Rick Perry and the Boy Scouts

Here's one for you, Danny. Do you guys remember when Mark used to tell us stories about fighting with Rick Perry on sleepovers? Here is a funny interview with Deborah Solomon in which Rick defends his decision to write a book and give all the money to the Boy Scouts' legal defense fund (yeah, they're defending their right to keep the Scouts hypothetically "gay-free").

shit

Let's not let this blog die!

loltheorists

loltheorists -- It's like cat macros, though somehow, even nerdier. And, of course, Henry Jenkins has posted about having his image used on loltheorists. So meta.

Eames, all day all night

Possibly only interesting to those in Jeff's class last year: the Eames are (or Charles Eames is?) getting a stamp, this summer.

Elspeth Rostow Passes

http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/local/12/10//1210rostow.html

On pornography and race

Use Of 'N-Word' May End Porn Star's Career

I really think the above is pretty brilliant. The politics are at least as ambiguous as they are provocative. I think this clip might make it into the lecture if I ever teach Nguyen Tan Hoang's work.

Apparently this French guy went through our Orals process

A land in need of heros: Dissertation in the making

Rocky in Serbia, Bruce Lee in Bosnia, Zappa in Prague...
I'm sure there's a small town in Kosovo that would love to have a Frederick Jackson Turner or Bernarr McFadden statue on behalf of our grad program. Shall we start a fund?

The end of some kind of an era

Norman Mailer is dead.

Must everything be sinister?

Apparently the candy lobbying groups are at the heart of the extra hour of daylight on Halloween this year...ain't nothin' sacred in this dirty world of ours.

Really?

So Pete and I were driving out in Buda today to pick up the dogs and we saw a church sign that said:
Sacred cows make gourmet hamburgers.

All I could think was:
Oversized crucifixes make awesome dildos.

Edutainment

So it seems like George Lucas has determined that the best way for students to learn about the early 20th century is to watch DVDs of "The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones." We've become obsolete....

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hEQGdpPRxzCC6KpBBqa_xt2GrPow

Preventing Knowledge?

Here's a question, Bush is quoted as saying "if you're interested in World War III, then it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make nuclear weapon." So is he suggesting the U.S. kidnap the scientific intelligentsia of Iran? Or perhaps shutting down the publishing industry.

David Horowitz strikes again

David Horowitz is putting together an IslamoFascism Awareness Week, to be held on college campuses starting tomorrow, because he thinks Americans are gravely under-informed about the dangers of said brand of "fascism". Wonder if anything will happen at UT...

American Studies in age of corporatization

Writeup that ran on Inside Higher Ed about a panel Janet was on at ASA, re the place of AMS in a corporatizing university.

handy notes on abstract writing

The Society for the History of Technology has a good primer on putting together gold star abstracts. Obviously, some of the information is specific to the SHOT conference, but most of it is pretty broadly applicable.

Another reason that Jimmy Carter is the greatest

Check it:
Jimmy Carter proves once again that you don't screw with a peanut farmer/nuclear physicist/ex-president/author/habitat for humanity builder extraordinaire even if you're Sudanese security.

letter to the Texan

I wound up writing a letter to the editor over the article covering the grad conference, which they actually ran.

Speaking of tests...

Here's an NYT article on the new test given to immigrants seeking citizenship.

pop quiz

Now, you can take a geography quiz with Miss Teen South Carolina, Lauren Caitlin Upton. Thanks, People!