It has been quiet around here this week. Jeremy seems to be the only one of us who’s got some energy to post. I don’t know what Chris is doing, but I’ve been working on a job application that has taken more time than I expected it to. I got the application all ready to send, but I called first to make sure I had all I needed. “Do you have two writing samples?” they said—and because the advertisement did not say I needed to submit two writing samples, I did not. Nor did I have two ready to submit, although I knew a long time ago that I would need to revise some nonacademic pieces for this very reason. So now I’m deep in the middle of revising, revising, revising what may prove, ultimately, to be a poor choice to send. Fingers crossed it won’t be.
I hope to write something non-sample, to follow up on hell soon, but in the meantime, let us make a salad bar. There’s a lot of things going on in the world, and we need to keep abreast of them, else we’re not a good blog.
- (Because everybody else is doing it…) Our alma mater’s Core
ValuesBeliefs [Ahem! -g] are the subject of debate. - A Michael Crichton novel has been given an award by the petroleum industry for outstanding journalism—in a novel.
- If you didn’t see Grizzly Man on the Discovery channel last week, I recommend it for a rental. Once you’ve seen enough of it that you have a grasp of Werner Herzog’s voice, be sure to read his diary entries from The Morning News.
- A court of law will not be determining the existence of Jesus anytime soon.
- Neighbors of Alice Walton’s art museum, Crystal Bridges, won’t need to worry about noisy construction.
- Finally, was anybody else as surprised as me to discover that the Grammys were this week?
Addendum:
- My computer is dying.
i have been to sick to post or read.
i have learned something important this week: one can have a sinus infection that infects both of one’s eyes.
also, big decisions may be afoot at this hermit’s house. we wait for news from afar.
finally, i ask a question of greg: can we host images on our site here? do we have bandwith limits and/or storage limits? don’t worry…i am not thinking of making this a porn site. although…
by chris—Feb 10, 02:47 PM
in the above comment, “to” is code for “too”
by chris—Feb 10, 02:48 PM
Oh, no! I assumed illness of 2 weeks ago was healed, and you had passed it to Mary who took it to afar, and that you were busy catching up on work. Both eyes? Ewww.
As far as images are concerned, we could probably make money if we hosted porn, but we definitely don’t have the bandwidth for that. For everything else, I think we are okay—and it’s pretty easy to set up image galleries in txp. Our base file sizes are small, anyway, so we’ve got a ways to go before we bump up against any host limits. When I post an image, I usually alternate between flikr and uploading here.
Also: right now, we don’t let image search robots look here. I learned how to scare them away when evan kept showing up in “little girls bikini” searches. But we can change that for specific directories/images.
by greg—Feb 10, 04:26 PM
to add to the current events post:
the olympics started today. yeah, i hadn’t noticed, either. didn’t even know what country they were in.
by mary—Feb 10, 07:52 PM
Do any of you guys have any interest in these Olympics? (Yes, I do take M’s ambivalence to be a key indicator that the answer to the ? is “No.” But…) According to the Olympics commercials “Bode” and “Scott” and “Michelle” are all going to kick butt there, and all I can muster in response is, “So what?” Frankly, the ads only make me more curious about whose butts are going to be kicked.
Maybe Michael Crichton can write a novel about that.
by greg—Feb 10, 08:25 PM
kl forwards this stunner: Gary Oldman may not play Sirius Black in Order of the Phoenix!
by greg—Feb 10, 08:59 PM
on werner, he has a great little crazy docu from 1980 entitled werner herzog eats his shoe
i’ve seen his aguirre, his fitzcarraldo, and his cobra verde…they all star klaus kinski, are set somewhere in the amazon (at least for portions of the film), are about crazy, obssessive men.
cannibals make appearences in the first two movies.
i do hope that the infections and sinuses (sini?) dry up.
by Jeremy—Feb 10, 10:12 PM
sorry to hear about all of the sickness and infection; hope everyone’s on the mend…
i never knew much about herzog before all of the hullaballoo (how should one spell this word?) around grizzly man. but today i learned that a)he helped rescue joaquin phoenix from his car after JP rolled it recently in LA, and b)he was shot by a crazed fan with an air rifle during an interview with a BBC film critic, and then proceeded to carry on with the interview as though nothing had happened.
that man really made my day today, though i was still a bit stunned at the prospect of gary oldman not playing sirius in the next HP movie.
by kathy—Feb 10, 10:50 PM
For Chris when his eyes can see, and everyone else, too:
“She blended in, lumpenly”? This essay is really as bad as it seems, right? If it weren’t a shallow treatment of mental health, it’s also a poor imitation of Oliver Sacks with prose enough to make it insipid. (Tia at Unfogged calls it the greatest obscenity.)
by greg—Feb 11, 08:48 AM
A lousy summation of discussions of THE Core Values:
by greg—Feb 11, 09:40 AM
re: the olympics.
as, soon will be appearing, an article from the wash post…it’s all an elitist affair…whether your a bobsledder (unless your jamaican, man) or a rebel snowboarder…it takes even more money and specialized equipment and training facilities than any of the other sports.
this i thought, especially, as i watched the brazilians march in last night. not that i have anything against brazilians or any other latin american…it’s just that only the super uber rich, especially in amazonian countries, can ski and do ski.
i like georgia, macedonia, azerbaijan, with their handful of atheletes…and any other nation who sent 1-4 in the hope of winning.
but, it’s a little like amway, i fear. the selling of hope and little else. only in this case, the racking up of enormous debt to buy hope and national pride.
by Jeremy—Feb 11, 09:56 AM
all of that said, i will be watching. i love the winter olympics. it’s part of my childhood…sitting in the sweltering caribbean heat, drinking coke out of 1 liter glass bottles and watching the ski jumpers…pulling for people i didn’t know simply because they could fly.
by Jeremy—Feb 11, 10:02 AM
Amway. When I was a teenager a missionary family moved to S from New Guinea—3 daughters, one trés hott. Went to the same church. They were an odd collection, very fundamentalist and empassioned yet also very transcultural (Dad: American, Mom: Scottish; Kids: creole in mind, anyway) Once I visited their house, and as has happened to me since I was ten, contracted a headache to make the trumpets ‘round Jericho seem dull. (It wasn’t a migraine, though. I didn’t get those until graduate school.) I mentioned the ache, and one daughter said, “Would you like some aspirin? It’s Amw—”
Her sister slapped her on the shoulder: “You’re not supposed to say that!”
“What? Amway? We can say Amway, can’t we mom?”
“Yes.”
And I got the aspirin, and eventually forgot the weird scene I’d witnessed, but now I wonder: What was that all about?
by greg—Feb 11, 10:10 AM
amway is a cult man. that might be my next post.
i’ve got something brewing on cosmopolitanism and something brewing on God…but maybe the best post on God is an eternally deferred one.
by Jeremy—Feb 11, 12:46 PM
Oh, do tell of the Amway hordes! I look forward to that one…
by greg—Feb 11, 12:50 PM
Hooray! That’s one more application submitted… to what end? No one knows!
by greg—Feb 11, 01:09 PM
See, J, I see you go all Christian ed-phil, and I start to wonder why you weren’t more interested to pursue that job at Wheaton. Then, I look at it again, and I realize: Oh! That’s why J didn’t go for that job at Wheaton!
by greg—Feb 11, 04:55 PM
yeah…i’m regreting that post a lot… i asked greg to delete portions of it.
by Jeremy—Feb 11, 05:13 PM
No, you shouldn’t regret it. (If greg deletes what you wrote, it’ll only make what I said that much more cryptic.)
by greg—Feb 11, 05:21 PM
wheaton is a bad word in my department. as i have been told, we definitely do not do christian psychology…we are christians who do competent psychology. from what i have deduced, the true wheatonians would have us do the former?
by chris—Feb 11, 05:32 PM
To echo chris: Wasn’t that your trouble with the job there, J, vís à vís lit?
by greg—Feb 11, 05:37 PM
yes, christians read everything first and foremost as christians…which means everything is a morality tale, often on a mythic level and christians are about affirming those things which are good…and if they are good they are by definition christian…
the logic went something along those lines…
well, i asked him to delete my reference to burkes’s statement regarding faculty and phds and regarding mcclarty…and though i stand by both of those comments, i don’t want to be accused of slander or something like that.
by Jeremy—Feb 11, 06:24 PM
it goes without saying that i am an idiot, but the title of the post to which you’re referring appears to me to be Latin for “super kinky anus.”
by chris—Feb 11, 09:01 PM
Now that’s my kind of Latin translation.
by greg—Feb 11, 09:09 PM
I'm kicking myself. I didn't want to write further on the whole Core Values thing. I’ve so been wanting to untwist myself from the notion that the alma mater matters that much. It’s all history, and yet it’s my history, and that’s the rub of it. History always is, it never fades into the past. If I don't allow it some lee, I feel less myself.
Sigh. I must redouble my efforts. I reaffirm my original sentiment: I'm not that interested.
I am interested, though, C, whether you read the article about the schizophrenia patient?
by greg—Feb 11, 10:06 PM
i do hope you’ll keep the threat of cloning foremost in your mind, though. i know i will!
by kathy—Feb 11, 11:42 PM
i read it just now. the tone seemed a little “breathless” for the rather unremarkable story it told: beautiful people can have psychopathology, and antipsychotics have often-frustrating side effects. obviously, most people would choose non-psychotic lumpiness over psychotic waifishness. all that to say, if the author wants to sell his/her book, he/she should find a better excerpt or a better angle.
by chris—Feb 12, 07:51 AM
breathless is a good adjective. it seems an incredible angle to take, as if it were such a surprise: What? Vixens can have mental illness? And drugs to end the psychosis can also make them fat?!
It’s the converse of A Beautiful Mind, except the mind is beside the point.
by greg—Feb 12, 08:10 AM
Channeling my bitchy inner geek for a minute: So I’m troublshooting the death of my computer (to date, a workhorse 1999 PB G3 Lombard). I fear it’s the processor. I’ve replaced it once before, but last time it failed it was more obvious: the OS went haywire and gave me lots of messages to tell me how broken it was. Now, not so much. It drags sometimes, but only when I restart do I know something bad is wrong: it won’t startup without a reset of the power manager. There’s a couple of other things it could be besides the processor, but I can’t quite figure out how to know for sure. If the processor must be replaced, it’ll cost $300. :(
by greg—Feb 12, 01:21 PM
are you going to buy a new computer, or just start replacing stuff. not to make light, but your computer is totally the ship of theseus !
by chris—Feb 12, 03:12 PM
If my old and problem-ridden iBook (complete with stickers acquired at protests and some software of questionable origin) would be of any use to you, you’re welcome to it. It’s a pain in the ass to use (OS9 crashes about every five minutes, and it has some other quirks), but if you really felt like fiddling with a computer, it could be diverting. You are, of course, also welcome to say, “Laura, that thing is a piece of shit.” Then we can have a party and stomp on it.
by Laura—Feb 12, 04:01 PM
A new computer, as nice as it would be, is out of the question: I’ll be replacing the failing (not failed yet) part. As much as I appreciate the offer of the iBook, L, that thing is a piece of shit. :)
C, this is no place for Heraclitus, else you want me to bust out some
Shudder. That’s too many bad memories.
by greg—Feb 12, 07:58 PM
this has got to be the most eclectic bunch of comments/topics a hermits post has had in a long time.
and btw, we are trying to get rose to watch the olympics. the only events that interest her are the moguls (sp?) and the luge. she really, really wants to do the luge.
by mary—Feb 12, 09:05 PM
I was just thinking the same re: comments. I wager Rose might have liked the ski jump if the TV coverage had been at all adequate. We saw some of one of the finals tonight. All prep was cutaway, time between rounds was decimated, and I must say by the end I had no idea who was winning or losing or why. Also, I wish they’d pull the camera shot back every once in a while. Those guys are floating 100 meters! But the way the camera follows them, you get no sense whatsoever of that kind of distance.
The image of Rose watching the luge is really cute. And the fact she likes muggles puts her in good company…
by greg—Feb 12, 09:13 PM
Oh, and Chris, I just double-checked: we’ve got loads of space/bandwidth. No worries for hosting images—not until Jeremy’s popularity skyrockets and this becomes a de facto fansite for him. However, I’m not expecting that to happen for a few years yet.
by greg—Feb 12, 09:54 PM
thanks for the vote of confidence.
i will now make it manditory that my students visit this site for a grade…well, on second thought, maybe i won’t…i’ve recieved all the inappropriate gifts that i want to recieve.
by Jeremy—Feb 13, 07:13 AM
Is there a statute of limitations on when you can tell that story officially, as in a whole blog post? I mean, it’s not as bad as the guy who caught students having sex in his office—although it’s pretty close…
by greg—Feb 13, 08:13 AM
CPU update: Part ordered.
by greg—Feb 13, 08:38 AM
well, it looks, if that story is to be believed, just a matter of months.
by Jeremy—Feb 13, 09:09 AM
Oh, and it gets better. If you didn’t also read the updates (II, and III), read them now!
by greg—Feb 13, 09:30 AM
yeah…i did read them…and it does get better.
i don’t know where we stand, legally, for me to disclose my story. i do know that the department is being sued for emotional damage. i did not know this until the student in question sent me a packet with all of the communiqués to the deans, chair and the lawyers. the student, for some reason believed that i should be kept in the loop. believing, i guess, that i would side with the student.
by Jeremy—Feb 13, 09:43 AM
nothing like really teasing the one reader we have!
by Jeremy—Feb 13, 10:13 AM
OMG!!! You never mentioned that! You’re doing a lousy job keeping us apprised on the good gossip, you know.
(I imagine if our reader’s curiosity was truly piqued, that reader could e-mail J and get filled in, all legal considerations and vouchings for said reader’s character considering, of course.)
by greg—Feb 13, 10:28 AM
it’s piqued. send details.
by mary—Feb 13, 10:46 AM
i am going to post a new post now to keep j. from getting himself fired for inappropriate disclosure… :)
by chris—Feb 13, 10:52 AM
For some reason the washington post has us near the top of their box, ‘look who’s talking about this Olympics story’ that Jeremy linked to yesterday. Do you think we should actually talk about the story? I mean, haven’t even read it yet, to be quite honest…
by greg—Feb 13, 08:28 PM
i obliquely referred to it.
by Jeremy—Feb 14, 07:02 AM