Category Archives: General Comment

An Entry Sad to Make

One of the joys of the 06 summer came with working with students from Farmington in a collaboration between Tunxis Community College and what we called The China Institute. John Timmons and I, along with Ren Tong, provided opportunities in digital storytelling and Mandarin Chinese study for the students, who generated wonderful work in video and other software.

These young men and women were charming, smart, conscientious, and tech savvy. One of the standouts was Alyssa Roy, whose gregariousness and work ethic made the digital storytelling sessions a pleasure, not just for the instructors but for her peers.

Alas, we must report losing her to an automobile accident.

This is very sad news.

College and Value

My wife sends this to me from the NYT. Here’s a snip (login may be required):

Some public university officials say they worry that students who are charged more for their major will stick to the courses in their field to feel that they are getting their money’s worth.

“I want students in the College of Engineering at Iowa State to take courses in the humanities and to take courses in the social sciences,” said Mark J. Kushner, the dean of that college. To address problems like climate change, Mr. Kushner said, graduates will need to understand much more than technology. “That’s sociology, that’s economics, that’s politics, that’s public policy.”

Undergraduate juniors and seniors in the engineering school at Iowa State last year began paying about $500 more annually, he said, and the size of that additional payment is scheduled to rise by $500 a year for at least the next two years.

Mr. Kushner said he thought society was no longer looking at higher education as a common good but rather as a way for individuals to increase their earning power.

Lying Liar

The Veracifier video of Gonzales testimony here is just outrageous.

Josh Marshall is right on here, too:

Without going into all the specifics, I think we are now moving into a situation where the White House, on various fronts, is openly ignoring the constitution, acting as though not just the law but the constitution itself, which is the fundamental law from which all the statutes gain their force and legitimacy, doesn’t apply to them.

If that is allowed to continue, the defiance will congeal into precedent. And the whole structure of our system of government will be permanently changed.

I think that the future and the past have already connected with this “precedent” or the conditions that provide for its proliferation. Entertainment news, disingenuous schooling, willful forgetfulness, arbitrary government decision-making, inimical government, and scorn for creative problem solving and intellectual pursuit. On a grand scale, we must chose to play by rules and not pervert the very notion of that choice by corrupting agreements. The Constitution is a fragile thing and will only keep if we use it wisely.

Rome did fall.

Crap

Yet more crap.

I’m fairly informed on American history. I wont ever stop studying it (is that knocking on wood?). What’s clear is that our system is a system that must be used and used proactively, and thus I support impeachment with full thrust: American power shouldn’t be about force or information gathering; it should be about sharing and creativity. I don’t believe we can leave Iraq as quickly as some would want, which is a pretty sorry position to have to take. But major media will not cover some stories that matter and need to mater at the human level, such as those effects of ignorance and arrogance that change the lives of millions on pure whim. Media story after story on the subject of the “war on terror” (shameful term) are not about what we need to know.

More specific case: Media force the notion that elections in the US are about candidates. They’re not, so I could care less about what is said in the padded-cage engines of our election cycles. People who run for president are tough customers, but they’re not that tough. The only public figure I’d put a vote down for is Cornel West. Elections should be about need, ideas, and the people who elect. YouTube in politics is curious only.

We just had a family destroyed just down the street. Horrid. This is one of the worst crimes I can think of because it’s about the destruction of space, of an ambient idea, of an ideal, and an expectation, which Langston Hughes teaches me a lot about. Ethically, the invader leaves their rights behind them when they push into my space. In culture we share our spaces with others and learn where the boundaries are. In my mind, you don’t enter another person’s space unless you are invited in or your entrance can assist in some reasonable fashion or reasonably prevent harm.

9/11 was a similar invasion, a breaking of boundaries.

Yes, I believe that the law requires that Bush be impeached.

Games and Art

Roger Ebert sparks more conversation about the subject of games and art in this listing. Mark Bernstein responds here.

Some of this reminds me of our experience with Shelly Jackson in Contemporary Fiction. Each student in the course has a different physical reading of what I would refer to as “the text,” much as with games where puzzles can be solved in different ways or different choices lead to different outcomes, an allure of Borges’ garden.

The question of what makes something art or high art is still up for grabs, even when the concept goes back to Mozart. With games, the question not be if they are art, but “when” something becomes art.

Forget the Propane

Giving the new grill its first go-round was interesting and tasty. Here’s what it looks like in the showroom. It’s a fantastic grill.

Forget the propane, though. We kept to burning paper in the chimney.

The thermometer read at 450 for a full 40 minutes, which was part of the test. This is pretty typical though.

Anyway, here’s what we did with it.

Tenderloin cut into 1 and 1/2 inch steaks, rubbed with lots of kosher salt and pepper and gooed with olive oil. I seared the steaks over high heat coals in bins on the side then baked the filets in the center of the grill for about 8 minutes. Perfect. Red and firm.

Rosedale corn.

Grilled garlic Naan.

And a bottle of Juan Gil thanks to C.

Bad Grilling Weather

Today was not good for grilling. The Chipotle chicken was sweat and soft yesterday, but today the hamburgers came off like roofing shingles, well sort of. It was hard to tell whether the grill was cool enough for cooking and the charcoal smoked like mad.