more typos

I was setting up a reservation for a student and he was leaning over the desk to watch what I was doing. I find this a little annoying. Without meaning to, I almost entered his name as "Bretty."

Cold Night

Sunday I went to Devon Street with a friend from church who's from Uzbekistan (sp?). Coming back from the El, after dark, I saw two people sitting under the train overpass on the concrete supports. One was a middle-aged woman with lots of dark brown hair, the other was a middle aged man with a stocking cap and a beard. She held out a small stuffed animal dog. As I passed them the man reached out to stroke its face and the woman said "Snuggles".

the end

Socialization

"If children do not dip their toes in the waters of unsupervised social activity, they likely will never be able to swim in the sea of civic responsibility. If they have no opportunities to dig in the soil, discover the spiders, bugs, birds, and plants that populate even the smallest unpaved playgrounds, they will be less likely to explore, appreciate, and protect nature as adults. "

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/om/05-5om/Monke_FT.html

What crap. Why should "recess" be the only opportunity for social interaction or physical activity?

"WHEN I WAS GROWING UP IN RURAL IOWA, I certainly lacked for many things. I couldn't tell a bagel from a burrito. But I always and in many ways belonged. For children, belonging is the most important function a community serves

Substituting the excitement of virtual connections for the deep fulfillment of firsthand engagement is like mistaking a map of a country for the land itself, or as biological philosopher Gregory Bateson put it, "eat[ing] the menu instead of your meal." No one prays over a menu. And I've never witnessed a child developing a reverence for nature while using a computer.

This shift toward remote control is akin to taking the child out of the role of actor and turning her into the director. This is a very different way of engaging the world than hitting a ball, building a fort, setting a table, climbing a tree, sorting coins, speaking and listening to another person, acting in a play. In an important sense, the child gains control over a vast array of complex abstract activities by giving up or eroding her capacity to actually do them herself. We bemoan the student who uses a spell-checker instead of learning to spell, or a calculator instead of learning to add. But the sacrifice of internal growth for external power generally operates at a more subtle level, as when a child assembles a PowerPoint slideshow using little if any material that she actually created herself."

What are you sniggering at?

Adam McCune, describing with characteristic panache, the progress of his next film:

"Yes, all I have to do for that scene is show two imaginary friends walking away from two people"

"I decided to use all caps because that is what they did in Lord of the Rings"

further McCune Watch update: he now wears his hair in a 1" ponytail/tassel

Also, on the way back from work I passed high school football players wearing purple jerseys: one, though, had orange polka-dot zoobas as well.

Which is still nothing compared to the synchronized "running and leaping and praising God" that Baxter once witnessed, but it was enough to make me smile the rest of the way home.

Meow

Oy. Googling yourself can be embarrassing. Googling former penpals, on the other hand...

It turns out my junior high penpal has posted a movie review I gave her years ago on her website. Browsing around, I find she's been busy: with help from her periodical publishing parents, she is living out her dream of becoming a professional writer without having to go to college or read books with difficult vocabulary. Proving she's fulfilled each of those goals, her online store lists her favorite authors as "The classics, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and C.S. Lewis."

At the risk of exposing my own fatuous nonsense that is being hosted there, here's a link to her site: http://www.charitysplace.com/review/charitybishop.htm

Anyone who has a soft spot for the fictional offerings of Mr. McCune should check out her novels.

Why I love my Grandfather...

Pure Nerd
73 % Nerd, 17% Geek, 30% Dork

For The Record:

A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia.
A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one.
A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions.
You scored better than half in Nerd, earning you the title of: Pure Nerd.

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 80% on nerdiness
You scored higher than 15% on geekosity
You scored higher than 44% on dork points

Subconscious Soundtracks

This morning, after I surrendered to my snooze button and tumbled out of a dream that included arguing with my mother in an old diner, intelligible monkeys that wore Victorian clothing, Jane Austen's Bennet family, unlocking deceased children's rooms, photographing pink cosmos, and major house construction, I was getting dressed hurriedly and found myself quoting nursery rhymes in my mind.

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall/ Humpty Dumpty had a great fall/ All the kings' horses and all the kings' men / Couldn't put Humpty together again," it kept repeating.

Previous tracks from my drowsy subconscious:

"My name is Inigo Montoya! You killed my father! Prepare to die!" (also on repeat)

Video Killed the Radio Star
You Can't Take That Away From Me
Night and Day, by Cole Porter - all the verses, with chorus.

Does anyone else experience this? If you do, what do you hear?

Blargh - mini rant

Dear Netflix:

I recently rented "The Gleaners and I" by Agnes Varda and was surprised to see it first described as "no-holds-barred documentary" then "an insouciant treat from beginning to end" and finally "an unexpectedly obtuse perspective." Is it normally your policy to attach negative reviews to your films? Insouciant means "marked by blithe unconcern; nonchalant." Obtuse, on the other hand, suggests the movie's perspective was dense, dim, dull, dumb or slow.

Agnes Varda is an internationally acclaimed director, the only female member of the French New Wave. The film won 11 awards including "Best Documentary" from the European Film Academy. Roger Ebert gave it his highest rating, as did critics from the NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and Salon.com.

This film was neither inaccessible nor elitist; it also was not a "no-holds barred/nonchalant/dull" documentary. I don't know where you get your descriptions, but I'd suggest using a dictionary rather than adding words just because they "sound good" in a description.

Crucifixation & hertiage

I'm searching for typos in our catalog. These are my favorites so far - best read aloud.

• alaphabet
• artits
• bridgegroom
• cementeries
• childhod
• classifiction
• ecocomic
• errr
• humdred
• Lousie (I like it louse-ee)
• pinciple
• playright
• presidental
• pscyho
• pslams
• studnet
• washingtin

Nostalgia & Filippo Marinetti

I ran across this this here and was surprised to find myself entertained and stimulated by an article in a Christian magazine. I need to stop reading World and listening to people who only read things they agree with. Oy. I miss having people who talk like this around.

And he's so right about the Italian Futurists. I need to read more manifestos. They make me so happy.

Duncan and the Electoral Process

A moment ago I was unobtrusively microwaving my lunch (yummy leftover Indian food) in the faculty lounge.

A table of faculty were discussing "their favorite deposed dictators," and as I left one man was nodding with satisfaction while another discussed how the actual Macbeth ruled happily and the original Duncan was ousted in due process by an electoral function...

I like eavesdropping on odd conversations.

I'm a fan

My Office

Who would wear this?

Mini-Moo's?

Why don't you need to refrigerate the little cups of cream? What is this stuff?
I'm cold. Stupid fickle Chicago weather.

Sleazy movie characters and my limited visual memory

In the last week I've had two guys express interest in me only to realize later that I've replaced their faces in my memory with images of obscure, kind of sleazy-looking movie characters.

I've never had that great of a visual memory, but what does it say about me that I can remember what the parking garage attendant in Ferris Bueller's Day Off looked like but not the guy at Blockbuster I talked to yesterday? And I work with the other guy, so I see him at least once a day. Still, I replaced him with the image of the father from Pieces of April, which I saw about two years ago.

They do both kind of look like the actors (Richard Edson and Oliver Platt) but neither of them give off the greasy, sleazy vibe that the movie characters' images do. They may have made me feel a little trapped by trying so hard to be friendly, but that's awkward, not creepy. Am I screwed up?

Freeze-dried books and chocolate chip bagels

I like working at a college in the summer. Free pastries and no one's eating them but me. Why does low-fat cream cheese look like slick sour cream?

My boss is reading about an old case where one state judge in California was going to shoot another judge (in a courtroom) and was shot down by a federal marshall who thereby precipitated all sorts of state vs. federal arguments. Her favorite part is the woman who carried a gun to court every day in her purse and would stand up occasionally and say "I'm going to kill you! You know I'm going to kill you!" and no one seemed to care.

I, meanwhile, am throwing away printed out e-mails from ten years ago requesting more paper in the copy center. At this rate I'll get the whole filing system in "my office" down to two drawers instead of twelve.

Did you know that some people freeze-dry books? Midwest Freeze-Dry Ltd. can rescue books "dating to the 16th century, captain's logs from sunken ships, and insect-infested artifacts of wood and leather"

Naturally she had a chip on her shoulder, not being Lutheran.

Zimmie is not a lutefisk and does not wish to be a housekeeper for Mr. Harsano.