Saturday, April 30, 2005
all in the family
"Sometimes things take on a life of their own, just like weddings," she saidthe person who made this statement was found in new mexico. three days ago she disappeared. cellphones, ripped sweatshirts, tufts of hair, these were things search parties found near where she'd gone jogging. a prayer vigil had been planned in lieu of the 600 person, 28 attendants wedding. the groom to be had undergone two separate lie detector tests.
she was on the lam; the wedding had freaked her out.
the family, who before had been out in parking lots and lawns, are now behind closed doors and shut blinds.
in other news, this weekend i have to respond to my grandmother's letter. a few weeks ago she wrote me a letter fearing for my soul and accussing me of my wife astray and not loving my family enough.
in other, other news...would you like a frog cocktail to help you make love to that special someone?
Friday, April 22, 2005
???
To my incredulous American Christian eyes, this does not seem good...
Perkins said that he had attended a meeting with congressional leaders a week earlier where the strategy of stripping funding from certain courts was "prominently" discussed. "What they're thinking of is not only the fact of just making these courts go away and re-creating them the next day but also defunding them," Perkins said.
He said that instead of undertaking the long process of trying to impeach judges, Congress could use its appropriations authority to "just take away the bench, all of his staff, and he's just sitting out there with nothing to do."
These curbs on courts are "on the radar screen, especially of conservatives here in Congress," he said...
...
"Very few people know this, that the Congress can simply disenfranchise a court," Dobson said. "They don't have to fire anybody or impeach them or go through that battle. All they have to do is say the 9th Circuit doesn't exist anymore, and it's gone."
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
nothing but excuses
life in my quiet hamlet in north-southern new wales on the caribean has been quite busy.
planning courses... i will show you the final product on the travel course.
ordering books. fretting about the articles i haven't yet sent off. reading masters exams. preparing for classes. reading compositions that have no thesis, no introductory paragraph, no conclusion, and paragraphs that ramble on for about 3 or 4 pages. trying to stay out of legal trouble as all the department's old nut jobs come find me.
oh yeah, sleeping very little at night b/c little evie, though she can go five hours in the first stretch, that only gets us to 1 am, which is when i am going to bed, wakes up every three after that.
because we now have high speed i-net, we've cancled my nytimes subscription and so i don't even read the news paper anymore; don't listen to npr because i wake up too late for the morning and am tending evie in the evening.
yet, i won't complain about my life. it's quite enjoyable, though very, very busy.
Monday, April 18, 2005
Given the finger
All this deserves more lucid analysis, but I'm testing a few things in the new, improved Hermits, and it's already way, way past my bedtime, so bear with me...
From the AP wireprobably off a tip from a Wendy's exec:SAN JOSE, Calif. - The woman who claims she bit into a human finger while eating chili at a Wendy's restaurant has a history of making claims against corporations, including another fast-food chain, a former employer and General Motors.
Anna Ayala, 39, who hired a San Jose, Calif., attorney to represent her in the Wendy's case, has been involved in several legal battles in the San Francisco Bay area, according to court records.
Dublin, Ohio-based Wendy's International Inc.'s spokesman Bob Bertini said Wendy's stores in San Jose have suffered from declining sales.
"Obviously the store has been down significantly," he said. "This has been an ordeal for all of us. Hopefully there will be a resolution soon."
Speaking at the front door of her two-story stucco home in suburban Las Vegas on Friday, Ayala declined to provide details about her litigious past. She acknowledged, however, that her family received a settlement several years ago after her daughter, Genesis, now 13, was sickened at an El Pollo Loco restaurant in Las Vegas.
"That was something very different," she said....
With the mystery surrounding Ayala's report of her unsavory discovery pointing in different directions, Ayala alleged that police are out to get her and were unnecessarily rough as they executed a search warrant at her home on Wednesday.
"Lies, lies, lies, that's all I am hearing," she said in an interview with The Associated Press. "They should look at Wendy's. What are they hiding? Why are we being victimized again and again?"
The leopard connection:
LAS VEGAS A woman who lost part of her finger in a leopard attack believes it was her body part that allegedly showed up a month later in a bowl of fast-food chili in California.
A lawyer for Sandy Allman, 59, said she wants to participate in any DNA testing of the finger, which she said she last saw packed in ice in a Las Vegas emergency room. Doctors told her it could not be reattached, and she does not know what happened to it after that, lawyer Philip Sheldon said.
The hospital said it cannot account for the 3/4-inch fingertip, which Allman lost Feb. 23 in the attack at an exotic animal compound at her home in rural Pahrump, about 60 miles west of Las Vegas.
If it were Allman's finger, Wendy's might give her $100K; however, even leopard amputees can't cheat forensic science:
"We had our latent print examiners analyze the fingerprints from the lady in Nevada, and we determined it's not a match to the finger found at the Wendy's restaurant," said San Jose police Officer Enrique Garcia. "Now, we just need to continue with the investigation. In any kind of whodunit, you look at your options, and you eliminate your leads, and this is one we've eliminated."
Thank God we can all keep speculating!
Thursday, April 14, 2005
i would be a lib dem (even though they suck)
Who should I vote for?
Your expected outcome:
Liberal Democrat
Your actual outcome:
|  Labour 14 |
Conservative -31  | |
| Liberal Democrat 40 |
| UK Independence Party -3 | |
| Green 9 |
You should vote: Liberal DemocratThe LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.
Take the test at Who Should You Vote For
Note: Although I disagree with several of their ideas, I do sympathize with the lib dems. I used to watch the prime minister's question sessions at lunch time when I lived in Belgium, and I always preferred the lib dem mp's over the labour ones.
Tuesday, April 12, 2005
CSS Update
Hermits, as of tonight there are some slight new revisions to the CSS. I have added a new pair of classes to the style sheet to better facilitate our picture posts. Now you can include your images with a caption of your choosing displayed conveniently in a box with your picture as I've done in the Corrections review below. To use: when you wish to post a picture, you can include it in a DIV container. Give the container a class of either "leftimage" or "rightimage" depending on which side of the page you want your picture to display. For captions, simply include a P container, with text, within the DIV tags.
The code isn't yet as advanced as I intend it to be and there are still some limitations. Therefore, you can still post images exactly as before if you like.
Review: The Corrections
Enid Lambert's only wish for the whole of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections is that her family meet again at their home in St. Jude, Kansas for one last Christmas together. Enid is a materialistic woman who frets for middle-class respectability, who is often overbearing and insufferable, but who also desires affection from her husband, Albert. True it is that Albert Lambert is a difficult man. He spent his youth citing Schopenhauer; his life in general is a life that betrays no affection for anyone, most especially Enid. Yet when Enid wishes for one final Christmas at home, there is a reason for her to emphasize final: Albert's health is swiftly dimming as he succumbs to Parkinson's and to dementia.
The oh-so fine cover for the novel. FSG hired a good designer.
Enid's and Albert's three children are yet again ones to make Enid fret. Oldest is Gary who seethes like his father. A father of three married to an independently wealthy woman, so far as middle management in a bank is success; so far as success is measured by raising children who team up with their mother to counter his every attempt at stern fatherhood (in the interest of freedom, of course); so far as success is the respectability, largesse, and sameness that comes with living in a gated suburb of Philadelphia, Gary is successful. Gary is ruthless; Gary is also simpering fool. His wife hates his mother. When Enid asks that they bring the family to St. Jude, she refuses, and further she entices her sons to refuse as well. She is a mother to make Iocaste proud. Gary himself does not love his parents, or if he does, he forgets it as he tries to run their elderly lives (as futilely as he tries to run his sons' adolescence). Although Gary's best represents the life Enid desired, he is a man most like the worst of Albert.
Enid and Albert's youngest is Denise, a successful chef in Philadelphia who disappoints Enid by not settling into marriage and child-rearing. (She thus denies Enid the chance to brag.) Denise has a habit of sleeping with older men: not only her marriage-then-divorce to her husband Emile, but before that, in high school, with a man who worked in the same office as Albert. Yet as successful as Denise isshe garners the favor of a patron-of-the-cuisine, who pays her exorbitantly and builds a restaurant for hershe is unhappy. Part of her story is how she comes to realize what she tells her boss's wife, "I'm not into guys." Denise's life will never match Enid's vision of what it should be.
Finally there is Chip, a young Foucaultian English Ph.D. just recently liberated from the academy by virtue of a semester spent violating his university's code of ethics. (He slept with a student.) Chip lives off the money Denise gives him while he writes a screenplay. He lies to others and to himself about the life he lives. For much of the novel Chip's singular accomplishment is to have walked out of his New York apartment the moment his parents came to visit and into an airplane to Lithuania. There he joins his ex-lover's ex-husband to defraud American investors by promising streets in exchange for "shares" in Lithuania's gravel monopoly of Eastern Europe. Of all their children Chip is the one Alfred loves most, and he is the one whose relationship to his parents is most contentious. Enid is clueless about Chip's life because he keeps her that way.
So it is that The Corrections works to bring this family together for one last Christmas. Enid's family isas I suspect most of our families aremore varied than she knows. It is the breadth of Franzen's vision of this family that makes the novel a good one. It's not a flawless novel (what novel other than Crime and Punishment is?): its formal unity does so-so work at covering up some awkward ambiguity. How we are to know Albert, for example, is very uncertain throughout. His is a stern character; it is also pathetic, especially in old age. Denise seems to have the most balanced view of him, but it is not Denise's point of view on which the novel begins and endsit is Enid's, and she lays much blame on Albert for the pain in her life. Yet there are some astonishingly good scenes in The Corrections. There are scenes in this novel of familial strife, as when Chip, a boy, refuses to eat the liver and onions Enid feeds him and is therefore forced to sit at the table all night, that is so well constructed as to draw the most pitiable sympathies. The novel is at other times so bold as to feature lengthy political/scatological speeches by an Anarchist turd about which Albert hallucinates in the night. Franzen owes much to Don DeLillo for what he has achieved in the novel's style. It's linguistic aura is built with the similar light of advertising as White Noise. The Chronicles of Narniaspecifically, the feeling the children get when they are near Aslanrepresent the desire for escape. Aslan, soma, grokcall it what you willmodernity is often symbolized by a desire to escape it. One of this book's accomplishments is its gentle, yet firm insistence that escape is not possible. The book does not argue that man must capitulate to the march of modernity; one must, however, face it full-on. It takes each of the Lamberts (save Gary and perhaps Albert) years to reach that conclusion. The book's a delight to read.
PS. Do you prefer reviews that are introductory and a mite shallow, or reviews with more critical bite? I try to gauge by what I suspect we've all read. If y'all haven't read what I'm reading, I rater prefer you to read or not read it before you get all doped up on what it all means. But if you're not concerned, then I won't be either.
PPS. Next up (what I'm reading now) is Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven.
i'm funny
so, she smiles. this does not mean that she always smiles. but, it does mean that, at least for the morning of this picture little bit was well rested.
sorry, if i'm turning this blog site into a pictures of my most beautiful daughter.
at the moment, i have no clue what's going on in the world, except that negreponte has been given all power, that my students' writing is hit or miss, and that my daughter smiles.
Monday, April 11, 2005
Someone's man in Cairo
This flurry of output is astonishing even to me. But this is important whereas what I said earlier is not. Presuming he actually updates his blog like he promiseswhich knowing him is dubious (and he'd say so himself; in fact, all he's promised is to update it periodically)MTR is keeping a blog as he studies in Cairo. He claims in an email that bombs have followed him from Saudi Arabia to Egypt. Fortunately, the U.S. embassy has his back: he writes, "the latest update I have received reads, 'We believe the explosion in Khan al-Khalili was the result of a bombing,'" and quips, "I guess this is better than saying the bombing resulted in an explosion." I'd ask him to write updates for us, but it'll be good enough if he'll simply write for himself. (BTW, J: he's sent out a blanket request for the email address of a certain art history Ph.D. by initials of CH. You can provide it, yes?
abandonment
Shucks. At some point this afternoon I crafted a stupid theory of human behavior. As every stupid theory should, it was supported by scimpy anecdotal evidence. But between conception and composition, I've forgotten it. (If I were Jonathan Franzen, I would probably rephrase that to say "I've forgotten it like a turd that didn't flush." [So far as I know he never used that line, but I'm sure he wishes he had. He has, however, written, "like a baby stuffed in the trash at prom."])
Saturday, April 09, 2005
GWB on JPIII, our very own paul deman
On the way back to Texas from the funeral, Bush donned a nylon tracksuit embroidered with the presidential seal and invited a few pool reporters up to the front Air Force One for a wide-ranging conversation, according to the LAT and WP. "I think John Paul II will have a clear legacy of peace, compassion and a strong legacy of setting a clear moral tone," he said, later asking reporters if he could make sure they add the word "excellent" in there, too.i also heard him say, on npr that the pope: "represents a symbol of peace."
i will refrain from mocking in these dark hours, but it is refreshing to see bush acknowledge the problem of referentiality, that you cannot be a symbol, something which represents, but only a representation of something else that represents.
Wednesday, April 06, 2005
in other hometown news
- What I did today
- 1) I always had misgivings of working for the church. Ministers, pastors have such great responsibility. They are charged to live up to great, often unreasonable expectations: not only do they teach, but also they comfort, encourage, serve, advise, counsel, uplift their flocks. Moreso at a small church like the one at which I've worshipped the past several years. Any work that is not done by the paid minister is wholly volunteer. Large churches, of course, have large staffs, and not all of their paid staff members are de facto ministers. Today I interviewed for a job as the Christian Education director at a large church. The interview seemedI am surprised to sayto go well.
- 2) I've known that I would not continue to be a practicing member of the C.o.C. With all due respect to the small southern Christian school we attendedor the somewhat similar one which one of us teaches at nowI haven't held to the theology-at-large of the C.o.C. for years. Too many proofs, not enough theories you might say. But I've remained a member at the small church I've attended because when I moved here, I committed to that particular group for as long as I was in graduate school. At first that also meant for as long as I was in town, but my stay in town has begun to outlast my stay in graduate school. I am now perhaps on the verge of making a jump from one ecosystem to another because I applied for work at a different church in town. Today I interviewed for a job as Christian Education director at the local UCC. I am surprised, even shocked, to say the interview went pretty well.
Updates, further reflexion, and explanation forthcoming.
it's not as red of a state as he pretends...
but
this is an engaging tale related to a campus of the same university that has a relatively new branch in greg's and my hometown.
it would have been good for the little asu branches to contribute to the central arkansas universities' non-boring speakers of this academic year: among them, michael moore at uca, maya angelou at hsu, and ashcroft at hu.
Sunday, April 03, 2005
anal is the new oral?
today i read an online reference to a study indicating thatamong a sample of 18-24-year-oldsthe penis-to-vagina virgins who had taken virginity pledges were several times more likely to have had oral or anal sex than were the penis-to-vagina virgins who had not taken virginity pledges. (the full-text of the journal article is available
here, and brief summaries are available on google news by searching "'abstinence pledges' oral anal.") it appears that elevated rates of anal sex were among the penis-to-vagina virgin males who had taken virginity pledges: four percent of these guys had had anal sex vs. 1% of the penis-to-vagina virgin guys who had not pledged. very few girls reported anal but not vaginal sex. i guess these virginity-pledged guys are having anal sex with non-virgin girls, non-virgin guys, or the other virginity-pledged guys.
(with respect to oral sex, 13% of virginity pledgers reported oral sex with mulitple partners (and no vaginal sex ever), whereas 2% of non-pledgers fit into this category.)
i would not really be interested in this particular study (e.g., more research should be done before one concludes that virginity pledges make boys go anal), except that last week one of my students reported to another faculty member that she perceived an uptick in heterosexual anal sex among our students. our students are big into "virginity" and big into big frilly weddings and big into christianity, so an outbreak of anal sex seemed a little implausible. however, it's been a while since oral sex was considered to be "sex" in our college culture...maybe anal sex will be next to go?
Friday, April 01, 2005
un-boring plagiarism tale
Here lives the cached version of a now edited but apparently widely linked tale of internet-assisted plagiarism by a student at a university in Illinois.
If the above link doesn't work, or if you would like the slightly redacted but lengthier version, start at the bottom of the
A Week of Kindness Blog.
it's 2 o'clock in the morning...where are you
no, i'm not up because of evie...though this evening was not a good sleep night.
instead, i have just finished the second abstract in two days. working on tenure and that's got me staying up late.
if i'm lucky and my lovely will let me go to columbia this summer, i will be submitting another abstract in the next couple of days.
got a few vents...but i might leave those for responses to the hermits because of their sensitive nature. but not to worry, i will not divulge anything more about my own personal helen of troy.
