December 2010
1 post
I started a story today
502 words
baby steps
September 2010
3 posts
Is it just me, or is this totally insane?
The admissions application deadline for the UMass Lowell school of education is Jan 1.
Classes start Jan. 24.
That seems like a… short amount of time.
teaching lit.
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to teach literature to high schoolers (which really is right and proper, since I’m applying to teacher licensure programs this November). I am not sure what the best way is but I’m pretty confident I know a few bad ways. Here is one bad way: chronological progression.
I get why we teach the material in survey courses in...
a lit snob's forays into genre fiction part 1:...
On a friend’s recommendation, I sent a cellular signal into space. The radio waves that came back contained China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station, in the form of some kind of digital code that my electronic reading device had no trouble rendering into print — a reasonable facsimile of a book. It’s frankly incredible that I can get almost any book I want, whenever I want,...
August 2010
2 posts
WatchYou should all watch my friends’ web series.
Is that Jonathan from Buffy on Mad Men?
haggers:
ZOMG.
First Angel’s asshole son. Now Buffy’s nemesis?!
Joss Whedon and the Mad Men people must use the same casting director.
July 2010
1 post
June 2010
6 posts
My new favorite thing is to call people "simple."
i am going to learn how to play the vuvuzela
NATURE IS FUCKING TERRIFYING
LOOK AT THIS ANIMATED GIF
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imago
So I was a camp counselor when I was like 16,
gregtron:
and I wasn’t very good at it.
One day a kid picked up a snake by its tail, and started swinging it around over his head like a lasso. The snake wasn’t very big, or very dangerous, and for the first few revolutions, our intrepid young hero had this extremely proud smile covering his entire face. Every time the snake went around, however, it inexeplicably grew, until we were all...
in which I cheer up lenore on the eve of a paper...
hachface: This is me wishing luck to you through the power of your iPhone.
hachface: Not sure how the luck is going to get from the iPhone to you.
hachface: Try rubbing the touch screen all over your face.
hachface: You might need to buy a special iPhone luck transmission device.
hachface: Like, a USB intravenous drip.
hachface: I am not sure how this works I am not a scientist.
lenore: I discovered the paper is actually due at 4 and am considering staging a scenario in which i could pretend the seppuku was an act of honor
lenore: Also why does my phone have seppuku in its suggestive text
hachface: All products that include Japanese patents in their design must acknowledge seppuku in some way.
hachface: My toaster oven came with a diagram of all the arteries innervating the stomach area, for instance.
hachface: So really the iPhone got off pretty light with the predictive text.
it's a little embarrassing
that I’ve had this particular iTunes library basically since tenth grade, but in the few months that “Bad Romance” has existed it has become the music file on my computer with the highest play count.
By, like, a severe margin.
May 2010
17 posts
Did I really pay $0.99 to Steve Jobs for the Buffy...
I did.
Not only did I buy and pay for it, but I put it on my iPod and worked out to it.
Eternal nerd am I.
I am thankful for my sisters.
lenorebeadsman:
Until now, reading this, I did not realize that I never actually knew how the song “Fergalicious” went. I mean, I knew, but I didn’t realize how bad it was because I had only heard my sisters singing it, and they are both much better singers than Fergie.
(cracked: the 5 most famous musicians who are thieving bastards)
She rhymes “Fergalicious” with...
A brief lesson on the fallacy of composition
dailyrenegade:
Up to that point in my life I was considerably more liberal on the issue of homosexuality. I worked as middle management in a store where the two people directly over me (not the only two people around and NOT IN A BARRACKS) were both homosexual, even said that they wanted me, I declined and got on with my life. No harm, no foul. It’s just not that easy with 100 guys who all...
Hatchface,
librarianpirate:
(Spoiler alert) I have heard that how she [redacted] will make me angry? We’ll see.
(spoiler: vague hints about later Angel seasons below)
…Yeah. Well. I don’t want to give much away, but suffice it to say I don’t consider that part of her arc. I think her arc ends in Season 3, and up until that point it’s awesome.
But you’ve heard right. Her...
Librarian Pirate: Sometimes I feel like the... →
(first season Cordelia. I’ve only gotten as far as the 5th season and that was ages ago and I’m rewatching but I’m not even done with the first season. So I hear she has this whole big arc and I’m gonna be angry when it’s over, but I’m talking about the shallow, vapid, unobservant Cordy here.)
Wait there are people who don’t like Cordelia’s character arc? I thought it was kind of...
Were the ideas on the GOP Speak Out website posted...
It is impossible to tell.
Seriously they’re a good idea. Writing something that you intend to be good is really stressful. Writing something you know is utterly disposable is liberating. And then when you read it over and realize it’s actually pretty good it feels like you got something wonderful for free.
20 minute stories are a really good exercise
Facebook suggested that I "reconnect" with my own...
If I were estranged from my mother that might seem poignant, like a digital angel reaching across the void of human loneliness and beckoning me back to the warmth of home and family. But since I’m actually pretty close to my mother this message makes Facebook seem weird and alien, like someone who is intruding on my life to an uncomfortable extent but who is also very incompetent at it,...
in another long funk
Self-medicating with Sweetarts. They are cheaper than SSRIs and have fewer side effects.
These are actual words
that an ostensibly thinking person wrote, and then managed to get published in the nation’s premiere news daily:
The crime wave killed off the hippie movement. The hippies celebrated disorder, mayhem and the whole Dionysian personal agenda. By the 1970s, the menacing results of that agenda were all around.
David Brooks.
You head it here, folks: Sky-high rates of inner city crime in the...
Elizabeth Warren is speaking in Boston
for a live taping of NPR’s On Point.
Tickets are $150.
Shiiiiit.
Oh my god
Oh my god
Oh my god
This is the best fucking thing
http://www.theonion.com/video/joad-cressbeckler-is-back-to-claim-rightful-title,17408/
I don't have a "network."
How is that possible?
Didn’t I go to college?
What was I doing during that time?
Also, professors need to stop cheating me out of...
haguenite:
hachface:
haguenite:
Like all those weeks we spent on Whitman, and not a peep about the homosexual under (and over)tones? Uncool.
Yes, obviously I picked up on them. But when I asked the professor about it, she just resorted to that evil label, ‘homosocial.’
In the year 2010 any professor who ignores Whitman’s obvious homoeroticism is not on the side of good.
Yes. I quite...
Also, professors need to stop cheating me out of...
haguenite:
Like all those weeks we spent on Whitman, and not a peep about the homosexual under (and over)tones? Uncool.
Yes, obviously I picked up on them. But when I asked the professor about it, she just resorted to that evil label, ‘homosocial.’
In the year 2010 any professor who ignores Whitman’s obvious homoeroticism is not on the side of good.
My sister ordered a pizza last night
and she chose Domino’s, of all places.
When I saw her walk into the living room with that red, white and blue box, I just stared in disgust and thought, “Whose sister are you?”
April 2010
13 posts
What's the best way to get blood out of sheets and...
librarianpirate:
No reason. Just hidin’ some bodies.
Saliva.
Preferably the saliva of the person who bled.
I guess I should be working on my lit and...
haguenite:
But I don’t WANNA! *whines*
I’ve been watching a bootleg Wicked (on Google vids! I didn’t upload or download and therefore I’m not punishable in any way, right?)
Technically, when you view anything on the Internet you are downloading it to a temporary folder on your hard drive.
Maybe I should start a blog about my increasingly vivid sex fantasies involving Matt Taibbi.
New Car Inaugural Road Trip
OK, OK, not really a full-fledged “road trip” — that’s coming later, when I have time to recruit some friends. More like a day trip to celebrate my newfound mobility. I need to go somewhere I can feasibly enjoy that is only a few hours’ drive from Billerica, Massachusetts.
I have also decided that it has to be a place that only a total weirdo nerd could possibly...
so all my friends from college...
…seem to have interesting and compelling blogs, but I really don’t. Do I not have ideas? Am I congenitally unfunny? Or am I just lazy?
And why does not having a blog even bother me, anyway?
I encourage all of you
to read the Simple English version of Wikipedia’s entry on Hamlet.
I really think it provides a lot of fresh insight into the play.
Meaning
Scholars can not agree on what this story is about, even for very simple things, like if Hamlet is a good or bad man, if he loves Ophelia, if Ophelia is a virgin, if Polonius knows about king Hamlet’s murder, and so on. Scholars also disagree...
I am so satisfied
that “Like a Prayer” is the song in the promo for Glee Season 2.
my greatest pet peeve
is when people shit on philosophy in general because they’ve had a bad Derrida experience.
Derrida is so not what modern philosophy is.
(analytic 4 eva)
Jacques Derrida on whether we love a person's... →
novazembla:
I’m not sure I buy the distinction. What is this inherent essence he seems to be talking about? Something independent from all their character traits?
Is it just not tricksy enough to think of a person as a complex amalgam of many different traits? If you wake up tomorrow different in every way, are you still you? If this is starting to sound like gibberish to you, you’re not...
Is everyone at the New York Times high?
First there was Maureen Dowd’s offensive pun, which was incredibly crass and ignorant on no fewer than three levels. And then this headline:
“Alexander McQueen’s suicide at age 40 shocked his friends. Until they thought about it.”
“This church needs a sexorcist more than an exorcist.”
– Maureen Dowd
Ugh. Fuck off, Maureen Dowd.
March 2010
47 posts
smiletime:
a grammar: don’t act like you don’t *WANT* James Franco’s allegedly horrible short story
… … … … …
I haven’t read Franco’s story yet, but as a mock-offended graduate of said program, I must say: physician, heal thyself! Not that I’m interested in scolding anyone about it, but if the reception of this story is an indictment of anything,...
A boring talent I have:
lenorebeadsman:
My handwriting and notebook align perfectly to make each handwritten page equivalent to one typed, double spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman page with 1” margins.
This skill is about as useful as being second-bulletproof.
Does this ratio take into account average accuracy rate and usage of cross-outs?
Part of me wishes I had the economics background to mount a more thorough evaluation of the things that Paul Krugman says. The only credential I have to my name is an A in Econ 101 at a second-rate college. Standing as I am on this shaky ground, I must ask myself: Do I believe Krugman because he makes good arguments or do I believe Krugman because his writing flatters my liberal ideology?
...
Re: Men's studies
I am not against the idea of “Men’s Studies” on the face of it. It’s true that men enjoy a position of power in the world, but then so does the United States, and the continued existence of “American Studies” remains uncontroversial.
What I am against is the idea that a Men’s Studies curriculum would be predicated on the assumption that misandry is a...
Good one, Hatchface! But for a 10 year old? I...
(via librarianpirate)
Ah, I didn’t realize it was supposed to be for a 10 year old. Um… let me think.
Maybe:
So Far from the Bamboo Grove
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/So_far_from_the_bamboo_grove
I have a job now!
I am glad there is no "unlike" feature on Tumblr
Because it would be a feature that I would use often, and lead to rampant flame wars.