Procrastination

If you want a break, check out Steve Colbert at the White House Press Corp Dinner. It is hysterical, how uncomfortable he makes everyone.

peace cat

here's the peace cat picture from coyote corner's site... i meant to add it at the end of the paper for those who had expressed interest in seeing it, but, well, i didn't.

thinking about texas

so, the other day i IMed with that girl who's doing the academic research on what-it's-like-to-be-in-texas (remember, lisa jaskolka sent us her email address?) she's really hoping to interview some more UT grad students, both texan and non-texan. here's her email address: tlsmith at ucdavis dot edu. and here's the address of the blog she started on the topic. in the interest of good journalist karma, i told her i'd post here and see if anybody else wants to talk...

drunk people+crayons+pricey art=blanton opening at 3am

anyone else go to the blanton tonight?

Field Trip

So, I friend of mine just told me about the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health - what does this have to do with us, aside from the mental health counseling we will perhaps all need after end-of-semester paper writing? Apparently they have a library/database/librarians who work on finding people grant money. That's right there is actually a physical space where people are paid to help people like us find some cash.

I thought this would be a great place to take the new cohort as part of their orientation, but I also thought it would be worth testing out (by which I mean, find my own money before sharing the potential bounty with strangers). Anyone up for a little field trip?

partial liberation

anybody want to meet after turning in papers tomorrow & have happy hour? i know i'm not going to feel like going back to work...

has anybody else been totally foiled trying to get to jstor and/or academic search premier from the ut library's website today?

i think the problem has to be with ut, because jstor.org comes up fine (of course, we can't use it because we have to access through ut).

U.S. Grant

It's his birthday. Has anybody ever read his memoirs? Apparently Mark Twain published them, on a subscription basis, and he had ex-Union soldiers go door-to-door in uniform to try to sell people on the idea. Marketing genius! Made tons of money.

Why have I never heard of this/had to read them in class?

This is reinforcing, once again, my perception that I need to be forced—bodily, if necessary—to take a hardcore intro-to-American History seminar.

no der.

really.

Tell me again?

How are we turning our papers in? We're putting a paper copy in Mark's box; Blackboarding to the rest of the class? Email communication has been interpretable multiple ways.

Shameless

Why not just build a secret underground tunnel between Fox News and the White House and be done with it?

RIP Jane Jacobs

She looks a really nice lady, doesn't she?

Invitations

So do y'all think we should invite the new cohort to join Neverending Jeremiad. I think it would be a nice jesture.

Update: Yikes! EndNote has turned against me

So it wasn't Endnote, but Microsoft Word that betrayed me (shaking fist at Bill Gates). For future reference, if undesirable field codes are showing up in your Word document press ALT+F9 and it should go back to the normal view.

My opinion on Chilean movies

If you want it, check out Austinist. I started writing film reviews for them as of today. My first post is like a million pages down, but you can search for my name.

Now I must work again, or Becky will chastise me.

knitting can save the world!

if anyone had any doubts....

knitters are suiting up penguins for oil spill recovery.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/National/Knitters-save-endangered-penguins-lives/2006/04/07/1143916701251.html

13 Ways of Seeing Nature in LA

Well. This is an article I like very much but have not had time to finish. It's by Jennifer Price, who wrote a book called Flight Maps and is a yale history PhD (wm. cronon protege) who ended up deciding to work outside of academia, as a writer.

The piece addresses many of what I see as extremely pertinent questions for those who would be environmentalists and writers/historians: namely, what kind of "nature" is it that we choose to write about? If we really want others to examine/refine their relationship to the environment, shouldn't we talk about/prize the nature that most people see and work with every day, instead of canyons and hawks and dolphins?

Or, as Jennifer Price would put it far better than I just summarized:

"If L.A. symbolizes 'the end of nature' (to use Bill McKibben’s dangerously catchy phrase), it actually has more than enough real fodder for such tales, if you want to write about the sunset on Broad Beach in Malibu or the hawks soaring in Temescal Canyon or the dolphins leaping just offshore or how your heart soars like a hawk or leaps like a dolphin as you watch the sun set offshore from atop the trail in Temescal Canyon.

But there are so many more kinds of nature stories to tell here. I head for L.A.’s wild spots when I can, and delight in hawks, dolphins, and sunsets as much as the next nature lover. I have a special soft spot for ducks. But the anthologies ignore about 90 percent of the nature in L.A. and all the other places we live, as well as most of people’s encounters with nature on Earth. What the crisis of nature writing amounts to, in a few words, is that Thoreau really, really needs to Get on the Bus.

And my own list of favorite representative topics for a more comprehensive, on the bus nature writing in Los Angeles would have to include mango body whips, the social geography of air, Zu-Zu the murdered Chihuahua, and Mapleton Drive near Bel Air. And, of course, the L.A. River, where all the possible kinds of nature stories in L.A. converge."

Dogs and bears and horses

Y'all, please come to the roundtable I'm moderating on Saturday. It's at 1:15 pm, in the Governor's Room, in the TX Union.

Don't miss the opportunity to hear the story of Balto the wonder dog, who appears here lovingly cast in bronze and immortalized in Anchorage! The tale will be told and then deconstructed, ams-style! Frozen men of the North will make multiple appearances, only to be chastised for their paternalistic attitude toward "Esquimeaux"!

Also, two other people from my class are presenting - so you'll also get to hear about grizzly bears and racehorses. What the hell else are you going to do of a Saturday?

Next semester classes

Hey MA-ers,

Anyone know when we're "supposed" to take our 3 credit Master report section? I figured it would be good to know before meeting with Steve tomorrow.

bun run

this sunday is the schlotzky's bun run at auditorium shores.
i'm gonna do it, but it will be more like a bun walk, as the only
running i've been doing lately is to pcl to get some book before
the circulation desk closes.

www.bunrun.com

addendum:
for those with aversion to the word "bun," there is a 5k called the "ashdash" on saturday.

Great Spirit, help me to be strong

At my roommate's gentle prodding, we just got cable TV. My plan is to pretend like we didn't until May 8. Then, y'all have to come over one night so we can sit and watch it for six hours straight.

I think someone wanted to see this, so here it is...

Mack Brown reprazentin' in Norman, OK: 10/31/05.

crazy cat lady

the title links to an article about a local woman who just had 77 cats removed from her backyard.

it's going to take a lot to earn the title "crazy cat lady" after this.

i do like that the statesman named the article file "meow.html"

(and yes, i edited the title... as much as i tried to get over it, both who and whom
bugged me, for their own reasons)

Ruination Day

Oh, it's April 14! It's the anniversary of A. Lincoln's assassination, and of Black Sunday (when a big windstorm hit the Dust Bowl in '35), and of the sinking of the Titanic.

Should we all stay home to forestall disaster? Or to write our papers? Or both?

On the upside, Steinbeck published _The Grapes of Wrath_ on April 14, too, in 1939. And Gillian Welch got what I think are a couple good, melancholy songs out of the events of the date.

But I guess maybe if you don't like her music, that just adds to the disaster for you.

Collyer disease

Not that anybody wants to think of acquiring any more books at this point in the semester, but there's a big used book sale next weekend and the week after. I will probably go, because I am addicted to paper matter and thus doomed to die like those pack rat brothers in New York who were found smothered under the weight of their own hoarded newspapers.

american psycho

On a more sobering note, here's the text of that drunken lacrosse email, which was, indeed, sent post-party...

"Why look at fish?"

You mean besides the fact that they're awesome? Here's that aquarium article from the Believer that John was talking about today in class.

Further information on "Scout's Honor"

Here's an interesting *cough* response.

Boy Scout movie

If you googled that, I bet you'd get something gross. Anybody watch it yet? How long is it?

AMS 394 Final Paper

If anyone has one of the good papers from last year could you tell me approx. how many sources they used? This is probably not how I should approach my research for this paper, but I thought that Mark, when he originally explained the project, implied that it was good to have a lot of sources, but not that many pages.

hi

so, for all who have the time/inclination, let's bring some snacks to class tomorrow. anything is fine, bag of chips, whatever. i have been sitting in the dark and desperately need to go somewhere to purchase a lightbulb, so i will plan to get some trail mix bars while i am at the store.

except for those who have their own strong inclination to do so, we'll skip the mass going to showdown after. perhaps in may....

Frank Hamilton Cushing

The supp. article this week calls him an "oddball," so I googled him. The dude was born in 1857 and was the curator of the ethnological dept at the National Museum in DC by the time he was nineteen. He went on an expedition with John Wesley Powell to New Mexico in 1879 and then just up and moved in with the Zunis. He initially pissed them off because he was so inquisitive, and then they accepted him and made him part of the Priesthood of the Bow. After all that, he died in 1900 after choking on a fishbone in Maine. I love these weirdos!

DVD/VHS request

Afternoon, all.

Does anyone have a copy of Blue Velvet or American Beauty that I could borrow briefly? I'm making sure that my readings of these (for a conference paper) are correct.

Muchos gracias!

Really up in your grill

Per our conversation last night, here is an article about some overzealous prosecutors in washington state who were seeking to rip the grills right off some poor drug dealers' teeth.

Imagine this forehead, only huge - and then, boom! Blackface!

Says Garrison today:

"It was on this day in 1927 that an audience in New York City saw an image of Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover in the first successful long-distance demonstration of television. At the time, there were several competing versions of television, and this version was a mechanical process that used a metal disc, punched with holes in a spiral pattern, which transformed light into electrical impulses. It had been invented in Europe, and it was called 'Radio Vision.'

Herbert Hoover was speaking in Washington, D.C., to the audience in New York City. The broadcast began with a close-up of Hoover's forehead, because he was sitting too close to the camera. Hoover backed up and delivered his speech, saying, 'It is a matter of just pride to have a part in this historic occasion ... the transmission of sight, for the first time in the world's history.' Hoover's speech was followed by a comedian performing jokes in blackface.

'Radio Vision' never really caught on. Instead, the TV as we know today was an entirely different technology, invented by a high school student in rural Utah named Philo Farnsworth."

Comic relief, part dos

Anybody else read the Mechling yet? Here's a teaser for you. A choice quote from p 202:

"The Treasure Hunt itself is a complex ritual full of anal-erotic symbolism. Jones and Menninger both see 'interest in the discovery of treasure-trove' as a trait that combines several anal-erotic impulses. The size and shape of the cans of Coke [they were the prize at the end of this particular treasure hunt] could be seen as similar to animal droppings, completing the feces = treasure equation. Note, as well, that the treasure is always Coca-Cola ('Coke: It's the Real Thing!'), never Fresca or 7-Up or root beer or even Pepsi. This is not an insignificant detail, given the phonetic pattern common in words associated with feces—for example, cloaca, colon, caca (or kaka), KYBO. In fact, the two favorite beverages of this group—Coke and cocoa—fit this pattern."

Comic Relief

First the beaver, now a croc-fish. I'm waiting for the t-shirt.

fetishizing the west

You got Kathleen Norris, then you got this.

One more reason

why Massachusetts is one of the best states in the Union.

looking forward

Hey, if anybody happens to see that the new class sched. has been posted (either at garrison or on the web), can you post here? I forget to look, but I want to know. I feel so free to choose, now that I know I have 200 more years of classes to look forward to.

ok, so i am feeling guilty on about 7 different levels for bringing up the whole going out after class next week thing. one of those levels is to myself, as i may very well be an anxious lass by that time.

so... here is an alternative. would anyone be interested in our all bringing snacks to share for next week during class? maybe even camp-themed snacks, a la boy scouts?
that way we can be kind of festive, without cutting into outside working time.

Footnote question

Ok, so say I have a quote like this:

“Cohen and Willis (1985) and Willis (1985) have developed one of the most commonly used typologies of social support."

Now when I make the footnote I obviously include the typical bibliographic info, but what do I do about the references within the quote?

Does it go: Bibliographic info. Using Cohen and Willis (1985) their bib. info and Willis (1985) bib info.

Thanks,
Becky

let it be noted:
yesterday i helped build a 6 ft snowman,
and my toes nearly got frostbitten.

edible book fest report

Some notable entries into the Edible Book Festival yesterday. "Spamimal Farm" brought home the grand prize. I got a really cool t-shirt with a dorky information-tech people joke on it. Success.