Blowing & Drifting

Julia and Genevieve are fascinated by spelling, both for practical reasons related to their reading abilities (“What does ‘r-e-c-i-p-e’ spell?”) and philosophical ones related to why the world’s so weird (“Why is ‘night’ spelled that way? It should be spelled ‘n-i-t-e’.”). But for some reason, both girls are also presently fascinated by the number of [...]

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Though I knew that Cinco de Mayo commemorates a victory by the Mexican army over a French one in the 1860s, I didn’t know much about the actual battle, at Puebla, in 1862. In sketching out the context of the Battle of Puebla and its significance, Wikipedia offers up a few choice bits of history, [...]

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Best blog post: Mary Walters, “In Praise of Revision, or the Four Fails of Trying to Write the Last Draft First” – an excellent essay which expands on the hoary but oh-so-true idea that “writing is revision.” That the piece is superbly written shows, as much as a redlined printout might, that is has been [...]

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For a number of reasons, I spent today wallowing in pop culture – not all of it the very most current stuff, but all undeniably poppy. Starting low and ending high… The Hills At the gym this morning, I watched an episode of The Hills, the MTV “reality” show. Even with closed-captioning, the show seemed [...]

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1. Things I Read A. Online Article “Blogging, Now and Then” by Robert Darnton, in the New York Review of Books‘ NYRBlog How new, then, is bloggery? Should we think of it as a by-product of the modern means of communication and a sign of a time when newspapers seem doomed to obsolescence? It makes [...]

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I was very exciting when I arrived on campus this morning to see that Carleton is immediately starting to put up a new building, the William H. Sallmon Administrative Building. As President Oden says in the video announcement of the project, the building will be devoted to offices for Carleton’s large and growing administrative staff. [...]

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There are more gaps in my pop-culture awareness than there are holes in a Sarah Palin policy speech, but thanks to the internet I can address one of those holes by watching the videos for all six of Lady Gaga’s number-one songs. Which I will now do, with the grounding assumption that I have never [...]

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The nordic events at the Vancouver Winter Olympic Games were colossally exciting to watch. The best single moment for me was Billy Demong’s gold-winning attack in the last nordic combined race, last Thursday. Demong’s medal – part of huge American haul in nordic combined which also included two silvers from Johnny Spillane and a silver [...]

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The girls are really enjoying A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is great because it’s short (limit the screen time!), funny (Lucy’s and Sally’s Christmas lists; Linus telling Charlie Brown that “of all the Charlie Browns in the world, you’re the Charlie Brownest”), easy to use to create a few minutes of quiet, well-scored, and fairly moving. [...]

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Today Julia and Genevieve received a nice Advent gift from their Nonna and Boppa in Moorhead, a video in the “VeggieTales” series: The Star Of Christmas Cavis Appythart and Millward Phelps (Bob & Larry) are putting the finishing touches on their first Christmas musical. With more electric lights than London has ever seen, Cavis is [...]

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With the outbreak release of Microsoft’s new “System 7″ now imminent, some tech-minded folk have been looking back at Apple’s own System 7, which was, back in the day, quite a big deal. My first Mac, a Classic bought and used at Mac(alester) in 1991, ran System 7. I wrote dozens of papers on System [...]

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Lacking all motivation to develop a real post, I’ll go the Twitter route and report that I’m going to go watch this flick now. Popcorn will be involved.

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Art for the first day of fall… I. Bill Evans playing “Autumn Leaves,” one of my favorite jazz tunes. (Judging by the YouTube comments, this isn’t the classic Evans trio with drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro, but this cut is at least as good as the canonical version on Portrait in Jazz.) II. [...]

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Mostly by accident, this week I wound up watching two different thrillers set in Los Angeles: Chinatown, the 1974 classic directed by Roman Polanski and starring a young, amazingly handsome Jack Nicholson and a frighteningly seductive Faye Dunaway; and Point Blank, a 1967 film directed by John Boorman and starring Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. [...]

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Depending on one’s view of rap music (and its practitioners), you may disagree, but yo, I thought that Rap Represented in Mathematical Charts and Graphs was pretty funny. (Clicking on the graphics here and on the RRMCG webpage takes you to the relevant video on YouTube.) My favorites: This, of course, leaves out the butter [...]

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