Monthly Archives: July 2008

Bad: Nader Saleh, landlord of the Robert E. Sheridan apartment building at 75 Martin Luther King Drive, said Tuesday that he has been battling a bedbug problem in about a dozen rooms in his building for six weeks. It’s one … Continue reading →

This fall semester will mark, if my math is correct, ten years that I’ve been teaching courses of my own design.  (For one previous year, I taught composition courses from a department-chosen text, hewing closely to model department syllabi, culminating … Continue reading →

So, the boy has been reading the all-ages Marvel comic, X-Men: First Class: New Beginnings, which collects issues 1-4 of X-Men: First-Class. In issue 4, “Seeing Red,” the X-Men and Dr. Strange travel to another dimension in order to return … Continue reading →

Motoko Rich’s NY Times essay about the old books-vs-web chestnut, “Online, R U Really Reading?,” has generated a fair amount of attention.  While I don’t usually agree with Laurie Fendrich about a lot, her conclusion is correct: A new elite … Continue reading →

The boy found this picture–it’s my ID card for the British Library in the summer of 1999–a few weeks ago, and for a minute or two couldn’t figure out who it was:   For reference, here’s a pretty recent picture: … Continue reading →

You can see me talk–*very* glibly, and mostly to undergrads–about Lost Causes: Historical Consciousness in Victorian Literature on our campus’s “Central Authors” television show here.  (Scroll down to November.)

I hadn’t really noticed this formally until yesterday, but apparently once you follow someone in Twitter, all their previous updates are retroactively incorporated into your timeline, as if you had been following that person forever. That’s a slightly puzzling behavior: … Continue reading →

Some of you will have seen this already, but Tom Franklin is administering a survey about the use of web 2.0 in teaching [“we” in the paragraphs below = Tom Franklin]: We are undertaking an international study of the use of … Continue reading →

At Cult of Mac yesterday, Leander Kahney wrote about a new Japan-only feature of the iPhone 3G: The iPhone 3G in Japan has a special feature unique to that country: The camera always makes a conspicuous “shutter” sound when a … Continue reading →

A week or so ago I bought a Flip video camera–after an amusing exchange at Best Buy in which a sales associate claimed never to have heard of this trendy popular camera despite standing in front of a display of … Continue reading →