Oh it’s just a kitty-petting festival going on here in Elsinore [and now I'm going to get some very disappointed random hits to this page, aren't I?]. Leia now complains if you stop petting her.
This morning, she was sitting on the couch. Malkin was atop the cat tree in the hallway, looking daggers at me. [...]
Archive for December, 2008
Entertaining side effects of progress
Posted in cats, tagged cats, cute himmie, odd feline behavior, himalayans, multi-cat households, unexpected things, petting Leia on 31 December, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Unexpected progress
Posted in Uncategorized on 28 December, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Leia didn’t run away when I walked into the room with the cup of kibble tonight. I walked a little closer, and she still didn’t run.
So I took a chance and tried to move my hand closer [she was facing away from me, so I was about to touch her back]. That resulted in [...]
Winter cleanup FAIL
Posted in Rennovations, tactless observations, tagged blowtorch, Christmas idiocy, house fire, stupid people on 23 December, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
A man in New England thought he could use a blowtorch to clear away some of the snow and ice near his house.
While the report says he isn’t being charged with anything [other than the $30k it's going to cost to do repairs], I really think he should have been charged as Stupid and Endangering [...]
You know you don’t follow college football when…
Posted in Language failure, My brain on 21 December, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
You see the following title for a news item in the NY Times:
Southern Miss WR DeAndre Brown Injured
And you spend several moments trying to figure out which beauty pageant has a “Miss WR”.
Thank you, I’m here all week… well, most of it…
Forever young
Posted in Backstory, Festival of Bad Writing, Musing about Teaching, My brain, tactless observations, travel, tagged Alphaville, exams, family obligations, faux Russian Orthodoxy, grading, holidays, Milton, nostalgia, Piaget, Turkle on 19 December, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Alphaville is proclaiming themselves from the speakers on my lap — there’s an image, eh? How much farther from stadium Euro-rock could you get? But the distance shouldn’t be measured from concert venue to little laptop: the distance is really from being an undergraduate studying in a dorm lounge to being a professor [...]
Why I’m a rhetorician, not a ‘critic’
Posted in Backstory, Musing about Teaching, My brain, tactless observations, tagged Boyer Hall, Cultural Theory, does not include eggplants, general irritability, Janice Peritz, opportunities versus constraints, Rhetoric, saving throws on 14 December, 2008 | 2 Comments »
This afternoon, I had a stark reminder of the choice I made 20+ years ago — to apply for a Rhetoric Ph.D., rather than one in Literary and Cultural Theory. (The programs were at the same school, and I had the course background for either area.) The text I was reading discussed the work of [...]
But when did they get to measure?
Posted in Backstory, Introductions, My brain, tactless observations, tagged "fit to be tried", bad marketing, do not thou solicit me, exasperation, eye in the sky, incidentalomas, intimate measurements, overblown claims, seeing is not always believing on 12 December, 2008 | 2 Comments »
In the NY Times recently, there was an article about a disturbing fact of human variability. Well, let me re-phrase that: it’s not all that disturbing in the abstract: people differ. The disturbing fact is that treatments have been based on an idea of “broken/not broken” or “normal/abnormal” that may not hold up in [...]
A link to somebody else’s trove of bad writing
Posted in Festival of Bad Writing, Language failure on 10 December, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I haven’t got my final exams yet, where I expect the timed writing task will result in a few worthy gaffes, simply because of the amount of thinking I’m trying to squeeze out of those undergraduates. [And yes, actually, I will be digging around for some older exam examples, so it isn't blazingly [...]
Reasons and rationales, for lack of a better title
Posted in Musing about Teaching, My brain, tactless observations, tagged arguments, balanced presentations, enthusiasm, expertise, gratuitous kitties, hazards of war, long term plannng, military preparedness, patient care, prudence, shock and awe, short term thinking, Toulmin on 5 December, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I don’t know whether my undergrads all ‘get’ what I am trying to teach them about portable intellectual tools — I want them to see that reasoning about science is not that different from other kinds of reasoning: it’s the types of data, the range of acceptable warrants, and the strength of the claims that [...]
