Despite my taste for violence in fiction, I have a very limited appetite for mediatic violence when it corresponds to something that actually happened. Which is to say that I’m not particularly a news junkie when it comes to disaster and monstrosity and thus have not been following the Virginia Tech Massacre beyond reading enough …
Continue reading “A Few Thoughts on the Virginia Tech Massacre”
The following email arrived in my inbox yesterday, which I am reproducing here. If you want to skip to the chase, here’s a link to a letter you can send to the Postal Board of Governors. I’m not sure if they’ll pay attention if you’ve got a Canadian address, but then, it being the U.S., …
For each academic year since I’ve become a professor, the end of classes has been punctuated by a rock show. I have fond memories of sitting on the Carnegie-Mellon lawn in Pittsburgh, lazily watching a lukewarm set by Superchunk. Another year we drove to Cleveland to watch Shiner (one of my favorite bands at the …
I just learned of this last night. The refresh rate is too slow, but hey, it’s pictures of penguins. How can you go wrong?
I just finished reading a comprehensive exam answer in which the student refers to Lewis Mumford’s notion of “biotechnics,” which he elaborates at the end of The Myth of the Machine. For Mumford, biotechnics is an attempt to subordinate technological development to the rules of life instead of the rules of math, an attempt as …
I’ll just write and say that I was a little disappointed that the Quebecois gangsters didn’t get a little more time on last night’s The Sopranos. But we’ll take what we can get. Commentary (and links to more) here.
1. (24) If you have a TV series where a character plays the president, you cannot have two different vice presidents conduct 25th amendment proceedings to usurp two different presidents in two different seasons. 2. (Ugly Betty) If you have a gay character in a TV series who is coming out to his mother, does …
