Andie Miller, who is always alert for things literary and South African, lets us in on a wonderful story from Texas (from the Senior Seminar of Jerome Bump) by Will McDonald called, “Conversations between a Plan II Freshman and J.M. Coetzee”.
Inventive and even Coetzee-ian.
Month: April 2005 (Page 3 of 4)
BBC Creative Archive is released with Creative Commons-like licenses for resuse.
Welcome to the Creative Archive Licence Group
The purpose of this site is to introduce the Creative Archive Licence. The Creative Archive Licence and the Creative Archive Licence Group logo are markers that let you know when you can access, download and re-use content from the contributing organisations.
In developing the licence, the BBC, Channel 4, the bfi and the Open University hope that other organisations will join the Creative Archive Licence Group and release content that will fuel a truly creative nation.
Al enters and begins a monologue about UNC as national champs, panders (self-admitted) to us by bashing Duke (his daughter went there for one year), a bit about UNC grad Paul Wellstone. How is he different from Rush? (much laughter). Where does Rush get his facts (hint: most of us sit on this source)?
quotes, etc:
Rot at the top can be mulch for the grassroots
To appear Barry Saunders, Joel Schwartz, Larry Grossberg, Mike Nelson, Mark Kleinschmidt and …
Coach K dissed as a Republican and for his tacky American Express adverts
A bit about the origin of the term Tar Heel (sorry not get that part entirely)
Bashing Bolton. How he tried to give a talk to Heritage about bio-weapons in Cuba. He was stopped by Westerman who said no there aren’t. Bolton tried to then get Westerman fired by Asst Secretary for Intelligence and Research Ford (at State Department) who refused. Play Ford’s testimony about how Bolton abused authority regularly. Now plays a tape of Bolton speaking about how the US should run the UN or do nothing with them.
“Kiss up and kick down.” quotes from Ford on Bolton.
Britney Spears/Bolton jokes ensue.
2 year moratorium on death penalty proposed in NC. Talk on that.
See also Sally’s blog for her better typing and more coherent sentences.
Oy! Oy! Oy! Show. Many Jewish jokes and appearance of Jerry Meek head of the NC Democratic Party. Grassroots vs Demo machine tale told. Jerry agrees with ideology of both but wants door to door conversations by the Democrats. Becoming oil-free in 10 years. How could we not go for renewable resources after 9/11?
Now about making the Demo Party responsive to the people instead of the good-ole-boys. Dean-like.
Dissing on Newt Gingrich. And on to Tom Delay.
AlFrankenShow.com: Call your Republican congressman twice. Once to say get rid of Delay. Once to keep him.
Franken’s own blog entries and comments.
Barry Saunders up next. Hat talk. Barry is a fedora wearer. Fred Phelps of Kansas who hates gays and is coming to Durham to picket the School of the Arts High School where the Laramie Project is being produced. Phelps is the GodHatesGays guy. His hate cult will visit Duke, local churches and the high school. Phelps folks are celebrating the Pope’s second week in hell (in case hating gays are not enough).
Phelps was at the Shepherd funeral with GodHatesFags signs. Phelps is a character in the play. Barry has interviewed Phelps. Franken has been picketed by the Phelps cult.
Carrying condoms does not get you sex. Barry carried a condum for six years and never got any. This in context of Wake County School Board’s fear of any sex ed. Especially of condums.
Barry’s column on American Idol asking Reuben to lose weight got him tons of hate mail calling him names he’d never been called before — like whitey, like red-neck, like N–hater. One letter told him that he must have it in for big, black men. Seeing Barry makes this much funnier. His book: Do Unto Others Then Run. Barry looks much slimmer on the cover than on the radio.
Next up Mark Kleinschmidt. and Mike Nelson, Mayor of Carrboro. Mike from the phone. Carrboro has a lesbian police chief and a gay mayor. Mark is the second gay council person in Chapel Hill. Now a bit about the repeal of the defense of marriage act. Now the tale of the Called2Action packing of the Council with an anti-gay crowd. Mark describes how all kinds of people actually from Chapel Hill defended Mark’s position. The Council voted unanimously to support Mark’s proposal.
Mark on the Death penalty. Mark is a death penalty lawyer. Mark has strong hopes and belief that the death penalty moratorium will pass in NC.
Talk of Mary Matlin’s Simon and Schuster imprint Threshold. A bit about Mary Cheney as described by Matlin. Matlin says that she hasn’t read Al’s books, but that Al’s books are useless. Al wonders how both statements could be true or if she is lying!
Larry Grossberg up next.
Larry’s book: Caught in the Crossfire: Kids, Politics and America’s Future
Larry says that the Right demonizes kids saying that the kids are worst than ever. Even Rolling Stone. But the statistics don’t say so. Kids are less criminal. Use less illegal drugs. Are getting pregnant less often. And in general are better than say in the 80s.
Kids are safer in school than anywhere else in Amercia. You have a greater chance of being hit by lightning than suffering violence in a public school.
Discussion of child-poverty rate. which is very high in the US compared to Europe say. A bit about drugging kids with prescription drugs.
Why are we treating kids so badly? (see larry’s book)
We are in the midst of a fundamental struggle about the kind of America we want our children to live in. Under attack: public schools, juvenile courts, children’s place as our relationship to the future.
Next more Larry?
[found WillR blogging live on OrangePolitics.org] and doing a great job.
Yes more Larry. He was just warming up. Dissing on Revelation about a nun and a cop. Apocalyptic visions seen as a end of the future. Larry discusses Virgina Postrel’s Future and its enemies. Two kinds of people: Those who think the present can act to form the future. Those who would just let things happen in the present since you cannot plan a future. She says she belongs to the last. Larry (and the Unibomber according to Postrel) belong to the first.
Larry is just getting wound up when he’s called for time. We need 50 minute academic talk radio!
No matter Larry is explaining things art length and with many hand motions to WCHL owner Jim Heffner.
Talking basketball next. What else? Start with NCAA theme from CBS. Had to get an expert from Cambridge, Thad Williamson (but he is a native Chapel Hellian). Author of More than a Game: Why North Carolina Basketball Means So Much to So Many.
Book written before Matt Dougherty’s seasons. Now a lot about Williams and his history with UNC. Now a bit about Dean Smith. Especially about how Dean treated everyone and how he has been living his life. Now about players leaving school early. Including Michael Jordan.
Franken says he did air work with MJ and it worked out fine. (air joke). Al gave the Espies Award. He tells joke on himself. About how his joke which was ironic wasn’t taken so well.
Now McCants announced that he will go pro early — like this year. Hoots for Sean May.
Next up Joel Schwartz about Paul Wellstone.
Wellstone was Schwartz’s first graduate student. Telling a story about Paul and himself at Berkeley where they shared a two bedroom appartment (a total of 8 people in both families). His last call to Wellstone was PW saying that he would vote against the resolution to give the President war powers that belong to Congress
That’s Justinsomnia’s Justin Watt leaving Chapel Hill and heading to Sebastopol, California to take a job with O’Reilly Media, my favorite publisher and the folks who run FOO Camp and the Emerging Technologies Conference.
Best wishes on your Left Coast life, Justin.
In my role as consort to the council person,
I’ll be meeting up with Al Franken. Sally, the council member with whom I consort, is way ahead of me and has been asking for topics and suggestions about what to say to Franken — even borrowing comments from Orange Politics
I need your help. Although I will probably emulate Prince Phillip and stand there deferring, I may need a topic or question or news bit for Al riff upon. If you have one, lemme know.
Bloggy hasn’t been able to get to her blog lately which is extremely odd for a blogging robot. But she has a good excuse. Bloggy may be cute, but Bloggy is also a young robot. Bloggy has been in a cute snit. Bloggy wants her own iLog. She calls it her Loggy. She would be cute with her Loggy, but she has no ears that I can find. How can she use her Loggy?
Late Friday, I took a call from a Daily Tar Heel reporter doing a story on Open Access journals. I chatted a bit and pointed him to others who know more, including but especially Jeff Pomerantz who helped organize the Convocation on Scholarly Publishing here a couple of months back. We both wrote about the Convocation here (me) and here (Jeff).
Here’s a clip from the article which takes what I said, in portions, and at least makes me interesting. Perhaps more interesting than I deserve.
“You don’t have to be a Marxist to figure out that the workers are getting screwed,†said Paul Jones, a clinical professor in the schools of Information and Library Science and Journalism and Mass Communication.
“If I was a publisher and I could say it with a straight face, I would say I add value at every step.â€
A paper written by Sarah Michalak, head University librarian, and Research and Special Projects Librarian Judith Panitch states that the cost of physics journals has risen 36 percent in the last five years to an average cost of $2,543 per subscription.
Such numbers make Jones a proponent of open-access publishing. He said he hopes it will force the major journals to be more reasonable in their pricing.
I said that scholars must join (or feel like they must join) the scholarly societies that publish the journal, in many cases they must pay a page fee to publish (or even to be reviewed), they pay again for the journal and/or their library pays for the journal, then they pay again to use the articles in their classes. You don’t have to be a Marxist…
The cover of today’s NYTimes Business section has a story on IBM’s patent reevlauation and their patent release. As I discussed in my interview with the News and Observer back in mid-January, IBM is getting the “Better if we share” idea. The Times writer rightly cites Eric von Hippel‘s new MIT Press book, Democratizing Innovation (which you may buy or download free from his website as a PDF and yes the book has a Creative Commons license) as a good (I’d say great) source for learning about the ideas influencing the IBM decision.
Aside: The online version of the story has an audio/visual slide show which does little more than summarize the article. The pictures there add little to the story. Looks like a way to give you all of the downside of a radio news short version of the story with not much added insight. The charts however are quite good. Both are accessible as click and pop links on the story site.
Personal Aside: I did a separate interview with the IBM folks in the article back in February as a follow up to the NandO interview. They seemed to be right on top of things as you might expect and were very interested in ibiblio. It was also a good feeling to hear that I had it right in my interview — I was wondering if they were calling to set me straight on a few things at first, but I surprised myself ;->
We woke up this morning ready to turn our violet infusion into jelly. Unlike the examples and the recipes that we found our infusion was not blue-green, but a deep purple.
We strained out the flowers, mushing them to get out every last drop of infused water. We measured the results and found we have a little over 3 1/4 cups. We topped that off with water to get the required 3.5 cups as instructed.
Then we turned on the heat. As the waters were heating, we added 1/2 cup of fresh lemon juice and the contents of one 1.75 oz package of pectin (aka Sur-Gel or other brand).
At this point the mixture was supposed to change from blue-green to violet. Ours stayed deep purple.
We brought the mixture to a roiling boil and added 4 cups of sugar. Stirring the whole time.
We brought the mixture back up to a roiling boil and kept it there for about 1 minute.
Then we ladled the liquid into five jars and began to let them cool.
In a double boiler, we melted house wax and poured it onto each jar. A film of about 1/8 inch of wax on each jar.
It took a long time to cool and to gel. We were getting a little nervous and were thinking that we would have a warm violet drink instead of jelly in the end.
Our nervousness was unfounded. The mess gelled just fine. We added another layer of house wax to be sure that we had sealed the jars well.
Now we’re ready to eat this and to make more.
We have a yard full of violets. This might be a sign of some PH imbalance, but the effect is quite lovely. It also allows for an opportunity to try out an old time recipe for violet jelly, which may be indeed violet in color when we finish.
In the spirit of Miles Efron, let me keep you in touch with the process:
First, Tucker and I went out and picked 8 cups of violet flowers — no stems. This went much more quickly than we anticipated and feared. We thought we’d only make half our recipe and stop of 4 cups of flowers, but the yard had plenty of flowers and we were not too long in filling the full recipe.
Next we rinsed off the flowers and drained them, fluffing a little to shake out any insects. We found none.
At the same time, we set water to boil.
The rinsed flowers were put in a glass bowl then covered with 3.5 cups of boiling water.
Almost immediately the water turned dark blue. We stirred the water occasionly. then let the mixture settle for the evening. The recipe called for only 2 hours of infusion, but other recipes recommend overnight or as long as 24 hours. The consensus is as little as 2 hours or as long as 24.
We assembled the ingredients that we’ll need in the morning.
- Sur-Gel or any pectin jelling product. This comes in a 1.75 oz package and we’ll need it all.
- Lemons for their juice. We’ll need 1/2 cup.
- Sugar. We’ll want to use 4 cups.
[more in the morning when we get underway.]
Side posting: Many years ago there was a band in Chapel Hill called the Blazers. On their one LP “Store Bought” was a song called “Violent Jelly” writen by on J. Earth. J. Earth is rumored to be the father of Ruby Sinreich.
The Wired sponsored talk at the New York Public Library last Thursday evening with Larry Lessig and Jeff Tweedy was sold out early (within 5 minutes of being announced on the Internet, says the Times).
But there’s a quick write up in today’s NYTimes called “Exploring the Right to Share, Mix and Burn”.
Tweedy notes that filesharing helped the sales of “Yankee Foxtrot Hotel” become double that of the previous CD “Summerteeth” in the first week and that filesharing helped the band survive and thrive after being dropped by their label.
More at the Times article above and more important — WilcoWorld says they will be presenting an archived version of their livecast of the event.
Just back from a great dissertation defense. “An Analysis of the Creative Commons as a Solution for Copyright Protection in the Digital Era” by Minjeong Kim.
First, Dr. Kim does a fine job of outlining the history of copyright in the USA and in the UK showing the various tensions between the private property view and the public policy view of copyright.
Next she did a great survey with good responses from her carefully selected pool of CC license users.
There are some very interesting surprises in her results, but I need to let her have a chance to decide where and when she might publish her work or even the findings before I let them loose on the world. If you are interested in who uses CC licenses and what they expect from them, you’ll want to read this dissertation. (and I hope the book that follows).
The musical based on our friend Elizabeth Spencer’s novella, The Light in the Piazza, is coming to Broadway. Sally and her mother will be there at the preview next weekend.
As the show has traveled from Seattle to Chicago to New York, there’ve been a lot of stories about it. The most recent is a piece on All Things Considered last night. NPR includes some pictures and some songs from the show on the archive pages.
The novella was made into a movie in 1962.
A couple of years back, I was named Best Geek in the Triangle by the Independent Weekly. Not Bermuda Triangle, but Research Triangle, NC.
This year, the Indy has extended the definition of Geek to include scholars, a Jazz DJ, and a contributor to Wikipedia. Eight in all. Many folks who I know and admire and several who I’m glad to learn about. Imagine being a specialist in hog waste! That’s one skill that is easily transferable to other fields I’m sure.
So Larry Thomas (the coolest Jazz dj), Seth Ilys (Wikipedia contributor), Jim Johnson (Urban Investments Strategist and economic geographer), Sarah Shields (historian of the Middle East), Mike Williams (scholar of Hog Waste), Rich Superfine (physicist and great teacher), JoAnn Burkholder (Pfiesteria specialist), and Henry Petroski (poet and historian of engineering and design) welcome to Geekdom!
Ismael Olea writes from Espana to let us know of the MANIFIESTO POR LA LIBERACIÓN DE LA CULTURA. If you are a Spanish reader, Go on over and have a look.
If you are an English reader, this Babelfish translation might help you or at least amuse you.
Interpid photographer and diehard UNC fan, Fred Stutzman, posts great pics of the fires and frenzy on Franklin Street after the NCAA Final on Monday.
Last night Sally and Tucker and I went to hear E. O. Wilson speak at the Morehead Science Center. His talk was co-sponsored by the National Humanities Center which gave the talk an interesting direction toward Wilson’s Consilience : the unity of knowledge (1998) book and his Promethean Fire: Reflections on the Origin of the Mind (with Charles Lumsden).
A few not exactly random notes:
Environmental Science | Ethics
———————————————-
Social Science | Biology
the quad above represents a flow of interactions as we try to get at big problems usually going clockwise say from Biology to social science to environmental science to ethics.
Studying languages that add colors or that are impoverished in their names for colors we see:
only 2 terms = Black and white
3 terms = Black, white and Red
(note that these are the colors attractive to new borns – pj)
4 terms = Black, white, red and Green OR Yellow
5 terms = Black, white, red, and Green AND Yellow
6 terms = Black, white, red, green, yellow and Blue
7 terms = Black, white, red, green, yellow, blue and Brown
Then purple, gray, orange, in no particular order
A bit about the incest taboo being strong in primates and recognized by very primative societies. If children are raised together at a very early age, they will not be physicially attracted to each other. Children raised together in a kibbutz rarely if ever marry within that kibbutz. All of this a description of the work of Edvard Westermarck.
Small joking observation in response to a question of what traits other than language are unique to humans:
Man has Paleolithic emotions, Medieval institutions, and God-like powers of catastrophic destruction through his technologies.
As an extra treat, we sat behind Larry Earley, author of Looking for Longleaf: The Rise and Fall of an American Forest, one of Sally’s favorite recent books to have read.
Jeff cites official sources at Duke saying that the iPod for new Dukies will continue at least through the academic year 05 – 06.
The Blue Devils are also looking for new and innovative ideas on how to use iPods in education. You can help them out (I think you are supposed to be a Duke faculty member, but they might take good ideas from others). Here’s the form.
UPDATE: Jeff just posted a link to the official Duke Press Release.
Chief Bloggy developer, Fred Stutzman, writes to say that Bloggy is now a Daily Link at BBspot!

Bloggy is cute. Bloggy likes to cuddle. Bloggy likes music. Bloggy is blogtastic (after coffee).
Should Bloggy be nominated for next year’s Computerworld Heroes Awards?
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