Pseudointellectual

We are on hiatus

2007-03-19T17:05:00.000-04:00

This blog has been put on indefinite hiatus. It may reappear sometime down the road. But for now, if you want to know what I'm up to, you'll have to contact me elsewhere.

Plus, what would strippers do?

2006-11-20T12:33:00.000-05:00

"While the government would save about $500 million annually in printing costs if it got rid of the dollar bill in favor of more durable coins, Castle said there are no plans to follow the lead of Canada and several European countries in ditching the smaller currencies.

'The dollar bill is just Americana. There is a lot of sentiment to keeping it,' he said."

Dollar coins

Make Mine Freedom

2006-10-13T09:29:00.000-04:00


Hilarious (and well made) anti-communist propoganda from the 1940s.

Scientists and Engineers for America

2006-10-09T12:03:00.000-04:00

Hey everybody. Go check out Scientists and Engineers for America. They are dedicated to helping elect public officials that don't ignore scientific findings (like, say, about global warming, stem cells, and the like).

It's been a while

2006-08-30T06:50:00.000-04:00

This article cracked me up:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060824-7591.html

I taught the first classes of the semester yesterday.

Sometime this summer I got feedback on my first exam. I think it was a passing exam, but there was lots of room for improvement.

I am starting a Moby Dick reading group with some friends. We start next week.

That's all for now.

2006-07-28T15:41:00.000-04:00

You know what's ironic about Carrot Top?

The tops of carrots are green.

Scam

2006-06-23T11:24:00.000-04:00

Hey everybody. I bought tickets from Fandango.com a while back, and one of their advertisers asked if I wanted to get a 10 dollar rebate in exchange for filling out some info. So I figured, "sure I do" and gave them my spam-only email account. It turned out that the rebate required far more work than the ten dollars was worth, so I ignored it.

Then, today while going over my bank records I noticed a ten dollar charge from WRI*ReservationRewards. I wasn't sure what that was, so I googled it, and found, among other webpages, this site: Watch out for this online credit card fraud via Fandango.com!!.

They advertise with online retailers, and when you click to get the rebate, they get your credit card info from the "legitimate" retailer (in this case, fandango). Then they charge you 10 bucks a month.
I called the company, and they said that they would refund the money and cancel the account. I'll keep you posted, but beware.
Also, it makes me not want to do business with any company that lets these bozos advertise on their site. No more Fandango for me.

Exam

2006-06-15T10:03:00.000-04:00

Dear internet,

I took my first prelim exam yesterday, and it was ok.

I think I did well on 2 out of the 3 questions, but by the time I started in on the last question, I had been writing for about 4 and a half hours, and my brain was mostly fried. I think I bombed that one question.
Now I get to surf the web (do people still call it that?) without feeling guilty, head to Boston to catch up with some people, read something just because I want to read it (a trashy pulp detective novel called Night Walker, followed by Lulu Dark Can See Through Walls), and start preparing for my second exam in September.

Another reason to get off the grid

2006-06-09T10:28:00.000-04:00

Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites: "Pentagon sets its sights on social networking websites"

Zzzzzzzzzz

2006-05-24T12:32:00.000-04:00

Scientists claim that if you Sleep more, you have a better chance of not gaining weight.

whatever.

Choose your own adventure is back!

2006-05-24T09:20:00.000-04:00

This might be old news to some, but the Choose Your Own Adventure books have been updated and are back in print.

These books rocked. I could go on a rant about how they were precursors to hypertextual narratives; I could say that they fostered analytical thought, and the notion that our actions have consequences; I could say that non-linear nature of the "text" in fact problematizes textuality insofar as the text you read and the one I read may be quite different, which is to say, it simply underscores the process we undertake whenever we read "texts."

But really, they rock because they are just wicked fun.

This is Rad

2006-05-12T05:52:00.000-04:00

A little bit of awesomeossityness: good grammar costs nothing

(via China Ruby)

Meat Chips!

2006-05-11T15:21:00.000-04:00

Jen brought home a bag of these the other day:

This is what they look like out of the bag:

My first reaction: "They taste kind of gross, but I can't stop eating them."

They are crispy and salty and sweet and taste vaguely like meat. Yum!

remaking the world

2006-05-01T09:44:00.000-04:00

According to one of my students, "Iran is a NATO nation and those countries are forbidden from producing uranium"

The Morning News - Do You Have Hipsters?, by Eric Feezell

2006-04-26T13:36:00.000-04:00

The Morning News - Do You Have Hipsters?, by Eric Feezell

good news for slackers

2006-04-24T13:27:00.000-04:00

New York Daily News - City News - Surf's up! Judge OKs Web crawls: "The ruling by Administrative Law Judge John Spooner deemed that on-the-job Internet use is equivalent to reading a newspaper or talking on the phone - which flies in the face of Mayor Bloomberg's quick firing of an Albany clerk playing solitaire this year."

leila craigslist nyc massage

2006-04-21T17:57:00.000-04:00

this
made me chuckle when I saw someone found my web log by searching for the above

good news for goths

2006-04-14T09:57:00.000-04:00

New Scientist Breaking News - Goth subculture may protect vulnerable children

backside butt derriere rear buttocks ass keister rear-end "tail bone" "where the sun don't shine" rump

2006-04-12T16:39:00.000-04:00

Somebody really delved into the thesaurus when writing this article
Philadelphia Daily News | 04/12/2006 | Bunsmoke: Are bullets in backsides warnings?

Please, keep your prayers to yourself.

2006-03-31T10:19:00.000-05:00

Indeed, researchers at the Harvard Medical School and five other U.S. medical centers found, to their bewilderment, that coronary-bypass patients who knew strangers were praying for them fared significantly worse than people who got no prayers.

Preliminary Exam

2006-03-27T12:33:00.000-05:00

Hi everyone. I now have a date for my first exam. It's May 25th at 9 AM.
They sure don't make the process easy. According to the calendar that was sent out, today, March 27th is the last day to sign up for an exam date. However, April 6th is the last day to submit reading lists and the exam protocol. But guess what? In a lovely twist of bureaucratic normalcy, you need to submit your reading lists and exam protocol at the same time that you sign up for an exam date.
I don't get it either.
But I've managed to get an exception so I have until the end of the week to get all the paperwork done and filled out. This is after I asked what sort of paperwork I needed to have filled out to sign up for an exam and was told that there wasn't any.

What do people do all day?

2006-03-15T13:04:00.000-05:00

Well, if you are a geeky grad student/freshman comp teacher, you spend your lunchbreak writing emails to abc news because you are sick of seeing poorly edited news stories on their site. And you feel justified in doing so because you have to read poorly constructed sentences as part of your job. And really, you think that part of the reason your students have trouble writing two coherent sentences in a row is because they are used to seeing reputable news sources get away with publishing subjectless sentences.
Then you feel kind of like a big loser for doing so.

Then you post about it to your blog.

Bird Flu

2006-03-09T16:04:00.000-05:00

Also, I'm recovering nicely from a bout of Bird Flu, thanks to OTC drugs, chicken soup, the boo boo buddy, and some TLC.

Night Watch

2006-03-09T15:50:00.000-05:00

I saw Night Watch last night. Having glasses makes it much easier to read subtitles.
In the bathroom after the film, I heard someone describe the movie like this:
"It's like Star Wars, only Russian and with vampires."

It was a fairly good movie, actually. A little confusing at times, with a couple of "huh? where'd he get the light saber from?" moments. If it had been made in this country, it probably would have been unbearably awful. It would have starred Wesly Snipes or Ben Aflack or somebody. Also it wouldn't have had nearly as much Russian heavy metal in the soundtrack.

New glasses

2006-03-07T17:44:00.000-05:00

I have glasses now, everybody. On the bright side, I can now see stuff. Like street signs. On the down side, I've been wearing them for a couple of hours, and they have given me a headache. Will that go away eventually?