from the comments
Daryl’s quote brings to mind Jon Huntsman’s recent newsworthy antics, mainly that he’s distancing himself from his opponents by saying that he trusts scientists’ expertise from everything ranging from global warming to evolution. Strange to see how this has become controversial, but again, I think the bottom line is that A) conservatives also tend to be very religious and science often makes claims that contradict religion and B) conservatives don’t like to be told what to do. Palin et al. often frame the debate around environmental regulations by saying “they want to restrict how you do a, b, and c” – it’s a rhetorical fallacy that never accounts for the actual science or reasoning behind regulations, but it’s been pretty successful so far.
I recently saw that a reporter was questioning Rick Perry on how, if he selectively believed what the scientific community claims, how he could be trusted to responsibly support the scientific community in keeping America on the forefront of technological advancement. Not surprisingly, he didn’t really have an answer.
Take that, Scroggins!
Most of us regard Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Slaughterhouse-Five as a masterpiece of thought-provoking science fiction, but the School Board of Republic High School in Missouri felt differently. They decided to ban the novel.
And in response, the Vonnegut Memorial Library offered to provide a free copy to any of the 150 students who were originally supposed to read it.
On the redemption of physical reality
“This is, of course, what (film theorist) Siegfried Kracauer meant when he spoke of the ‘redemption of physical reality.’ It’s also at the heart of Werner Herzog’s new documentary, The Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2011), in which he attempts to retrieve the ‘now’ of prehistoric cave painters flickering into life – the analogy often used to explain the psychological power of film.”
In the same way that cutting ourselves off from any older aspect of our culture diminishes us by dimming our awareness of who we were and how that made us who we are, there is something lost when we turn away from the gray ones.
It’s quite a long piece, but it is worth reading. Bill Mesce’s The “Gray Ones” Fade To Black, brought to attention by Ebert.
Matt Damon on Education Policy
Huh.
quote out of context
“I congratulate them for doing what’s right and removing the two books,” said Scroggins, who didn’t attend the board meeting. “It’s unfortunate they chose to keep the other book.”
Mining for college money
In my ongoing quest to find college money, I came across a work related email listing all the scholarships available to undocumentated workers. Mentioned in this list was the Ayn Rand Foundation writing competition. So flock, has anyone read an Ayn Rand novel that is worth writing an essay in hopes of getting scholarship money?
Remembering Scott, 6
From Mark:
Remember those “basic skills” tests we took as TX school children (they were probably administered everywhere) where you’d bubble in the answers? Scott told me that he read the first question, then bubbled in the rest of the test booklet in a design that resembled an eyelet dress fabric that he liked.
headline of the day
Toddlers won’t bother learning from you if you’re daft
Las Reinas Chulas: “Que Suave Patria”
Please don’t turn aside take a look even if no hablas español (not even dumbass texan spanish).
¡Las Reinas Chulas reglan!
Dozens of plastic foam heads rain onto the stage. Four drug traffickers in fringed jackets and sparkly pink cowboy hats bat them into the audience with toy AK-47s. All the while, the cast croons, “Let them slit our throats, let them pack us up . . . let them not ask any questions, let them not investigate.”
This is cabaret, Mexico style. Las Reinas Chulas, or the Beautiful Queens, parody drug violence in a show the women first produced in 2005 and that still fills nightclubs around Mexico, including a performance in the tourist town of Taxco this weekend.
A fine book by Robert Coles
I just finished The Call of Stories:Teaching and the Moral Imagination, and I recommend it.
I love this passage:
At one point he (William Carlos Williams) reminded us that an important part of our lives would be spent “listening to people tell you their stories”; and in return, “they will want to hear your story of what their story means.”
Protein Synthesis Dance
Thanks to Paul B., who says, “Don’t ask me about the biology. And remember, 1971 really occurred in the late ’60s. Downside: No music credits.”
Mr. B.’s Vegas Posse
There, on the left.
The Life Zone
Three women have been kidnapped from abortion clinics and are being held for seven months–until they all give birth. The film, which appears to cut right down the middle, examining the topic from both sides, offers a powerful, anti-abortion climactic twist.
And no, this isn’t satire.
headline of the day
‘Sovereign Citizen’ Opens Fire On Store Because It Ran Out Of Crawfish
from the comments
Oh my. This song. Mr. B. became obsessed at 5, a girl at school taught it to him. He would sing “drove my cheby to the leby but the leby was dry.” He was spooky quiet with the line “this’ll be the day that I die.” I would think okay, not playing Barney songs in the car, mistake. So I’d ramp up the Allmans about then. Something cheerful like “Whipping Post.”
Siam vs. Mexico
From The Saddest Music in the World. Guy Maddin (2003).
“The singers are giving us a sad peek into child burial customs ‘down Mexico way’.”
“The Mexican mama is being very firm with her dead infant.
“Now go away, she wails
You are dead
Don’t sneak in at night
to nurse from my breast
That milk
is only for the living
“To Canadian ears, that may sound harsh.”
Cowboys and Pit Crews
Atul Gawande delivered this year’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School:
You are the generation on the precipice of a transformation medicine has no choice but to undergo, the riders in the front car of the roller coaster clack-clack-clacking its way up to the drop. The revolution that remade how other fields handle complexity is coming to health care, and I think you sense it. I see this in the burst of students obtaining extra degrees in fields like public health, business administration, public policy, information technology, education, economics, engineering. Of some two hundred students graduating today, more than thirty-five are getting such degrees, intuiting that ordinary medical training wouldn’t prepare you for the world to come. Two years ago, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement started its Open School, offering free online courses in systems skills such as outcome measurement, quality improvement, implementation, and leadership. They hoped a few hundred medical students would enroll. Forty-five thousand did. You’ve recognized faster than any of us that the way we train, practice, and innovate has to change. Even the laboratory science must change—toward generating treatments and diagnostics that do not stand in isolation but fit in as reliable components of an integrated, economical, and effective package of care for the needs patients have.
May 23, 1934
This day in 1934 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow was shot dead by Texas officer Frank Hamer and his posse on a back country road in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.
It probably weren’t much like in the movie.
Cooper’s and my friend Allen was just writing to tell about the 1936 Texas Centennial, staged in Dallas.
“One of the attractions which impressed my father, who at that time was 13, was the bullet-riddled death car of Bonnie & Clyde.”
How Archivists Helped Video Game Designers Recreate the City’s Dark Side for ‘L.A. Noire’
Earlier this week, video game enthusiasts and fans of L.A. history cheered the release of Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire, a police procedural game noted for its faithful reproduction of Los Angeles circa 1947. To recreate a city now hidden beneath 64 years of redevelopment projects and transformed by age and expansion, production designers with the game’s developer, Team Bondi, consulted several Los Angeles area archives.
I fear for future generations
Laughing with Kafka
It’s not that students don’t “get” Kafka’s humor but that we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get — the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.
From a speech given by David Foster Wallace in 1998 at a symposium to celebrate the publication of a translation of The Castle by Schocken Books.
Teacher Teacher // Rockpile (Live) // 1980
Singing, chewing, strumming. What more do you need to know (or teach)?
A friendly, goofy salute to Luke.
One’s Teaching Philosophy
I suspect he might be too modest to share it here himself, so you should all take a moment and read through Luke Neff‘s teaching philosophy, which I found to be a wonderful collection of thoughts, ideas and hopes for educating a future generation of students (and non-students).
kids today
A 16-year-old from the Toronto area used a supercomputer system to find a new drug combination that shows potential in treating the genetic disorder cystic fibrosis.
When I was sixteen, I fucked a grapefruit.
Precession of the Equinoxes
The thing that caused everyone to freak out because their astrological signs had changed is one of the more fascinating stories in the history of intellectual evolution. That thing is called precession of the equinoxes, and precession is one of those phenomena that is simultaneously invisible and obvious, observable and hidden.
Let’s start with the technicalities and move to the history of it.
In astronomy, axial precession is a gravity-induced, slow and continuous change in the orientation of an astronomical body’s rotational axis. In particular, it refers to the gradual shift in the orientation of Earth’s axis of rotation, which, like a wobbling top, traces out a pair of cones joined at their apices in a cycle of approximately 26,000 years. The term “precession” typically refers only to this largest secular motion; other changes in the alignment of Earth’s axis — nutation and polar motion — are much smaller in magnitude.
So, precession is essentially the planetary equivalent of the wobble in a top as it spins.
If you carve the horizon into twelve roughly equivalent sections, each year, at the equinoxes, the sun will appear to rise in one and set in its opposite. Because of the wobble in the axis of the earth, the section of the sky the sun appears to rise and set in will shift very slowly over a period of roughly 2,160 years. This is the basis of astrology, as various civilizations applied meaning to the constellations they saw in each section. More interestingly, I think, our tracking of it appears to be the basis of astronomy.
To begin to notice that tracking takes time. To fully understand the cycle, and be able to project it forwards and backwards, to mark the passage of time in the relative movement of the stars, would take hundreds, if not thousands, of years — observation, measurement, notation. Once a culture had an awareness of that pattern, no matter on what scale, it could begin to find a place for itself, and make a story out of it, and because we are human, of course, that is what we did.
If you are interested in this subject, and are comfortable with an approach equal parts academic and poetic, you might enjoy Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechen’s Hamlet’s Mill. It shows glimpses of precession’s possible influence throughout the history of art, an astronomical code for our place in the universe embedded in language.
