Back in Fayetteville, Arkansas, we’d sometimes get a ’snow day’–a nice break from work or school to watch the snow fall and catch up on daytime TV. Here in the Carolinas, it never snows, but sometimes tropical storms and hurricanes grant us the day off. Gina and I call them “hurricane days,” regardless [...]
I’ve been using Writely this semester to store all of the word processing documents I create in a typical semester: lecture outlines, reading quizes, a copy of the syllabus itself. It’s a web-based word processor that Google now owns. It is part of Google’s growing stable of web-based office/personal productivity applications. [...]
I stumbled across this extensive comparison of the two film adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and the original book. I’m a fan of both the 1971 version (featuring Gene Wilder/directed by Mel Stuart) and 2005 version (featuring Johnny Depp/directed by Tim Burton), but I’ve never read the book. Fun.
I found this groovy 18-minute documentary of the “Amen break,” one of those sampled drum loop staples of hip-hop (and other) music. It’s a very thoughtful piece of work:
It’s from Nate Harrison. The title of the film is “Can I get an Amen?” (2004).
Finally, a little political validation: the NSA’s eavesdropping program has been ruled unconstitutional (something any 9th grade civics student could have told you). You can read up about it at the ACLU’s site (they’re the ones who brought the case).
If you’re feeling vigilent, you can help the EFF defeat Arlen Spector’s attempt [...]
I finished Don DeLillo’s novel, The Names a few days ago. It was a bit of a miss for me. I enjoyed the language and also enjoyed a few of the themes he suggests here and there (those about language and media, especially). But I didn’t feel the whole thing really hung [...]
I posted recently about trying to find new essays for use in my ENG 101 classes this fall. Turns out I will be teaching ENG 102 instead. I’m pretty happy with my syllabus for that class, though this weekend I’ll do some fine tuning and see what stays and what goes. Besides [...]
Here’s a little internet-literary-mad-scientist project for you: Concord. It’s a online concordance of a growing list of literary works. You can use it to answer amazing and or inane questions like “How many times does the word ‘plump‘ occur in Joyce’s Ulysses
The wife and I have been turning off the TV and amusing ourselves of late with board games. We have quite a few. The last two nights, it’s been Othello (my favorite, as it’s the only game I can win against my lovely opponent, who has super-human abilities at all games, it seems) [...]
Well, maybe. But, then again, maybe not. Josh and I have resumed development of Showlister. We look forward to putting out a nice version 1.0 toward the end of Q3 or early in Q4. This will be the first version to show off Josh’s considerable graphic design and CSS kung-fu. [...]