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Wednesday, August 20th
After nine and a half hours of workshops or meetings today, I'm ready for a wacky little Plan entry. First, a comment: I adore my colleagues, and I'm not just kissing up because I don't have tenure. I've met a bunch of new (to me) people this week, and I keep thinking how lucky I am to work with them. (I adore you students, too; you're just not here yet.) Second, a cool link: here's an article on wind power, which has become a much more realistic energy option than I realized. Third, a wacky list for [zdyrkoem], [generoca], and anybody else in London: [simpsons]'s favorite ways to eat cheaply in London. 1. Eat Müller's Fruit Corners for breakfast. A Fruit Corner has yogurt in a big compartment and fruit in a smaller one; one blends them together for a sinfully wonderful breakfast. It's not lowfat yogurt, but it's heavenly and costs less than 40p. 2. Eat bread and cheese. Even supermarket cheese is sooo good in England. I recommend especially the West Country Farmhouse Cheddar and Blue Stilton at Sainsbury's. You can get a good-sized chunk of the cheddar, enough for many meals or snacks, for a pound and a half. Day-old loaves of standard country white bread are about 38p at Sainsbury's. (Baguettes are even better, but they go stale really fast, so you have to get them on the day of eating.) Add a few apples and you've got three lunches for about three pounds. 3. Don't drink at pubs. 4. Eat biscuits (cookies) for snacks or desserts. Again, I'm talking economy here, not health. McVitie's Ginger Nuts are excellent and easy to find; slightly more scarce but worth the effort are Hovis Digestives, which are shaped like bread loaves--they taste like wonderful animal crackers. 5. Make your own tea with a kettle. Buy a kettle if necessary. Tea is really cheap in the stores, and the standard brands are terrific. It's one of the residual benefits of the Empire. 6. Look for Indian food. Basically, all Indian food in London is good Indian food, even the frozen stuff. (There's so much competition that bad places would die off instantly.) Frozen Indian food is pricier than other supermarket stuff, but it's a nice treat. You can also get good sauces--rogon josh is a common one, for instance--more cheaply and whip something up yourself very quickly. My friend Emily, who is writing a dissertation on food and literature, tells me that Indian food is so naturalized in England that early 20th-century English cookbooks with foreign food sections would put Indian recipes in the domestic section. Obviously, this is the Empire at work again. 7. The New Covent Garden Food Company soups are really good and portable (in little milk-style cartons), and you can make a meal out of them. The tomato-based variations are often good straight out of the carton. They aren't cheap by soup standards, but they're not bad by meal standards. 8. Sainsbury's has little bags of raisins and unsalted assorted nuts for 99p. That's not dirt cheap, but each bag contains enough for many good snacks. Then there are the American standbys: pasta and sauce, ramen, and so forth. And there you go. Additions to the list are emphatically welcome--I'll be going back sooner or later. Tuesday, August 19th(c) [rebelsky] links to Grinnell's rankings in the new Princeton Review report. The full list of top scores is this:
#17 Professors Make Themselves Accessible #4 Best Academic Bang For Your Buck #7 Students Happy with Financial Aid #7 Gay Community Accepted #14 Students From Different Backgrounds Interact #12 Students Ignore God on a Regular Basis #11 Great College Radio Station #6 Most Politically Active #6 Students Most Nostalgic For Bill Clinton #12 Birkenstock-Wearing, Tree-Hugging, Clove-Smoking Vegetarians I entered some other schools for comparison, and I was really impressed by how well Grinnell came off. My guess is that the "Bang for Your Buck" number will get more play from the PR and admissions folks than the Clove-Smoking one. [stutelbe] (Miss Stutelberg for those of you in junior high) listens to LA! Right on! Tuesday, August 19th(b)
An addendum: I meant to mention a few days ago that a Dean staffer told me
(unprompted) that Dean has an "open-source campaign." I thought that was
neat. But now I see that the connection is more than metaphorical. Here is
an excerpt from an interview (from
this
Trippi: I used to work for a little while for Progeny Linux Systems. I always
wondered how could you take that same collaboration that occurs in Linux and
open source and apply it here. What would happen if there were a way to do
that and engage everybody in a in a presidential campaign?
[interviewer]: So is this an open-source presidential campaign?
T: Yes. That moment when that was all going on made me think, "That's sort of
what we're building here." I guess it's about as open as you can do it in
modern-day politics.
There's a good LA passage from [stone] now. Here's another taste of her lyrics, which aren't as cool without the electronic beats she sets up, but so be it. This is from "Smoke Rings," and for the record, it predates the Saturday Night Live "Quien es mas macho" game show:
Stand by. You`re on the air. Buenos noches Senores y Senoras. Bienvenidos. La
primera pregunta es: Que es mas macho, pineapple o knife? Well, let`s see. My
guess is that a pineapple is more macho than a knife. Si! Correcto! Pineapple
es mas macho que knife. La segunda pregunta es: Que es mas macho, lightbulb o
schoolbus? Uh, lightbulb? No! Lo siento, Schoolbus es mas macho que lightbulb.
Gracias. And we`ll be back in un momento. Well I had a dream and in it I went
to a little town And all the girls in town were named Betty. And they were
singing: Doo doo doo doo doo. Doo doo doo doo doo.
Happy birthday, [wohlwend]!
[burtone] solicits my opinion about a collection of student reviews of
professors. My only strong opinion is that such a thing should be done well,
including as much descriptive information as possible. We already have a
miniature version of such a project in the Grinnell section of
www.ratemyprofessors.com Many thanks to [weimerda], [marzench], [caseevan], and (very belatedly) [brannin] for their communications. Tuesday, August 19th Yay! [rebelsky] likes Laurie Anderson. I still wonder if any students even know who she is. When I went to Philadelphia to see her, I was struck by the number of women in their 30s for whom LA was a major feminist inspiration. Now there's a whole gaggle of Penn students who feel the same way, and LA's installations are still in major museums, but I hadn't realized how little she has reached younger listeners. I think Grinnell's communal obsession with The Simpsons--and largely with the seasons that were first run when I was in college--sometimes tricks me into thinking other cultural icons have more staying power than they do. Today is the second day of the workshop of faculty developing a new template for the intro course in Gender and Women's Studies. Kathleen Skerrett is leading it, so I get to hear some of her thoughts about teaching, which alone would make the workshop worthwhile. Developing the GWS course is also turning out to be fun and interesting, though I won't be able to teach it anytime soon. [heroldk], I'm with you on the Country Club debate. That's easy for me to say because I don't have swimming kids. I grew up in a Grinnellish small town with a similar club--it was where we sledded, where the golf team (on which I played for a while) held its meets, where I played music for club dances a couple of times. Even as a teenager with virtually no class consciousness, I couldn't stand the place. Carolyn and I did have our wedding reception at the Grinnell CC--we had to get a place when we first moved here and didn't know of other options--and the people were very nice, but the club's rules were oppressive even for that. I've heard really good reasons why other people have joined the CC, but for me, the old associations with CC life will be hard to overcome. Monday, August 18th(c) Doing little updates to clear my head as I put the syllabi together-- Taking the advice of last semester's 224 students, I am compressing and editing the Victorian unit to make room for Jane Eyre. I like the idea of teaching a whole novel, even in the whirlwind survey, but I'll miss the stuff that has to be sacrificed. It will be great to be able to foreground the connections between Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh. Are there any other Laurie Anderson fans on Plans? (I was just listening to her stuff as I wrote syllabi.) In an informal survey of a few dozen students last year, I found nobody who had heard of her. Am I just old, or was my survey sample misleading? Carolyn (an even bigger fan) and I got to meet LA in Philadelphia last year, and she was as funny and charming in person as she is on her albums. And she has an adorable little dog that she takes everywhere. Point taken, [stone]. Monday, August 18th(b) Today I begin constructing my fall course calendars in earnest. The most interesting problems are posed by English 224 (British Trads II). I've taught the course every semester I've been here; in that way, it is the most familiar course I could teach. This incarnation of it, however, will be the biggest I have taught. As a result, I need to create a hybrid lecture/discussion course that attempts to capture the best of both formats. I've been reading research on effective lecture formats and borrowing ideas from colleagues, and now I'm putting it all together. It's exciting to see the big picture take shape. I hope students find the results equally exciting. [stone], when I call DNA the "bedrock of identity," I don't mean the bedrock of personality or anything like that, but of legal/criminal identity. Willing as I am to question many assumptions about coherent identities, I did assume--and perhaps this was indeed simplistic of me--that my blood and my hair would be identifiable as coming from the same person. Monday, August 18th [wgemigh], by all means use the Dean stuff however you like. On another note, this is probably a long shot, but what the heck: back in the earlier days of Usenet, I remember a regular, admired contributor to some of the baseball groups named Mike Emigh. Any connection? Here is an audio link to an amazing NPR story about "chimeras," meaning people who contain two sets of DNA as a result of two twins fusing in the womb. The implications are amazing, both legally (have people been acquitted of crimes because they are chimeras?) and philosophically (what does this do to the notion of DNA as the bedrock of identity?). My annotation: in Greek mythology, a Chimaera was a monstrous creature comprising dragon, goat, and lion parts. In the literature I study, the term refers to a fantastic idea ("fantastic" as in "having to do with fantasy"); by analogy to the mythological creature, it is something too unnatural to exist. Democracy in the mode of the French Revolutionary government, for instance, was routinely described as chimaerical by its opponents. [abramowi], I take your point, but I think the argument is not that a candidate (on either side) should try to convert core supporters of the other side but rather that the candidate is best served by persuading people with soft preferences. This works for either party: political strategists on both sides resist the notion that non-voters are more radical than voters and therefore that candidates can win by moving away from the center. The reason that model doesn't work perfectly right now, IMHO, is that the spectrum of politics is even less linear than usual, since we have a Republican government that is breaking the budgetary bank and pursuing an interventionist foreign policly. You can't map their policies in conventional ways, so fiscal conservatives and social progressives can now form unusual and unusually powerful alliances. Sunday, August 17th I'm not planning much due to a visit from my parents, but I surface to say that I read that the head of the late baseball great Ted Williams has been removed from his body by the company that he hired to freeze him for future regeneration. According to Antonio Damasio (author of Descartes' Error and other books), that approach won't work because some kinds of intelligence are stored and generated throughout the body. Therefore, if Ted's head is restored to life in any way we can imagine now, it will not handle situations involving risk management and some social interactions the way it would have with its original body attached. The businesses in downtown Grinnell are really struggling this summer, especially this month. I recommend the Italian sodas at Saints Rest as a way to cool down! Thursday, August 14th [abramowi] asks, "Dean, [simpsone]? You sounded like you didn't think so well of him in your last plan entry about him -- said that he was less liberal than people thought and that his support among Democrats would drop when people realized this. What changed your mind?" Having seen Dean in Newton this morning, I am now fully on the bandwagon, and I'll take John's question as a prompt for thinking through why that's so. Here follow my ten reasons for supporting Dean for President. I reserve the right to change my mind capriciously at any moment. :) 1. It's true that Dean is not a thoroughgoing liberal, but most of his positions are moderate to progressive. He has a very good sense of how to sell progressive causes as matters of justice and common sense. I posted here before that I thought Dean's position on gun control was a remarkable feat of political positioning, as he used a traditionally conservative rationale to arrive at traditionally Democratic conclusions. I have now seen a similar pattern on many other issues. For one example of many, he justifies his opposition to the Bush tax cuts on the basis that sustainable economic growth depends on the prosperity of unionized workers. His position is a traditional (pre-Clinton) Democratic one supporting labor and opposing big tax cuts, but the rationale is a medium-term macroeconomic argument about the right ways for government to stimulate the economy. 2. A related point: I am persuaded by the DLC argument that it's a lot harder to win an election by convincing new people to vote (net gain of one vote per person) than by convincing voters to switch from the opposition (net gain of two votes per person). Dean has the potential, I think, to offer the best of both worlds by capturing Nader voters and lefties who sat out the last election and people who supported Perot and McKain. 3. Dean is willing to disagree with people. He routinely begins public events by saying that he will disagree with the crowd on some issues. Today, as he was talking to people after his stump speech in Newton, I stood next to him as an older man expressed his unbridled fury about the fact that rich people get Social Security checks. Dean said, "now that I don't agree with you on," and he explained briefly why he opposes means-testing Social Security. Then they talked about something else where they agreed, and the man closed the conversation saying how much he liked seeing someone tell him frankly when they disagreed. Dean's skill in such situations might come from his medical experience; he must have a lot of experience telling emotional people what they don't want to hear. He's now talking about how leadership is 80% following the wishes of the people one is elected to represent but 20% is about doing what's right no matter what. He covers both sides of that division skillfully. (His points here echo Wordsworth's comments on the need for genius to create the audience that will appreciate it, by the way.) 4. Dean points out areas where he agrees with most Republicans on something. He is not reflexively oppositional. 5. He has some great stories to tell about his achievements in Vermont, including a post-natal care program that has created some amazing effects. 6. He's funny. My goodness, do we need that. 7. He's gaining momentum. I don't mean only that his poll numbers are rising as people find out more about him, though of course that's attractive. I also mean that while Kerry and Edwards are (in the conventional mode) hammering pre-packaged points repeatedly, Dean's speeches and answers to questions are getting more and more forceful and detailed. He now frequently sounds like Bill Clinton at his best, citing relevant research, pointing out balancing concerns, and so forth. I mentioned this to a staffer this morning (on the basis of transcripts I had been reading), and the staffer said that you can see Dean thinking things through and generating new ideas in the course of a given day. Lovely. 8. He's willing to say things are difficult and complicated. When asked about the homeless--the sort of people who never surfaced in the last election, by the way--Dean points out that many homeless people are mentally ill and unmedicated, and he talks about the difficult ethical decisions involved in choosing to forcibly medicating them or not choosing to do so. And get this--he doesn't then say what the right answer is. 9. He picks his battles well. Dean is subtle when he needs to be, and he saves his righteous anger for the biggest issues. He spent about ten minutes talking about the need for international cooperation in Iraq and elsewhere this morning, culminating in a rebuke of the administration for insulting friends and enemies alike, leading to the statement, "We need a grown-up foreign policy again." Blistering! Coming out of nowhere, I would wonder if such a line were too risky; hearing the way Dean sets it up, it seemed like a good move. 10. He and his writers are better at politics than I am. I often see candidates--Edwards, for instance, or Gore last time around--who make terrible decisions about how to represent their political assets. They make me think, perhaps incorrectly, that I could write better speeches than they can. Dean, however, has come up with a number of strategies and phrases that strike me as remarkably clever and original. Calling Bush the "credit-card President," for instance, is flat-out brilliant, IMHO: it ties together domestic and national debt in a way that links corporate deregulation and the tax cuts. The phrase works if you don't think about it too much, but it also rewards close inspection. It also crystallizes Dean's larger argument that we need to think in 20- and 100-year increments, not in election cycles.
And that's why I'm running for governor of California! I mean, why I have
signed ---
Word! Google has a
new This will change the world in a small way: manufactured diamonds have attained a new level of quality. I'll shed no tears for DeBeers. As the article points out, the big issue is that diamond can withstand extremely high temperatures, so produced cheaply, it might become the material of choice for microchips. [sarafsau]: as far as I know, eBay is touchy about joke auctions on its site (for good reason--they need to protect the integrity of the process), but mine--unlike the Bush action figure one--is not a functional auction, just a bit of cosmetic satire. Fox-Franken lawsuit update: the Franken book had leapt to #1 on the Amazon.com list by yesterday afternoon. It won't be released until September 22nd. Al should buy the Fox News team a round of drinks or something. Tuesday, August 13th
This seems too wonderful and funny to be true: Fox is suing Al Franken for
using "fair and balanced" in the title of his book, Lies and the Lying
Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. See the
responses in this
Thomas Friedman, who supported the Iraq war loudly, has an interesting and
disturbing
column A headline in the "Other News" section of the current Onion: "Seven-Foot-High Grammatical Error Displayed Next To Car Dealer's Head." It's a good issue overall this week. [zdyrkoem]: on being told that you were "never that young"--I got that line at your age, too. A freind of my parents said that I had never really been a child, or something like that. I didn't know what to make of it, either. Tuesday, August 12th(b)
[stone]'s description of
this
In fact, I concede that the linked page is more clever than
my Thanks to [kensler], [rosenblu], [moondm] (fellow INTJ), and [stone] for their advice on programming languages. I will read up on the subject; [stone], I may well take you up on that generous suggestion of a faculty-faculty tutorial someday. [garrett], that's good stuff about education and personality types. Thanks.
Dean is the
Guerrilla
Oh, and Dean is coming to the State Fair on Thursday, starting at 12:35. I
might try to catch him in Newton that morning. If you want emails about local
Dean events, write to Amber Tischer (the Jasper-Poweshiek coordinator) at
amber4dean@yahoo.com
Fair tip: the pork chops on sticks are really good and not as bad for you as,
say, the bags of donuts, which are really really good.
Last year, the butter cow lady (TM) also made the Peanuts gang (TM) out of
butter. Snoopy and Lucy and Charlie Brown were all perfectly normal, in a
buttery way, but Pigpen was smeared with utterly disgusting dirt, and
{"
By the way, Which
Tuesday, August 12th
Six degrees of separation: a nice idea and a pretty good play, but
an
This
In my lost Plantry, I cited the new research concluding that Kansas is
significantly flatter than a pancake. Now
furious
Monday, August 11th (c)
[stone], [kenslerj], other programming types: I'm getting more and more
interested in the free software movement--specifically, I am interested (in
the long term) in constructing a set of course tools for teachers that can
replace and surpass course management software such as Blackboard. I have
some thoughts about collaborations and funding possibilities along those
lines, but again, that's long-term stuff. For now, I have just a small
question. The software I have seen along these lines was written a number of
years ago in Perl, which seemed to be the language of choice then. If I were
to learn one additional programming language with these purposes in mind--I'm
thinking of annotation tools and collective bibliography tools, for
instance--what language would you recommend at this point? Any guidance would
be much appreciated.
Monday, August 11th (b)
[wray]: your theory of the world (that exceptions to rules point to different
rules) is pretty much exactly what Richard Feynman says about scientific
evidence in his generalist lectures. Right on.
[fagan]: I've meant for a while to respond to your personality type comments.
I'm an INTJ; this
Addendum
On the Jane Eyre-Harry Potter bit: in both cases, the protagonist leaves the
original environment by going off to boarding school--seven years for Harry,
six (as student) or eight (as student and teacher) for Jane. Believe it!
Monday, August 11th
Hooray for the return of search functions!
My last entry was lost in the Plan shuffle, and I have no backup, so it is
lost to the world, which of course sobs uncontrollably as a result.
Political update: I declared myself undecided below, but most of me has now
climbed onto the Dean bandwagon. I could support Kerry, too, but the DLC's
idiotic Dean-bashing makes me root for Dean to win all the marbles and crush
the DLC in the process.
Along that line, there are some good election jokes among the ones recorded
here
A. "Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman took a shot at frontrunner Howard
Dean. He said Howard Dean is a ticket to nowhere. So at least Lieberman will
have someone to ride with now." -Jay Leno
B. "Former vice presidential candidate Joe Lieberman said today that if the
Democrats nominated Howard Dean, it would be a ticket to nowhere. Lieberman
added, 'If there's one thing I know, it's about being on a ticket to
nowhere.'" -Conan O'Brien
On the page, I give the nod to the more efficient Leno version, but Conan's
version allows room for a good Lieberman impression at the end to send it over
the top.
And then there's this one: "It was reported this week that of all the
Democratic Presidential candidates Congressman Dick Gephardt has raised the
least money. As a result, Congressman Gephardt has announced his new campaign
slogan will be 'I ain't got Dick.'" -Conan O'Brien
---
Anyway, I'm back from London, whence I went to Seattle to represent Grinnell
at the Phi Beta Kappa convention--your neck bristles with excitement already,
does it not, reader? Highlights of the trip: getting the lowdown on Seattle
from [jansonp] and [jansonla], seeing Robert Pinsky give a cool speech, hiking
the hilly way to UW and beyond to the house where my dad lived until he was
four, seeing the first Starbucks location (way too cute and small to have
given birth to its progeny), and an utterly bizarre public bus conversation
with a ex-con small-time dope dealer.
Now I'm finally in Iowa to stay for a while. Good.
---
I re-read Jane Eyre on the trip in preparation for adding it to 224 for
the first time in the fall, and I think I may have discovered the source of
Dudley Dursley's character--and perhaps even Harry Potter's, to some degree.
Dig this: Jane begins the novel as an orphan (check) staying with her paternal
aunt's family (check) mourning the loss of the family that really loved her
(check) and persecuted by the boy of the house, John Reed, who is described
thus in the first chapter:
John Reed was a schoolboy of fourteen years old; four years older than I, for
I was but ten: large and stout for his age, with a dingy and unwholesome skin;
thick lineaments in a spacious visage, heavy limbs and large extremities. He
gorged himself habitually at table, which made him bilious, and gave him a dim
and bleared eye and flabby cheeks. He ought now to have been at school; but
his mama had taken him home for a month or two, "on account of his delicate
health." Mr. Miles, the master, affirmed that he would do very well if he had
fewer cakes and sweetmeats sent him from home; but the mother's heart turned
from an opinion so harsh, and inclined rather to the more refined idea that
John's sallowness was owing to over-application and, perhaps, to pining after
home.
John had not much affection for his mother and sisters, and an antipathy to
me. He bullied and punished me; not two or three times in the week, nor once
or twice in the day, but continually: every nerve I had feared him, and every
morsel of flesh in my bones shrank when he came near. There were moments when
I was bewildered by the terror he inspired, because I had no appeal whatever
against either his menaces or his inflictions; the servants did not like to
offend their young master by taking my part against him, and Mrs. Reed was
blind and deaf on the subject: she never saw him strike or heard him abuse me,
though he did both now and then in her very presence, more frequently,
however, behind her back.
This is Dudley and Petunia, right? Am I crazy, [schunaca], [zdyrkoem], other
HP fans?
[brannin], I read another Sayers book on one of the plane rides: The
Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. Not bad, thought I. Have you read
that one?
"Enough!--Or too much." --Blake
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