Twitter stream, I saw this entry from The Next Web, "Has Google Reader Just Gone Real Time?" Possibly: Google is adjusting Reader so it will turn around RSS-fed content momentarily. Until now, Google Reader-fed material was delayed, arriving anywhere from 30-90 minutes after the content was first published. Google's demure response (cited in The Next Web piece) is unsurprising in light of reactions to Google Buzz. But an upgrade to Google Reader that nudges it toward the ever-unfolding now is an intriguing, promising development, nevertheless. Moving Reader toward the now may dislodge assumptions about its readerly orientation and help us come to terms with it differently as a writerly/receivable mechanism--a platform for collaborative filtering (like Delicious networks) and threaded conversational annotation (both of which take GR well beyond a flat consumption practice). I'm encouraged to see some new energy routed Google Reader's way. In fact, while it's much too early for me to be decided about Google Buzz, if it makes any appreciable impact on Google Reader, all the better.

"She did not want to be up there with her sisters."

Right-o: #sotta is a hashtag for State of the Twitter Accounts. Of course, I realize that hashtags don't help organize blog entries the way they do Twitter updates. So much runs together nowadays.

Their unplanned alignment, though not especially remarkable for everyday people (even Digg overlooked this happening), was just uncanny enough for me to justify taking a step back, a deep breathe and reflective, 24-hour pause. Could be a conductive, insightful occasion, or not. The two accounts resemble fraternal twins. One came first. They have much in common, but they do not quite look alike: different avatars, different personalities, different aliases, different habits of writing and linking.

I keep the older account around because it follows and is in turn followed by a somewhat more collegial and professorial company than the other. The second account is more teacherly; it fills a pedagogical need for the activity streams ENGL328ers write throughout the semester. In other words, the second account is more for orchestration and course-specific guidance.

Two-hundred forty-three tweets: that's nothing. Even multiplied by two, it's in the shallow end of the pool some measure away from Twitter users who have upwards of two thousand entries. So in this, my first half-year of tweeting, I'm still trying to figure out where my own writing and working rhythms blend in with the Twittersphere, whether I'm being (perhaps somewhat willfully) negligent of the accumulative effects of writing not only in a networked platform but in a networked platform with such a boundless temporality as this.

Over holiday break, while on the dog-fetching sojourn in Syracuse, I chatted with a friend about the course I am these days so thoroughly concerned with teaching well. She asked, Why Strunk and White? It's a setup piece, staging for the remake project inspired by Derek Pell's NSFW The Marquis de Sade Elements of Style. I value the remake because it calls into question the plasticity of the elements, checking time honored rules against the many pop culture contexts that are, on the one hand, stylistically rich, but on the other hand, roaming on the roomier side of language's prison house.

I also appreciate The Elements of Style for how conspicuously it presents style as arhetorical, or, if that is too extreme a characterization, for how it positions style as synonymous with "grammar," falling, that is, on the side of correctness and clarity first rather than encompassing kairos and ornament (these four terms: correctness, clarity, kairos, and ornament come from the Crowley and Hawhee chapter on style). The style-grammar conflation is, of course, widespread, and EOS helps us see fairly explicitly its limitations, especially in its neglect of language acts as situated and in its inattention to figures and tropes.

The other day, when concluding our discussion of the "little book," we ran out of time for looking at a surprising turn in the fifth section, "An Approach to Style (With a List of Reminders)," where E.B. White dispatches with "audience."

Many references have been made in this book to "the reader," who has been much in the news. It is now necessary to warn you that your concern for the reader must be pure: you must sympathize with the reader's plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader's wants. Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one. Start sniffing the air, or glancing at the Trend Machine, and you are as good as dead, although you may make a nice living. (84)

When he says "most readers are in trouble about half the time," I'm not entirely sure what he means. Surely the reader he refers to in that context isn't his former teacher, Will Strunk, right? Could the reader "in trouble" be the adolescents working through a copy of Stuart Little or Charlotte's Web? I don't want to harp on this point like I'm driven to a hermeneutic pinning down of "the reader" in this passage. But it seems to me an extraordinarily strange gesture toward pleasure and self-satisfaction at the end of an otherwise conservative handbook.

Indeed, today marks another blogday, and since I haven't missed announcing any previous blogday, I feel an obligation to mention the historic occasion (everything, after all, is more impactful if "historic"). Cake? No. We will celebrate at home later with leftover cod chowder (simple, delicious, i.e., better than expected), cheddar biscuits, and if somebody else feels like baking them, brownies. Today also happens to be a Monfri to top all Monfries: the first day of the first week of the new semester at EMU and, for me, the last day of the first week of the new semester at EMU. Frenzied, manic. Monfri, the average of Monday and Friday, their median, or Wednesday, depending on how you mark it in your day planner. Monfri, the grue moon of academe. No telling whether today is also EWM's Monfri, the critical moment mid-distant between its initiation and its termination. No telling.

I'm teaching ENGL328 this semester, again unpicking the triple squareknot at the intersection of writing, style, and technology. Introducing myself in the first class this morning, I mentioned that I'm looking forward to re-establishing a regular reading and writing schedule this winter (perhaps it sounded like "irregular" as I said it). It's not that I neglected to read and write in the fall, exactly. But I wouldn't describe those four months as acceptably disciplined or scheduled. Not up to my standards, anyway. And I gather, hints and clues, that it's typical in first years of new appointments to experience an irregular stride, an arrhythmia attributable to figuring things out, getting bearings, settling.

We'd quietly parted ways with him in July after arranging for him what we thought would be a happy and permanent situation. No need to re-rationalize why we gave him up when we did, now that he's back. But the top three reasons were 1) renting in new town, 2) Child One heading off to college, 3) Child Two young enough to forget, 4) high-needs dog, 5) no fenced yard at new digs, and so on.

Only, Is. didn't forget. In fact, she proceeded to mention him every single day for five months as if she knew all along he would return. Just before sitting down to supper: "God bless Yoki on his play date in New York." For five months. A three-year old's determinative rhetoric rooted in repetition, memory (i.e., memory cast as an image onto the future), and an unwavering pre-purposeful innocence: these turned out to be highly effective, at least in this case (were she asking for a pony, perhaps it would have been less so). We began to wonder about Yoki's return, too.

In early November, on a hunch, I tried to contact the new owner but reached a disconnected number. I dug around a bit more and eventually found her name on Facebook, friended her, and sent a short note saying we were just curious how things were going, happy holidays, and so on. Five days later, I received in reply a thorough breakdown of how persistent, how egregious Y.'s behaviors had become.

Next thing I know, I'm driving 500-miles along the snowy road to Syracuse. And as of midnight last night, we're safely home from the trip, the bulk of winter break snow-driving is behind us (only a jaunt to Okemos to pick up D. and Is. later this afternoon still on the list of drives).

I've mentioned before that Yoki's name comes from Musyoki, a Kikamba word meaning "one who returns." When Ph. and D. visited Kenya in 2005, Ph. was dubbed "musyoki" by friends he made on that trip. A year later when we picked up a puggle puppy just before Is. was born, Yoki seemed like a suitable name, a good choice. And now that he is back again after his five month "play date in New York" the name seems more appropriate than it did before, as if "Yoki" fitted him to an entelechy Is. understood better than the rest of us.

Comments include, in no particular order, Sp&m, XKCD reference, (Distant Reading as Sure Sign of an Unavoidable) Robot Apocalypse, Boredom, More Sp&m, and There Goes Context Leaking Out All Over the Place Again.