In U.S. and Canada class, I always assign people a basic term paper, 5-8 pages about anything in the U.S. and Canada that can be considered somewhat geographic.  I do this to give students a chance to explore their own interests and perhaps fall in love with geographic things.

How, though, in the entire realm of possibility, does a student think he/she (protecting the victim here) can write the following line as the conclusion to a term paper on McDonald's and get a decent grade?

 "Ppl will continue to eat @ Mcdonalds.  IDKY."

Yep, text message lingo.  I had to look up IDKY, which is apparently something this kid devised, combining the IDK (I don't know) with Y (why).  First think I thought was Idaho-Kentucky. 

Here are some other gems.  These are copied down letter for letter.

From a paper about Chinatowns in the U.S. and Canada:

"These cities include New York which has a rather famous Chinatown as well as Chicago these places are known for there dense population of mainland Chinese as well as there teaming culture centers....

Most of the Chinese who arrived in British Columbia spurred by the Gold Rush most of the Chinese arrived in British Columbia for similar reasons.  If the two thousand gold miners who arrived in California, 1500 were Chinese and nearly all of them settled in Vancouver."

From another paper about McDonald's (a suggested topic listed on the assignment sheet):

"It is no longer some great mom and pop kinda restuaraunt where you get quality food, but it is all about getting where you need to go-meaning-get your food as fast as you can."

From a kid arguing for the use of nuclear power:

"The steel wells are ten and a half inches thick so that one and a half million pounds of two hundred and fifty gallons of water per minute can flow from one hundred thousand garden hoses to cool the reactor."

From someone debating the U.S. healthcare system against Canada's:

"A film just recently came out in June by the award-winning liberal and America-hating director Michael Moor, and it was called "Sicko," this film he investigates America's health care and compares it to other countries such as Canada, France, Cuba and the United Kingdom." 

Also, the fact that I keep assigning term papers to students, despite the fact that I could just give them five exams and tell them to go away with minimal effort, amazes me to no end.  I just am wishing for like four or five straight papers that are really nice, because those take little effort to grade.  I'm only 1/3 of the way through my stack, and it doesn't seem to be shrinking with any real quickness.

Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ at 01:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We're still in Indiana.  This little holiday is about to end, being utterly destroyed by the six hour drive that awaits us this afternoon.  It's been nice, in a way, to completely avoid doing any work.  I've been afforded this possibility by the fact that my dissertation proposal is now turned into all of the committee members and has been approved as a final draft by at least two of them.  Since I'm still waiting on words from the others, I haven't had anything to work on in that realm all weekend.  I've had some grading to do and lectures to write, but I've blown them off.  Even though it's been nice to take a little break (or, really, the longest break from doing work that I've had in a couple of years) my mind is going insane and I really need to start reading (or doing some sort of work) again.

The next couple of weeks are going to be difficult.  It's a very strong possibility that I will be dealing with comprehensive exams and my oral defenses during these weeks.  Luckily, since I'll have those finished, I will be able to spend Christmas break wrapping up some old projects and getting them turned into publishable papers.

Amy's at church right now, and I'm sorta jealous.  I wish religion was as easy for me as it is for her.  I can't tolerate the idea of becoming a Church-of-Christer (which is what I call them, NOT the "Christian" that they call themselves, some of which do so specifically to the absolute exclusion of all other brands of Christianity, a problem in-and-of-itself) because it's not a path I can follow.  I've tried, and it just doesn't work.  I had thought strongly about going to one of the Quaker churches in Westfield, since there are several and they are all at least minimally programmed for worship instead of totally silent, but I didn't go.  Even though that experiment ultimately failed earlier this year, I still think Quakerism is the best fit for me.

The experiment failed for three general reasons: 1) an inability to connect with the members of the churches in Akron or Kent, caused by small numbers and demographic incompatibility (in other words, each only had a handful of members, of which I would have been the youngest by 30+ years).  2) Pedro's untimely death, which occurred in late May after I gave him a few weeks off.  After that, he didn't start, which meant that I had no Sunday morning transportation, and I wasn't about to ask the people that I couldn't connect with for a ride to church.  3) Sometime in May, Amy threw a massive fit about how she thought Quakerism wasn't bibilically correct and how she thought that all it was doing was leading me astray from the "true form of Christianity."  This was probably the largest reason I gave up, because once this happened, I just didn't have the energy to work past the other problems.  I knew, at this point, that continuing with the experiment would be cause for a weekly war with Amy, and I thought that would have been too bitter an irony (you know, Quakers starting wars).

Our time in Muncie was generally pleasant, I suppose.  Hanging out with my parents is nice because they're good people.  We visited Tim in Greenwood, because he is on house arrest now.  He seems to be doing well.  We stayed in Muncie visiting from Monday night through Thursday afternoon (after lunch) and then headed to Westfield.  During conversations with family at lunch, I am almost always surprised.  In some ways, I've always felt like a freak in my extended family.  Everyone else in that family inherited an uncanny ability to work on mechanical things, and many of them have achieved successful careers in this kind of work.  On the other hand, I was blessed with a brain that can read and write decently well, but barely an ability to nail boards together.  So, when I am with my family, I tone down my academic-ness and focus on more conversation-friendly topics.  (I don't know an academic out there that doesn't do this on occasion).  Doing this makes me worry about some things.  For one, there's a certain stigma attached to academics as absent minded professors, people with their heads in the clouds with no real connection to the common person.  I've always wanted to avoid this definition, no matter how true it's turned out to be in my case.  I'm not sure how to avoid this, except perhaps to give people more credit.  See, here I was dumbing myself down in some ways, and I happened into a pretty decent and fairly well informed conversation about the global economy.  I guess there's been an ontological problem for me thus far which I hadn't yet realized.  Here I am, writing about how this society exploits people and uses them and such, and yet I never have recognized that the people being used seem to know just as much about that, though from a different perspective.  It was an odd thing that I'm going to have to think about more, because I want my research to make a real difference in the world, and it can't do so if I can't relate what I'm saying to the very people I'm trying to help.

On the way out to the car after Thanksgiving lunch at my parents' house, I fully realized how late in the year it finally was.  It was weird, walking down my parents' street to our car, all of the sudden, a big gust of cold wind (and with it, the beginning of some snowfall) struck us.  As I looked up, I realized that the world very abruptly looked wintry, probably with this other sensory experience as aid, if not as a catalyst.  The trees in front of us were completely free of leaves (which stuck around a while this year for the mild autumn) and the sky behind was snow-gray, you know, the kind that prompts older folks to say, "gee, those clouds look like they're full of snow."  The wind on Thursday was suddenly 30 degrees cooler than the night before.  (Weird thing: we left Akron while it was snowing, and we got to Muncie in 64 degree temperatures.  The mildness stayed around until we left on Thursday).  Of course, entering these somewhat generic sensory experiences into my brain, I began to think as we walked and I fully realized that we had just finished Thanksgiving lunch.  I declared this second my official start of the winter season, even though I understand the winter solstice was nearly a month away.

Of course, then, I realized that this meant the semester was almost over (where the-fuck did THAT go?) and that I would have a lot of work to do in the next few weeks.  Of course, somehow those few weeks will feel as long as the entire semester preceding it, a good application of my mother's noted "Bathroom Door" theory of relativity (of course, that is an explanation of how quickly time seems to progress as a variable dependent upon the independent binary representing the side of the bathroom door you are located).

On our way out of Muncie, we stopped for gasoline at the Village Pantry on the corner of White River and Tillotson.  Using some money my parents generously scrounged up to support our adventure home, we put some gas in the tank.  Had we not been broke enough to accept this money, and therefore not paid with cash (which we never do at gas stations anymore), I wouldn't have run into an old friend who was moonlighting there.  This old friend, a strong anti-authority type in high school, is working on a masters degree in mathmatics these days at Ball State.  We had a brief chat about how our respective lives were going, in which he expressed admiration (huh?) for my stature (as a PhD student) and a desire to do the same, but doubt that he could achieve it.  I encouraged him by telling him that doing so is hard work but not impossible, and that he'd turn out just fine.  Unfortunately, I had to cut the conversation short because Amy was in the car and was generally unhappy that we were running late for dinner in Westfield.  But it was good to see this friend, and encouraging.

As we drove to Westfield, Amy remained mostly silent because she was irritated at our tardiness.  This gave me an hour of driving time to let my mind wander as I played the latest Dixie Chicks CD in hopes of cheering her up.  My mind wandered to paper.  It came across paper because of one simple but mindblowing fact: Kent State University is going to charge me a substantial sum of money to place a hardcopy version of my dissertation in their library.  See, dissertations are somewhat obscure things.  Researchers only write one dissertation during their careers, and that's to get a PhD completeted.  Now, while dissertations tend to represent the ultimate acheivement of researchers' lives to that point, it's not supposed to be the opus maximus.  That in mind, dissertations are important research documents that often contain new ideas and important contributions to the field in which they're written.  Usually, the only way to get a copy of a dissertation is to know the research or his/her commmittee members, or to visit the library of the institution from which that researcher completed the doctoral degree.

Now, what about Kent State?  This trend of preferring digital versions of dissertations is a disturbing thing.  Certainly, digital versions take up less space and probably cost less to deal with, but isn't there something to be said for there being a material evidence of such research?   Sure, I know that my dissertation would be stored on a disk somewhere, but what happens if that disk dies or whatever?  I mean, think about this historically.  How do we today know anything about the ancient civilizations of the past?  Pax Romana, ancient Greece, the Sumerians, the Egyptians, etc.  Well, in most of these cases, there's some sort of standing material link, whether it's pots and stuff from the Sumerians, Pyramids and biblical references from the Egyptians, ancient texts from the Greeks, or coins, roads, buildings and such from the Romans.

The death of paper is a disturbing thing.  Now, I know that paper doesn't last forever, but it lasts a tremendous amount longer than humans do, generally speaking.  I've seen books at yardsales going for a quarter that are older than the oldest person I know (Amy's grandma, who's 93) or the oldest person I've ever crossed paths with (my great-grandma, who'd be 112 this year if she was still kicking).  And how long do hard drives last, intact?  Maybe 30 years, if perfectly cared for (which history tends not to do)?  Do we even know?  Point is, we still have letters sent by George Washington.  The Magna Carta still exists.  Hell, papyrus scrolls from ancient Egypt still exist.  This material link, and the other part it provides, a vessel for language, is tremendously important.  Maybe it's the capitalist bias in me that constantly falls back to the material good, but I think there's something here.

Think about it this way.  The most significant historical writings (biographies) come largely from personal correspondences and papers.  This is something that Jon and I have talked about before.  Back in history, everyone wrote each other letters on paper.  Now, while this is more expensive and time-consuming than using e-mail, it left a material paper-trail which could be used after the death of these people to reconstruct social relationships, lending themselves to being the primary sources for biographical reconstructions of the lives of "significant" (the debatablity of this term is for another time) people. 

(Of course, worth mention here is the time-frame distortion that e-mail causes.  See, being that e-mail is so much faster than writing letters, I have a hard time using it.  If someone writes me a letter via email, and I write a nice response, that's all well and good.  But if my corresponder writes another letter that next day, what do I have to say?  I mean, only a handful of hours have passed, and chances are nothing important or remotely interesting has happened.  I guess blogging does this same thing, because if I blog to often it becomes nothing more than a log of the absolutely mundane things that have happened in a few hours' time, which usually isn't very interesting).

These historical complications are perhaps what's most troubling about the death of paper.  The Internet will inherently someday die.  People will inevitibly quit caring about the computers and the servers and everything that makes the internet what it is.  Let's assume that the same obselescence will apply to library servers and so on.  If and when this happens, the entire correspondence of a huge cohort of people (from my age on down to whenever this death happens) will be completely lost forever.  True, most things are lost in historic periods, but the coming-some-day-way-in-the-future death of data will be catastrophic for that entire time period.  Beyond the limited durability of email messages, I don't communicate with anyone in any sort of durable way.  Once I am gone, and once anyone who's crossed paths with me is gone, the memory of my existence is gone. 

I guess, in some ways, this alternative is attractive.  I've mentioned repeatedly to those people that I care about that whenever I should happen to die, I don't want to be embalmed or preserved in any way.  I want to be torched and sprinkled somewhere that I liked to visit in my life, like the Big Thompson Canyon in Colorado, the Pacific Coast of California, or something pretty like that.  I don't want a gravestone "permanently" marking my remains.  I want to be remembered not as another digit in the population clock, but for whatever I was and whatever I accomplished.  And I think the memory of my doings, then, will last an appropriate length of time, because if I somehow do something great like discover the ultimate cure for cancer, my name will live on forever.  If I become a depressed blob who plays video games for the rest of my short and miserable life, then I will be remembered for approximately 37 seconds, which would be appropriate given what I was.  I see no need to do otherwise.

At the same time, though, here I am arguing for more use of paper and less digitizing.  Well, here's the thing: the importance of paper is its use as a vessel for language, and through these uses, it preserves knowledge.  While my accomplishments as an individual may not be worth the paper they're printed on, perhaps the knowledge I share as a researcher is.  It may not change the world, but if it helps someone answer a question at some point in the future, then its worth being printed on paper.  And, of course, you've probably heard of the old adage about the flap of a butterfly's wings a long time ago causing the winds of a hurricane today?  I like to think that I contribute to whatever happens, even if the contribution is completely insignificant.  But to make that contribution happen, that knowledge has to exist, and I don't trust digital storage to last that long.

So, I will therefore pay the 60 bucks (or whatever it is) to place my dissertation in the Kent library, and I will probably bitch about it the whole time I'm writing the check. 

(I'll also realize that it's probably not a good idea to give my fully-rested and nearly restless mind an hour of silence to think while driving to Thanksgiving in Westfield).

When we arrived in Westfield after that fairly short drive, we went straight to Uncle Kenny's house for dinner.  Awaiting us was a massive table of goodness, including vegetarian goodies adapted for us by Amy's mom, like green bean cassarole, vegetarian stuffing, vegetarian dumplings, and so on.  It was absolutely delicious, and afterwards we watched the Colts game on Kenny's high definition television.  All in all, a really good night which I enjoyed very much.

After we retired back to Amy's parents' house, Amy and I looked through the ads for the "Black Friday" craziness.  I really think Black Friday needs to be done away with.  These ads were presenting "DOORBUSTERS!," which were special deals limited to a certain quantity of products offered.  Most of these, yes, were good deals... but most of these said, even in the ads, "minimum quantity of 1 per store."  Wal-Mart's ad said "1 per store" for several items, without qualifying that with a "minimum."  Really, there's no purpose to this kind of a sale other than to make people crazy enough that the riot incited is shown on the news, netting Wal-Mart publicitiy.  (Of course, since the riot was incited to achieve a capitalist objective and not, say, a labor strike or a revolution, the corporate-sponsored riot not only goes unpunished but encouraged!)   Many of these stores opened at 4:00 am for these short DOORBUSTERS! sales.  Best Buy's ad explains to shoppers what they are to do, stating "Prior to opening, a line will form outside of the store.  At 3:00 am, tickets will be distributed to those at the front of the line granting access to the DOORBUSTERS! sale, with quantities of tickets limited.  The store will open at 4:00 am for those holding tickets."

I don't know how good a deal would have to be for me to wake up this early and deal with a bunch of complete fucking idiots to buy something.  At the same time, these ads have become an integral part of our Christmas experience.  While we never shop during these idiotic sales, we certainly browse the ads to put together "wish lists" of useless crap we've convinced ourselves to want.  Sure, there are about ten different Wii games I'd like.  And I wouldn't argue with a mammoth TV or a digital SLR camera or a new laptop.  But truth is, all I want for Christmas this year is book money.  Anything else would be a complete failure of my wishlist, and I very strongly hope that people don't waste their time getting me anything else.   Of course, if I get a few hundred people to donate five dollars to my book needs, then I could go on a massive shopping spree to Borders or Amazon.  It won't happen, but that would be the happiest Christmas ever.

The last few days of our stay have been quiet.  Amy's dad is a little obsessed with getting a big HDTV now that he's watched the Colts game on Kenny's.  Amy's somewhat obsessed with the ludicrous cable packages that each set of our parents have.  She's been watching the "Dog Whisperer," "Little People, Big World," and "Flip this House" marathons.  We've also seen a handful of "On-Demand" movies, the service of which might be the strongest argument for never leaving the house since the invention of internet pornography and chat rooms.  Such cable would be a nice thing to get, but the expense is somewhat ridiculous and we never would do anything remotely productive again.

We've visited Amy's grandma, who's in bad shape but was looking good on the day we stopped by and was incredibly happy to see us.  I tried to visit Jon and Kris in their new store, but didn't succeed because they weren't in when I visited.  Their store is nice, and you should buy stuff from them.  I'm pretty sure they didn't buy ads and shout about DOORBUSTERS!

Okay, that's all for now.  Everyone's home from church, and it's time to eat.  Then, it's on the road to Akron.  The petsitter has apparently had problems with the foster dogs.  Mona has been a complete bitch (literally and figuratively), faking illness, fighting and doing other things completely out of character.  Carlton, who went to prison, is on the verge of getting kicked out.  And Rocky, who's spent the week at Rose's, is having a major meltdown.  Luckily, there are some leads on getting a few of these dogs adopted.

Either way, I haven't missed dealing with dog bullshit.  I just have to keep convincing myself this is for a greater good....

Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ at 11:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been silent for two weeks.  I've been busy, and my thoughts are scattered everywhere.  Perfect time for another edition of Random Thoughts 

The dissertation proposal is almost finished.  I'm literally like two hours from having my final draft complete.  I will be giving it to the committee on Monday, giving them time for over break to deal with taking a look at it, and then getting comps scheduled for the week after we're back at school.  After that will be the proposal, and my project will be on the road and ready to go.  (Sidenote: my fourth committee member, a fellow in political science, says that I "write like the wind," which is a nice thing).

After I'm finished proposing my dissertation, I'm going to take a designed break in my research to work on some other projects to wrap them up.  I want to get a few things published from older work for a couple of reasons.  For one, it's good stuff that I want to get out.  Second, I need to diversify my publications (I should have five by the end of this academic year, if not six).  Third, I need to get this stuff finished and out of the way.  Fourth, I need a break from my dissertation. 

Odd thing: We're actually sorta kinda considering getting more television channels for the first time since two years ago when the free cable went out.  I absolutely despise the idea of paying more that ten dollars for television, but there are some things I would like to be able to watch: Mythbusters, ESPN for various sporting events, The Daily Show and Colbert Report... but at the same time, I know that I tend to sit and zone if there's stuff to watch.  Plus, I hate to admit my elitism, but there's definitely a badge of honor that goes with "I don't get that channel," even for the basics.

Same goes for cell phones!  I liked them better when they were bolted to the floorboards of cars.

I read an article about some guy in California that does research about aging the other day.  This guy said that he believes some people on the planet today will live as long as a thousand years because of how technology is improving.  While the guy is something of a quack for believing this, it's troublesome in a lot of ways.  For one, without the fear of mortality, I'm unsure anyone will ever be motivated to do anything in any sort of timeframe.  Secondly, I've seen tons of evidence (see: elderly family members whose minds have rotted) that people are already long outliving the abilities of their brains to function effectively.  I don't know if anything about this is a good idea.  Sure, death is one of the scariest possible things, but I don't know if living so long is any less scary.

One thing that's cool about being around a college campus (as I have been in one capacity or another for, gasp, 22 years now!) is that there's a constant rotation of people, which means that the population never really gets stagnant, or if it does in terms of personality, it doesn't stay that way very long.  If we kept the same people on the earth for the next 1,000 years, wouldn't that get pretty fucking boring?  If you're a fatalistic person, there's a certain progression that goes with natural beginnings and ends in the life trajectory.

Stranger still, it wasn't more than a day later that I came across a different opinion about the future of aging.  Some other crackpot has this idea that we'll soon all be able to live forever, but in a different way.  According to this guy, we'll soon be able to upload our brains to a massive mainframe, where all of the contents of our brains will be digitized.  He foresaw two possibilities emerging from this technology: one choice was like an odd crossbreed between a MMORPG and The Matrix, where our brains would continue on in the mainframe's society after our bodies have died.  (I'm assuming our consciousness moves with our brains, otherwise it's just random information floating around, right?)  His other option was that we could potentially clone empty bodies, and transport this data into body containers to use until the body wears out, then reupload, redownload and repeat, like some sort of twisted shampoo.

There are other implications of this long-life stuff, from any of these models.  Lucien LeFebvre (the French historian, not Henri Lefebvre, the awesome geographer who wrote Production of Space) theorized that one reason government and religious institutions have such staying power is because they have already lasted into the "longue duree," essentially meaning long term.  Human lifespans are limited to, at most, 120 years.  Anything that lasts longer than human consciousness (which of that maximum 120 years is maybe 110, taking away five from each edge) is part of the longue duree, which means beyond what any human can comprehend.  Once an institution gets to that longue duree, it has a certain legitimacy that makes it exceptionally hard for humans to dismantle.

Of course, if humans are suddenly living essentially forever, this might mean the end of many existing government institutions and religious organizations, for several reasons.  If people live forever, the idea is that they'll be smart enough to not tangle themselves so severely into problems and won't need government assistance.  Maybe that's an arguable point.  But, at the same time, if people aren't afraid of dying because it's always so far away, then they won't need religion or government to assure them that things are okay.

So, in other words, the two guys are still crackpots, because if people start living forever, either God or the government will get pissed off enough to disrupt the system and send us back to the stone age, where life was somewhat miserable, more leisurely than today (hunter-gatherers worked 16 hours per week compared to our 50 plus) and very short (maybe 25-30 years).

See, this is why I need a budget for books.  If I don't have a stack of fresh new books waiting on me at all times, I go out seeking oddball internet articles about weird shit, then I write random crap about it.  I can't wait until I'm a professor and we can dedicate 75% of my income to buying books.  No?  50%?  20%?  Um, 10%?  Okay, maybe 2%...  Please? 

I'm about ready to be finished with this semester.  I think I've run my course with most of my students, and I think most of them are ready to move on to other things.  That's fair enough.  I don't expect to have little cultists or anything.  In fact, I expect that they're tired of me after a while.  I'm getting worn down by the classes I'm teaching right now, and I'm hoping that Thanksgiving break will ease my mind there and refresh me enough to give good lectures for the remainder of the semester. (Of course, that said, at least four of my first year colloquium students signed up for World Geography in the fall.  Yippee!)

So, question: Where the hell is the flying car?  We've been promised a flying car since like the 1940s and the thing has never materialized.  I've seen a couple of magazines asking this very question, and of course the biggest problem is finding a fuel and building material combination that's efficient enough to get a car off the ground and not be as unwieldly as a Cessna (a.k.a. millionaire death trap).  At the same time, can you imagine how stupid a world of flying cars would be?  People have enough trouble driving their cars in two dimensions and not killing each other.  What happens if you add a third?  And, besides that, if you have a crash or run out of gas or have mechanical problems, remember, you're above the ground, which means you have a serious problem.

I guess really that I'm mostly just sad because that's one more thing I can toss out from Back to the Future II from my theory that Robert Zimeckis could actually predict the future.  Very sad.  Also, the Miami Alligators baseball team, which lost to the Cubs in the 2015 World Series, never happened. The Florida Marlins were established in 1993, but weren't called Miami or Alligators.  Also, the Marlins were in the National League, meaning they could never meet the Cubs in the Series.  Oh, and no hoverboards, which is far more reasonable than flying cars, but still a big disappointment. What the fuck, Robert Zimeckis? 

Oh, we're going home for Thanksgiving.  Thanks to some begging and borrowing, we're going home on Monday afternoon and staying until Sunday afternoon.  Not bad!  We'll be in Muncie from Monday evening through Thursday afternoon, and we'll be eating dinner in Westfield and staying there until Sunday afternoon.  We're hoping to see some peeps that we haven't for a while, so if you're bored, drop me a line.

(crickets)

The weekend after that, we're taking advantage of the university.  See, a couple of things: some friends of ours are meeting up there that weekend.  Secondly, the library is offering people money to visit a cool map exhibit on Ptolemy's maps at the Newberry Library.  See, as long as I go to the library, I can fill out a form and get all of my expenses reimbursed.  I get to see a cool exhibit on historic maps at one of the world's premier archives, plus I get to see some friends?  Not bad!

Television news here has been predicting a coming onslaught of snow the past few days.  It hasn't yet materializing in any accumulating form.  The stations here, though, are absolutely nuts about it.  They practically scream at you during the advertisements that snow is coming soon, and imply that this snow is the kind of snow that will somehow kill us all.  Then, in the newscast (which, no, I never watch on purpose and if I catch a glimpse of it, it's because I'm busy writing with the TV on as the background and don't notice that the local news has come on, or I don't have the remote and am too lazy to look for it) they say that Warren got exactly 26 snowflakes today, and that we should all go buy milk and bread and other provisions, perhaps snowshoes and huskies.  Of course, the local news here is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen anyway.

Odd anti-parent rant: a lady at the Indian restaurant the other day ripped out her boob and began feeding her kid at the table. What the fuck was that about?   Really?  You can't go to the bathroom?  I don't care how "beautiful" this part of parenting supposedly is.  I don't care how natural it is.  I don't care how gross it is to expect your newborn to eat when there's an old lady dropping a deuce in the next bathroom stall.  You don't pull your udder out in the middle of the restaurant and let the kid visibly suck on it for all to see.  Go somewhere else.  Or at least put a blanket over it.  Just because you have a kid, it doesn't excuse you from being decent.  And no, I don't care if our society's definition of decent is fucked up for not allowing something that's so "beautiful" and "natural."  You don't see me ripping out my junk to piss on the carpet while you eat, which would be both "beautiful" and "natural." 

My back hurts like a bitch.  Our mattress is shot, and I'm hoping we're going to get a new one with financial aid in January.  I just hate that we'll have to wait that long.

Amy and I went to a hockey game tonight, which was great fun.  Hockey is one of God's gift to sports (baseball is the other).  Basketball and football, while both very good, are definitely within the realms of human achievement.  Soccer (the real football) is too.  Hockey and baseball are on another plane altogether.  And we must add: the cankle boot infestation at Kent State is out of control!!!! Every female wears cankle boots now!  One girl at the ice arena (you know, where it's cold enough to keep a solid sheet of ice for the hockey and such) was wearing a miniskirt with cankle boots.  Whatever sluttiness she was trying to achieve was totally undermined by the fact that her legs looked corpselike because of the cold.

I'm really sick of having seven dogs.  Seven is too many.  We gave two dogs (Carleton and Lilly) to the prison today for their training program.  I was sad to lose Carleton, but I was certainly happy to see Lilly go.  Lilly and I just did not get along.  Perhaps we are too much alike.... she is hardheaded, doesn't seem to hear (or in her case, listen) very well, and she complains a lot.  We didn't get along.   When we sent away Carleton and Lilly, we got two more to take their places.  Petey, a fox terrier mix, was on death row and had been chosen by the rescue to be saved, but his hours were numbered by a horrific kennel cough epidemic that forced the Ravenna pound to put down most of its animals.  Rocky is the deceased Italian neighbor's old hunting dog, who had been living in a makeshift pen for five years.  (Oh, his pen was gross.  No one had taken care of him for a long time, probably since Pio got really sick in August, and turds were caked on the concrete floor to the point that we seriously thought his pen had a dirt floor!  Of course, as we cleaned his pen, we put him in the vacant pen next door, which had been occupied by his biological mother until two years ago when she died giving birth to Rocky's puppies... go backyard breeding incest!)  After Pio's death, the neighbors surrendered Rocky to the rescue.  Rocky has gotten treatment for his heartworm, and today he moved into our basement until he goes to Rose's house while we're in Indiana.  He's a sweet German Shorthaired Pointer who needs a lot of direction and love, but there's a very salvagable dog in there.

Some random good news: the Ball State Fighting Cardinals football team is bowl eligible, which means that for the first time since 1996, they'll get to play in a football bowl game.  Granted, because of their low stature in the college football world, they'll probably play in the Ray's Port-a-John Wheat Bowl, held in Minot, North Dakota... but still.  It's about time my alma mater was good for something besides affordable and innovative education!

My World Geography class for spring already has 118 students, which means it has eclipsed the largest class I've ever taught, and registration just opened to everyone a few days ago. Hope I can get a few teaching assistant hours for grading tests and taking attendance and whatnot, though I know that's unlikely.

My brother Tim set up a MySpace page for his music this week.  You should check it out.  It's good.

I set up an awesome docking station for my iBook in my office this past week.  See, I know that I can't fix the mattress portion of my backache, so I decided to fix the "laptop crunch" that I have to be in to write at work.  I used an old flatscreen monitor that Ball State gave me, "borrowed" an old USB mouse and keyboard from the department at Kent (they were plugged into an old G3 desktop that hasn't been turned on since 2005!).   I put the monitor on a stack of books and plugged everything into my laptop, leaving it open just a crack so it doesn't go into sleep mode.  It's freaking awesome!

Also, I've been way too obsessed with Sufjan Stevens's Illinois album this week.  It's a fine set.

Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ at 03:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We went to Cleveland tonight and bought me a train ticket to go to Boston in April for the AAG convention.  Cool thing was, since we had a $100 gift certificate to Amtrak, the roundtrip trainfare only cost $33.61.  On the way out, I go through Washington DC (with a three hour layover a block from the Capitol and National Mall) and I get to ride through places I've never been (Philadelphia, Delaware, New York City, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts).  On the way back, it's a more boring (I think) route through Albany-Schenectady.

I got "travel jitters" as we pulled into the train station, that little bit of excitement and adrenaline that happens before a trip.  It took me a bit to convince my body we weren't hopping a train and going tonight.

I'm really mad at the NFL.  The only thing I cared to do this Sunday in terms of sports was to have the Colts vs. Patriots game on television.  It's only fair.  It's a game of unbeaten teams, one of which is my favorite.  But no.  Because of archaic blackout laws, the game is not going to be on television because the stupid fucking Browns play earlier in the afternoon.  See, apparently back in the day, team owners were concerned that having another game on in their market after their teams would create a competitive fanbase for another team.  So, this means that, if I want to watch this football game that most of the rest of the country gets, that I have to go to a fucking bar where they have a satellite package.  I don't drink, but to get football, I have to give up the privacy of my home and the ability to grade student reaction papers to sit in a crappy dark hellhole with a bunch of drunks?  Stupid.

When I was in East Lansing for ELDAAG, the beds in the hotels were the best things ever.  They had ridiculously delicious sheets (and that's the only word I can think to describe them, even though it's not a taste sensation) and uber-comfortable mattresses.  Our poor mattress was inherited from some family nearly four years ago, and was basically already shot when we got it.  We need a new mattress, for one.  Also, we're getting to be a maturely married couple.  My old friend Jon had a theory that when people are married for a bit, they eventually decide to create a ridiculously comfortable nesting spot.  His theory seems incredibly correct, especially now, because all I think about in this crappy bed we've got now is making a nice little nest, with 400,000 thread count (or whatever) sheets, nice new pillows, (fake/vegan) down comforters... you know, the works.  Anything is better than the fucking springs that are attacking my back...

I find it interesting that the latest commercials for Total cereal try to link the cereal to the free spirited ideas of the 1960s, saying that Total was working for changing the world by being the first nutritionally complete cereal.  This is a complete sham!  Think about this: the hippies were largely protesting against the status quo, the modernized world in which people thought it was necessary to ass-rape southeast Asia for no real reason.  On the other hand, Total, with it's complete nutrition, is a product of that status quo.  How in the world did the folks at General Mills (or who-the-fuck-ever) create a nutritionally complete cereal?  Using the top tiers of modern technology and chemistry, engineering a food to have an artificially high amount of various chemicals.  Total's origins were no more a rebellious of the 1960s than TV dinners!

Randomly, we're going to Chicago on university (or private foundation?) dime.  We had been planning to go to Chicago to see some friends at the end of November.  Of course, we're broke as fuck and figured that it simply would not happen.  However, I got an email today from the department telling us that, because there's an exhibit on Ptolemy's maps at the Newberry Library in Chicago and because Kent State had contributed somehow financially to the Newberry thing, that any grad student could get $500 travel funding to go.  Basically, this means that my trip (which we were thinking about doing anyway) is getting funded, if I go to a museum exhibit that already looks pretty damn cool.

My little iBook is starting to die a slow death.  We had planned to replace it in January and give it to a (not quite) starving artist friend, but we aren't going to have the money to do that for a bit.  Now, it does all kinds of weird things.  It kinda reminds me of when my various grandmothers have had various forms of Alzheimers or dementia (and three of them, now, have had these issues) where things just quit working right without rhyme or reason.  Unfortunately, my laptop isn't that old (three years) but has had a hard life.  I mean, I usually use it around 8-10 hours a day (yes, just about every day), and I take it everywhere with me.  It's been all over the country, and into others.  I'm surprised it hasn't just exploded, leaving nothing more than a pile of broken keys. 

The university fucked up my email this week.  Without my knowledge or consent, they switched me over to a new system.  My old email account, which still login-able, had been hacked, with the messages forwarded to some new system.  They haven't given me a password for the new system, so anything that goes to my Kent address is somewhere in a black hole.  They did all of this so that they could give Microsoft an exclusive contract.  Microsoft (in every sense) sucks donkey dick for coke, so I'm just going to have it go to my Gmail anyway. 

This weekend has big plans but little time.  I want to outline three more papers to publish, grade 30 student reaction papers and finish my new dissertation proposal draft.  I will be lucky to grade any student papers, let alone the other stuff.  I'd do better with the grading if I could watch the Colts game, as football games are perfect background noise for grading.  But, alas, because of the pole-smoking, fart-sucking, turd-licking Browns, I cannot without going to a bar.  And is it cool to grade papers while I drink a Shirley Temple in a bar?

Probably not. 

Posted by Your Friendly Neighborhood DJ at 01:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)