Posts Tagged ‘clowns’
Friday Night Links!
UPDATE: oof.
* ICYMI: Grad School Vonnegut #14: Happy Birthday, Wanda June! This one is Aaron’s “Vonnegut and Africa” episode.
* CFP: Utopia and Tabletop Games. CFP: NeMLA 2021 Creative Session, “Speculative Figures and Speculative Futures: Our Uncanny Postapocalypse.”
* Two core pieces of Watchmen criticism from my Watchmen class this week: “Panelling Parallax: The Fearful Symmetry of William Blake and Alan Moore” and “The Forgotten Story of Watchmen’s Unsung Hero.” The second one comes via my pal Jacob Brogan, who was kind enough to shoot some ideas about Watchmen, Higgins, and auteurship with me back and forth the other day.
When I ask Damon Lindelof, showrunner for the upcoming HBO series Watchmen, about John Higgins, his mind goes straight to the Beatles. “John Higgins remains one of the unsung heroes of Watchmen,” he says. “Certainly Moore and Gibbons were John and Paul, but Higgins was George and Ringo combined, and his striking colors reinvented the genre every bit as much as Alan’s words and Dave’s pencils.”
Higgins was indeed a hero of the graphic novel that Lindelof’s show riffs on, having been the man who did the coloring for the book. That makes him one of only three collaborators who created the Watchmen comic, along with writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons, and he is indeed underappreciated, even by the book’s supporters. But even that bold analogy isn’t enough: It’s more as if Beatles fans assumed the band consisted only of John and Paul and didn’t even know George and Ringo existed, much less that they created music of their own.
* Let’s Stop with the Realism Versus Science Fiction and Fantasy Debate.
* Wisconsin’s daily COVID-19 case count breaks record again, tops 2,500. They had to rescale Marquette’s COVID Dashboard today. Outbreak Stresses Town-Gown Relations in Wisconsin. Millennials and Gen Z are spreading coronavirus—but not because of parties and bars. Laughin’ and a-runnin’, hey hey. Skippin’ and a-jumpin’.
Slippage between multiple concepts described as “lockdown” and “quarantine” really doesn’t capture what the students in these quarantined dorms are experiencing. They’re being asked not to leave relatively tiny dorm rooms; even bathroom time is scheduled. The yard went up *today* https://t.co/a2vbvYEdwq
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
They’re the dog that caught the car, now, though — having lured these students here they can hardly disperse them to the winds now. So they find themselves with a duty of care they never should have volunteered for and cannot responsibly provide. https://t.co/Jlv1sPUjvZ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
* Huge, if true: The United States is backsliding into autocracy under Trump, scholars warn.
* Federal judge temporarily blocks USPS operational changes amid concerns about mail slowdowns, election. The U.S. Commerce Department has announced it plans to block downloads of the Chinese-owned social apps WeChat and TikTok, beginning on Sunday. “The Trump administration argued against a challenge to its 2020 census plans by saying the Constitution requires a count but does not say it must be accurate.” Bill Barr’s Titanic Lack of Self-Awareness. Independently of Trump and this presidency, William Barr, his henchmen, and his Federalist Society supporters represent a powerful threat to the fundamental values of liberal democracy. The Department of Education as Right-Wing Troll.
What Trump calls "patriotic education" is racist education.
— Ibram X. Kendi (@DrIbram) September 18, 2020
the call for an explicitly fascist national curriculum is just the logical extension of all the 'PC culture has gone too far' rhetoric of the past few years and every one of you who contributed to that discourse is culpable
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 18, 2020
* Only going to get worse: NYPD Crushes Tiny Anti-ICE Protest With Overwhelming Force And Bloody Arrests.
* The U.S. Is on the Path to Destruction.
when I hear it I think MY KIDS ARE GOING TO DIE YOUNG AND MISERABLE BECAUSE OF WHAT YOU MONSTERS DID https://t.co/SHMAiSafZQ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
* Friends And Family Members Of QAnon Believers Are Going Through A “Surreal Goddamn Nightmare.” It Makes Perfect Sense That QAnon Took Off With Women This Summer. Meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news. The Toxic Slime Will End Us.
* Where Is Biden’s Ground Game?
knocking on doors doesn’t win elections, an unprecedented massive dropout of all your opponents on the eve of Super Tuesday wins elections https://t.co/q23qXjHB2K
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
For a club for pathetic sad sacks who love to lose, the idea of somberly turning the keys to the planet over to Donald Trump on a technicality for the second time must be intoxicating
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
Ok this is pretty huge: the NYT says that if polls are as wrong as they were in 2016, Trump will win. This means we should actually assume Biden is losing, not winning. The lead is a mirage based on assuming that the exact same thing we’ve already seen can happen will not happen. pic.twitter.com/OWJ0sGxbZD
— Nathan J Robinson (@NathanJRobinson) September 18, 2020
also, when Trump won the first time he did it from a position of laughing-stock weakness, rather than being at the head of a cult-like fascist movement that will break any law or norm to win, and not having full control of the executive, the Senate, and the courts https://t.co/xKz2VA85BJ
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 18, 2020
every tweet on this website should be this tweet https://t.co/gZ4PjZJ7JH
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
we are less than two months out from the final crisis, and democrats are too busy declaring themselves 99.5% likely to win to hear what Republicans are already saying about the vote
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 17, 2020
* Ugh, Tatiana Maslany is great casting for She-Hulk. I thought I was done with these!
* Academic freedom in action: U of T law school under fire for opting not to hire human-rights scholar after pressure from sitting judge. Search for new director of U of T law faculty’s International Human Rights Program leads to resignations, allegations of interference.
* BLM and the University of Chicago English department. I had some thoughts about this (blessedly left out of the article) the other day (and again the next morning).
* Big Ten announces football returning Oct. 23-24. No confidence at the University of Michigan.
So we're going to more-or-less intentionally infect a bunch of (disproportionately nonwhite) student athletes with COVID-19 by making them play sports for our entertainment, then use them to study the heart damage caused by COVID-19.
Tuskegee vibes https://t.co/K7TZ7Hkevl
— Will Stancil (@whstancil) September 16, 2020
* The Black Community in Indianapolis has been left reeling — as shocking and disturbing details released in the last 24 hours have emerged regarding a disgraced activist exposed for posing as a Black Woman. This one has exciting estate fraud on the side.
* Restaurants need a bailout. The Big Corporate Rescue and the America That’s Too Small to Save. Inequality Robs $2.5B from American Workers Each Year.
* Russia’s space agency chief declares Venus a “Russian planet.” Quick, someone wake up Rachel Maddow!
sometimes i remember that if a clown wants to trademark their makeup they have to paint it on an egg that is stored in a special clown egg warehouse and then i have to go lie down pic.twitter.com/5ltP6aQzL5
— jø mårius (@jo_hauge) September 16, 2020
the implication here is that the face breathes
which means it has lungs and blood pic.twitter.com/fymeQTIGrr— Heather Anne Campbell (@heathercampbell) December 14, 2017
* When overwhelmed unemployment insurance systems malfunctioned during the pandemic, governments blamed the sixty-year-old programming language COBOL. But what really failed? Meanwhile, in Wisconsin: Tony Evers firing DWD Secretary Caleb Frostman over unemployment claim backlog.
* Pedagogy corner! The Moment Is Primed for Asynchronous Learning.
* Dallas school district apologizes for assignment describing Kenosha shooter as ‘hero.’
Given the last tweet, I wanted to share this. It's a tinotype photograph ftom 1856, of three unidentfied women from Harvard's collection. Note their style, and think about how black women are too often styled during that era when portrayed on film. pic.twitter.com/jGH89cvL39
— Octavia Butler Predicted This MAGA Dystopia (@MsGo) September 16, 2020
* Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
* The Boys confronts real American Nazis better than most comic-book stories.
* Songs of Love and Hate: “Layla” and Martin Scorsese’s ‘Goodfellas.’
* Patrick Blanchfield goes deep into the Call of Duty storyworld in my menchies.
* And it’s not all bad news: the sequel to one of the best Metroidvania games I’ve played in years is out on the Switch. And I’ve been loving Baba Is You, too! It’s a golden age for video games. AND NOTHING ELSE.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 18, 2020 at 6:14 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, Africa, America, anti-racism, apocalypse, asynchronous learning, autocracy, Baba Is You, bars, Bill Barr, Black Lives Matter, blackfishing, Call of Duty, Castlevania, CFPs, China, class struggle, climate change, clowns, COBOL, college football, college sports, comics, comics studies, coronavirus, COVID-19, Department of Education, disability, Donald Trump, drama, dyslexia, ecology, Electoral College, English departments, extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, fantasy, fascism, film, Fox News, games, general election 2020, Generation Z, Goodfellas, Grad School Vonnegut, Green New Deal, guns, Happy Birthday Wanda June, How the University Works, ice, income inequality, Indianapolis, Joe Biden, Kenosha, Kyle Rittenhouse, lockdown, Marquette, Marvel, masks, mass shootings, MCU, Metroid, millennials, moral panics, MSNBC, my media empire, Nazis, NCAA, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, NYPD, Ori and the Blind Forest, Orphan Black, Palestine, pedagogy, plays, podcasts, police violence, politics, QAnon, quarantine, quit lit, race, Rachel Dolezal, racism, Republicans, restaurants, Russia, science fiction, science fiction studies, She-Hulk, speed runs, Super Mario, Tatiana Maslany, teaching, The Boys, the Census, the courts, the law, the stock market, Thomas the Tank Engine, TikTok, trolling, Tuskegee, unemployment, University of Chicago, University of Tennessee, USPS, Utopia, Van Morrison, Venus, Vonnegut, voting, Watchmen, whiteness, William Blake, Wisconsin, zunguzungu
Monday Night Links!
* Navajos on Mars: Native Sci-fi Film Futures.
* They’re renaming the Tiptree Award after all. From Julie Phillips: On Tiptree and naming.
* The Tragedy of GJ237b: A Role-Playing Game for No Players.
* Happy 82nd Birthday to The Hobbit. And from the archives, in celebration: The Most Metal Deaths in Middle-earth, Ranked.
Happy #HobbitDay! It’s the canonical birthday of Bilbo Baggins. Our collection includes the only known copy of a play adaptation of The Hobbit by Joanna Russ, written in 1959 when she was a playwriting grad student at Yale. pic.twitter.com/i5XQc1tZqV
— Browne Pop Culture Library @ BGSU (@BGSU_PopCultLib) September 22, 2019
* Students protest climate change, MU demonstration policy.
* Essay mills are using TurnItIn to prove they’re selling original content.
* Terrible, if inevitable: Grad Students at Private Colleges Could Lose the Right to Unionize.
* Got Shakespeare? What about Milton on Shakespeare?
* The university in ruins in Buffalo.
* Humanities ‘risk becoming cherry on top’ of other disciplines.
Thinking of writing a Chronicle op-ed claiming that the liberal arts are necessary because they cultivate habits of ironic critical distance from one's own convictions, which are necessary for future middle-managers to carry out their orders and still live with themselves.
— Adam Kotsko (@adamkotsko) September 18, 2019
* The Problem with Sugar-Daddy Science.
* Today in actual threats to free speech: U.S. Orders Duke and U.N.C. to Recast Tone in Mideast Studies.
* The Trump administration’s crackdown on campus criticism of Israel is Orwellian.
* New Mexico Announces Plan for Free College for State Residents.
* Johns Hopkins Ends ICE Contracts.
* Can’t believe MOOCs didn’t work.
* Legacy and Athlete Preferences at Harvard.
* Is Meritocracy Hurting Higher Education?
* To Protect Your Faculty from Right-Wing Attacks, Follow the Money.
* US academic given two weeks to leave UK after eight years.
* Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe.
* A new issue of Analog Game Studies is up.
* On Dark Matter and White Empiricism.
* CFP: UW Women and Gender Studies Consortium Call for Proposals: Resistance and Reimagination. CFP: U Chicago Grad Student Symposium: Race and Capitalism Defined.
* Actually, Gender-Neutral Pronouns Can Change a Culture.
* A Brief History of Trans Philosophy.
* Dear Disgruntled White Plantation Visitors.
* We Didn’t Stand a Chance Against Opioids.
* Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action. It’s right to be scared, says top UK scientist. Climate change is morally wrong. It is time for a carbon abolition movement. Millions Of Young People Around The World Are Leading Strikes To Call Attention To The Climate Crisis. ‘We will make them hear us.’ Best Protest Signs From the Global Youth Walkouts. How to be Young in a Climate Emergency. I have a dream that the powerful take the climate crisis seriously. The time for their fairytales is over. ‘You’re not trying hard enough. Sorry.’ This is all wrong. Why Greta is Good.
2018 | 2019 pic.twitter.com/zH0vNClPRQ
— James Shield (@jshield) September 20, 2019
Greta Thunberg at #UNGA: "This is all wrong. I shouldn’t be up here. I should be in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words."
Via ABC pic.twitter.com/NudonxKNss— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) September 23, 2019
* Only a Green New Deal can douse the fires of eco-fascism.
* Hello From the Year 2050. We Avoided the Worst of Climate Change — But Everything Is Different.
* It’s Kids vs. the World in a Landmark New Climate Lawsuit.
* Does Science Fiction Have a Moral Imperative to Address Climate Change?
* To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution.
* Money Is the Oxygen on Which the Fire of Global Warming Burns.
* Elsewhere in headlines from the Anthropocene: SF’s Treasure Island, poised for building boom, escaped listing as Superfund site.
* Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change?
* ‘Worse Than Anyone Expected’: Air Travel Emissions Vastly Outpace Predictions. Only 8 People in This Indigenous Tribe Still Speak Their Native Language. The Amazon Fires May Wipe It Out Completely. North America Has Lost a Quarter of Its Birds in Fifty Years. ‘Opening the Door to Hell Itself’: Bahamas Confronts Life After Hurricane Dorian. ‘This situation brings me to despair’: two reef scientists share their climate grief. Exposing The Myth Of Plastic Recycling: Why A Majority Is Burned Or Thrown In A Landfill. America’s Nuclear Power Plants Were Not Built for Climate Change. America’s Great Climate Exodus Is Starting in the Florida Keys. 9 Oldest Trees in Africa, Some Over 2,000-Years-Old, Now Dead. The Capitalocene.
sometimes I think the most fictive aspect of post-apocalyptic stories is the idea that we're going to have the benefit of a clear before and after rather than a perpetual enervating slide into more and more misery
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) September 17, 2019
Signs and impacts of climate change speeding up, latest science says:
-> Sea-level rise accelerating from 3.2mm per year since 1993 to 5mm per year
->5-year period from 2014 to 2019 warmest on record
->Temperatures up by 1.1°C since 1850, 0.2°C just between 2011 and 2015 pic.twitter.com/2O0OV0zAER— Assaad Razzouk (@AssaadRazzouk) September 22, 2019
What's striking is this younger generation seems to be arriving at "Oh, wait, how about instead we meet just outside the village, regroup, go back to Omelas and get that kid out of the fucking basement."
— John Rogers (@jonrog1) September 20, 2019
* That’ll solve it: Following the lead of Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a former 2020 contender, many candidates have set a target date for, at minimum, requiring all new passenger vehicles be zero-emission: Sen. Kamala Harris of California and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg put it at 2035, for example, while Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts aim for 2030.
"Haven't you heard? Communism is awful, millions died."
"But haven't millions died under capitalism too?"
"Yes, but under capitalism poor people deserve to die."— Existential Comics (@existentialcoms) September 18, 2019
* The Student Debt Problem Is a Family Crisis.
* The Case Against the Popular Vote.
* More voters are registering than dying — but differences by state could shape 2020.
* Elizabeth Warren’s Crusade Against Corruption.
found a good meme on facebook pic.twitter.com/7ArsBwe9o7
— whatever forever (@wrong_rachel) September 22, 2019
* It’s Not Just Millennials — Gen Z Is Dealing With A Lot Of Debt Now Too. Wisconsin remains in the top ten states in the nation for the percentage of graduates with student loan debt.
* Elsewhere in everyone being super broke. Millennials believe they’ll die before they retire. America has two economies—and they’re diverging fast.
* WeWork and the Great Unicorn Delusion.
* How Boeing’s Managerial Revolution Created the 737 Max Disaster.
* Sandy Hook parents release chilling ‘back to school’ PSA.
* ‘Fantasy Island’: How the American Dream fueled Puerto Rico’s decline.
* In 2007, 47 dogs were rescued from an illegal dogfighting ring organized by NFL quarterback Michael Vick. They could have been euthanized. Instead, they became family pets.
* She Quit Her Job. He Got Night Goggles. They Searched 57 Days for Their Dog.
* New York Judge Fines Landlord $17,000 for Threatening to Call ICE on Tenant.
* King of Kong sequel shaping up nicely.
* This game should be illegal.
* This question about art predicts Trump support better than educational attainment.
* There’s a shortage of perfect movies in this world. It would be a pity to damage this one.
* Emma Thompson’s new movie The Lost Girls paints Peter Pan as the villain he’s always been.
* Watching Toy Story 4 I simply assumed this was how the movie would end, and was shocked when it didn’t.
* Saved by the Bell: The New Class: The New Class.
* How Wes Anderson Makes Films.
* We needed the X-Men, and now — thank the mutant gods — they’re back.
Since the 1940s, professional clowns Copyright their faces by painting them on eggs. There's a Clown Egg Registry in London, England pic.twitter.com/h9eXthxbCC
— 41 Strange (@41Strange) September 18, 2019
* Why do people believe the Earth is flat?
Why don’t we agree on the urgency of climate change? Because of a moneyed conspiracy to make us doubt it. Why did we let a single family amass riches greater than the Rockefellers while peddling OxyContin and claiming it wasn’t addictive? Because of a moneyed conspiracy. Why do some 737s fall out of the sky? Why are our baby-bottles revealed to be lined with carcinogenic plastics? Why do corrupt companies get to profit by consorting with the world’s most despicable dictators? Conspiracies.
In other words: Big Tech doesn’t have a mind-control ray, but it does have an incredibly sophisticated people-finding machine, and if you’re looking for people who might believe in your conspiracy, it helps if there’s a massive pool of people around who’ve been battered (and had their lives irreparably harmed) by conspiracies.
* What the Apps That Bring Food to Your Door Mean for Delivery Workers.
* China forcefully harvests organs from detainees, tribunal concludes.
* Industrial agriculture and #MeToo.
* A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Arrested After Throwing A Tantrum.
* Look at this incredibly over-the-top unveiling for Staples new logo.
* How the Black Turtleneck Came to Represent Creative Genius.
* How TikTok Holds Our Attention.
* How a sneaky asteroid escaped detection.
* How we invest in our cities is broken.
* We’ve Reached Peak Wellness. Most of It Is Nonsense.
* Why Jeffrey Epstein Loved Evolutionary Psychology.
* Purdue Pharma, Maker of OxyContin, Files for Bankruptcy.
* Graffiti That Helps You See Through Walls.
* So, the Navy just admitted the Blink-182 guy leaked actual UFO footage.
* A Lunar Space Elevator Is Actually Feasible & Inexpensive, Scientists Find.
* The Socialists Who Think Revolution Will Come When the Aliens Get Here.
* How a ‘Sesame Street’ Muppet became embroiled in a controversy over autism.
* Artificial Intelligence Confronts a ‘Reproducibility’ Crisis.
* MIT Media Lab Kept Regulators in the Dark, Dumped Chemicals in Excess of Legal Limit.
* Impossible Burgers Aren’t Healthy, and That’s the Whole Point.
* Meet Shampoodler, the podcast and Twitch superfan who’s the future of fandom in interactive media.
* Frozen II just remains inscrutable to me.
Disney: Here's the Frozen 2 trailer! It starts with a flashback to Anna and Elsa's parents!
Me: Are they being chastised for years of emotional abuse?
Disney: …no, but here's a man who might be Elsa's love interest!
Me: pic.twitter.com/RpJeZzBZ79— Abigail Nussbaum (@NussbaumAbigail) September 23, 2019
* Aron Eisenberg, the Actor Who Played Nog on Deep Space Nine, Has Died.
* Hey, God, which beings are conscious?
* And I’ve been saying it for years: Scrabble is broken.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 23, 2019 at 3:28 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 737 Max, academic freedom, Achille Mbembe, Africa, air travel, aliens, Alzheimer's disease, America, animal intelligence, animals, apocalypse, Area 51, artificial intelligence, asteroids, autism, Boeing, Buffalo, capitalism, Catholicism, CBP, CFPs, charter schools, China, class struggle, climate change, climate grief, climate strike, clowns, college footballs, college sports, comics, communism, consciousness, conspiracy theories, copyright, Cory Doctorow, cultural preservation, democracy, Democrats, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, drugs, Duke, ecology, Electoral College, electric cars, Elizabeth Warren, English departments, essays, evolutionary psychology, fast food, film, first contact, flat Earthers, Florida, Florida Keys, Foxconn, free college, free speech, Frozen II, games, games studies, gender, Generation Z, genius, gig economy, graffiti, Green New Deal, Greta Thunberg, Groundhog Day, guns, Harvard, High Line, How the University Works, Hunter Biden, Hurricane Dorian, ice, Impossible Burger, indigenous futurism, industrial agriculture, Islamophobia, Israel, James Tiptree Jr., Jeffrey Epstein, Joanna Russ, Joe Biden, John Milton, Johns Hopkins, kids today, King of Kong, Koch brothers, language, legacy admissions, logos, Lord of the Rings, Luddites, Marquette, Marvel, mass shootings, meritocracy, Michael Vick, military-industrial complex, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, Milwaukee, MIT Media Lab, modern art, MOOCs, Muppets, names, necropolitics, neoliberalism, New Mexico, New York, NLRB, nuclear power, opioids, organ theft, Orwell, over-educated literary theory PhDs, OxyContin, Palestine, pencils, Peter Pan, physics, plagiarism, plantations, podcasts, politics, popular vote, Posadism, Princess Bride, protest, Puerto Rico, race, racism, recycling, reproducibility crisis, Republicans, resistance, retirement, revolution, San Francisco, Sandy Hook, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, Saved by the Bell, scams, school-to-prison pipeline, science, science fiction, Scrabble, sea level rise, Sesame Street, Shakespeare, Shampoodler, since the dawn of time man has yearned to destroy the sun, socialism, space elevator, standardized testing, Star Trek, Star Trek: Deep Space 9, strikes, student debt, student movements, Superfund sites, the afterlife, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Bahamas, the Capitalocene, The Hobbit, the humanities, the kids are all right, The Little Mermaid, The Lost Girls, The Princess Bride, The Simpsons, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, TikTok, Tiptree award, Tolkien, Toy Story 4, trans* issues, trees, TurnItIn, Two Americas, UFOs, Ukraine, UNC, unions, University of Buffalo, University of Texas, University of Wisconsin, vaccines, war on education, wellness, Wes Anderson, WeWork, white people, Wisconsin, X-Men
Labor Day Weekend Links!
* Aliens! Aliens! Not really. But it’s never too early to panic.
* This truly is the darkest timeline: Marquette signs new contract with Pepsi for on-campus beverage services.
* Some Of The Best PC Games Ever Made Hit Steam This Week. Quest for Glory! Police Quest! Wow. Waiting now for the Mac port.
* Star Trek: Discovery really will follow Number One. Relatedly: The 2000s-era Star Treks we never saw. Star Trek Beyond, Reviewed by Tim Phipps.
* Jason Scott Talks about Preserving Games with the Internet Archive.
* Be a rebel; major in English. A decent discussion of the fact-free moral panic involving choice of major, clickbait headline aside.
* The Peculiar Success of Cultural Studies 2.0.
* How to Write an Effective Diversity Statement for a Faculty Job Application.
* Mandatory Trigger Warnings at Drexel?
* Symposium: Why Monster Studies Now?
* Nicholson Baker, substitute teacher. Welcome to Terror High.
* The most important lesson to take from all this is that there is no way to confront the climate crisis as a technocratic problem, in isolation. It must be seen in the context of austerity and privatisation, of colonialism and militarism, and of the various systems of othering needed to sustain them all.
* Improv as self-help philosophy, as scam, as fad, as cult. (via) I’ve never taken an improv class, but my nonstop consumption of improv-based comedy podcasts has seriously helped my teaching by helping me see the importance of adopting the yes-and stance in the classroom.
* Professor hunger strikes against denial of tenure.
* Islam and Science Fiction, the long-running website dedicated to “fill[ing] a gap in the literature about Muslims and Islamic cultures in Science Fiction,” has just published Islamicates: Volume I, as a free-to-download release.
* Check Out These Amazing Soviet Maps Of D.C.
* That’s a serious charge, worthy of being considered seriously. Although easy access to inexpensive Mexican food would be a boon for hungry Americans, what would the inevitable presence of those trucks do to the American economy? How could our country accommodate an explosion of trucks at that scale? The national economic implications of a taco truck on every corner.
* Stranger Things and the spirit of play.
Here’s why: it’s about play. We have good reasons to overthink TV shows, to take them too seriously: it helps us reclaim from them all that they take for granted, all the ideology in which we find ourselves implicated as we enjoy works produced by a capitalist, patriarchal, racist culture, etc. If your fave is problematic, it’s worth thinking about why, not because you or it are bad and should feel bad, but because our world is fallen and all is vanity and what does humanity gain by all the toil at which he toils under the sun, etc. Or something like that. Art has baggage; criticism is about rummaging through that bag to see what’s inside, and what you want to do with it.
* Girls feel Stranger Things, too.
Fortunately, those of us who grew up in the 80s also experienced the 90s, where Dana Scully and Buffy Summers awaited us. But with its flawlessly staged setting and piled-up homages to 80s movies, Stranger Things has performed a kind of time travel: it has reached back into my memories,Total Recall-like, and inserted characters who now seem as though they were there all along. Nancy, the nerd-turned-monster killer who can like more than one boy at once. Barb, the buttoned-up babygay whose best friend won’t let her be disposable. Eleven, the terrifying, funny, scared, brave, smart weirdo whose feelings could save the world.
* Global Capitalism, Fan Culture, and (Even) Stranger Things. The Strange Motivations of Stranger Things. Sticking a tough landing: Stranger Things Season Two Will Add New Characters, New Settings, and Sequel Sensibility.
* Teasing the Fall 2016 Pop Culture series at Marquette: Harry Potter, Tarantino, and (yes) Stranger Things.
* $600,000 humanities endowment account at CUNY turns out to be a mere $599,924 dollars short.
* Learn to Write the Vandermeer Way. Keep scrolling!
* Virtually every decision made by Warner Bros. with regards to its DC superhero movies has been bad. But it’s been so desperate to recreate Marvel’s success that it keeps running forward, trying to constantly course correct, when what it really needs to do it take a break, a deep breath, and start over from scratch with a long-term plan that it will actually stick to.
* Jack Kirby’s long-lost, incomplete “The Prisoner” comic book.
* The Myth of the Millennial as Cultural Rebel.
* Apartment Broker Recommends Brooklyn Residents Spend No More Than 150% Of Income On Rent.
* Airlines are surprisingly ill-equipped to handle accusations of sexual assault on their planes.
* This small Indiana county sends more people to prison than San Francisco and Durham, N.C., combined. Why? Yes, the word “oxy” appears in the first sentence.
* Creepy Clown Sightings in South Carolina Cause a Frenzy.
DEVELOPING: Sheriff in Greenville, South Carolina, vows to arrest anybody dressed as a clown after reports of creepy clowns across town
— Al Boe (@AlBoeNEWS) September 2, 2016
* Tracing the history of the phrase “office-involved shooting.”
* How Fox News women took down the most powerful, and predatory, man in media. Why Isn’t It a Bigger Deal That Trump Is Being Advised by Sadistic Pervert Roger Ailes?
* Democrats really might have a shot at taking the House. Here’s the math.
* Because you demanded it! CBS is developing a scripted drama based on the life of Judge Judy. It’s also graciously decided to allow you to pay extra for an ad-free experience on its subscription service.
* Ah, the good old days. Still not done yet!
* Meet Moya Bailey, the black woman who created the term “misogynoir.”
* Dialectics of Superman: The Old Lois Lane Really Doesn’t Like the New Lois Lane. The Rise and Fall of Axiom.
* Math is cool: The absent-minded driver’s paradox.
* Solar Power Plant Can’t Figure Out How to Stop Frying Birds.
* Georgetown University Plans Steps to Atone for Slave Past. Georgetown’s slavery announcement is remarkable. But it’s not reparations.
* Deep in the Swamps, Archaeologists Are Finding How Fugitive Slaves Kept Their Freedom.
* “A short story in English is a story in which the letter e occurs no more than 5715 times.”
* How far are you from an In N Out Burger?
* Works for academic papers too.
* Debating the Legality of the Post-9/11 ‘Forever War’ at the Council on Foreign Relations.
* Whiteness without white supremacy?
* Football and the Buffalo both owe some of their survival today to Teddy Roosevelt, who loved them both because they were accessories to one of his first loves: violence, which he and others of his time and a lot of people living right now believe tempers men into steel.
* Sold in the room: Alison Brie Will Star in Netflix’s ’80s Lady-Wrestling Series G.L.O.W. And that’s before I even found out Marc Maron would be on it too.
* I’m also excited to option this one: Bizarre ant colony discovered in an abandoned Polish nuclear weapons bunker.
* The L.A. Times is running a six-part story on that framing of a PTA mom in California.
* Screens in Schools Are a $60 Billion Hoax.
* The critics are saying Arrival (née Story of Your Life) is the real deal.
* Breaking: Warner Brothers wants another five billion dollars.
* Few baseball fans have heard of the tiny Pacific Association, an independent league founded in 2013. But in 2015, during the Stompers’ sophomore season, the team fielded pro baseball’s first openly gay player, Sean Conroy. Then, in the off-season, the filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola approached the team to talk about making his Virginia Dare Winery, based in nearby Geyserville, one of its sponsors. That proposal came with another: he wanted the team to recruit female players.
* Understanding Prenatal Depression.
* It’s weird that 911 has an off switch, isn’t it?
* Web comic of the week: Ark.
* Short film of the week: Movies in Space. Chris and Jack’s other stuff is pretty great too.
* The New York Times Reassures Parents That Their Sons’ Penises Are Probably Totally Fine.
* And I really think just one more year ought to do it.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 3, 2016 at 8:43 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic freedom, academic jobs, academic papers, Agamben, air travel, aliens, Alison Brie, ant colonies, ants, Apple, archaeology, Ark, Arrival, art, augmented reality, austerity, Avengers, Axiom, Back to the Future, Barack Obama, baseball, Batman, because you demanded it, Biff Tannen, birds, Brooklyn, Buffalo, California, capitalism, CBS, CBS All-Access, CFPs, Chris and Jack, class struggle, climate change, clowns, comedy, comics, conferences, corruption, cults, cultural studies, CUNY, Dan Hassler-Forrest, DC Comics, Democrats, dialectics, diversity, Donald Trump, Drexel, drug addiction, drugs, Dungeons & Dragons, editing, education, endowments, English departments, English majors, epipens, fads, fan culture, feminism, Fermi problems, film, football, forever war, fugitive slaves, Full House, G.L.O.W., games, Gene Wilder, general election 2016, Georgetown, gerrymandering, grift, guns, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, heroin, hoaxes, homeland security, How the University Works, humanity, hunger strikes, improv, In N Out Burger, independent film, Indiana, Internet Archive, intersectionality, iPads, Islam, Islamicates, Jack Kirby, Jeff Vandermeer, Judge Judy, kids today, legacy admissions, lockouts, Lois Lane, Long Island University, Macs, maps, Marc Maron, Mark Waid, maroon communities, Marquette, math, medicine, military-industrial-academic complex, millennials, misogynoir, moms, Monster Studies, moral panics, Movies in Space, Moya Bailey, my misspent youth, my scholarly empire, NASA, neoliberalism, Netflix, New York, Nicholson Baker, nostalgia, nuclearity, Number One, obesity, obituary, off switches, officer-involved shootings, oxy, Paradox, pedagogy, penises, Pepsi, play, plot, Poland, police, Police Quest, police violence, politics, pop culture, prenatal depression, prequels, prison-industrial complex, prisons, probability, professional wrestling, Quest for Glory, rape, rape culture, rebels, Rent, reparations, Roger Ailes, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, self-help, sequels, SETI, sexual assault, short stories, Sierra, slavery, socialism, solar power, South Carolina, Soviet Union, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, state of emergency, state of exception, Story of Your Life, Stranger Things, streaming, strikes, superheroes, superhumans, Superman, taco trucks, Tarantino, teaching, Ted Chiang, Teddy Roosevelt, tenure, the archives, The Cage, the courts, the darkest timeline, the House, the humanities, the law, The Prisoner, the PTA, trigger warnings, true crime, unions, unnecessary sequels, violence, war on terror, Washington D.C., white privilege, white supremacy, whiteness, worldbuilding, writing, yes and, zunguzungu
Sunday Links and Every Tab Is Closed, Forever and Ever Amen
* I’ve noticed, to my bewilderment, the question circulating of whether J. K. Rowling should have agreed to this project. What could be the case against it? That the play could dilute the accomplishment of the original series? That Rowling’s readers might revolt when asked to read a script? That characters and stories best beloved by readers no longer belong to their author?
* Into the Black: Stories of People Getting Out of Debt. Via MeFi.
* The three student loan crises.
* Five years on Skid Row from University of Chicago sociologist Forrest Stuart.
* Off to a great start: Rio officials had to open Olympic Stadium with bolt cutters after losing key. These Are the Actual Costs of the Rio Olympics. The ideology of the Olympics. A blind eye to sex abuse: How USA Gymnastics failed to report cases. With just days to go until the Rio Olympics begin, the AP—which has been testing viral levels since last year—reports water conditions are worse than ever. Inside the Gloria Marina, where the sailing races take place, adenoviruses per liter have jumped more than 42 percent since they first sampled it in March, 2015.
whymynotcaringmuchabouttheolympicsprovesmymoralsuperiority.Salon.docx
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 6, 2016
I was never an Olympian because I reject the false promises of nationalism. That is the only reason.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 7, 2016
* Burn your money the higher education way.
* Elsewhere in obviously functional organizations: Recent construction of emergency exit near chancellor’s office for security reasons symbolizes closed-off nature of Dirks’ administration.
* “As an alumnus of the college, I feel that I have been lied to, patronized and basically dismissed as an old, white bigot who is insensitive to the needs and feelings of the current college community,” Mr. MacConnell, 77, wrote in a letter to the college’s alumni fund in December, when he first warned that he was reducing his support to the college to a token $5.
* “We call on the U.S. Department of Transportation to conduct a thorough examination into the prevailing practices of major American air carriers, including Delta Air Lines, and to develop policy guidelines on the objective factors that are to be considered when determining that a passenger may legally be removed from a flight,” CAIR-Cincinnati attorney Sana Hassan said.
* Clinton’s tuition plan and private colleges.
* “Free college” is a moralistic ruse, in other words, used to smuggle in a market logic where it has no place without addressing the core question of exploitative, exorbitant college costs. It treats education like anything else you’d buy in a store, and scolds those who feel otherwise by pretending they want to get something without working for it. There ain’t so such thing as a free lunch, of course: students and the public have amply paid for it already. They’re just not eating.
* Ira Steven Behr has been working on a Deep Space Nine documentary that apparently somehow includes a “notional season eight.” And while we’re at it: Oh, That’s Where Carol Marcus Was During Star Trek Beyond. Rumor of the Day: Star Trek: Discovery to take place before The Original Series?
I wasn’t super-enthused about STAR TREK: DISCOVERY being set b/w TOS and TNG, but prospect it will be set before TOS fills me with despair.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 3, 2016
* Roger Ailes Used Fox News Budget to Finance ‘Black Room’ Campaigns Against His Enemies. This story is just going to get more and more incredible as time goes on, I think.
* Seinfeld: “The Twin Towers.” An original spec script.
* Secrets of the Millennials Revealed: They’re Poor.
* But in a consumer culture committed to prolonging adolescence at all costs, the boundaries demarcating child and adult experience have blurred to the point that it’s no longer obvious just who is imitating whom. The American state of play is terminally confused. Much of it feels grimly compulsory, and carries with it a whiff of preemptive failure to achieve the target level of revelry.
* This Joke Was Off-limits at Donald Trump’s Comedy Central Roast. Who Lies More? The Answer May Surprise You. You Always Hurt the Ones You Love. On Veterans. On Unlikely Voters. The Shrinking Electoral Map. Georgia as Battleground State. Bloodthirstier than Cheney. If President Trump decided to use nukes, he could do it easily. Congressman Proposes Law To Prevent Trump From Being Able To Launch Nukes On His Own. Only in America could proposals to bomb at least three nations and indefinitely occupy another be labeled “isolationism.” Senior GOP Officials Exploring Options if Trump Drops Out. What Happens If Trump Drops Out? If Trump Drops Out, The Result Will Be A Horrible Legal Quagmire. Premediating a Loss. Just 92 More Days in the Bunker. Here’s what an 8% Clinton Lead Looks Like. Trump, or Political Emotions. A Fable, by Teju Cole. Of course there’s more links after the chart.
* Anagha Uppal, an activist at the University of Tennessee, describes the meal plan rule as “an exercise in tyranny.” Ms. Uppal has not used her plan — “I don’t purchase from Aramark,” she said between bites of chicken salad in pita (cost: $5.74) at the Golden Roast Coffeehouse. On her laptop: a Food Recovery Network sticker; she’s a campus coordinator for the network, a national student group that fights food waste. It was Ms. Uppal who prodded officials to start the Big Orange Meal Share to let students donate swipes.
* Possibilia, or, Love in the Multiverse.
* Why Amish Children Rarely Get Asthma.
* When Exhaustion Became a Status Symbol.
* Travel reimbursement voucher, trip to Moon, July 16-24, 1969.
* Like the blog, my Tumblr has been languishing the last few weeks while I’ve been teaching, but every so often I throw up some gold. I don’t know what else I was expecting. I’m with Her(zog). You have every reason to go on living. The last week of my comics class.
* A Radioactive Cold War Military Base Will Soon Emerge From Greenland’s Melting Ice.
* Perhaps our billboards are the civic sludge, the highway litter, of America’s ambitions and aspirations — literally writ large.
* A Brief Publishing History of Game of Thrones.
* Tolkien: The Lost Recordings.
* Quantum Computing, Getting Closer.
* Crows Continue to Be Terrifyingly Intelligent.
* A new report from Zillow estimates that with a six-foot sea level rise, “almost 1.9 million homes (or roughly 2 percent of all U.S. homes) – worth a combined $882 billion – are at risk of being underwater by 2100.”
* What’s Wrong With the DC Comics Movie Franchise? Report: Warner Bros. Turned Suicide Squad Into a Mess in Its Panic Over BvS Criticism.
At this point Zack Snyder and his deranged artistic vision has cost Warner Brothers, what, 2 billion dollars at least?
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 7, 2016
* …it increasingly makes less and less sense to divorce or sequester games from other forms of cultural study or to think that videogames are so unique that game studies requires its own critical modality. The function of video game criticism.
* Men, am I right. Marriage, men, and alcohol.
* The “biological mystery” of the female orgasm.
* Last year, though, the National Institutes of Health banned funding of animal-human chimeras until it could figure out whether any of this work would bump against ethical boundaries. Like: Could brain scientists endow research animals with human cognitive abilities, or even consciousness, while transplanting human stem cells into the brain of a developing animal embryo? Would it be morally wrong to create animals with human feet, hands, or a face in order to study human morphology? Modern medicine thinks before it acts. SMASH CUT TO: After a nearly year-long ban…
* Life in the city without cops or firefighters would be unpleasant and, inevitably, tragic. But, she notes, “if sanitation workers aren’t out there, the city becomes unlivable, fast.”
* Malcolm Harris reviews The Last Days of New Paris.
* Head shots of all of the ways US intelligence thought Hitler might try to disguise himself.
* In Super Mario Galaxy, whenever Mario drowns in a swamp, his hand reaches out from under the surface before being sucked in. However, since Mario’s head is so big, he cannot raise his hand above the surface without his head being still visible. To solve this, the game simply shrinks Mario’s head so it doesn’t interfere with the animation.
* How Bill Cosby Finally Landed in a Courtroom.
* The Blackest Superhero Story That Marvel Comics Ever Published.
* And Wisconsin, once again in the news.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 7, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, academia, academic writing, administrative blight, air travel, airlines, airplanes, alcohol, America, animal intelligence, Apollo 11, asthma, babies, BBC, Berkeley, Bill Cosby, billboards, biological clocks, birds, books, Brazil, Buzz Aldrin, Captain America, Catholicism, Cheney, children, China Miéville, class struggle, climate change, clowns, comics, consumer culture, criticism, crows, DC Comics, debt, Deep Space Nine, Delta, documentary, Donald Trump, donations, donor class, ecology, editing, Electoral College, emergency exits, endowments, everything is not fine, exhaustion, fables, female orgasm, Florida, flossing, Fox News, Game of Thones, games, general election 2016, George R. R. Martin, Georgia, graft, Green Bay, Greenland, Harry Potter, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, highways, Hillary Clinton, Hitler, How did we survive the Cold War?, How the University Works, human-animal hybrids, I'm with Her(zog), ice sheet collapse, ideology, immigration, isolationism, J.K. Rowling, Japan, jokes, journals, Kelly Link, kids today, La Jetée, lies and lying liars, life, love, mad science, many worlds and alternate universes, Marquette, Marvel, masculinity, meal plans, medicine, men, military-industrial complex, millennials, moral superiority, nationalism, neoliberalism, NIH, Nintendo, nuclear war, nuclearity, nuns, Olympics, parenting, pigoons, play, politics, polls, poverty, private colleges, protest, quantum computing, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Republicans, Rio, roasts, Roger Ailes, romance, room and board, Salon, sanitation, science fiction, sea level rise, secret exits, Seinfeld, sex, sociology, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek Beyond, Star Trek: Discovery, student debt, student loans, student movements, Suicide Squad, Super Mario, Teju Cole, the Amish, The Last Days of New Paris, the Moon, time travel, Tolkien, tsunamis, tuition, unlikely voters, veterans, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, waste, water, Werner Herzog, Wisconsin, women, Won't somebody think of the children?, World War II, writing, Zack Snyder
Week-Old Links at Two-Weeks-Old-Link Prices
* The San Bernardino mystery. Disband MSNBC. The story of the first mass murder in U.S. history. From the archives: The Making of a Rampage Murderer: What the Brutal Life of Oakland Shooter One L. Goh Says About America. So There’s Just Been a Mass Shooting. The Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook. Your tweets are not helping.
* The story, called “The Princess Steel,” was discovered by scholars Adrienne Brown and Britt Rusert, who write about it in the new issue of the Modern Language Association journal. We May Have Just Found W.E.B. Du Bois’ Earliest Science Fiction Story.
* Crank watch: What No One Is Telling You About Mark Zuckerberg Donating 99% Of His Fortune To “Charity.” The Philanthropy Hustle.
* Tickets go on sale Friday, Dec. 11.
* Elsewhere on the local beat: The Transformation of the Milwaukee Art Museum.
* I teach practical, marketable skills that will serve my students their entire lives.
* Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Four tough things columnists should do before writing about universities.
* Are most academic papers really worthless? Don’t trust this worthless statistic.
* College athletic departments are paying themselves to lose money.
* The future is a nightmare, and Purdue is ready.
* Self-driving cars will be the worst. Hopefully this particular problem is mostly solved by the elimination of private car ownership altogether.
* Catholic University Declares 1st Amendment Right To Ignore Catholicism.
* Sports Corner: Stephen Curry Is The Revolution.
* Meanwhile it is stunning to have my prejudices confirmed so wholly: New Study Finds ‘Surprising’ Correlation Between Degenerative Brain Disease And Amateur Athletics.
* Cruel Optimism and the NFL, or, Life in the Factory of Sadness.
* Let us be precise: Donald Trump Is Not a Liar.
* Leaked Documents Show Alabama Police Department Planted Drugs On Black Men For Years. Meanwhile, in Chicago. UPDATE: There may be less to that Alabama story than meets the eye.
* Spoiler Alerts: Three Books on Trash.
* The 24 Most Embarrassing Dungeons & Dragons Character Classes.
* Assuming a round figure of two and a half billion years of beak-sharpening, and assuming (a BIG assumption, to be sure) about three days per iteration of the Doctor, you can figure, based on a solar year of 365.25 days, that there have been approximately three hundred and four billion, three hundred and seventy-five million and twelve Doctors.
* And speaking of the Doctor: I’m not even sure who #2 would be.
* Behold the Jessica Jones backlash.
* Study suggests Type 2 diabetes can be cured by weight loss — specifically the loss of half a gram of fat from the pancreas.
* What they give with one hand they take with the other: Research Points To Mental Health Risks Associated With Meatless Diet.
* This is neat: The Third Amendment to the Constitution — the one that bans the quartering of soldiers in homes without the owner’s consent — is sort of the Pete Best of the early American legislative experiment. While the other amendments have had all sorts of play at the highest levels of legal rulings, there has never been a Supreme Court decision primarily based on the Third Amendment. Clearly the Founders had a goal, wrote it down, and we haven’t had too many questions about the matter since. Nice work, Founders. Anyway, there’s an idea bubbling among legal theorists to use the Third Amendment to counteract domestic spying from the NSA — a branch of the Department of Defense — and while it may not be 100 percent there, it’s interesting.
* Our bad: U.S. Holds Yemeni Man at Guantanamo Bay for 13 Years in Case of Mistaken Identity.
* Starting work before 10am isn’t just soul crushing, this scientist says it’s equivalent to torture.
* Why Education Does Not Fix Poverty.
* Of One and the Other: Humans and Animals.
* Know your branches of economics.
* State sues prisoners to pay for their room, board.
* “This is the best declining mall review I’ve ever read.”
* Teach the controversy: Will Our Descendants Survive the Destruction of the Universe?
* Magnifique! In Photos: Anarchists Clash With Riot Police During Climate Summit Protest in Paris.
* When the Onion goes dark, there’s still no one better: Frustrated Gunman Can’t Believe How Far He Has To Drive To Find Nearest Planned Parenthood Clinic.
* Female-Authors-Only Philosophy of Science Syllabus.
* There’s no such thing as a male or female brain, study finds.
* Florida Woman’s Car Turned Her in for a Hit-and-Run.
* Mom Who Overslept While Son Walked to School Could Get 10 Years in Prison.
* General election watch: Democrats are fiercely committed to the proposition of nominating a perhaps fatally compromised candidate whom basically no one likes. And from Amber A’Lee Frost: My Kind of Misogyny. Wheeeeeeeeee!
* Philosophy Corner: Is there a principled difference between having a gun and just having a button that when pressed kills the person standing in front of you?
* Was Star Wars’ Empire on the brink of financial ruin?
* This company believes it can resurrect humans in the next 30 years.
* Kill the Santa Claus in your head.
* From Climate Crisis to Solar Communism. World’s Most Vulnerable Islands Are Hoping Paris Will Bring an Impossible Climate Miracle. India Holds the Planet’s Fate in Its Hands. That’s Great News.
* Def Sec Carter To Open All Combat Jobs To Women In Historic Change.
* How to Be an Anticapitalist Today.
* Soviet erotic alphabet picture book, 1931.
* There but for the grace of God go we: Man arrested with 51 turtles in his pants.
* And of course you had me at Rare 40-Year-Old Star Trek Comics Are Finally Being Released In the U.S.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 5, 2015 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with abortion, academia, academic journals, academic writing, actually existing media bias, Afrofuturism, alphabets, America, anarchism, animals, anticapitalism, apocalypse, art, basketball, Bill of Rights, brain damage, brains, breaking news, Bruce Springsteen, bullshit, cars, Catholicism, charity, Chicago, CIA, climate change, clowns, college sports, comics, counterintelligence, cruel optimism, Democratic primary 2016, diabetes, Doctor Who, domestic surveillance, Donald Trump, Dungeons & Dragons, ecology, economics, education, Episode 7, Facebook, fan fiction, feminism, games, Guantánamo, guns, Hillary Clinton, history, How the University Works, human capital contracts, hustles, India, Jessica Jones, juries, jury duty, kids today, labor, lies and lying liars, Lord of the Rings, malls, Mark Zuckerberg, Marvel, mass murder, medicine, Milwaukee, misogyny, MSNBC, museums, my scholarly empire, NCAA, Netflix, NFL, NSA, Oakland, our brains work in interesting but ultimately depressing ways, Ozymandias, parenting, Paris, pedagogy, philanthropy, philosophy, philosophy of science, photography, Planned Parenthood, police corruption, porn, Porn Studies, poverty, prison-industrial complex, protest, Purdue, race, rape, religion, resurrection, rising sea levels, ruins, San Bernardino, Santa Claus, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, science fiction, sleep, solar power, Soviet Union, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, Stephen Curry, surveillance society, teach the controversy, teaching, television, terrorism, the Constitution, the cosmos, the courts, The Force Awakens, the humanities, the law, The Onion, there but for the grace of God, Third Amendment, TIAA-CREF, Tolkien, torture, trans* issues, trash, true crime, turtles, Twitter, vegetarianism, Vulcan, W.E.B. DuBois, war on terror, Wisconsin, Won't somebody think of the children?, work
Tuesday Links!
* CLIR-DLF Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies at UWM.
* David Bowie’s New Video Is 10 Minutes of Sci-Fi Creep.
* Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Masterpiece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tantalizing Animation.
* Why science fiction matters to life in the post colony.
* MTA: kind of overdoing a bit, don’t you think?
* A people’s history of yoga. But maybe this story isn’t being reported properly.
* From the Wisconsin files: Teen dressed as clown raises concerns in Waukesha.
* OK, it’s out of control now. When a major-party presidential frontrunner says this kind of bone-chilling stuff, the joke is over. Friends, I have some terrible news. Trump Tweeted Fabricated Murder Stats From A Neo-Nazi And This Is How The Media Reported It. The media has no idea how to deal with Donald Trump’s constant lying. PS: Trump Built a Monument to a Fake Civil War Battle on His Golf Course. This is all burying the lede, though: Donald Trump has superpowers.
* Five people shot near Black Lives Matter protest in Minneapolis.
* Pakistanis target drones with giant posters of child victims.
* Thomas Jefferson is next. I’m amazed he’s emerged unscathed thus far.
* How to escape a dying universe.
* Seems legit: The US Government is Being Sued for Losing a Critical JFK Assassination Film.
* Yet no group is more impressed with Edward Snowden than American college students. Even skeptical or indifferent students change their opinions of him when they hear him speak — by Skype — in packed college auditoriums.
* And the new MST3K is trying really hard to be good. I agree with the commenter who suggested that she should have the Joel/Mike role — and Jonah Ray would be better off as the Mad…
Written by gerrycanavan
November 24, 2015 at 12:21 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 9/11, advertising, Alejandro Jodorowsky, America, animation, Black Lives Matter, Bowie, Civil War, clowns, conspiracy, disability, Donald Trump, drones, Edward Snowden, empathy, Felicia Day, golf courses, guns, history, housing, Islamophobia, JFK, kids today, lies and lying liars, memory, millennials, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Nazis, postdocs, protest, science fiction, suicide, survival, teenagers, the heat death of the universe, The Man in the High Castle, the post-colony, Thomas Jefferson, UWM, Waukesha, Wisconsin, yoga
Bottomless Thursday Links, No Refills
* Cheryl Abbate has decided to leave Marquette. Marquette has apparently decided to suspend John McAdams, though who knows for how long. As an untenured junior faculty member (who has, incidentally, been a subject of McAdams’s unsubstantiated attacks in the past, as has nearly every other professor I know on campus), I feel somewhat constrained speaking about all this, and so I won’t — but I’m unhappy about the first and queasy about the second, and will be free to discuss this all at length with you in a mere four or five years. It’ll still be relevant then, I’m sure: I expect this whole tangled mess to be a go-to example on Academic Freedom and Repellent Speech for many years to come, not to mention the lawsuits. It’s a very complicated and miserable situation that seems like it just got a whole lot more complicated and miserable. I’m sorry for a campus and for the students that are going to be dealing with the fallout from this situation for a long time.
* CFP at Milwaukee’s Own C21: “Indigeneities.”
* Climate change comes to Shishmaref, Alaska. Arctic is warming at twice the rate of anywhere else on Earth.
* Hugely disappointing news from Vermont: they’ve giving up their plan for single payer. I really thought this was how it would finally come to America.
* The word you’re looking for is “racism.” Just say racism.
* But dead men loot no stores. Property-based ethics.
* Financial aid and class struggle.
In recent weeks and months, the power of the gesture has never been clearer: “hands up” transforms the visual sign of surrender into one of political resistance. Nevertheless, it’s worth looking at the complex cultural and historical work the move engages—the multiple moves it makes. As my students register, “hands up” isn’t quite the Black Power salute, given that it rehearses a moment of full-body interpellation by the police. But as one student observes, part of its force is rooted in this very repetition. To throw one’s hands up in the stadium, in the street, and (perhaps most powerfully) for the camera is to convert that gesture of surrender into something else: a shared performance that makes visible the deeply historical and split-second choreographies of power in which bodies deemed criminally other—deemed threatening, which is to say deemed black—become the objects of state violence. “Hands up” cites and reroutes these choreographies, a physical disruption not unlike playing dead in solidarity with the dead, a form of protest to which it is closely aligned.
* Police Investigating Texas Officer For Tasing 76-Year-Old Man. Ohio Detective Berated Girlfriend of Black Man Shot and Killed by Cops. California Cop Tweets That He Will ‘Use (His) God Given And Law Appointed Right To Kill’ Protesters. Wesleyan University Forced to Pay Police Overtime for Protesting Police Brutality. UPenn President Criticized For Joining Protesters’ ‘Die-In.’ Cops Off Campus.
* Supreme Court Says Ignorance Of The Law Is An Excuse — If You’re A Cop.
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the same standard doesn’t necessarily apply to police. In a splintered 8-1 ruling, the court found that cops who pulled over Nicholas Heien for a broken taillight were justified in a subsequent search of Heien’s car, even though North Carolina law says that having just one broken taillight is not a violation of the law.
* Policing is a Dirty Job, But Nobody’s Gotta Do It: 6 Ideas for a Cop-Free World.
* Of course Americans are OK with torture. Look at how we treat our prisoners. The Luxury Homes That Torture and Your Tax Dollars Built. They Said ‘No’ to Torture: The Real Heroes of the Bush Years. Skinny Puppy demands $666,000 in royalties from U.S. government for using their music in Guantanamo torture.
* This is one of the better readings of Sorkinism and its worship of white masculinity I’ve seen.
* Need to learn to think like an administrator? There’s a retreat for that.
* ASU English goes 5/5 — without a pay increase. ASU English by the Numbers. Meanwhile, you’ll never guess.
The Arizona Board of Regents on Friday approved a 20 percent raise in base pay for Arizona State University President Michael Crow that pushes his total annual compensation to nearly $900,000.
The $95,000 raise is his first increase in base pay since 2007, before the recession, and could be enough to place him back among the top 20 earners for public-college presidents.
* Straight Talk About ‘Adjunctification.’ Come for the one or two sensible points, stay for the nightmare flame war…
* The ‘Job Market’ That Is Not One.
* Meanwhile meanwhile: According to a report from the NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport, citing anonymous sources, U-M offered Harbaugh $8 million per year to coach the Wolverines.
* Gasp! The secret to the Uber economy is wealth inequality.
* The Judicial Ethics of Serial.
This risk of bias is not a reason to question content like Serial that draws attention to the problems inherent in our criminal justice system. It’s a reason to question a system of judicial elections that makes judges vulnerable to their influence.
* The Elf on the Shelf is preparing your child to live in a future police state, professor warns. Yeah. “Future.”
* Teach For America could miss recruitment mark by more than 25 percent.
* Both I Was Gang Raped at a U-VA Frat 30 Years Ago, and No One Did Anything and Jackie’s Story and UVA’s Stalinist Rules, working from opposite directions, suggest that universities should just not be in the business of adjudicating sexual assault claims at all.
* This Is Why One Study Showed 19% Of College Women Experience Sexual Assault And Another Said 0.6%.
* Trigger warnings and law school.
* Five Stories About Addiction.
* Oberlin College denies requests from students to suspend failing grades after protests.
This past Friday, over 1,300 Oberlin students signed a petition for college administrators asking for understanding and “alternative modes of learning” as they continue to cope with what’s happening across the country.
They asked for the normal grading system to be “replaced with a no-fail mercy period,” and said “basically no student …especially students of color should be failing a class this semester.”
This actually really threw me. I think I must be getting old.
* Surveilling students, 21st century style.
* Scientists Are Using Twitter Data To Track Depression.
* It’s unclear how many people changed their views in the course of the yearlong debate. And questions remain. The most obvious one is whether the boycott has had any effect. In one specific sense, no. The ASA said it would not work with any Israeli universities, but it has not yet had any offers to do so. On a broader level, though, the vote has left an indelible mark. “We got into the mainstream press and triggered a number of conversations not visible before about Israel-Palestine,” says the ASA’s president, Lisa Duggan, a professor at New York University. “In that sense we had done what we wanted to do.”
* And they say there’s no accountability: Top Financier Skips Out On Train Fare, Gets Barred From His Profession For Life.
* The Cuomo administration announced Wednesday that it would ban hydraulic fracturing in New York State, ending years of uncertainty by concluding that the controversial method of extracting gas from deep underground could contaminate the state’s air and water and pose inestimable public-health risks.
* Cuba’s cool again. Please be advised.
* Werner Herzog Inspirationals.
* All The Scenes That Could Have Been Cut From The Hobbit Trilogy.
* Oh, so now Tim Burton doesn’t think it’s cool to make the same movie over and over.
* Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically.
* 18 Badass Women You Probably Didn’t Hear About In 2014.
* The Racket would have been insane.
* Reading the gospel of New Athiesm leaves you with the feeling that atheism is simply a reprimand — a stern “hush hush” to the querulous children of faith. But the problem with this view is that it drains atheism of the metaphysical force of its own position. What makes atheism so radically different from agnosticism is precisely its desire to meet the extraordinary truth claims of religion head-on with rival propositions about the world. Hitchens’s claim that “our belief is not a belief” could not be more wrong. On the contrary, as the literary critic James Wood writes, “atheism is structurally related to the belief it negates, and is necessarily a kind of rival belief.” He claims being an agnostic would be “a truer liberation” since it would mean disregarding the issue altogether. The atheist, on the other hand, is always trapped in a kind of negative relationship to the God whose existence she denies in the first place, but whose scandalous absence she is forever proclaiming — a paradox memorably captured by Samuel Beckett’s Hamm when he exclaims, “The bastard! He doesn’t exist!”
* The One Character JK Rowling Regrets Killing—It’s Not Who You’d Expect.
* Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal explains evolution.
* Congratulations, Bitcoin, the worst investment of 2014.
* And you had me at let’s bring Star Trek back to TV. Yes, let’s! Maybe we can just skip Star Tr3k altogether.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 18, 2014 at 8:52 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Aaron Sorkin, academia, academic freedom, academic job market, academic jobs, accountability, addiction, adjunctification, administrative blight, administrative bloat, Alaska, America, American Studies, Arizona State University, atheism, Barack Obama, Bitcoin, boycotts, Bush, California, campus police, capitalism, Center for 21st Century Studies, Cheney, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, clowns, college, college football, college sports, copyright, Cuba, daily affirmations, depression, ecology, Elf on the Shelf, English departments, Eric Garner, ethics, evolution, feminism, Ferguson, film, finance, financial aid, first-year English, free speech, games, Guantánamo, guns, hands up, Harry Potter, How the University Works, income inequality, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, investments, Israel, J.K. Rowling, Lord of the Rings, male privilege, Marquette, Marvel, Matt Taibbi, Michael Brown, NCAA, neoliberalism, North Carolina, NYPD, Oberlin, Ohio, Palestine, Parks and Recreation, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, police brutality, police state, police violence, politics, prison, prison abolition, prison-industrial complex, property, protest, protests, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Serial, single payer, slavery, socialism, St. Louis, Star Trek, Star Trek 3, surveillance society, tasers, Teach for America, television, tenure, the courts, The Hobbit, the law, The Newsroom, The Racket, think like an administrator, Tim Burton, torture, trigger warnings, tuition, Twitter, Uber, University of Michigan, UPenn, UVA, UWM, Vermont, Werner Herzog, Wesleyan, white privilege, women
Sunday Night Links!
* Kenya sci-fi series imagines European immigrants fleeing to Africa. A very different premise, but it reminds me a bit of some of what happens in Abdourahman A. Waberi’s excellent short novel The United States of Africa.
* Map of the week: 57% of languages do not have gendered pronouns.
* How comics portray psychological illness.
* New Analysis Shows Problematic Boom In Higher Ed Administrators. With searchable database so you can see how your school has changed since the 80s.
* UCLA spends 2% of its budget on sports, while UO spends 13%. 13%!
* The Council of UC Faculty Associations did the math, and showed to get tuition back down to 2000-01 levels $5300 in today’s dollars), and state funding back up to spend 20001 amounts per student, would cost to the median individual California taxpayer, each year, a total of $50. Restoring full quality and affordability for the state’s 1.6 million public college and university students would cost the state median taxpayer about the same as a holiday bottle of single malt scotch. That would get us halfway back to a Free UC
* Grad school’s mental health problem. When education brings depression.
* “Teachers can’t strike, so we’ll strike for them.”
* Functioning democracy watch: The rise of the blank-slate candidate.
* Lawrence Lessig: Only the super-rich can save us now.
* But when it comes to the narcissism of war, as the example of Christopher Hitchens reminds us, no one has quite the self-deluding capacity of the intellectual.
* Friends, it gets worse: California aquifers contaminated with billions of gallons of fracking wastewater.
* U.S. Emergency Rooms Are Bracing For An Ebola Panic. The nightmare Ebola scenario that keeps scientists up at night. ‘Breach of Protocol’ Led to 2nd Ebola Infection. Cuba leads fight against Ebola in Africa as west frets about border security. But don’t worry, we’re tweaking all our incentives: US government offers $1m for best hazmat suit design as demand surges.
* Prison to Table: The Other Side of the Whole Foods Experience. Pennsylvania’s addiction to prison-building a moral, economic disaster.
* BREAKING: White people are radically misinformed about just about every salient question in American politics.
* Yes, they are killing young black males. Documents Show NYPD Has Paid $428 Million in Settlements Since 2009. Asset seizures fuel police spending.
* Why is the recovery so weak? It’s the austerity, stupid.
* They did, however, find the case significant enough to notify their sergeant — “due to the fact that it was an F.S.U. football player,” the report said. The sergeant, a Florida State University sports fan, signed off on it and the complaint was filed away as “unfounded.” It was hardly the first time that the towering presence of Florida State football had cast a shadow over justice in Tallahassee.
* Cultural preservation watch: There Is A Nine-Foot Tall Statue Of Edward Snowden In New York City.
“When the story broke about Edward Snowden, I was thinking a lot about surveillance and monumentality and how we remember things,” Dessicino told BuzzFeed News on Friday. “How public space is used and how people in history are remembered.
“And I got the idea that maybe people who are major actants upon history aren’t always represented properly, and those people could be written out of history by not having something more permanent made of them.”
* Elsewhere in Snowdenmania: news that he has apparently inspired a second leaker, still at the agency, as well as a nice button on the love story that dominated so much of the early coverage.
* I’ve been a Moffat-skeptic and didn’t like Twelve’s introduction or first few episodes at all, but I have to admit the new Doctor Who is probably as good as it’s ever been. Each of the last few episodes has been better than the last. Sid & Nancy on the TARDIS.
* Nielsen: still the absolute worst.
* The oldest struggle: Hawk v. drone.
* Yet, there is something incomprehensible and inconsistent about this brand of “evil.” Mordor presents these characters in incredibly high fidelity—and I mean that both aesthetically and narratively. Some of the Orcs wear visible jewelry. One dev pointed out during a video preview that “some of them are poets.” But we’re told again and again that these Orcs want to destroy beautiful things. It just doesn’t hold up, and this tension extends to every element of their narrative and systemic characterizations. These Orcs have fears, interests, values, rivalry and friendships. Some Orcs are lovingly protective of their bosses or underlings. But they are “savage creatures” that “hate beauty,” so go ahead and enslave them.
* Matt Yglesias is making sense: The real problem with Nate Silver’s model is the hazy metaphysics of probability.
* The LEGO Batman Movie is the moment reboot culture begins to learn at an algorithmic rate. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.
* “He soon resigned.” A chess column had run in the New York Times since 1855, until today.
* Here come the self-driving cars.
* Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don’t get hired.
* This Is How Judges Humiliate Pregnant Teens Who Want Abortions.
* Marissa Alexander will have a new trial.
* Unpopular opinion watch: This is not a perfect article, but the proposition that universities are not equipped to be courts and shouldn’t try to be seems basically right to me. I can’t imagine how people are looking at the last few decades of Title IX implementation and saying the answer is to give schools a larger role in this.
* Understanding the Great Zucchini, DC’s most in-demand clown.
* Well, that explains it. Hitler was ‘a regular user of crystal meth’, American Military Intelligence dossier reveals.
* The age of miracles: cure for type-one diabetes imminent.
* And I’m so old I can remember when “full of bees” seemed like the worst possible thing.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 12, 2014 at 6:13 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Abdourahman A. Waberi, abortions, academia, addiction, administrative blight, Africa, Afrofuturism, agriculture, America, an age of miracles, animals, austerity, California, cars, chess, civil forfeiture, clowns, college football, college sports, comics, crystal meth, Cuba, cultural preservation, democracy, depression, diabetes, Doctor Who, don't panic, drones, drought, dystopia, Ebola, Edward Snowden, FSU, full of bees, full of spiders, futurity, games, gender, grad student life, Great Recession, hawks, Hitler, Homestuck, How the University Works, hydrofracking, imperialism, ISIS, just raise taxes, Kenya, language, Lawrence Lessig, LEGO, Lord of the Rings, Marissa Alexander, medicine, memory, mental health, mental illness, metaphysics, MS Paint Adventures, Nate Silver, neoliberalism, Nielsens, NSA, NYPD, only the super-rich can save us now, orcs, pandemic, pedagogy, Peter Capaldi, police brutality, police corruption, police violence, prison-industrial complex, probability, pronouns, race, racism, rape, rape culture, reboots, road signs, science fiction, science is magic, self-driving cars, Silicon Valley, spiders, Steven Moffat, strikes, surveillance society, teaching, television, the courts, the economy, The Great Zucchini, the Holocaust, the law, The LEGO Movie, this time it'll be different, Title IX, Tolkien, tuition, UCLA, United States of Africa, University of Oregon, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, warning signs, Washington DC, water, web comics, white people, Whole Foods, words
Tuesday Night Links
* The way the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself, down through the generations: Tara Reid Says She’s Going To Be Filming The Big Lebowski 2 Later This Year.
* It is snowing everywhere and it will never stop. PS: Tell your winger relatives extreme winter storms are perfectly consistent with rising global temperatures. Trust me; they don’t already know.
* Building a tunnel under the Hudson just can’t be done, and honoring contractual obligations to public-sector workers would of course be socialism, but at least New Jersey still has plenty of cash to blow on casinos.
* waxy.org has a huge list of metagames, proceeding from the abusive to the downright bizarre.
* These days Superman wouldn’t even qualify for in-state tuition.
* Great Recession watch: 11% of American homes are vacant.
* Nemesis watch: James Franco will be teaching a course about James Franco.
* When hippies ruined all the books. Why, hippies, why?
* And clowns are getting women pregnant. Stay safe out there ladies.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 1, 2011 at 10:15 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, America, Big Lebowski, books, casinos, Chris Christie, climate change, clowns, Coen Brothers, Columbia, ecology, film, games, Great Recession, hippes, housing market, immigration, James Franco, literature, metagames, New Jersey, New York, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pedagogy, pensions, politics, pregnancy, science, self-reference, snow, Superman, trains
Foolish Old Men
Halprin takes some scalps: Harry Reid and Bill Clinton both look pretty bad today, not to mention John and Elizabeth Edwards and the entire freakin’ Edwards campaign. With Democrats like these, is it any wonder Obama looked so good?
UPDATE: Ben Smith comes to the same conclusion here:
Having dug into the book — which is quite good — a bit, one disparity was hard to miss. The Edwardses, Clintons, Giulianis and others are depicted as vastly different from their public images. John and Elizabeth are a vain empty suit and Lady MacBeth; Hillary is as calculating, hard-edged, maladroit, and ideological as her critics have always maintained.
The one character who appears in the book as he’d like you to see him: Obama. Which, one way or another, explains why he won: He was either untroubled by the deep contradictions that dogged his rivals; or he was better at concealing them. (He is also the only candidate whose staffers remain with him, deeply invested in his image and unwilling to dish, which helps.)
More inside details from the book from Jonathan Martin here, including some details of its report of Biden’s being cut off from Obama’s inner circle during the campaign and McCain camp fears that Sarah Palin was mentally unstable.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 9, 2010 at 4:06 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, clowns, Democrats, general election 2008, Harry Reid, Joe Biden, John Edwards, Mark Halprin, politics, race, Sarah Palin
Sunday Misc.
Sunday misc.
* Calling bullshit on the feel-good story of the week, Britain’s Susan Boyle.
* Why can’t clowns and cops learn to get along?
* The Sunday Herald has your brief history of manga.
* Joss Whedon on the future of Dollhouse.
So how far of an arc have you planned for the series already?
When I pitched it, I gave them a six-year plan with a lot of leeway for change. But what I really mapped out was the first 13, and even though we start in a different place than I had originally intended, we end up exactly where I’d intended in the 12th episode. Then, in the 13th episode, things just get stranger. There’s some twisted sh– coming.
Can you give us an idea of what to expect from the second half of the season?
The second half of the season, especially starting with episode six, “Man on the Street,” just kicks the entire franchise up a huge notch. It’s where we start to pay off on everything we’ve been setting up for five episodes in terms of the relationships and the progression that Echo’s going through. And then I just start twisting the knife and I don’t stop. Hopefully it’s still accessible to people; we’re still doing standalones and every episode has its own resolution, so it’s not just a rabbit’s hole. The first half was definitely, “This is the world and here’s how it works.” And then the second half just takes that up to an intense level and then we really start to mess with the audience.
Stick around for some creepy and unprofessional comments about his coworker Eliza Dushku.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 19, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with American Idol, calling bullshit on the feel-good story of the week, clowns, comics, culture industry, Dollhouse, Eliza Dushku, Fox, Joss Whedon, manga, Simon Cowell, Susan Boyle
Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years
Oink, oink, baby, in the most Orwellian and neo-Freudian senses.
* At McSweeney’s: Saved by the Bell: The Grad School Years.
* The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital.
* J.G. Ballard’s Alien and Starsky and Hutch.
* Every time a bell rings a volcano erupts, Bobby Jindal doesn’t become president.
* Life as a $100,000-a-year clown.
* Life as the world’s hottest basketball prospect—in sixth grade.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 23, 2009 at 9:52 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with academia, Alien, basketball, Bobby Jindal, clowns, graduate student life, J.G. Ballard, McSweeney's, over-educated literary theory PhDs, politics, Saved by the Bell, sports, Starsky and Hutch, volcanoes, Won't somebody think of the children?
The Art of Mark Bryan
The surrealism of Mark Bryan. Fantastic. Via Posthuman Blues.
Written by gerrycanavan
September 1, 2008 at 1:52 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with America, art, Cheney, clowns, luchadores, Mark Bryan, Mona Lisa, oil, robots, science fiction, surrealism, war