Monthly Archives: July 2007

Students’ research and writing process

This month’s issue of Macworld imagines a typical student’s writing process, and it isn’t pretty: If you’re using Safari to do so some heavy-duty browsing, you’ve probably got multiple windows and multiple tabs open at once.  For instance, when doing … Continue reading

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For future students: How to ask to be let into a course

One of my best things is not taking things personally. Almost nothing has anything to do with me. –Robert Lopez, A Part of the World   Unlike Robert Lopez’s narrator,  “not taking things personally” is one of my worst things.  … Continue reading

Posted in higher education, teaching | 3 Comments

A summertime Friday query on faculty governance

If the student center changes their fries (to “steak-cut”), shouldn’t they have to run that by the faculty senate? Steak-cut’s gross. (It may well be, of course, that they’re just out of regular fries.  But isn’t it convenient that they’d … Continue reading

Posted in higher education, silliness | 1 Comment

Poetry links

My weekly post is up at Bookslut.  Topics include Darrell Grayson, “poetry therapy,” mathematical poems, an astronomer’s complaints about Whitman, and more. I think some interviews are likely to go up soon, and there’s something interesting coming in a few … Continue reading

Posted in books, elsewhere | 1 Comment

Facilities Management has a sense of humor

Yesterday, the following message went out to departments located in a campus building: Toilet partitions will be replaced in the second and third floor bathrooms of . . .  Hall.  The third floor restrooms will be closed tomorrow and the … Continue reading

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NAVSA spring 2007 newsletter

The North American Victorian Studies Association spring 2007 newsletter, which includes the big list of member books, is now up.

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Women and The Wire

Urmee Khan has a terminally silly post this morning at the Guardian‘s Comment Is Free site, arguing that only middle-aged white guys like HBO’s brilliant show, The Wire.  Her chief objection to the show is its treatment of women: It … Continue reading

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What’s your Walk Score?

Via Digital Digs, here’s Walk Score, an interesting Google Maps mash-up that “calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc.” Our house scored a 28, or Not Walkable. Which is funny, because we in … Continue reading

Posted in connecticut | 6 Comments

Weird things that are sort of Victorian

These three things are all related to Victorian literature and culture, and are very, very strange. “Experiments in Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver.” When it’s installed at a gallery, museum patrons or internet users can make a dead frog jerk … Continue reading

Posted in Dickens, silliness, Victorian literature | 2 Comments

On grades and anxiety

I’m grateful to Chuck and Alex for their encouraging comments about my plan to make my grade distributions public, and it still seems like a good idea to me. However–and maybe this is just me–it is slightly anxiety-provoking.  Last night, … Continue reading

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