The problem with freshmen

They'd rather...


The graph supposedly cites data from:

Pryor, J. H., Hurtado, S., Saenz, V. B., Lindholm, J. A., Korn, W. S., & Mahoney, K. M. (2005). The American freshman: National norms for fall 2005. Los Angeles: Higher Education Research Institute, UCLA.

Noodles on my back

"No people are uninteresting."

No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.¹

1: by Yevgeny Yevtushenko

"..." 27

Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York toy shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down, and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it; yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover. This contraption is the opposite of Pandora's "box."

—Ivan Illich

"Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress"

WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.

Enlarge Image

Faced with losing everything, Americans took a long overdue step forward and elected Barack Obama.

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

"Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate," said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. "To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you."

Added Obama, "It's a great day for our nation."

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

Enlarge Image

After enduring eight years of near constant trauma, the United States is, at long last, ready for equality.

Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.

According to a CNN exit poll, 42 percent of voters said that the nation's financial woes had finally become frightening enough to eclipse such concerns as gay marriage, while 30 percent said that the relentless body count in Iraq was at last harrowing enough to outweigh long ideological debates over abortion. In addition, 28 percent of voters were reportedly too busy paying off medical bills, desperately trying not to lose their homes, or watching their futures disappear to dismiss Obama any longer.

"The election of our first African-American president truly shows how far we've come as a nation," said NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. "Just eight years ago, this moment would have been unthinkable. But finally we, as a country, have joined together, realized we've reached rock bottom, and for the first time voted for a candidate based on his policies rather than the color of his skin."

"Today Americans have grudgingly taken a giant leap forward," Williams continued. "And all it took was severe economic downturn, a bloody and unjust war, terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan, nearly 2,000 deaths in New Orleans, and more than three centuries of frequently violent racial turmoil."

Said Williams, "The American people should be commended for their long-overdue courage."

Obama's victory is being called the most significant change in politics since the 1992 election, when a full-scale economic recession led voters to momentarily ignore the fact that candidate Bill Clinton had once smoked marijuana. While many believed things had once again reached an all-time low in 2004, the successful reelection of President George W. Bush—despite historically low approval ratings nationwide—proved that things were not quite shitty enough to challenge the already pretty shitty status quo.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by saying we should pull out of Iraq months before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."

As we enter a new era of equality for all people, the election of Barack Obama will decidedly be a milestone in U.S. history, undeniable proof that Americans, when pushed to the very brink, are willing to look past outward appearances and judge a person by the quality of his character and strength of his record. So as long as that person is not a woman.

—The Onion

The Albatross1

Often, to pass the time on board, the crew
will catch an albatross, one of those big birds
which nonchalantly chaperone a ship
across the bitter fathoms of the sea.

Tied to the deck, this sovereign of space,
as if embarassed by its clumsiness,
pitiably lets its great white wings
drag at its sides like a pair of unshipped oars.

How weak and awkward, even comical
this traveller but lately so adroit—
one deckhand sticks a pipestem in its beak,
another mocks the cripple that once flew!

The Poet is like this monarch of the clouds
riding the storm above the marksman's range;
exiled on the ground, hooted and jeered,
he cannot walk because of his great wings.

1: From Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire. Translated by Richard Howard.

Random jotted thoughts, aphorisms

Our words, our expressions, our analogies, are clothed in humanness--in our concrete everyday-ness, our veracities, our situations. And, it would seem, too, that our outgoing thoughts are clothed in our words.

Philosophy as an ultimatum is a denial of the right for future generations to want to say something profound about the world, to color it with their own experiences and judgments.


What do we get out of such a doctrine? An advancing culture that must continually reject all that comes before it. A generation that says something, and another that says, "You're wrong... but perhaps..." and yet another generation that rejoins "no."


It's my view that one should be skeptical of religious beliefs that establish human-to-human hierarchies. Divine-to-human seems perfectly fine; it's the others that are dangerous. Religion originates in the individual—"subjectivity is truth"; "the crowd is untruth"—in subjectivity's relationship to another.

Deterministic rules, etc. -- The question of what these rules are is scientific. The question of why there are rules is religious.

"Is the space pope reptilian?"

"Culture is an observance. Or at least it presupposes an observance." —LW

The essay at hand is almost subterranean. (Deep.)

Kierkegaard is one of the few thinkers I would describe as overwhelmingly intelligent.


If I don't find a motivation beyond the grade in the course of a class, I'm not going to go very far.

Listening to the new Mars Volta albums is like waiting for a bus. A few beautiful moments in a sea of overindulgence.

"Be one of those upon whom nothing is lost." —W. James

Think about the following: the mark of good writing is in the artistry, wisdom, or significance to be gleaned.

Cheese is one of humankind's greatest achievements.

Debt clock gets extra digit

1. US debt clock runs out of digits

"It’s Not What We Teach; It’s What They Learn"

EDUCATION WEEK

September 10, 2008

It’s Not What We Teach; It’s What They Learn

By Alfie Kohn

I never understood all the fuss about that old riddle – “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear, does it still make a sound?” Isn’t it just a question of how we choose to define the word sound? If we mean “vibrations of a certain frequency transmitted through the air,” then the answer is yes. If we mean “vibrations that stimulate an organism’s auditory system,” then the answer is no.

More challenging, perhaps, is the following conundrum sometimes attributed to defiant educators: “I taught a good lesson even though the students didn’t learn it.” Again, everything turns on definition. If teaching is conceived as an interactive activity, a process of facilitating learning, then the sentence is incoherent. It makes no more sense than “I had a big dinner even though I didn’t eat anything.” But what if teaching is defined solely in terms of what the teacher says and does? In that case, the statement isn’t oxymoronic – it’s just moronic. Wouldn’t an unsuccessful lesson lead whoever taught it to ask, “So what could I have done that might have been more successful?”

That question would indeed occur to educators who regard learning – as opposed to just teaching -- as the point of what they do for a living. More generally, they’re apt to realize that what we do doesn’t matter nearly as much as how kids experience what we do.

Consider what happens between children and parents. When each is asked to describe some aspect of their life together, the responses are strikingly divergent. For example, a large Michigan study that focused on the extent to which children were included in family decision making turned up different results depending on whether the parents or the children were asked. (Interestingly, three other studies found that when there is some objective way to get at the truth, children’s perceptions of their parents’ behaviors are no less accurate than the parents’ reports of their own behaviors.)

But the important question isn’t who’s right; it’s whose perspective predicts various outcomes. It doesn’t matter what lesson a parent intended to teach by, say, giving a child a “time out” (or some other punishment). If the child experiences this as a form of love withdrawal, then that’s what will determine the effect. Similarly, parents may offer praise in the hope of providing encouragement, but children may resent the judgment implicit in being informed they did a “good job,” or they may grow increasingly dependent on pleasing the people in positions of authority.

From both punishments and rewards, moreover, kids may derive a lesson of conditionality: I’m loved – and lovable – only when I do what I’m told. Of course, most parents would insist that they love their children no matter what. But, as one group of researchers put it in a book about controlling styles of parenting, “It is the child’s own experience of this behavior that is likely to have the greatest impact on the child’s subsequent development.” It’s the message that’s received, not the one that the adults think they’re sending, that counts.

Exactly the same point applies in a school setting since educators, too, may use carrots and sticks on students. We may think we’re emphasizing the importance of punctuality by issuing a detention for being late, or that we’re making a statement about the need to be respectful when we suspend a student for yelling an obscenity, or that we’re supporting the value of certain behaviors when we offer a reward for engaging in them.

But what if the student who’s being punished or rewarded doesn’t see it that way? What if his or her response is, “That’s not fair!” or “Next time I won’t get caught” or “I guess when you have more power you can make other people suffer if they don’t do what you want” or “If they have to reward me for x, then x must be something I wouldn’t want to do.”

We protest that the student has it all wrong, that the intervention really is fair, the consequence is justified, the reward system makes perfect sense. But if the student doesn’t share our view, then what we did cannot possibly have the intended effect. Results don’t follow from behaviors but from the meaning attached to behaviors.

The same is true of teachers who are stringent graders. Their intent – to “uphold high standards” or “motivate students to do their best” – is completely irrelevant if a low grade is perceived differently by the student who receives it, which it almost always is. Likewise, if students view homework as something they can’t wait to be done with, it doesn’t matter how well-designed or valuable we think those assignments are. The likelihood that they will help students to learn more effectively, let alone become excited about the topic, is exceedingly low.

If teachers just do their thing and leave it up to each student to make sense of it -- “so that the child comes to feel, as he is intended to, that when he doesn’t understand it is his fault” (to borrow John Holt’s words) – then meaningful learning is likely to be in awfully short supply in those classrooms.

But let’s face it: It’s easier to concern yourself with teaching than with learning, just as it’s more convenient to say the fault lies with people other than you when things go wrong. It’s tempting, when students are given some kind of assessment, to assume the results primarily reveal how much progress each kid is, or isn’t, making – rather than noticing that the quality of the teaching is also being assessed.

“I taught a good lesson . . . “ probably suggests that learning is viewed as a process of absorbing information, which in turn means that teaching consists of delivering that information. (Many years ago, the writer George Leonard described lecturing as the “best way to get information from teacher’s notebook to student’s notebook without touching the student’s mind.”) This approach is particularly common among high school and college teachers, who have been encouraged to think of themselves as experts in their content areas (literature, science, history) rather than in pedagogy. The reductio ad absurdum would be those who “took their content so very seriously that they forgot their students,” as Linda McNeil put it in her devastating portrait of high school.

The trouble may start in schools of education, where preservice teachers in many states spend very little time learning about learning, relative to the time devoted to subject-matter content. Worse, when teachers these days are told to think about learning, it may be construed in behaviorist terms, with an emphasis on discrete, measurable skills. The point isn’t to deepen understanding (and enthusiasm) but merely to elevate test scores.

The fact is that real learning often can’t be quantified, and a corporate-style preoccupation with “data” turns schooling into something shallow and lifeless. Ideally, attention to learning signifies an effort to capture how each student makes sense of the world so we can meet them where they are. “Teaching,” as Deborah Meier reminded us, “is mostly listening.” (It’s the learners, she added, who should be doing most of the “telling,” based on how they grapple with an engaging curriculum.) Imagine how American classrooms would be turned inside out if we ever really put that wisdom into action.

And it’s not just listening in the literal sense that’s needed but the willingness to imagine the student’s point of view. How does it feel to be sitting there with your shaky efforts to write an essay or solve a problem subjected to continuous evaluation? (Many teachers who expect their students to bear up under, and even benefit from, a constant barrage of criticism are themselves often extremely sensitive to any suggestion that their craft could be improved.) Indeed, educators ought to make a point of trying something new in their own lives, something they must struggle to master, in order to appreciate what their students put up with every day.

Finally, as teachers are to students, so administrators are to teachers. Successful school leadership doesn’t depend on what principals and superintendents do, but on how their actions are regarded by their audience – notably, classroom teachers. Those on the receiving end may be older, but the moral is the same: It’s best to see what we do through the eyes of those to whom it’s done.

... 26

(Jerome Bruner. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds.)

Perhaps Richard Rorty is right in characterizing the mainstream of Anglo-American philosophy (which, on the whole, he rejects) as preoccupied with the epistemological question of how to know truth—which he contrasts with the broader question of how we come to endow experience with meaning, which is the question that preoccupies the poet and the storyteller. (p. 12)

The most general implication [of a "hermeneutic" or transactional view] is that a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum for negotiating and renegotiating meaning and for explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for action. (p. 123)

Interlude

No posts for a little while now. I've been looking back through what I've put on here, and I think I would feel a little better if I composed at least one good poem to put up. That to follow... hopefully.

PS. This is what part of the alphabet would like like if Q and R were eliminated.

Poem 27

syncopated

the door handle is warm
as footfalls stamp
the paneled room

tonight is left to chance
as lips part from another's
and cajolement from others

the night is silent
beneath the resounding
sway

and I've only begun
to stammer


you said we grunt and sweat
beneath a weary life

with a pretentious smile

we're all reduced
to simplicity
and so much clamor

with frailty
and the warmth of skin

palls of satin

as you leaned and furled
over
mouth agape


unsure
of the vicissitude
of this

morning--


the songs and
clever reconstitution--


in the morning

I can only sleep;
and swallow
the light of a new day


("your mom can
only sleep and swallow")

"..." 25

   Adam was saying, "The times are changed. A boy must be a specialist or he will get nowhere. I guess that's why I'm so glad you're going to college."
   Aron said, "I've been thinking about that, and I wonder."
   "Well, don't think any more. Your first choice is right. Look at me. I know a little bit about a great many things and not enough about any one of them to make a living in these times."
   [. . .]
   Lee looked in. "The kitchen scales must be way off," he said. "The turkey's going to be done earlier than the chart says. I'll bet that bird doesn't weigh eighteen pounds."
   Adam said, "Well, you can keep it warm," and he continued, "Old Sam Hamilton saw this coming. He said there couldn't be any more universal philosophers. The weight of knowledge is too great for one mind to absorb. He saw a time when one man would know only one little fragment, but he would know it well."
   "Yes," Lee said from the doorway, "and he deplored it. He hated it."

There was a young man from Stamboul

from Slaughterhouse 5:

There was a young man from Stamboul,
Who soliloquized thus to his tool:
'You took all my wealth
And you ruined my health,
And now you won't pee, you old fool.'

My Wii Virtual Console wishlist

Here's a list of games that I've been eagerly wanting to see pop up on the Wii's Virtual Console:

	Zombies Ate My Neighbors (SNES) 48+ levels of horror-themed co-op madness. The SNES version is just a bit better than the one on Genesis.
	Shinobi (Master System) Old-school arcade ninja action. (The NES port is terrible, however.)
	The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening DX (Game Boy Color) I know it's a long shot, but since the DS doesn't play GBC games they should really consider putting them on the Virtual Console. Link's Awakening is my favorite 2d Zelda game.
	Sonic CD (Sega CD) Another long-shot, but there are Turbo-Grafx CD games already on, so why not some Sega CD? A lot of people consider this to be the best Sonic game. (I still say it's Sonic 2.)
	Earthworm Jim: Special Edition (Sega CD) If Sega CD ends up on the Wii, I'd also like to see this. It's Earthworm Jim with better music and more levels.
	Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Arcade Game (NES) So much nostalgia for this game...
	Goldeneye 007 (N64) If the licensing issues are ever resolved, this one's a no-brainer. My favorite console FPS.
	Joe & Mac (SNES) Co-op with cavemen and dinosaurs. And not needlessly difficult like the arcade and Genesis versions.
	Mega Bomberman (Genesis) Bomberman! No one's ever played this with 4 players because no one has ever owned the Genesis 4 player adapter. Let's change that.
	Sub Terrania (Genesis) This one is more obscure. It's very hard, but also very fun and unique.

Dream Omelet

Wow...


1. Chef Cooks 'Dream Omelet' From Recipe That Came To Him In A Dream

"Last Lecture," Randy Pausch

The Bush Multi-Year Plan on Global Warming

—by Tom Toles

Noam Chomsky on the US Election

A really interesting read:

1. Chomsky: US public irrelevant; US can learn something from Bolivia's democracy

Pedagogy of Hope

I finished reading Pedagogy of Hope by Paulo Freire about a week ago. Not to say that these are the only important ideas, but here are some passages and quotations that caught my eye while I was reading:

"I thought I'd been so clear," I said. "I don't think they understood me."

"Could it have been you, Paulo, who didn't understand them?" Elza asked...

Talking about what he was writing, Josué suddenly told us: "I'll suggest a good habit for a writer to get into. At the end of a book, or article, let it 'marinate' for three months, four months, in a drawer. Then one night, take it out again and read it. People always change 'something,'" concluded Josué, with his hand on the shoulder of one of us.

When it comes to language there is something else I should like to bring up here. It is something that I have never accepted—on the contrary, something that I have always rejected. It is the assertion, or even insinuation, that fine, elegant writing, is not scholarly. A scholar does difficult writing, not fine writing. Language's esthetic moment, it has always seemed to me, ought to be pursued by all of us, including rigorous scholars. There is not the least incompatibility between rigor in the quest for an understanding and knowledge of the world, and beauty of form in the expression of what is found in that world.

It would be an absurdity for there to be, or seem to have to be, some necessary association between ugliness and scientific rigor.

[T]eaching is not the pure mechanical transfer of the contour of a content from the teacher to passive, docile students.

[T]o teach is not the simple transmission of knowledge concerning the object or concerning content. Teaching is not a simple transmission, wrought by and large through a pure description of the concept of the object, to be memorized by students mechanically. Teaching—again, from the postmodern progressive viewpoint of which I speak here—is not reducible merely to teaching students to learn through an operation in which the object of knowledge is the very act of learning. Teaching someone to learn is only valid—from this viewpoint, let me repeat—when educands learn to learn in learning the reason-for, the "why," of the object or the content.

Therefore teaching is a creative act, a critical act, and not a mechanical one.

I feel utterly at peace with the interpretation that the wane of "realistic socialism" does not mean, on one side, that socialism has shown itself to be intrinsically inviable; on the other, that capitalism has now stepped forward in its excellence once and for all.

What excellence is this, that manages to "coexist with more than a billion inhabitants of the developing world who live in poverty," not to say misery? Not to mention the all but indifference with which it coexists with "pockets of poverty" and misery in its own, developed body. What excellence is this, that sleeps in peace while numberless men and women make their home in the street, and say it is their own fault that they are on the street? What excellence is this, that struggles so little, if it struggles at all, with discrimination for reason of sex, class, or race, as if it reject someone different, humiliate her, offend him, hold her in contempt, exploit her, were the right of individuals, or classes, or races, or one sex, that holds a position of power over another? What excellence is this, that tepidly registers the millions of children who come into the world and do not remain, or not for long, or if they are more resistant, manage to stay a while, then take their leave of the world?

[. . .]

What excellence is this, that, in the Brazilian Northeast, coexists with a degree of misery that could only have been thought a piece of fiction: little boys and girls, women and men, vying with starving pups, tragically, like animals, for the garbage of the great trash heaps outlying the cities, to eat? Nor is São Paulo itself exempt from the experience of this wretchedness.

What excellence is this, that seems blind to little children with distended bellies, eaten up by worms, toothless women looking like old crones at thirty, wasted men, skinny, stooped populations? Fifty-two percent of the population of Recife live in slums, in bad weather, an easy prey for diseases that effortlessly crush their enfeebled bodies. What excellence is this, that strikes a pact with the cold-blooded, cowardly murder of landless men and women of the countryside simply because they fight for their right to their word and their labor, while they remain bound to the land and despoiled of their fields by the dominant classes?

What excellence is this, that gazes with serene regard upon the extermination of little girls and boys in the great Brazilian urban centers—that "forbids" 8 million children of the popular classes to go to school, that "expels" from the schools a great number of those who manage to get in—and calls all this "capitalistic modernity."

We become capable of imaginatively, curiously, "stepping back" from ourselves—from the life we lead—and of disposing ourselves to "know about it." The moment came when we not only lived, but began to know what we were living—hence it was possible for us to know what we know, and therefore to know that we could do more. What we cannot do, as imaginative, curious beings, is to cease to learn and to seek, to investigate the "why" of things. We cannot exist without wondering about tomorrow, about what is "going on," and going on in favor of what, against what, for whom, against whom. We cannot exist without wondering about how to do the concrete or "untested feasible" that requires us to fight for it.

[S]omething of basic imporance turns—the basic importance of education as act of cognition not only of the content, but of the "why" of economic, social, political, ideological, and historical facts, which explain the greater or lesser degree of "inderdict of the body," our conscious body, under which we find ourselves placed.

The fundamental problem—a problem of a political nature, and colored by ideological hues—is who chooses the content, and in behalf of which persons the thing the "chooser's" teaching will be performed—in favor of whom, against whom, in favor of what, against what.

It is impossible to democratize the choice of content without democratizing the teaching of content.

What is altogether impermissible, in democratic practice, is for teachers, surreptitiously or otherwise, to impose on their pupils their own "reading of the world," in whose framework, therefore, they will now situate the teaching of content.

The role of the progressive educator, which neither can nor ought to be omitted, in offering her or his "reading of the world," is to bring out the fact that there are other "readings of the world," different from the one being offered as the educator's own, and at times antagonistic to it.

The school we need so urgently [I said in 1960] is a school in which persons really study and work. [...] The intellectualism we fight is precisely that hollow, empty, sonorous chatter, bereft of any relationship with the reality surrounding us, in which we are born and reared and on which, in large part, we yet feed today.

"I do not authentically think unless others think. I simply cannot think for others, or for others, or without others."

There is no dialogue in "spontaneism" any more than in the omnipotence of the teacher. But a dialogical relation does not, as is sometimes thought, rule out the possibility of the act of teaching. [. . .] If the educator's thinking cancels, crushes, or hinders the development of the educands' thinking, then the educator's thinking, being authoritarian, tends to generate in the educands upon whom it impinges a timid, inauthentic, sometimes even merely rebellious thinking.

More than ever before, political decision making, in a progressive mold, ought to be extended into populism, so that a university would place itself in the service of popular interests, as well. This would imply, as well,in practice, a critical comprehension of how university arts and sciences ought to be related with the consciousness of the popular classes: that is, a critical comprehension of the interrelations of popular knowledge, common sense, and scientific cognition.

...an interdisciplinary understanding of teaching, instead of merely a disciplinary one.
Various academic departments sought to work in this way in an attempt to overcome the compartmentalization of views to which we subject reality, and in which, not infrequently, we become lost.

From the peak of an elevation, we descried* a whole world to be built differently. [. . .]

*Past tense of "descry," not a typo. I think.

Be Patient, This Gets Amazing

1. White House Refused to Open E-Mail

RIP George Carlin (1937-2008)

1. Award-winning comedian George Carlin dies
2. George Carlin mourned as counterculture hero

Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare

Genius.


1. Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children's Healthcare

Poem 27

1doves that shift with melodic praise

the snowman given at halloween

the gruff angles at the curb's set


a coin echoes above all as it slips
     down a well
its glimmer met in shade and rust


above us, a rock dove lifts to the
     alley's top
as we walk through the caked mud


we try limericks and talk, but the
streets look slenderly and balk

at each line. the dove flies gently away.


whitewashed houses leaning all together

a glint of sunlight through pews and fodder

and a soft splash upon mossy water.

White House Announces 'Everything Is Great In Iraf'

1. In The Know: White House Announces 'Everything Is Great In Iraf'

Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

1. Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

"..." 24

"War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."

—Ambrose Bierce

Notebook doodles II

When I first came to college I was an art student dipping his fingers in philosophy and a few other classes.

I had a tendency to draw in my notes sometimes (which is still there), and I thought I'd post some of these doodles—maybe as emblems to show my "education" or at least some of my time spent in the classroom—both learning and not.

So I rummaged through my old notebooks, and here they are. (Not all of them, but a few of the good ones.) Enjoy.

---

HA 555: Art History Since 1945.

"[It's like an argument they have where they're] angrily shaking martini glasses at each other."






ANTH 160: The Varieties of Human Experience.







PHIL 292: The History of Modern Philosophy. Damn I was bored, by the looks of it...








SOC 104: Intro. to Sociology






PHIL 562: Kierkegaard. My only drawing in all my notes (and these aren't even lecture notes):


The full quote is:

With the aid of conclusion, one automatically and mendaciously takes credit for everything (I have heard people, so obtuse that they have nothing between the ears, say that one cannot stop with Socratic ignorance) and like all windbags finally ends up with having done even the impossible. Inwardness has become a matter of knowledge, to exist a waste of time. That is why the most mediocre person who concocts a book these days talks so one would believe he had experienced everything, and simply by paying attention to his intermediate clauses one sees that he is a rogue.

ENGL 312: British Writers to 1800.








ENGL 332: Shakespeare.






HSES 260: Personal and Community Health. My only full page of "notes":




PHIL 672: Philosophy of Law.




ENGL 580: The Rhetoric of Everyday Life.




The button reads: "I am a hardcore Marxist."


GEOG 104: Physical Geography.


The poem from the above reads:

Boredom is
a porous drum,
whose beat is deaf
and also dumb.

---

i. Notebook doodles I

McCain doesn't know how to use a computer!?

John McCain says he doesn't know how to use a computer. In a video interview with Yahoo's Political team and Politico.com, McCain admitted he is computer illiterate. When asked if he preferred a Mac or a PC, McCain said "neither."

"I am a illiterate that has to rely on my wife for all the assistance I can get," McCain said. In a computer-dominated world, McCain's professed computer ignorance may raise questions again about his age. At 71, he is seeking to become the oldest person ever elected president of the United States.

1. McCain admits he doesn't know how to use a computer


Also with the age issue, check out:
2. Things younger than John McCain

Some of my favorites include the peanut butter and jelly sandwich (anything involving "food history" and "food historians" is always a favorite), zip codes and area codes, the shopping cart, and The Grapes of Wrath.



Update:

And while I'm at it:
3. GOP Insiders Worry About McCain's Chances

I thought this bit analysis was a little different:

In reality there is only one candidate. Barack Obama. In November he will win or he will lose. John McCain is relevant only in so far as he is not Barack Obama. The Senator from Arizona is incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls, and has a personality that is best kept under wraps.

Obama's also favored internationally:


4. Obama The Preferred Candidate Around The World: Poll



6/15 update:
5. Analysis: Age an issue in the 2008 campaign?