Accept no substitutes

Category: Amusements (Page 12 of 31)

Things that are amusing

Confusing Message and Messenger

Collegue David Carr points us to a Chronicle of Higher Ed article called “The Professor as Instant Message.” After 5 days, the link above will vanish, but Chronicle subscribers can find the article here.

although i was amused by the article i found it to follow a familiar script:
new teacher (or old) tries new tech (email, chat, bboard, sms, im, etc).
teacher has less experience than students.
teacher projects uses and behaviors on tech and tech users.
the users (students) already have a social standard for use.
teacher is amused and slightly flummoxed by the tech and the social construction of the tech.
teacher reports mixed results after recounting a few tales.

i’ll bet there is a comm tech theory that covers this but what is it?

l8r

House of Paper

My mother-in-law gave me a small book for my birthday. Brief but dense, allusive and slightly magical yet real in that Southern South American way. Indeed, it was by a Uruguayan Carlos Maria Dominguez. “House of Paper” is about obsessions with books, about literature and personalities, about intertextualities of all kinds, about how lives intertwine, about (the author claims, correctly I think) “how books change lives” (but he often means the physical books, rather than the contents), and about passions.
The book begins with a death. A scholar and lover of the tale-teller is hit by a car as she crosses a street in Cambridge, UK while reading Emily Dickinson. Then a package arrives. A book. Conrad’s “Shadow Line” with concrete on the cover and an inscription made by the dead woman to a former lover (not the tale-teller). With that we’re off on a quest with the writer/speaker that takes us to Uruguay by way of Argentina. Borges is a heavy influence here but others touch the brief (just over 100 page in small format) book. And of course, Conrad who is saluted throughout the book and specificially given praise at the last.
I haven’t read “Shadow Line” I suspect few living have. It’s not a well-known Conrad book. From my first probings I see that book is about crossing the line into full adulthood and like so much of Conrad a sea tale with the subtitle “A Confession.” The Conrad book is out of copyright and available in many forms including from Project Gutenberg (see link above).

Birthday Socks

My parents think I am tough on socks. Every year at my birthday, they send me more socks. Last year, dark blue. This year, darker black.
I’m hoping that the increased darkness is only a matter of style and not some omen.
To counteract the black, my son gave me a Carolina blue “Cackalacky” billcap.
Sally gave me a dark chocolate Oaxaca Bar (with guajillo and pasilla chillies) — a bit of sweet/bitter darkness with hot spice not unlike that made in Chocolat.

Speaking of darkness: I wonder if anyone besides me was surprised that Woody Allen’s Match Point was somehow described as a comedy by the local movies site!

Match Point R
Comedy sexuality
Woody Allen is back in fine form with this dark and engaging story starring Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, whose chemistry is captivating. – wire 2 hours, 4 minutes.

Along the way, I found audio of Robert Bly reading his translation of Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to my Socks”and other poems at Unity Temple, in Oak Park, Illinois, on October 22, 2005.

Which Way the Wind Blows

Last night on WCOM, I was not only the brief poet guest, but I was also the weatherman or at least the weather reader. I can’t remember all about the four days or so of weather prediction that I read. It was handed to me quickly. But I do know that the current weather (for last night) included a bit about the wind speed. None of the later reportlets did. But as a reader, I kept looking for some symmetry in the writing. There were highs and lows. Sunny or cloudy. Not the word breeze or windy after the first time mentioned. At the end, I said something like “no word on wind.” I can’t quite recall exactly. Others who heard did recall, but no one quite had the same story. I’m less interested in that it was me doing the talking and more interested in what different people heard. My son thought I was too emotional about the weather. Another friend was kinder, she said I was dry — seems right for weather this week. Perhaps I was breezy as well.

In related news, Phil Meyer points us to Andrew Postman’s tribute/essay to his father on the 20th anniversary of the publication of “Amusing Ourselves to Death.”

Weaver Street Moments

On my way to do my brief poet bit on WCOM with Chris Frank and Joy Javits, I stopped by Weaver Street Market to grab a coffee. There I ran into Jon Wilner, ArtCenter director, and Ted Leinbaugh, MBE the expert in Medieval Literature. Jon was very excited that ArtCenter had just been named “Business of the Year” by the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce. We talked briefly about the poem Jon had seen in the News and Observer and I was delighted that Ted was very familiar with Dafydd ap Gwilym who is a major influence on my poetry.
Turning around I nearly ran into Elena, who I’d last seen in Irkutsk, Siberia a couple of years back. She surprised me. I thought I had seen her on Sunday also at Weaver Street but I told myself “No it can’t be Elena she’s in Siberia.” She’s here working on a text book for use in Russia.
So Weaver Street, international, multi-disciplinary, arts meets scholarship and pretty good coffee too.

Grant deadline

Working all day and a good part of tomorrow on a grant to add more films to folkstreams.net which is already a rich resource modestly called “The Best of American Folklore Films.”

Many surprises among the films up already including:

Painted Bride
This 1990 video features the exquisite mehndi body painting tradition as it is practiced among Pakistani immigrants living in Queens, New York City. The film follows a mehndi artist, Shenaz Hooda, as she prepares a henna paste and paints intricate designs on the hands and feet of a bride-to-be, while the bride’s friends sing humorous songs mocking the groom and the future in-laws.

Remembering Emmanuel Church
An oral history of Emmanual Episcopal Church in Fauquier County, Virginia. The storytellers are masters-all of them members of the congregation from the old farming community tradition of Fauquier County. The stories, funny, sad, and scandalous, are memories of friends and family who are dead and buried in the churchyard. A 2000 video by Tom Davenport.

When My Work Is Over
The Life and Stories of Miss Louise Anderson, 1921-1994

The gifted African American storyteller Louise Anderson (1921-1994) tells her family stories and folk tales, and recites poetry in this film taped in Jacksonville, North Carolina, in the last years of her life. Her sisters Evelyn Anderson and Dorothy McLeod join Louise in recalling their experiences growing up in the South, working in restaurants and as domestics in white households, and struggling for civil rights in the early 1960s.

Possum Trot
The Life and Work of Calvin Black, 1903-1972

Calvin Black was a folk artist who lived in California’s Mojave Desert and created more than 80 life-size female dolls, each with its own personality, function, and costume.

And many more that need to be added.

Orchids in winter

Johnny Randall, assistant director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden and neighbor, has two articles in today’s (Sunday’s) Chapel Hill News. One “Take advantage of bare branches” is a brief bit about finding and removing non-native annuals and invasive evergreen shrubs like privet. This is important of course, but it was the other that attracted me. And of course that’s the one article not online. Luckily Johnny points us to the NC Herbarium site and the great orchid resource there so we can learn more.

“Find Orchids now to enjoy summer flowering”
describes NC’s three native terrestrial orchids and how to identify them. They are rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera pubescens), putty root orchid (Aplectrum hyemale) and crane-fly orchid (Tipularia discolor). All three occur at the NC Botanical Garden.

Jones poetry on WCOM

Sure you can only get WCOM-LPFM‘s signal within about 5 – 10 miles of their tower in Southern Village, but they are a great little community effort in the great community of Carrboro. Just look at the studio; it’s like the one on Northern Exposure looking back at you as you drive by.

They do a very local news show from 6 – 6:30 called the West End Report. On this Tuesday, I’ll be reading some poems and talking with Joy Javits and Chris Frank. You can be one of the six people to hear it if you tune in to 1360 at that time.

And to the point of craft, I’ll read some of the strongly formally driven poems that I’ve snuck into the News and Observer over the past few years. Each with seven stanzas of seven lines. Each line made up of seven syllables. Other tricks have been taken from the hexaemeron of Thomas Traherne (17th century English religious poet) and from the cywydd of Dafydd ap Gwilym (14th century Welsh bard). Other top secret DaVinci-isms within each poem.

ibiblio banned in China?

Fred notices that while google.com searches with site:ibiblio.org retrieves over 7.6 million results. The same search on google.cn only returns 1.6 million.

Things do vary. I just got 4,220,000 for site:ibiblio.org on google.com and 1.6 million on google.cn (as Fred did).
But when I add tibet to the search as in site:ibiblio.org tibet
at .com I get only 688 and at .cn I get 1,140!
I do get different result orders.
When I add mongol as in site:ibiblio.org tibet mongol, at .cn I get 63 including one that reads:

Mongol-Tibet.Net is intended to cover things commonly related to the Mongol and Tibetan nations, people who are closely connected to each other, in many ways, along their history . There are some subsites which are on separate topics but are related to the main topic of this site. You will also find information on some other regions and people, especially the ones from Central Asia, who might somehow be related either to Mongolia or to Tibet. We would like to present certain concerns about the situations in Southern/Inner Mongolia and Tibet, whose people are suffering under the colonial rule of the People’s Republic of China. We would also like to provide information on the Uighur region, Burma and others.

Fredmania – Facebook and Fred on Carolina Week

I just got back from a great talk by Koleman Strumpf at Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. He’s added movie trading to his file-sharing study so I got to hear a lot of new news. Basically, trading movies is now worse economically than trading music (at the current quality levels at least).
But when I got back, Fred and a guy from Carolina Week had taken over my office. Except for my shabby mess, it looked like a TV studio. Fred’ll be on later in the week talking about FaceBook and social networking.

Strumpf at Duke: Economic effects of P2P file sharing

Koleman Strumpf will be speaking at Duke on “The Economic effects of P2P file sharing.” Amazing that I have to go to Duke to hear Koleman speak. Jennifer Jenkins of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain writes:

In 2004, Professor Koleman Strumpf co-authored an empirical study concluding that downloading has no statistically significant effect on record sales, and can even boost them. The study was called everything from “heretical” to “absolutely astounding” to “incomprehensible” (by an industry spokesperson). Come hear Professor Strumpf discuss his continuing work on the economic effects of file sharing at our first Information Ecology lecture of 2006. It will take place on Monday, January 23, at 12:15pm. Details are below.

Professor Koleman Strumpf of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

“The Effect of File Sharing on the Sale of Entertainment Products: The Case of Recorded Music and Movies”

Date: 1/23/06
Time: 12:15 p.m.
Location: Duke Law School, Room 3041
Lunch will be served

For industries ranging from software to pharmaceuticals and entertainment, there is an intense debate about the level of protection for intellectual property that is necessary to ensure innovation. In the case of digital information goods, web-based technologies provide a natural crucible to assess the implications of reduced protection because these technologies have drastically lowered the cost of copying information. This talk will discuss empirical evidence of the crowd-out effect of file sharing on entertainment products such as music and movies.

Professor Koleman Strumpf’s research interests are in applied microeconomics with an emphasis on policy applications. His current work focuses on P2P file sharing, prediction markets (such as political wagering markets or sports betting), and the economics of criminal behavior in illegal sports bookmaking. His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Financial Times, Science, Economist, Business Week, Rolling Stone, and Variety. He has appeared on ABC News, Nightline, CNN, CNBC, C-Span, NPR, and Bloomberg Radio.

Looking at people looking a photos of people looking at Art

Rosenthal: Big Man and Child
John Rosenthal has a great eye, a steady hand, a wonderful sense of composition and a tendency to reveal humor in a very smart way. Today was the opening of John’s show at Tyndall Galleries. Most of the images were taken in galleries and to good effect like the one above of a child looking at Ron Mueck’s Untitled (Big Man) sculpture in the Hirshhorn Gallery.
There was a very good turn out of writers, photographers and artists as well as lookers.
Next Sunday, John will be giving a gallery talk from 2 – 3 there.

Death to my espresso machine?

Have I been dealing death to my espresso machine by bad grinding? I love my Solis Crema 70 which has been doing a fine job for the past 5 or so years, but a while bad I noticed the flow was slow. I cleaned the machine. That improved things, but occassionally it still slowed. I ground more and more using my Krup blade grinder and that caused things to be worse instead of better. Next the Krup started gasping (not related to the Solis I think). The fine powered coffee had sifted into the power switch. I shook that loose a few times and it kept acting like it would work just a little more.
Today I decided to replace the Krup. There was a nice selection at Southern Season that included a new Krup model. I got a new Krup. When I opened the instructions, I learned that blade grinders are deemed not acceptable for pump espresso machines. Fine for drips and plungers, but no no espresso. Why? The fine powder clogs the wonderful crema pin point holes. Damn, that’s it I thought.
I went back and looked at burr grinders. They are much more expensive and giant. I’m not opening my own cafe with my lovely little two shots at a time Solis. I don’t need a 14 inch high, giant binned, industrial grinder — do I? I’m looking at alternatives now. Solis has a Maestro Plus that looks tempting but a bit steep. What’s a cheapskate coffee snob to do?

UPDATE: I went ahead and picked up a Bodum Antigua (as Badi suggested) tonight. My first cup of espresso out of the Solis Crema is the best I’ve had from that machine. Putting in store-ground espresso was good but this is better.

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