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December 31, 2004
From the 12/31 Boston Globe:
The US government is contributing $35 million of the half-billion dollars that the world's developed nations are donating to the tsunami relief effort, and many Americans believe -- as President Bush put it earlier this week -- that their country is being its typical ''generous, kindhearted" self.
But both on a per capita basis and as a percentage of the nation's wealth, America's emergency relief in Asia and development aid to poor countries actually ranks at the bottom of the list of developed nations, some of the world's top economists and analysts of international development aid said yesterday.
And from the 12/31 Chicago Tribune:
The United States upped its tsunami relief aid tenfold to $350 million Friday as the world's ships and planes converged on devastated shores. . . . . Washington, stung by criticism that its aid pledges were small and slow to materialize, scrambled to take the lead. Secretary of State Colin Powell was to visit the region and assess what more is needed.
France has promised $57 million, Britain $95 million, Sweden $75.5 million. The United States had pledged $35 million, but on Friday President Bush set the new figure of $350 million and said: "Our contributions will continue to be revised as the full effects of this terrible tragedy become clearer."
But will the U.S. actually deliver what it has promised?
Incidentally, Atrios points out what Bush hopes everyone will soon forget: that his "initial offer" was $15 million.
Posted by senioritis at 05:07 PM | Comments (0)
Few degrees of separation
Glenn Reynolds links to two blogs being posted from Thailand and India. These provide texture beyond the canned television network coverage described in the December 31 entry in Fear and Trembling.
Along with fewer than 800 people, most of them of European descent, we live in a rural village in central New York. Earlville has a bar, a minimart, a fully restored and maintained nineteenth-century opera house, a small grocery store, a lawyer, a realtor, a paper box factory, a bowling alley, a hardware store, and a cleaning service. That's about it for commerce. It's a middle- and working-class village, many of whose inhabitants were born here or in this locale. We're 40 minutes from Utica, an hour from Syracuse, and an hour and a half from Binghamton. That's about it for access to "urban" centers. It all seems very, very far removed from the Indian Ocean.
Tom and I are fixing pork chops, baked beans, cornbread, and broccoli for dinner. So I go to the next village, Sherburne, which has an exceptionally fine butcher shop masquerading as a small grocery store. From the outside, the shop is very unprepossessing, with aging blue vinyl siding and a message board that always announces "Bait" plus the special of the week. I get my pork chops, I'm checking out, and I see a crude plastic donation jar at the counter. In these parts, when somebody faces a terrible, expensive illness or their barn and house burn down, the community raises money by a variety of means, including these jars. This time, though, the jar is for donations to "tsunami relief," and it's spelled right. And I'm thinking damn, even here in rural central New York, people feel really connected to what's happening in southern Asia.
And then I realize, oh god, Brian just married a woman from Indonesia. Not a woman of Indonesian descent--a woman from Indonesia. And Brian wasn't behind the butcher counter just now. And I just stand there stupidly for a moment, staring at that jar, until the new girl at the checkout counter says, "Will there be anything else?" And I turn to her slowly and ask slowly, "Is Ida's family all right?" The girl doesn't know. She says she guesses so.
So I carry the groceries to the car, and then I walk back in, back to the butcher counter, where Brian's father Skip is talking to a couple of other guys, and after a minute, Skip says, "Did you forget something?" And I ask him the question.
It's okay. Ida's family, Skip tells me, all live inland, down near Jakarta, and are unharmed. But, he says, a lot of people have died. And suddenly all three men are giving me details--how many casualties where, how much money has been donated, what the survivors' problems are. And I realize that not only is the group of us standing there connected to the disaster by virtue of Skip's daughter-in-law's origins and recent residence in Indonesia, but also because yes, even the working stiffs in rural central New York are sobered and sorrowed by this disaster.
So I go get back in my car, sit there for a moment and calm myself, and head for the car wash. It's an above-freezing day, and I've got to get the crap off the car so that I can see to drive.
Posted by senioritis at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)
December 30, 2004
Narrative does it again—or maybe not
Peggy Noonan's piece on tsunami coverage contains some arrant nonsense, including the assertion that Middle East jihadists would surrender their cause for an opportunity to be in a U.S. movie and meet Cameron Diaz. But it also offers a sobering analysis of people's reactions to the individual narratives coming from Asia—the banal ways in which we establish our superiority to and distance from the tragedy, and the ways in which we use "dead people to make cheap points"—which, of course, gives me pause about my latest post on the topic.
Posted by senioritis at 11:41 AM | Comments (0)
Blogs at Work II
Via Avedon Carol, an overview from the Manchester Guardian's newsblog about how the early information on the tsunami disaster came from blogs rather than from the holiday-understaffed, -overstuffed MSM.
Posted by senioritis at 08:25 AM | Comments (0)
Still flunking algebra
Okay, let me check my math here:
1) George Bush won the November 2 election--or so it would seem.
2) George Bush is the most unpopular just-reelected president in the past 50 years.
3) A heartrending global disaster is insufficient to stir George Bush from his vacation.
4) George Bush is spending more money on his inaugural than on relief to Europe—er, Asia.
No, I'm going to stop. I am not going to torture myself by listing all the weird, conflicting data that just don't add up. No matter how I crunch the numbers, I cannot figure out how the guy hasn't long ago been tarred and feathered and run out of the country. All the possible answers I can come up with are so sickening that I can't accept them.
Posted by senioritis at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)
December 29, 2004
"The filthy bastards stole my stuff!"
I became a scholar of authorship nearly twenty years ago, and I've become accustomed to receiving, from time to time, a communication from an aggrieved party who believes him/herself the victim of plagiarism. (I also get communications from accused plagiarists.) In most cases, the person wants me to defend him/her. I never accept; that's not work I'm prepared to do. I'm a teacher and a theorist, not an attorney. (I do, on the other hand, engage in consultation work with universities that want to review how they define and deal with plagiarism.)
But through these experiences I've become alert to just how many people regard themselves as plagiarism victims.
Far more people tell me that they've been stolen from than that they've stolen. I'm a person with both experiences; in high school I patchwrote in a chemistry term paper, and in my early years in the professoriate, a reviewer of an article that wasn't accepted then used some of my stuff for an article that she subsequently published. Yuck.
I don't have any stunning insight into the "filthy-bastards-stole-my-stuff" phenomenon. Certainly it's well demonstrated in the comments on Henry Brighouse's post on Crooked Timber (to which Collin kindly alerted me):
“…and the worst plagiarism is not copying off some web-site but stealing other scholars’ ideas and/or empirical material before they publish it…”
My husband and I have both had very unpleasant experiences with this, and there is little recourse, least of all “truthful malicious gossip”. In the sciences, where many ideas are patentable, there is a great incentive to “scoop”. The person with the greates interest in a malicious gossip retribution may be the only person doing so. We found it very useful to sign and notarize our ideas as soon as they were hatched.
And you can see it in the Chronicle colloquy on plagiarizing professors (about whom I was growling recently), in which "An anononymous professor, large public research university," begins, "I was recently the victim of plagiarism by another professor in the U.S." (And of course the moderator, ever alert for material for his next story, injects, "Dear Anonymous Professor at a Large Research University: The Chronicle would love to hear about your experience. You can e-mail me at thomas.bartlett@chronicle.com.")
There's actually a long trail, pre-blogosphere, of victims' complaints; c.f. Neal Bowers, Words for the Taking: The Hunt for a Plagiarist. New York: Norton, 1997.
So here's my question/speculation: in a culture that's obsessed with plagiarism and in which any discussion of non-student plagiarism seems to evoke impassioned victims' testimony, why are so few institutional structures aimed at sanctioning non-students who plagiarize? In asking this question, I have to point out that I'm not talking about copyright, which is different from plagiarism:
In separating form from content or expression from ideas, copyright law differs from our common conception of literary borrowing or stealing, in which the unacknowledged appropriation of either ideas or words is deemed unacceptable. Plagiarism can and often does occur when the literary item is not copyrighted, and, in fact, the citation procedures that ensure academic honesty tend to be more rigid than those that apply to copyright legislation. In copyright, words alone are protected from appropriation without acknowledgment, but to avoid plagiarism both an author's "ideas" and his or her "wording" must be credited. . . . . (247)
Spigelman, Candace. "Habits of Mind: Historical Configurations of Textual Ownership in Peer Writing Groups." College Composition and Communication 49.2 (May 1998): 234-255.
And I'm not talking about the various mechanisms (for an early example of the lists of possibilities, scroll down to "Web Sites" on the Ehrlich page) that are available for catching plagiarists. I'm talking only about punishments—sanctions. If we're going to go so far as to throw students out of college for plagiarism but retain plagiarizing professors (including professors who plagiarize from their students, what does that suggest about the true motivations for institutions' energetic pursuit of student plagiarists?
In 1982, Neil Hertz suggested that teachers pursue student plagiarists in order to assuage their anxieties about their own unacknowledged textual appropriations when they give lectures. For my own part, I cannot help but regard the uproar over student plagiarism and the low grumbling about professorial plagiarism as one demonstration of what I have long asserted: that plagiarism as a cultural construct serves to preserve an educational status quo very much akin to the mechanisms described in Bourdieu's State Nobility. In fact, a Foucauldian interpretation of plagiarism policies as a means of surveillance over the Other—the dirty student bodies—still seems very much on the mark.
Prewriting for an essay. Feedback deeply appreciated.
Posted by senioritis at 05:16 PM | Comments (2)
Blogs at work
With 1500 Australians still unaccounted for, the Sydney Morning Herald provides a list of disaster blogs. And on the Sri Lanka page, a most remarkable ad. I may throw up.
Posted by senioritis at 01:04 PM | Comments (0)
Just one question—
How do I rub a blog with my paws?
Posted by senioritis at 07:58 AM | Comments (1)
December 28, 2004
Narrative does it again
All the overviews of the tsunami disaster are useful; I especially appreciate the BBC's map of the affected area. Most powerful for me, though, is this account of one individual's experience.
I'm trying to find out about reliable agencies to which one can donate: agencies that don't skim off 60% of the donations, and agencies that are actually organized to accomplish something. Sandra, who's pretty savvy about this stuff, says she's donating to the Red Cross. I'll go with that. Here's info from the Washington Post: Contributions should be sent to International Response Fund, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013. For more information about donating, call 800-435-7669.
Posted by senioritis at 09:05 AM | Comments (0)
December 27, 2004
Pumpkin soup
I was recently having a conversation with someone about pumpkin pie, pumpkin soup, and the relative merits of canned pumpkin vs. baked pumpkin. I have no memory of who it was, but that person was very curious about the properties of pumpkin soup, whose virtues I was extolling. Just in case that person reads this blog, here's the recipe:
6 cups chicken broth
4 cups pumpkin
2 medium onions, chopped
salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 tablespoon flour
1/4 cup water
1 cup milk
In a large saucepan, heat the broth and add the pumpkin, onions, salt, and pepper. Cook the soup until the pumpkin is soft, about 20 min.
Puree the soup in batches in a blender or food processor, or force the soup through a sieve.
Return the soup to the pan. Put the flour in a cup, and add the water, stirring until smooth. Add the flour mix to the soup and heat, stirring, till the soup comes to a boil.
Add the milk.
Two caveats: This soup tastes like a dog if made from canned pumpkin. Use fresh, baked, or frozen pumpkin. (In the fall, you can get pie pumpkins at the grocery store and roadside stands, and those are better than the thick-skinned jack-o'-lantern pumpkins.)
Second, if you're wanting to freeze it in single-serving portions, omit the milk; add it to the soup when you're thawing it out and warming it.
Posted by senioritis at 09:02 AM | Comments (0)
December 26, 2004
Coding and rebuilding
That's been my past two days. Yes, I spent December 25 and 26 setting up a syllablog for CCR 611. (Sorry; I'm just not ready to call it a pedablog yet; sounds too much like something that men in trench coats get arrested for.) The Movable Type platform is not being kind to me; the internal links keep going dead, and I'm just praying that the students will be able to navigate the site.
Setting up this blog was my Christmas present to myself, and I looked forward to it for weeks. Since Tom and I were alone this Christmas, we had time not only to fix a feast for ourselves but also to play. And setting up a complex website is (for me at least) more fun than the law should allow. (And perhaps one day there will be laws prohibiting the technologically inept from setting up complex websites, in which case I will spend my declining years in the slammer.)
Posted by senioritis at 11:48 PM | Comments (0)
Winter cycling
Fifteen years ago, my wind chill limit for winter cycling was 0°. I'm afraid it may have risen a bit over the last few years, and I'm hoping it's not as high as 20° now; that would really cut down my winter cycling. But 25° felt pretty damned frigid today. Before I surrender to a 20° minimum, I'm taking new steps: absolutely bundling up when I come in from cycling, and turning up the heat in my study by 6° until I start to feel uncomfortably hot--which is several hours after the ride. Best item of post-cycling wear is a new one: a moaboa. Make friends with Tyra if you don't know what that is.
Posted by senioritis at 04:12 PM | Comments (1)
December 24, 2004
Christmas wishes
Support Peace
Posted by senioritis at 12:01 AM | Comments (0)
December 23, 2004
Cheat sheets, international style
Former Native Speaker Jon has a not-to-be-missed catalogue of hilarious ways in which his students tried to crib through a supposedly memorized presentation.
Posted by senioritis at 09:44 PM | Comments (0)
SAD, Syracuse, and cycling
When I moved to Hamilton, New York, in 1984 with my shiny new PhD, it was the first time in my 38 years that I'd ever lived out of the South (having been born in West Virginia and having lived during Vietnam in Alabama and South Carolina, near Army bases where the starter husband was stationed). My hometown was Lewisburg, WV, a mountain plateau town where the winters were cold enough that we could ice skate on the local ponds and where sledding was a community activity. I thought I knew what winter was.
I was wrong. In my first semester at Colgate, the president's wife took me out to lunch (it was a small college that had only recently gone coed, and she regarded personal contact with female faculty and with faculty wives as a personal responsibility) and gave me a lecture. Agnes Langdon was German, with the requisite accent and can-do outlook on life. And her lecture went something like this:
Some faculty come up here and complain, and they want to leave, and some of them do. For some it's because this is a small college in a small town. That we can't change. But for some it's because they hate the winter weather. That they can change. I believe nobody has to be unhappy because of the winter, if they're properly dressed and if they go out and meet it. If you're not cold, you're not unhappy. As for being properly dressed, you need a long down coat; high boots; a wool cap that comes down over your ears; a heavy scarf; heavy gloves; and two pairs of silk long underwear. Don't buy that cotton knit underwear; silk will keep you much warmer, and I can give you a catalogue where you can order some. Flannel sheets are nice, too, but not a necessity.
Already I'm in the twilight zone. We're lunching at Merrill House, the Colgate faculty club, with its dark paneling and high pretentions. And the wife of the college president is telling me what kind of underwear I should have. Still, I'm a schmuck when it comes to advice: if the advice is given directly to me from a highly reliable source, I listen and obey.
Agnes continues,
And you need to take up a winter sport. I recommend cross-country skiing. It's good for the heart. But you also might want to try ice skating or snowshoeing. Get out IN the weather! MEET the weather! Don't be afraid of it!
So, schmuck that I am, I followed her advice. I bought the down coat and the cross-country skis (though I drew the line at having the president's wife know what kind of underwear I wore), and I've stayed in upstate New York for 20 years (with a brief detour to Texas) and plan to retire here. I really love this place, all four seasons of it (though the year we had a 6-month winter was a bit much).
So I've got the skis and the snowshoes, and I've even got a mountain bike outfitted for winter. Getting out does a lot to counter SAD, even when the days are cloudy (which they usually are). And to Agnes Langdon's stock of fine Upstate lore I'll add one more item, for scholar-writers: find the sunniest place in your house and claim it as your study.
Posted by senioritis at 06:54 AM | Comments (0)
December 22, 2004
Of bake sales and eBays
Paraphrasing a bumper-sticker commonplace: "What if education had all the funding it needed, and the Army had to hold a bake sale?" A couple of weeks ago, joshyelon at DKos ruminated on the possible media-stunt value of the Democratic Party's holding a bake sale for the Army. And in today's San Francisco Chronicle, we learn that some individuals who are on their way to Iraq have been doing just that. (Actually, it's an eBay sale rather than a bake sale. This is the 21st c, dontcha know.)
The Army is indignant. We don't need no stinkin charity, they say. Check.
Posted by senioritis at 07:35 AM | Comments (0)
December 21, 2004
The inescapable weirdness of being
Derek, one of those hardy souls trying to mentor me into the 21st c, forwards a most peculiar URL, for a site that promises to catch those nogoodniks plagiarizing my online material. Kind of a Turnitin.com for the blogosphere. A while back, Collin tipped me off to Technorati, which accomplishes much the same work but does not specify IP concerns.
Today's the solstice, see—the closest that we come to a religious holiday at Rancho Howard. In commemoration of which, we cracked open a nice bottle of champagne and scarfed same. It's been awhile since I drank anything, mainly cuz I either don't drink or I drink too much. Most of the time I find the effects of drinking too much to be simply unpleasant; hence habitual abstinence. But of course on a holiday, one has an obligation to intemperance.
But three glasses of champagne just make Turnitin.blog—er, Copyscape—seem even weirder.
Posted by senioritis at 08:22 PM | Comments (0)
December 20, 2004
Celestial signs
What does it mean when your new ENT's office is an hour's drive from your home; you are desperate to see this guy, in hopes that he might help you breathe; and you leave your copy of Tropics of Discourse on the kitchen counter? It means you are doomed, partner, DOOMED.
First, you'll miscalculate the amount of extra time needed for the stop at the feed store (to pick up 25 pounds of black oil sunflower seed, 15 pounds of niger, and 3 cakes of suet for those hungry little agents that keep you and your cats entertained): it doesn't take as long as you'd calculated, so you show up 20 minutes early for your appointment. Then when you arrive, the receptionist (whose nails are just too long and the wrong shade of red; you congratulate yourself on the restrained length of your own nails and on the perfect shade of red you chose for Christmas week) tells you in a really high voice and a really nasal, whiny Central New York accent that the doctor has been "delayed in surgery." (And when you hear her telling other patients that their doctor, too, had to "go to surgery," you figure a three-martini office lunch is underway.) So you sit down, and pretty soon some random guy sits down next to you, and it immediately becomes powerfully apparent that he has been drinking—for about the past four years. Alcoholics just smell so damn bad, and the reason you're at this ENT's office is in part because of rampaging chemical allergies. But there aren't many seats available in the office, so there aren't any decent options for moving. Then an old guy sits down across from you, a guy who hasn't bought any new clothes since he gained the last thirty pounds, and he gazes searchingly, unblinkingly at you as he taps his tank for extra oxygen. Oh, it's going to be a loooong afternoon. And you do not have High Theory to keep you distracted. And you left your iPod at home, too, so you cannot help but hear every little jiggle that the damned oxygen tank makes.
So you look around to see what's available to read. Prevention. Time (you know, those nice folks who just named W man of the year—no, not "person." Man.) And that's about it. No People or Entertainment to tell you all about what sorts of sleazy antics Russell Crowe is up to these days. You are doomed, doomed, doo--
But wait! Red Claws actually calls your name! "Rebecca"—that's me, right? And you skip off to the examination room and meet your new best friend, who turns out to be a pretty cool guy your own age (not some old fossil or some young thug) who actually talks and listens and gets his nurse to draw blood and makes an appointment in February to talk with you again and tell you what kind of allergies you have and what treatment he can give you for them. And all the reeking alcoholics and overstuffed oxygen-wielding weirdos are forgotten. There is hope! In celebration, you sail off to Wegman's House of Worship, where you blithely drop TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY DOLLARS for freakin groceries, including about 10 gallons of Eucerin, 'cause after all, winter's here and the skin's going to need a lot of replenishment and--
oh, just SHUT UP, Becky!
Posted by senioritis at 10:45 PM | Comments (1)
December 19, 2004
Small but helpful restoratives & distractions
Posted by senioritis at 12:04 PM | Comments (2)
December 18, 2004
Candace Spigelman
Kathi Yancey posts to WPA-L the shocking news that Candace Spigelman has died. Off-list, she alerts those of us who were involved in a collaborative book project with Candace. I will post here, as a sort of memorial, an excerpt from something I wrote about Candace just three weeks ago. With her death, it is no longer confidential; and I'd like those who come across this entry to understand just what a remarkable compositionist she was. I simply have no words just now to describe her as a person, a colleague, and a friend. In that regard—like many others, I am sure—I am just devastated.
Prof. Spigelman's work first came to my attention when my graduate students at Texas Christian University began citing it. Like Candace, I am a scholar of authorship, and as my graduate students worked in the field, they began saying to me (about her 1998 article "Habits of Mind" and the 1999 book chapter "Ethics of Appropriation"), "You should be reading this!" But I wasn't. I knew these looked like interesting essays, but my students read them before I did.As soon as I had a chance to read them, I was impressed. These articles demonstrated careful scholarship, careful evidence for all of Spigelman's claims, with no claims exaggerated. As a scholar given to some hyperbole and drama in my own rhetoric, I was immediately respectful of Prof. Spigelman's restraint—not to mention her findings. By that time I was in my present position, at Syracuse University, and once again, my graduate students were a step ahead of me. They were devouring her 2000 Across Property Lines and insisting, "You should read this!" This time I immediately made the time to read the book, and once again, I could see why graduate students in composition and rhetoric were finding her work so illuminating and important. Candace Spigelman's publications offer methodologically sound research into the ways in which teachers' and students' images of authors, authorship, and intellectual property affect their classroom and rhetorical behaviors. From Candace Spigelman I learned, for example, the ways in which collaborative classroom pedagogies can be derailed by nearly-invisible student assumptions and worries about their own intellectual property rights and by their sense of academic competition.
Last year Amy E. Robillard finished her doctoral dissertation ("Reimagining Students' Writerly Authority") at Syracuse, and it substantially drew on Prof. Spigelman's work coediting of the journal Young Scholars in Writing. Robillard regards that journal as a benchmark for the development of composition studies and its efforts to "authorize" student writing:
Divorced from a pedagogy, from assignments, from specific teacher-heroes, the student writing that appears in Young Scholars in Writing carries a different kind of authority than the student writing that has typically appeared in the pages of composition studies' primary journals. . . . The Young Scholars articles' separation from particular teachers and pedagogies functions in two important ways. First, this separation guards against the charge that the student writing has been appropriated by teachers wishing to demonstrate the outcomes of a particular pedagogy. Second, such separation also allows teachers and scholars—myself included—to draw on the work of students without themselves falling right back into the narrative of teacher-hero (78-79).
I quote at length from this doctoral dissertation not only to illustrate how much influence Candace Spigelman's work has upon scholars of authorship and graduate students in authorship, but also because the passage from Prof. Robillard's dissertation illustrates how innovative and forward-thinking all of Spigelman's work is.
The Houston Grand Opera's recording of Mark Adamo's Little Women is on the stereo, as the most eloquent way I can find at this moment to express my personal grief. I have lost a treasured sister scholar.
Posted by senioritis at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)
Punishments for plagiarists
A whole new possibility: stuff 'em.
Posted by senioritis at 05:29 AM | Comments (0)
December 17, 2004
Friday cat blogging
Ruth and Luigi.
And in the category of blogging milestones: the first pic posted to my blog.
Posted by senioritis at 11:46 AM | Comments (2)
Dark days in Cleveland
On this morning's Mike & Mike, a caller claims that for three days he tried unsuccessfully to give away two tickets to the upcoming Browns game. Finally he nailed them to a tree—and they're still there. The Browns are so bad this year that this apocryphal tale might actually be true.
Posted by senioritis at 08:02 AM | Comments (0)
December 16, 2004
The joy of downloading
A Salon article links to Better Propaganda, where one can listen to and download interesting indie pop. I realize I'm probably the last person in the blogosphere to discover Better Propaganda, but just in case there's one person behind me and that one person reads this blog, I'll share the love. And I'll offer another one of my celebrated rewards to those who point me to other sites that offer free, legal music downloads.
Posted by senioritis at 12:26 PM | Comments (0)
December 15, 2004
The joy of cooking
Over the past several years, Tom and I have gradually developed a new hobby: cooking. When it's just the two of us, we each tend to cook just for ourselves. He goes in for steaks & chops; I favor soups and stir-frys. But we've discovered the fun of cooking for guests, especially undergraduates. They're old enough to carry on good conversation, and young enough to liven up the house. And of course they appreciate something other than dorm chow. So we get a lot out of their company; they keep us from being two aging people living alone. Mostly it's Colgate students, because the trip to our house is a short one for them. It's students Tom has had in class and often basketball players. (He's been faculty advisor to the women's team for many years.)
In addition to enjoying their company, we're also discovering that cooking is becoming a hobby for us. We'll spend all afternoon in the kitchen preparing one of these meals. This evening it was ham, broccoli, rice, biscuits, lemon sauce, Waldorf salad--and Tom made some amazing cream puffs from scratch. So Tom and I get a square meal ourselves; we get the pleasure of the company of what I feel compelled to call youngsters; and we get the pleasure of cooking. Time was when we'd get cranky and anxious when preparing for guests; now it's a celebration. "Hobbies" tend to be things that one consciously chooses and practices, but sometimes one's joys just sneak up from behind, and all of a sudden, you recognize them.
Posted by senioritis at 08:41 PM | Comments (0)
December 14, 2004
Patents, Pt. 2
Last week I posted a brief rumination on the human and economic scales for weighing patent law. For anyone interested in expert opinion on patent law (although examined primarily on economic grounds), the Becker-Posner Blog for December 12 is a good start, especially Posner's contribution. Judge Posner has long been an important voice in intellectual property, arguing in scholarly and mass venues that we should balance proprietors' rights in copy with users' ever-shrinking fair use. Here he is in the 18 May 2003 New York Newsday (the piece is apparently no longer online):
Confusion of plagiarism with theft is one reason plagiarism engenders indignation; another is a confusion of it with copyright infringement. Wholesale copying of copyrighted material is an infringement of a property right, and legal remedies are available to the copyright holder. But the copying of brief passages, even from copyrighted materials, is permissible under the doctrine of 'fair use,' while wholesale copying from material that is in the public domain—material that never was copyrighted, or on which the copyright has expired—presents no copyright issue at all.
Fortunately, Posner's philosophy carries into his views on patent law: ". . . I am skeptical about the length of the patent term for pharmaceuticals." Unfortunately, he bases this argument entirely in economics. His work on plagiarism and intellectual property is also economically based, but it takes into account not only whether economic injury is inflicted on a proprietary author, but also whether injury to learning is inflicted when students and professors plagiarize. His blog entry on patent law, however, does not consider whether injury to life expectancy is inflicted by overzealous extensions of patent rights.
Posted by senioritis at 08:46 PM | Comments (0)
Tumor reduction
Syringoma, to be exact. A whole bunch of little benign tumors around my eyes, most of which are now gone and the rest of which will vanish once I schedule a followup appointment to get the rest removed. (The procedure is a little uncomfortable, and I had a lot of them.) I haven't had a very pleasant day, but I've had a smile on my face through it, because I got the damned things taken off before they became genuinely disfiguring. Here's a yucky picture to click on only if, like me, you're curious about what I was wanting to avoid looking like! The procedure was elective (and I've been gaily referring to this as my "cosmetic surgery"), but apparently my HMO may actually cover it, because, though benign, these little visitors are indeed tumors.
Posted by senioritis at 08:14 PM | Comments (0)
Compilation tape
Somebody in my household Other Than Myself has just produced a stunning compilation tape:
SIDE ONE
Noel Coward, I Like America (ex)
Run DMC, Walk This Way
Aerosmith, Walk This Way
Queen, Bohemia Rhapsody
Emigré, Spooky Reggae
Abijah, One Too Many Mornings
Nasio w/ Drummie Zeb & the Razor Posse, Gotta Serve Somebody
Screaming Blue Messiahs, Killer Born Man
Michael Rose, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
Hollywood Persuaders, Drums á Go-Go
Leonard Cohen, The Future
Son House, John the Revelator
Norman Blake, I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow
John Hartford, I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow
SIDE TWO
Bruce Springsteen, Born in the USA
Tomoiyasu Hotei, Battle without Honor or Humanity
Bill Miller, Dreams of Wounded Knee/Trail of Freedom
Ulali (fragment)
Prison Blues (fragment)
Prison Blues, Old Alabama
Willie Dixon, It Don't Make Sense (You Can't Make Peace)
Neil Young, Keep on Rockin in the USA
Iggy Pop, Run Like a Villain
Iggy Pop, Watching the News
Iggy Pop, Louie Louie (ex)
Eels, Mr. E's Beautiful Blues
Kinks, 20th Century Man
Noel Coward, 20th Century Blues
Aerosmith, Same Old Song and Dance
Pulp Fiction (fragment)
Posted by senioritis at 10:29 AM | Comments (0)
Sob!
There is no joy in Beantown; mighty Pedro will be pitching for the Mutts.
Posted by senioritis at 10:07 AM | Comments (0)
December 13, 2004
Plagiarism metaphors
The current record-holder for quantity of metaphors relating to plagiarism: Jeremiah McDonnell, a teacher in Tallahassee, Florida, who is apparently an experienced writer of letters to editors. In a letter to the Tallahassee Democrat today on the subject of plagiarism, McDonnell offers the following metaphors:
Trouble is, I can't quite figure out what the man is actually trying to say about plagiarism (or essays, or term papers). Must be my end-of-semester fatigue, or perhaps a more mundane senior moment. So, dear readers, senioritis will pay a reward of an as-yet-undisclosed sum (must check with my accountant, bookkeeper, agent, banker, manager, and creditors before naming exact figure) to the person who can most persuasively translate the message in McDonnell's letter.
Posted by senioritis at 08:09 PM | Comments (6)
December 12, 2004
Thanks—but consider the source
I can't help but appreciate it when the Weather Channel's site tells the story straight:
... "WINTER" WILL RETURN TO CENTRAL NEW YORK AND NORTHEAST PENNSYLVANIA LATE THIS AFTERNOON AND TONIGHT...
Yet I have learned that the Weather Channel grossly exaggerates the danger inherent in winter conditions hereabouts. They don't have car wrecks and house fires to attract viewers; instead, they have colossal dramatization of fairly ordinary weather. When you read the details in today's forecast for 13332, you discover that we're due for a whole inch of snow:
WHEN THE SNOW ARRIVES THIS AFTERNOON/EVENING... THERE COULD BE A QUICK, INTENSE BURST OF SNOW... WITH AN INCH OR TWO OF SNOW POSSIBLE IN A SHORT PERIOD OF TIME. IF YOU HAVE ANY TRAVEL PLANS FOR THIS AFTERNOON OR TONIGHT... BE PREPARED FOR WINTER DRIVING CONDITIONS.
Oh, okay, thanks. Whiteouts are indeed a bummer. I'll check the radar before I go to the grocery store. And I'll leave the skis in the closet.
Posted by senioritis at 11:06 AM | Comments (0)
Cause & effect
Are the proprietors of file-sharing services responsible for copyright infringement? Are the producers of violent movies responsible for copycat acts of violence? These questions seem to me categorically different from this one: Are cigarette manufacturers responsible for tobacco-related deaths? The difference is that cigarettes have only one purpose—to be smoked—and the lethal effects of that smoking are well established. (More difficult to answer is this one: Are gun manufacturers responsible for murder committed with their product? Depends on what kind of gun. I say this even though I'd be thrilled to live in a world without any guns at all.)
Back to my first question: if (in March 2005) the Supreme Court rules that file-sharing technologies are responsible for users' copyright infringement, we're looking at some dark days for new media. Among other (and more serious) things, it will provide a legal precedent for all the emerging commonplaces of print capitalism, e.g., email and IM are destroying sentence-level correctness (or at least a respect for it).
Posted by senioritis at 06:57 AM | Comments (0)
December 11, 2004
Don't blink!
Tom just yelled that the Christmas parade was going by, but by the time I got out of my seat and to the front window, it had passed. So I don't know whether Shari Taylor was able to borrow a donkey. If she did, I'm sure Earlville at Christmas rivaled Macy's at Thanksgiving.
Posted by senioritis at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
A new cure for writer's block
Prewriting with spray paint. I'm on my way to the hardware store right now.
Posted by senioritis at 10:41 AM | Comments (3)
Ho ho ho
I may not have blogged yesterday, but by george, the Howard halls are duly decked, to within an inch of their lives. True, we don't have a tree, and the juniper bush in front of the house is still unlit (having not yet run out of ways to thwart my holiday efforts), but practically everything else is electrically adorned. The house is certifiably jolly, and NYSEG is getting rich off the Howards.
Posted by senioritis at 09:58 AM | Comments (2)
December 09, 2004
Spamdodge
Get your cell phone on the do not call list!
Posted by senioritis at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
Blue nail polish
Everybody needs to have a way of celebrating the impending conclusion of the semester, and also counteracting the impending onslaught of winter. Mine is blue nail polish, and it's working quite well for me, thank you very much. I also have rings on all my fingers, though no bells on my toes. Let the games begin.
Posted by senioritis at 12:50 PM | Comments (3)
December 08, 2004
Sunday-Herald (Glasgow)
Across the pond they really know how to craft a headline: "US admits the war for ‘hearts and minds’ in Iraq is now lost". And the excerpts they select from the Pentagon report to Rumsfeld certainly back the headline's claim. My particular favorite is this passage: "The report calls for a huge boost in spending on propaganda efforts as war policies 'will not succeed unless they are communicated to global domestic audiences in ways that are credible.'" And all I can think about is that ludicrous PowerPoint's attempts to communicate credibly. It's just pathetic. The Bush admissions that, as TChris notes on TalkLeft, come only after re-election, are not, methinks, the last whoopsies that we'll be hearing from our president.
Posted by senioritis at 07:47 PM | Comments (0)
I get it!
I'm studying the way Collin Brooke has set up his CCR 711 syllabus in a blog, and it doesn't take more than a couple of seconds' studying to see what genius this is. For a blog newbie like me, this is a revelation--a revolution in how one thinks of a course and how it operates.
I'm not referring to Collin's 711 itself (though, as Krista notes, the course itself is a whole new—and important—animal. Lots of people, I suspect, will be following the online portion of CCR 711.) Rather, I'm referring to the idea of the homepage for a course being a blog, where people can respond, ask questions, make suggestions—before, during, and after the course. The blog setup also makes it possible for people to use the "categories" feature to find all the materials available about any given course topic or item.
It's how I'll be setting up all my course syllabi in the future. Thanks, Collin.
P.S. Just for the record, this entry is my first attempt at a trackback ping, which I'm hoping Collin will actually get. Another blog milestone reached.
Posted by senioritis at 09:39 AM | Comments (0)
False analogy?
At Tech Central Station, Collin Levy makes the argument that because Bill Clinton has supported the distribution of knock-off AIDS drugs that "pilfer technologies developed at huge cost by large Western research-based drugs firms," he deserves to have his book pirated and rewritten in cheap Asian versions for which he of course receives no royalties.
The analogy is accurate inasmuch as in both cases, a proprietor is deprived of income. But things are very different when we look at who benefits and how. When people in China buy a pirated and sometimes distorted version of Bill Clinton's book, their benefit is that they get an inferior product at a low price. When people in Africa buy knockoff drugs (an undistorted product, but one that does not pay "royalties" to the drug's developer), their lives are saved.
Whether the comparison between pirated versions of My Life and AIDS drugs is valid depends upon what one regards as the dominant issue: capital, or human lives.
Posted by senioritis at 08:16 AM | Comments (0)
December 07, 2004
Next book
In my hands are the page proofs for Authorship in Composition Studies. It will be published in 2005—January, I think—but with a 2006 copyright date. (The dissonance causes me to wonder about the meaning of a calendar. I have the same reaction to the 12 Dec. 2004 Feministe entry that I visited today, 7 Dec. 2004. Huh?)
Anyhow, the new book, which Tracy Carrick and I co-edited, will be out (from Wadsworth) anon, and I am very pleased.
1. The Binaries of Authorship (Rebecca Moore Howard)
2. Copyright, Plagiarism, and the Law (Paul Butler)
3. The Erotics of Authorship (Susan M. Adams)
4. Students and Authors in Composition Scholarship (Amy E. Robillard)
5. Students and Authors in Introductory Composition Textbooks (Jonna Gilfus)
6. Students and Authors in Writing Centers (Justin J. Bain)
7. Authorship and Technology (Collin Gifford Brooke)
8. Genders and Authors (Mary Queen)
9. Contesting U.S. Cultures of Authorship (Damian Patrick Baca)
10. Spot Keeps Turning Up: E/quality in Authorship(s) and Pedagogy (Tracy Hamler Carrick)
Posted by senioritis at 07:58 PM | Comments (3)
December 06, 2004
Shattered Glass (2003)
At least four times I've watched that Star Wars movie in which Hayden Christensen plays Darth Vader—not because it's a great movie, but because I sometimes get fixated on a really bad movie. I eagerly await the 2005 release of the third Star Wars prequel, in which I assume Christensen has to attempt to project evil, rather than just sulking. Will they do that with some sort of computer effects? Or will Darth Vader's true evil be that he sulks relentlessly?
Ever since hearing about Shattered Glass, I've felt a moral obligation to watch it, given that I try to keep up with pop culture treatments of my scholarly specialty. Tonight I was desperate enough for diversion that I actually did watch it.
Excruciating.
Pop quiz: what exactly is the difference between Christensen in Shattered Glass and in Star Wars?
Answer: In Star Wars he wore a black cape.
Posted by senioritis at 10:35 PM | Comments (0)
December 05, 2004
Citation pissing matches
"That pissing match was a lot longer than it was interesting," says cortex in a comment about the links in the entry "Excuse me, but we can credit sources however we choose," on Metafilter. I concur with cortex; in fact, I haven't read all the way through the pissing match and perhaps never will. But I nevertheless link to it here, not only to save it for my own possible future reference (back before I was Saved by the Blog, Collin said a blog was useful as a commonplace book, and in my ignorance I thought he was deluded) but also as a stellar example of how completely loony people can become when they perceive infringements of their authorial rights.
Posted by senioritis at 11:09 PM | Comments (0)
"emotional truth"
Comparing a military PR PowerPoint to a visual poliblog, the Washington Post concludes with a quotation from an academic expert on Iraqi affairs: "What the two presentations show us is that the U.S. military is full of brave and skilled warriors who can defeat their foes, but is still no good at counterinsurgency operations, and is wretched at winning hearts and minds." The PowerPoint (available at Soldiers for the Truth) endeavors to explain what the U.S. military is accomplishing in Iraq and why. Unlike the military PPT, the visual blog has no accompanying text, except to provide identifying (and sometimes emotionally charged, even angry) titles for each picture. Iraq in Pictures simply publishes wire service photographs that were not published in MSM. The blogger, who used the pseudonym "Hugh Upton" in an interview with the Post, referred to an "emotional truth" conveyed by these pictures and otherwise unavailable in the U.S.: "The world sees these images and we do not." One can draw a range of conclusions from the Post story and its links—conclusions about, for example, PowerPoint, politics, war, the visual, pathos, and the circulation of information.
One can also accept a responsibility to visit Iraq in Pictures regularly, because everyone in the U.S., regardless of how s/he voted on November 2, is a "beneficiary" of the violence being committed on the other side of the world. It's kind of like the good white folks who say that they shouldn't have to pay reparations to African Americans and Native Americans, because they weren't the agents of historical violence against those peoples. Well, they may not have themselves done it, and they might not, in a similar situation, make the choices that European Americans in the nineteenth century made. But they are nevertheless today the beneficiaries of those choices. The same is true with regard to the invasion and ongoing destruction of Iraq: just because an individual may not support this U.S. president does not mean that s/he is not benefitting (economically, whatever) from his actions. And that carries certain responsibilities, including the responsibility not only to engage the words about Iraq but also the pictures of it. In our self-justifying, self-satisfied political dissent, we mustn't allow ourselves to create a comfortable distance from what's happening over there. The November 19 entry in Iraq in Pictures begins with a quotation from Thomas Jefferson: "There is not a truth existing which I fear or would wish unknown to the whole world."
Posted by senioritis at 08:35 AM | Comments (0)
December 04, 2004
Hot flashes and black cohosh
Sounds like a coupla rappers. And perhaps it should be. But in fact it's the blog entry I've been intending to write since back in the Day when I didn't have a blog—verily, it's so a month ago. Here it is, anyhow. In the spirit of academom's fab entry on the complexities of being a breast-feeding runner, here's my entry on how to be a hot-flash-free post-menopausal woman in the Post-Estrogen-Supplement Age.
One friend (who might prefer to Remain Nameless) swears by flaxseed. She buys ground flaxseed and puts a tablespoonful in everything that can't get away from her: cooked cereal, bread, salad dressing, whatever. She says it keeps her hot-flash-free. Now, I haven't tried that (though I do add whole flaxseed when I'm having cooked cereal). Instead, I've tried the other major alternative, black cohosh. Works like crazy. Takes a few weeks to kick in: first I notice that I'm not having hot flashes so often; then I notice that when I do have them, they're not as severe (i.e., I don't have to suddenly start tearing off all the clothes that the law allows); and then I realize that I'm just not having them at all.
BUT I've learned that it very, very much matters how I'm taking the black cohosh. You can buy capsules or tablets everywhere--grocery stores, drug stores, health food stores. And I have tried it in three different dosages. The kind that you're supposed to take a single tablet a day of: that stuff does absolutely nothing for me. The kind you're supposed to take twice a day ameliorates hot flashes. (Sorry I can't speak of actual milligrams and what not here; I've thrown those damned bottles away so don't have that data at hand.) BUT 540 mg capsules of black cohosh root, three times a day: that stuff absolutely does the trick. After about 3 weeks, no more hot flashes. Eureka! "Nature's Way" makes the ones I buy, but I'm sure other companies offer capsules of the same dosage of black cohosh root.
Posted by senioritis at 10:24 AM | Comments (0)
Milestones in blogging
Behold, my Beloved Blog is so old that it has archives. Kewl.
Posted by senioritis at 09:11 AM | Comments (4)
December 03, 2004
Air Force (1943)
Hyperpatriotism during wartime is nothing new. The Green Berets was, for example, a four-star Vietnam-era attempt to justify war.
It's interesting to watch Air Force for its very particular rationalization: the internment of Japanese Americans. Air Force was made during the Big One, and its TV summary says, "A B-17 Flying Fortress crew reaches Pearl Harbor too late, then continues on to the Philippines." Well, along the way, they discovered that Japanese the world over were in on the conspiracy. The B-17 made an emergency landing at Maui, and sure enough, some "local" Japanese snipers were on hand. When the B-17 got to Pearl, they learned that truckloads of Japanese saboteurs had participated in the main attack.
Even if watching Hollywood's xenophobic political fantasies isn't your cup of tea, Gig Young's cheesy little mustache is worth seeing. And John Garfield? The man was magnetic. Sean Penn, shut your beady little eyes.
But I'm going to spoil the ending for you: after narrowly escaping Wake Island and Manila before they fell, the B-17 single-handedly stopped the Japanese invasion of Australia.
Posted by senioritis at 07:28 PM | Comments (0)
December 02, 2004
Yum, yum, yum.
In the midst of all the self-righteous furor over student plagiarism, we need to pause every now and then and remember the ways in which the professoriate exploits students—ways that include plagiarizing from students and that, at least in one case, include trying to pin professorial plagiarism on a hapless research assistant. Funny, though: I don't know of any academic integrity policies or college honor codes that mention students' intellectual property rights in the face of exploitative faculty.
Posted by senioritis at 10:56 PM | Comments (1)
Colgate 63, Vermont 80
Small-time sports is fun. It means you root for a team that loses year after year, but it means the people playing are dedicated to playing and have a strong sense of teamwork. And in the case of Colgate sports teams, it means they play even without scholarships (though as of this year, Colgate does at last offer some athletic grants-in-aid). And every once in a while it means you get to watch the team get game. In 2003, the Colgate softball team went to the NCAAs. Last year the football team played for the Division 1-AA championship, and the women's basketball team won the Patriot League and played in the NCAAs. Each time, we had the delight of listening to ESPN announcers marvel at the fact that the school enrolls fewer than 3,000 students and that it has no athletic scholarships. While the women played Tennessee, the announcers ruminated on what it meant for the team to have listened to Medcat prep tapes while en route to the game. (Two alumnae enrolled in med school this year, at Vanderbilt and Michigan.) That sort of stuff—the affirmation of sports for its own sake, without the anti-intellectualism; and the disruption of cynical assumptions about what college sports must be in order to be successful—is just fun.
Then there's the hard part: the coach who took the women to the NCAA tournament gets spirited away to coach at Northwestern, and yet another unknown quantity comes to Colgate to take her place. Maybe the new one will be a good coach, but statistically, that hasn't often happened. More often the women's basketball coach turns in a pretty dismal record for 3-6 years and then goes to coach at a Division III school in Pennsylvania. We've been Colgate fans for 20 years now, so we know the drill. The new coach, who came to Colgate from Case Western, is getting off to a very slow start with players who are as good as or better than last year's league winners. These are the moments where small-time sports fandom requires grit.
Posted by senioritis at 09:34 PM | Comments (0)
December 01, 2004
Better than woolybears
I'm told by my massage therapist that the local TV news says that when November is as mild as this one has been, there's a 66% chance that the entire winter will be mild, too. My mountain bike is all outfitted with its studded winter tires, and I'm rooting for the mild winter. Cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are fine substitutes, but there's nothing as good as riding the road on mild winter days. I had to go 8 weeks last winter without the bicycle, so I'm hoping Cosmic Justice is going to come through here.
Posted by senioritis at 10:01 PM | Comments (4)