wheatblog

A blast from the past, Negativland’s “Time Zones,” parts of which are forever stuck in my head.  I’d never before seen this rather excellent animation of it:

This is the American Library Association’s “Banned Books Week,” an event they’ve held since 1982.  It just so happens that I’m teaching Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at the moment, one of the most-often challenged books in the canon of American literature (it was No. 5 on the list for 1990-1990).  Google is a partner [...]

Most people don’t understand science, even on the most basic level.  Put more specifically, most people don’t understand scientific skepticism–the obligatory frame of mind from which one must view scientific research in order to benefit from it.  Maintaining doubt, if you’re unused to it, hurts your head.  Certainty certainly feels better.  It has an aesthetic advantage vis-a-vis [...]

A friend on Facebook has put together a group called “Old School F’ville” (account required) for documenting and sharing artifacts from a particularly rich time in the history of Fayetteville, Arkansas’s underground music scene.  So I’ve been digging through my archives.  Here are the ones I’ve contributed (no account required).  If you were a part [...]

A week ago today, my wife’s father, Tom, died of a heart attack.  We headed back to Fayetteville last week to make preparations and attend the funeral, which was at St. Paul’s.  I was asked to give the eulogy.  We had been there about a month prior for Haden’s christening.  We got back into town [...]

I get stuck in some sort of time warp occasionally and miss out on movies that everyone else and their dog has seen as a matter of course.  The most glaring example of this is the original Star Wars (1977) movie, which was a huge hit when I was a kid, but which I didn’t see until I [...]

Being a bookish sort, I’ve never had any patience for censors, especially self-appointed ones.  So, while she was never in danger of getting my vote, the recent news that Sarah Palin falls into that ignoble category is one more reason to dislike her and, in my book, one more reason she fails in the basic requirements [...]

I stocked up on water and canned goods.  The projected path is pretty wide.  I’ve been tracking its movements.  Right now, it’s down to 65MPH, which is a good thing, but it’s expected to hit as a category one hurricane on Friday.
We made it through Gaston, a few years back.  That one was called a [...]

Generally, I prefer my iPod to the radio, inundated as it is with commercials, witless DJs, and crappy music.  I like to listen to NPR’s Morning Edition pretty often on my drive to work.  But I’m fairly inundated with news, so I try not to indulge in it every day.  
Music, for me, trumps any [...]

A long while back, I set out to do a complete rewrite of Wheat’s BassBook and publish it as a dead trees book.  That project got back burnered pretty quickly.  But, now that I’ve slowing unpacking my backups, I discovered that I’d done a good bit more work on it than I had previously thought. [...]