One night last month, I was lounging about reading the Vanity Fair excerpt from Eric Clapton’s autobiography when Mister Husband happened by. Glancing down at the intro spread, he said, “AKMA!” He had a point, I think.

Posted at 10:15 PM | Permalink

The trees have been leafless for a bit now.

Ice started forming on the river this week. The bluffs along the Mississippi are full of icicles and frozen waterfalls.

Yesterday, I traded my fall coat (good to about 20F) for the Serious Winter Coat. And I needed a hat for my 8:45 class.

6 to 10 inches of snow are forecast for Saturday. We made the grocery run today. Tomorrow I will breakfast with a friend, run by the bookstore, and then bang out a final 1200 words for InaDWriMo. In the afternoon, Mister Husband and I will hit the O'Keeffe exhibit, then go to the department colloquium and drink a beer with the grad student mafia, and then we are in for the weekend.

I’m looking forward to a few days of hibernation.

Posted at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ever since I can remember, I’ve associated specific colors and personalities with numbers. It’s so natural to me that I don’t think I ever mentioned it to anyone until recently. (My mom will probably read this and be all WTF?) Looking back, I wonder if this particular quirk might be partly responsible for my general failures in mathematics. I would sit at my desk trying to work problems, but there were all these dialogues going on between the numbers and their personalities. Some of them didn’t like each other much, and some were afraid of each other, and some were comfortable. I didn’t like to make the ones who didn’t want to be next to each other move closer together.

These days I don’t imagine those narratives and stories when I work with numbers, but their colors and personalities have remained the same over the years. I mapped them out for Ms. Frizzy a few weeks ago for a project we might work on. (I made this in PhotoShop while working on a small screen, so please overlook the formatting issues and typos.) My favorites, by the way, are 1, 2, 7, and 8. 8 is a problem, but you just sort of end up loving her.

Posted at 7:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Both our RSA panels were accepted, so we’ll be headed to Seattle come May. Yay, research!

Of course, there’s the small matter of getting there. By plane? Oh hells no.

Much to see. Of course, there’s problems with this map — we won’t backtrack to Ft. Smith, for one thing. But it’s early yet. Plenty of time for refinement. And plenty of time for writing.

I wonder if I can get a full diss draft together before we leave? It'd be something to shoot for, anyway.

Posted at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I spent today in meetings, feeling a little like I was being herded from one to the next. My final campus act of the day was a flu shot, for which I was rewarded with a sticker emblazoned with a cow and the words “I took one for the herd.” It seemed appropriate.

So I am not very interesting today, but evidently yesterday’s NYT reported that the last of the Romanov graves have been found. Anastasia did not survive, after all.

Posted at 7:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The History Channel has a cryptozoology series, Monster Quest, and as you might imagine, I spent the evening watching the Champ and Giant Squid episodes with rapt attention*. I eagerly await the giant fish and swamp beast episodes. Oh, happy day, made even happier by this clip from It Came From Beneath the Sea.

Legend has it that the director only budgeted enough money to animate six of the monster’s arms, prompting Ray Harryhausen to dub it a ‘sextopus’.

*Curious thing: both the squid and BirdZilla episodes have featured researchers from UMN.

Update: The first two episodes I watched were rather well done, but the BirdZilla episode was just silly. I want a copy of it so I can use it to teach my students how not to structure an argument. It was more or less like this: There's no way there are gigantic birds that carry off small children and feast on human flesh. Nobody has any reasonable photos or non-crazy witnesses or bones or really anything. Nope nope nope. But if there were, here is what it might look like! And here is how it might have gotten blown all the way from south Africa to Iowa by the mighty late-70s winds! Maybe that could happen in an El Nino year! But seriously, there is no such thing. Here’s another scientist to tell you that this isn’t really even possible. Carrying off monkeys, maybe, but certainly not humans. No way.

Besides, the idea of gigantic people-eating birds is preposterous. Sea monsters, now, those are sensible.

Posted at 9:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In other news, I managed to bump the word meter along by about 3,500 words. I’m not done with InaDWriMo yet, dammit.

Posted at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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Al’s Breakfast, Dinkytown. 14 precious seats and a one-hour wait outside. Always worth it and sometimes then some, as demonstrated by this overheard testimony:

Diner #1: This place is always wonderful.
Diner #2: Oh, it’s even better when you’re drunk. It’s as good as smoking pot and watching Fantasia! Plus, the Eggs Benedict is a complete hangover cure.

Did I mention it’s right on the outskirts of the East Bank campus? Not so far from Greek row?

Posted at 3:48 PM | Permalink

Voicethread, which enables simple sound and image layering. See explanatory post here on my friend Candance’s blog.

Podomatic. So many of my students had issues with Odeo the last time I taught podcasting, so I’m looking around for other, similar systems. (Suggestions welcome!)

Posted at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chrysanthemums: some as big as a baby’s head. Bundles of curled penny-colored leaves with flickering lavender underhues. “Chrysanthemums,” my friend commented as we moved through our gardens stalking flower-show blossoms with decapitating shears, “are like lions. Kingly characters. I always expect them to spring. To turn on me with a growl and a roar.”

It was the kind of remark that caused people to wonder about Miss Sook, though I understand that only in retrospect, for I always knew just what she meant, and in this instance the whole idea of it, the notion of lugging all those growling gorgeous roaring lions into the house and caging them in tacky cases (our final decorative act on Thanksgiving Eve) made us so giggly and giddy and stupid we were soon out of breath.

Truman Capote, The Thanksgiving Visitor, 83-84.

Posted at 10:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This year it is so much better than last year, when I was dazed by lingering exams. I made a pumpkin pie and cranberry sauce yesterday, and then baked up a pan of cornbread to leave out overnight for making stuffing. I woke up this morning to the first sticking snow, a continuation of the little flurries that started yesterday afternoon while we were out. Nobody thought they’d amount to much, and really they haven’t, but there is white on the ground and more white bits coming down through the air every so often. I am snug in my fuzzy winter gown, drinking yergacheffe and feeling a little overwhelmed by how grateful I am this year.

Such a wonderful family, and I’m a little extra sad not to be with them today. We haven’t been home for the holidays since we moved to Minnesota, but Mom issued an invitation back in October. That would have certainly been enough warning for normal people, but being academics we had both set up our syllabi so that as much grading as possible dumps into the long weekend instead of the very end of the semester. I’ve gotten used to having my life booked up at least six months ahead in this job, but it still felt strange to explain that we really would have needed to plan Thanksgiving back in August in order to make it work. So I am missing them today, as well as my Fort Smith relatives, and sending them love from miles and miles away.

We are lucky that almost everyone we love is relatively healthy right now, and we are able to speak every day with the one who isn’t. Two wonderful close friends have had some big personal things happen to them lately, and they both found some resolution just before the holiday. (I’m the sort who worries over my friends, and it’s good to think of them being warm and happy today instead of trying to fake their way along while hurting.) I love my work and the cities where I live. I get to learn new things all the time. The house is warm, and full of books and bubbling fish tanks and my very best friend, who I happen to be married to. I have a copy of Capote’s The Thanksgiving Visitor, One Christmas, and A Christmas Memory to page through, and later ’ll get to work on the turkey and stuffing and sides.

Happy Holidays to all of you, and I hope you find moments of peace and cheer in the days ahead.

Posted at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was going to blog the big sea monster story of the day after my mom sent it over, but Mister Husband already did it better, and with Ray Harryhausen movie trailers, and I’m not even going to try to top that. Although I will add that the fact that the research results were published in the Royal Society’s Biology Letters is certainly a mark of their continuing relevance after 347 years of operation.

Right now, I am thankful for the weirdness of the world. It’s really a marvelous place.

Posted at 7:33 PM | Permalink

So I’m teaching a senior-level, writing intensive course on Emerging Technologies in Scientific and Technical Communication in the Spring. Registration opened last week, and it looks like it’s nearly made. And there are master's students from our MS program in it! (Masters students are allowed to take 4-credit 4000 level courses for 3 hours of grad credit. Of course, they do an extra project on top of the standard undergrad syllabus.) This should be even more fun than I had expected.

I had already expected it to be a pretty interesting time. Here’s the course blurb:

This 4-credit, writing intensive survey course explores the impact of Web 2.0 applications in scientific and technical communication. In this web-based class, we’ll work together to create an extensive informational site on scientific, technical, and social aspects of the 35W bridge collapse. Our project will use wikis, podcasts, tagging, Google Docs, Flickr, Picasa, Moodle, Basecamp and other content generation and management applications. We’ll also use blogs, IM, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Jaiku during the collaborative process.

Participants will gain a broad vocabulary and understanding of relevant theories as well as a sense of how different workplace environments are coping with the challenges of sci/tech communication in a period of complex factors, multiple audiences, geographical distances, and fast-changing tools.

I’m still sending the flyer around, though, since things will work out even better if the course picks up a few Econ, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Science majors. (Click to download PDF.)

The image is a minor remix of this HDR photo of 35W by gbenz, who runs the local photoblog View From the Tundra. Thanks for being so awesome about the CC licenses, man. The flyer is licensed in kind.

Posted at 6:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Recent reports of giant 30 metre long, poisonous jellyfish lurking off the coast of Cornwall may have been erroneous.

Several newspapers reported at the weekend that the String jellyfish, also known as the Pearl-chain jellyfish (Apolemia uvaria) had been spotted off the coast of Plymouth and Land’s End by tour operator Rory Goodall and photographer Neil Hope.

Previously this species has only been known in the deep waters off the coasts of Norway and the Mediterranean.

This pinkish jellyfish forms long strings of up to 30 metres long and is toxic enough to kill large fish. In 1997 a mass occurrence of string jellyfish caused lesions and death in a large number of cultivated salmon. [...]

Dr Hiscock has photographed and collected specimens from it and has been unable to positively identify it as Apolemia uvaria.

He stated that there was cause for concern for a positive identification as A. uvaria as crucial parts needed for accurate identification are missing and added:

“As for stinging, several of us put our fingers into the pot and no-one felt a sting - I suppose we should have draped it across our lips but ....”

Posted at 1:35 PM | Permalink

I picked up a copy of Cab’s autobiography, “Minnie the Moocher and Me,” last week, and have been dipping into it in the evenings. I had expected it to be a sanitized “aren’t I fabulous and interesting?” celeb bio, but it’s turned out to be a lot more than that — tales of illegitimate children, being managed by the mob, drinking and fighting, and cussing on every page. Which is all well and good, but as an IP geek, I find the following bit particularly interesting:

“Well, the Missourians became Cab Calloway’s Cotton Club Orchestra but we still didn’t have a real theme song. At the time, we were using St. James Infirmary, a traditional blues song that had been around for years. In the early twenties Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory made it famous, but nobody knows who wrote it.

One day Irving Mills came to me and said, “Cab, it’s about time you had a theme of your own. You’re on national radio, you’re doing national tours. The band needs a tune that it can be identified by.”

“The problem was that people were already identifying our band with “St. James Infirmary,” so we figured we ought to try to write something that would have the same feeling, and a melody that wasn’t too different. We first wrote a tune that was very similar to ‘St. James Infirmary.’ If you listen closely to Minnie, you’ll hear some of the same changes and harmonies. In fact the melody itself is pretty close in some sections. Then Mills and I got together on the lyrics. There was a song going around at that time called “Willie the Weeper.” I don’t know who wrote it, but it was pretty popular.

And there was another one called Minnie the Mermaid. They were both torch songs.

We combined our rendition of “Infirmary” with the basic concept of those two popular songs and called it “Minnie the Moocher.” We created her as a rough, tough character, but with a heart as big as a whale. Walter Thomas — Foots, as we called him — who had joined the Missourians in 1929 just before I took over, and who had previously played for two years with Jelly Roll Morton, did the first arrangement on “Minnie.” I hummed the tune we wanted and Foots put it down on paper with a little vamp before it; it became our first hit and the tune that I have become identified with personally.

The “hi-de-ho” part came later, and it was completely unexpected and unplanned. Scat singing was not new, of course. My favorite scat singer has always been Louis Armstrong, but there were many others… During one show that was being broadcast over nationwide radio in the spring of 1931, not long after we started using “Minnie the Moocher””as our theme song, I was singing, and in the middle of a verse, as it sometime happens, the damned lyrics went right out of my head. I forgot them completely. I couldn’t leave a blank there as I might have done if we weren’t on the air. I had to fill the space, so I just started to scat-sing the first thing that came into my mind.

“Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho. Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho. Ho-de-ho-de-ho-de-hee. Oodlee-odlyee-odlyee-oodlee-doo. Hi-de-ho-de-ho-de-hee.” The crowd went crazy. And I went on with it – right over live radio – like it was written that way…

From that night on, “Minnie the Moocher” and “hi-de-ho”have been one and the same as far as most people are concerned. And Minnie, hi-de-ho, and Cab Calloway, too.

— Calloway, Cab, with Bryant Rollins. Of Minnie the Moocher and Me. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1976. 111-112.

Posted at 11:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Scott reminded me of a wonderful post he wrote a few years ago on the peculiar mentality of being so functional that you can often — but not always — ignore your disability:

But I’m reminded, nonetheless, that despite how I sometimes grow furious while trying to accomplish a simple task like driving a screw or installing a windshield wiper, what stuns me from time to time is not that. It’s not the physical inability.

It’s the way the imagination itself becomes disabled.

When I was in my teens, my step-mother struggled with carpal-tunnel syndrome (she’s an RN), and so went through a period where her dominant hand was immobilized for several weeks after surgery. While eating dinner one evening at a Red Lobster in Memphis, she was forced to eat with her left hand. She looked at me and said “Wow, this is weird. This is so strange.”

I just looked at her and said “I honestly cannot even begin to imagine that. Seriously.”

This is what gets me. The rest is all simply frustrating.

What often gets me is the fact that I simply don’t know that certain things make sounds, and people have had to tell me. Snow falling, for instance. Or water boiling. Or hummingbird wings. As a writer who relies on description, this bothers me for the same reason Scott wrote his piece: it impacts my imagination. I wrote an essay a few years back on aspects of this, and it was published in a departmental collection. I’ll see if I can’t dig it up and post it here.

(I have a feeling that this is going to be Deafness Contemplation weekend here at Thinkery. There are several things I’ve been meaning to write on the topic for a long time. The trouble is that this makes me feel as if I’m gazing deeply into my own ... not navel, but ear canal, perhaps.)

Posted at 9:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, some suckage lately. The newish, rather-expensive hearing aid that I bought a year ago has been dying a slow death all semester. I took it in back in August and got into an argument with a fresh-out-of-school audiologist about whether or not there was anything wrong with it. I caved on that one, mostly because school was starting the next week and I didn’t want to ship it off to Chicago for a few weeks.

Don’t I have a backup, you ask? Yes, I do. But it’s had some issues with feedback that would cost some money to fix, and I’ve been feeling cheap lately. This is not something to feel cheap about — and usually I don’t — but I let myself slip into it this time.

My theory has been that I would send the backup off to be fixed this week or next, get it back in and running, and then send the primary one off over the break while I’m not in the classroom. Which would have worked just fine, had it not pretty much conked out on Thursday. Everything sounds like it’s underwater and about 1/4 of the volume it should be. Not so good for teaching.

So now I have an appointment for Monday morning and I’m using the backup, which has intermittent feedback that runs from squeaky to squalling so loud that anyone around me can hear it. It makes me crazy cranky. Poor Mister Husband. Obviously, I’m not willing or able to live with 16 hours a day of feedback, so this means I’ll probably end up leaving the aid out most of the weekend. This will make me functionally deaf.

In 29 years of deafness, I have never done this. I may be a severely/profoundly deaf person with only some of her hearing in one ear, but since I got my first hearing aid at 2? or 3?, I have never been without sound. The sound has had varying quality over the years, but it’s been enough to allow me to communicate and never bother to learn to sign.

I do not know how to be locked in my own little world of silence. I am very self-conscious about being able to hear, and almost never let myself be ‘seen deaf’ in public. (Compatriot G is the only colleague who’s ever seen me deaf, since we swim at the same pool. And even then, he persists in trying to talk to me. It’s rather funny, actually.) So I probably won’t go out of the house much unless the backup decides it’s in a better mood.

The next two days are probably not going to be much fun. But maybe I’ll get a chunk of writing done.

Posted at 7:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

From a rooftop succulent garden on the St. Paul campus.

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My first semester here, I finagled a trip to the UMN archive and special collections caverns as part of a campus look-see for a visiting scholar. The idea fascinated me: what could be more scholars-on-the-tundra than caverns full of archives, possibly run by a race of archivist gnomes?

Our East and West Bank campuses are indeed situated along the bluffs and banks of the Mississippi, and those sandstone bluffs are full of caves. The U makes use of all of it. For instance, the Weisman Art Museum garage is built right into the bluffs:

It’s a rather deep garage (six stories, perhaps?), and driving down into it often feels like you're descending into part of the river itself, even though that's not actually the case.

In the archive caverns, you have the sensation of being even further down. There’s a four-story service entrance carved into the bank, but we entered through the secured elevator system in Anderson Library. Access is limited to staff, but Jean-Nickolaus Tretter, the founder and head archivist of the extensive Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies*, which we were visiting, was nice enough to guide us through. There are two humongous caverns, each two stories high and the length of two football fields. Jean put it in perspective by explaining that they had the space to archive the Washington Monument several times. Caves being what they are, they naturally featured a year-round temperature in the mid-50s and very stable, high humidity. It doesn’t take too much doing for climate control technology to stabilize the rooms at 62 degrees and 50% humidity, the optimal conditions for paper storage. The Immigration History Research Center has posted a photo tour, and the cavern photos are about halfway down the page. They don’t really convey the sheer size of the caverns, but they do give some sense of just how much material is stored down there.

There were no archive gnomes, as it turned out — just human archivists who are managing a truly vast amount of materials, tucked away in the banks with enough sump pumps to survive a 500-year flood.

*The Tretter Collection is remarkable, and Jean is knowledgeable, chatty and very nice. Some of you would have a fine time doing research there. The collection contains all the usual paper as well as a surprising array of non-paper materials. The queer pulp collection alone could take up years of my life.

Posted at 8:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I’m working on a new installment of the Twin Cities Caves series that will feature the UMN archive caves, but since I’ve got to head out the door for meetings it won’t be up until later tonight.

It figures, because I see from the traffic logs that quite a few MNSpeak newcomers are finding their way from a comment I left over there. So for you guys: here’s Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the cave series. The entire Twin Cities category archives are here, if you’d like to take a look. I also keep a Twin Cities Flickr set and admin the Twin Cities Peanuts Statues Flickr Group. A 2008 calendar of Minnesotaness photos is available here, should you find yourself interested in such a thing.

And I’ll be back around here later.

Posted at 1:59 PM | Permalink

Leonard likes to go for rides.

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At the age of 25 I went from being the kid next door ... to being called a major American writer -- that's a role you just don't fit at 25. ... I used to feel I was secretary to someone named Norman Mailer, (and) to meet him you had to meet me first.

Obviously, he got over it. In spades. RIP, old lion.

Posted at 9:06 PM | Permalink

I made a calendar to give as gifts to family and friends this year, and thought I’d make it available to others as well. If you’d like one, you can find them here. It’s priced at $17.99*, and all proceeds go toward eventually graduating.

It's primarily shots taken in the Twin Cities, although there’s a few from Bemidji, Hastings, and Fargo-Moorhead. There are lakes and dogs and carnival rides and socks and UMN buildings. It’s all your Minnesotaness needs in one convenient package.

I also made a single-page calendar ($6.99) that condenses late-summer midwesterness in a single potent capsule. I picked this image because C. liked it so much, but if you see something else in this set that you'd like to see as a one-pager, let me know.

*Aside to CafePress: does the base price really, really have to be $14.99? I estimate that you’re working a one million percent profit margin.

Posted at 3:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

1. Procure some morsels of candied ginger covered in dark chocolate.
2. Pop one into your mouth. Crunch just a bit, then savor.
3. Appreciate. Swallow. Linger.
4. Take a sip of dark-roasted Mexican coffee, possibly au lait.
5. Oh my.

Posted at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The biggest development this week was the French court decision that Wikipedia is not legally responsible for information published on the site. Judge Binonche ruled that Wikipedia is a web site and not a publisher, and that “Web site hosts cannot be liable under civil law because of information stored on them if they do not in fact know of their illicit nature.” The official Signpost synopsis and commentary is here.

Yet another piece on whitewashed articles, but this one profiles MyWikiBiz, a company that offers to write Wikipedia articles for hire. The owner/writer, Gregory Kohs, has been permanently shut out of Wikipedia. Quite a bit of commentary from Wales is included.

A roundup and commentary of government edits to Wikipedia. NASA tops the list with 6,846 edits.

A semi-related press release announces that the current issue of Selling Power Magazine “shows how large companies are using the Wikipedia software and model to bring customers and sales teams together in an easy, open space where knowledge and needs combine to offer resources and solutions.”

Wales’ talk in Florida drew quite a bit of attention this week, particularly for his prediction that MySpace has two years to live.

A VCU student screened and deleted a new contribution by Wales. Much commentary has ensued.

An ongoing study by University of Minnesota researchers has revealed that only one-tenth of 1 percent of Wikipedia editors account for nearly half the content value of the free online encyclopedia, as measured by readership. In addition, the computer science and engineering faculty and students have discovered that few edits inflict damage on the content and damage is typically fixed quickly. Their findings on vandalism corroborate Viégas, Wattenberg and Davé’s 2004 findings developed through history flow visualizations.

CNN says nothing new, but it says it to a bigger audience: Use With Caution: The Perils of Wikipedia. Similarly, The Associated Press picked up last week’s “teaching with wikis!” topic, so it also hit a zillion additional outlets in the past few days. Veropedia continues to receive attention for existing.

Posted at 4:44 PM | Permalink

For lo, I have been tagged by Madeline.

1. I only recently noticed that I’ve become increasingly enamored of taxonomies over the past 10 years. Now I’m to the point that my sock drawer looks like this (prompting much commentary by Mister Husband and C) and I’m writing a dissertation on encyclopedias. Turns out I like putting things in order, and I’m fascinated by the way other people order various stuff. (In retrospect, this probably started to come out at UPS, when my work on peak volume plans basically involved getting a lot of people to gather up a lot of data and then give it to me to put in order so we could make predictions.)

2. In spite of this, I am sort of repulsed by the idea of implementing a more universal system of order like Getting Things Done. But I remain a big fan of lists and calendars. I have my own little system that works pretty well, except for the once a year when I accidentally stand someone up for lunch.

3. Earlier this year, I was regularly unplugging entirely from digital media each Saturday. This article on a related study at Carleton, one of our local colleges, reminded me that I should get back to that. NaBloPoMo makes it kinda difficult this month, though. (Aside: I brought this up when I was guest-lecturing in Mister Husband’s FYC class yesterday afternoon and the students were positively horrified.)

4. We saw Neil Young last night. It was the most I've ever paid for tickets, but the cheapest date on his current tour.

5. That said, it was totally worth it. And so is Chrome Dreams II. I’m a fan, but not a properly committed one (that would be Mister Husband), and neither of us are hardcore Rusties. But this album will be on repeat in the house for awhile. Both of us have commented that this is the first CD we’ve bought in awhile that really needs to be listened to as an album instead of just dumped into iTunes and shuffled.

6. I ended up feeling really bad for Pegi Young last night. People came and went and talked during her opening set, despite the fact that she and the band were in great form. I’ve never seen a Minnesota concert crowd be this rude before, but then again I’ve never been in the middle of a concert audience that skewed as heavily yuppie as this one did. They made it extremely clear that she was not the reason they came. When she finished and Neil came out, everyone went nuts and paid strict attention. I couldn’t help but think that despite the fact that she’s an accomplished, experienced musician in her own right, there’s no way she’d ever play to this size crowd if she didn’t open for her husband in a slot that’s more typically given to young bands who are still paying their dues. That’s got to be hard for a spouse — to open for a crowd who doesn’t care, to have your merch shunted off to the very side of the merchandise display out front. She seems to handle it well, though.

7. We had the first tiny flakes this week. Must be winter, even though they melted before they hit the ground. A couple of months ago, I was wandering around in Fergus Falls with the Nikomat when a very energetic older gentleman came up to talk to me. He must have been in his 80s or early 90s, but he had a quicker step than I do. He said that when he worked in the northland saw mills as a teenager, it got down to the -40s. The cold and friction would cause the saw teeth to snap and fly out at him. It seems like such a far-fetched idea now, a winter that cold, but the local histories I’ve read say it was indeed so.

Updates: Mister Husband’s review of the show is here. I couldn’t agree more with his comments about the crowd.

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I finally got my course evals from the Internet Tools & Issues I taught last spring. Mostly high scores and mostly good comments — and then there’s the one bugaboo that stands out right in the middle of the comment sheet:

This class assumed I knew how to blogg [sic], I took this class because I thought it would teach me how to...it did not.

This from an online course that required them to post to the course blog and comment on each other's posts for sixteen straight weeks. They learned to incorporate images and comics and video and audio into blog posts. They read and wrote about blogs as citizen journalism. They considered Google and privacy. They discussed net neutrality and user-generated content. And then we talked about it in a zillion other ways as well. In short, they were as up to their eyeballs in the composing practices of bloggery as I can possibly encourage distance-learning students to be.

Le sigh.

Posted at 3:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Sally, who’s running what promises to be one of the best-written style advice blogs around, left a comment wondering if anyone remembered Cab’s appearances on Sesame Street. And of course I was all Cab? and Muppets? In the same place? OMG. And off I went to search YouTube.

Aw yeah.

Posted at 9:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Every time I go home, my mom puts a different one of my great-grandmother’s quilts on the guest room bed. They always amaze me, because I never knew my Momo as a quilter. By the time I was born she only crocheted. Apparently, there are quite a few tucked away in mom’s house, and they are all in perfect condition because Momo immediately put them away in her cedar chest after she finished them. The fruit of all that tiny, intricate work — and all those hours— never enjoyed by the woman who made them. It breaks my heart.

Live your life as if it’s real, dear readers. Don’t keep your nice things put away until you die.

Update: Dear Reader Lynn sent the photo over to her quilter friend Debi, who says it might be a variation on the Whig Rose pattern. Mom recalls both her mother and Momo referring to it as a “poppy pattern.”

Posted at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Cab Calloway regularly played the Castle Royal caves back in the 1930s — which is also when the Fleischer Studio* was producing Betty Boop cartoons. Cab “starred” in three of them.

This one, which ostensibly re-tells the Snow White fable, is my favorite. In the course of fleeing the Wicked Queen, Betty, Koko, and Bimbo end up in a series of haunted caves where they encounter Cab’s ghost, singing St. James Infirmary Blues. There’s layers upon layers of intertextuality going on here: the song, which is about dying after finding your girl dead in an infirmary, spliced into the well-known fable, the name of which is also an euphemism for cocaine**, with various horror and fable tropes worked into the whole thing.

But I digress. My point with all this is: I wonder if Cab's adventures at the Castle Royal might have inspired part of the cave sequence? Betty and her compatriots run from the witch's castle into a snowy landscape that looks not unlike Minnesota. Betty tumbles along bluffs that are quite like the bluffs of St. Paul and is transported in her ice coffin via gnome sledge. The caves are strangely furnished, albeit not at all in the way that Castle Royal was. Along the way, there is a table of dead men gambling; one of the stories told by the Wabasha Caves guide yesterday concerned a gangland murder that took place around a card table in the room adjoining the stage cavern.

There’s no way to really know, I suppose, short of resurrecting Max Fleischer. But isn’t it pretty to think so? Wouldn’t it be awesome if it was true?

*There’s a fascinating IP section in the Fleischer entry.
**Cab’s famous Minnie the Moocher also dies of a cocaine overdose, and the relevant Fleischer cartoon also features ghosts. The drug also figures heavily in other Calloway songs as well as the mythology surrounding him.

Posted at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Wilhelmina and I met up at the Wabasha Street Caves yesterday morning for the Cave Tour. While I didn’t learn a ton that I didn’t already know, it was still totally worth the $5 admission to actually see the inside. “Inside” means both the restored nightclub, which still holds a weekly Swing Dancing Night every Thursday, as well as a few of the unused caves behind it.

The caves that were part of the original Castle Royal are covered over with steel infrastructure and stucco and completely finished out with electricity and running water. After the original club closed at the start of WWII, the caves were repurposed a number of times. They became a roquefort aging facility for Land O'Lakes, which put down concrete slabs in the unfinished caves in order to better roll wheels of cheese across them. (The concrete also effectively seals over any gangster bodies that were buried there during the original nightclub years.) Then the nightclub had another run as Castle Royal II before it became a disco in the late 70s. After the disco closed, it became a teenage hangout called The Library, which lasted for about a year. Then it was finally abandoned and turned into a major headache for the city. You can still see the scorch marks from hobo fires in the 1980s.

At some point in there, the city also crammed it absolutely full of trash from the 1952 Mississippi Flood. When the current owners bought it in 1991, it was two days away from being bulldozed. They’re a construction family, and they paid a fortune to clean the trash out of one of the cave sections so as to have a place to store their heavy equipment. (Several caves beyond it are still packed with trash because it would cost too much to have it hauled off.)

I’m glad they decided to restore the nightclub and find another place to store their equipment, because the place is such an interesting aspect of St. Paul history. The tour also includes quite a lot of information on the part it played in the gangster culture of the city and the extent to which it’s haunted today. (I shall leave it to Wilhelmina to comment on that. She’ll do it far better than I could.) All in all, quite recommended by Thinkery: admission is reasonable ($5), and it’s an excellent way to spend an hour geeking out on local culture.

Posted at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

On the way home from Fargo in late September, we stopped off at Sauk Center. It was Sinclair Lewis’ hometown, and the place is still very proud of the fact that their Main St. was the model for his best-selling novel Main Street. The day we were there was nippy. It was drizzling and I had forgotten to bring a jacket. I was tired and in need of a cup of tea and a bathroom — in other words, whiny and not feeling the camera at all (which is obvious in the shot.) Sauk Center is a lovely, historical small town that is doing its best to preserve what it has, and it deserved more from me than that. But some days, you don’t have much left to give.

Posted at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thinkery has indeed had features before (witness the Redhead and Pulp Projects, which aren’t dead yet), but never one that actually appears on a schedule. Lately I’ve been mining a number of news alerts I set up, as well as the Wikipedia Signpost, and then dumping the links into Zotero (which I’m really loving, btw). Zotero doesn’t share, and I’m not willing to set up a duplicate link ranch through deli.cio.us. Thusly, the Friday Wikipedia News Roundup is born.

Veropedia, “a collaborative effort by a group of Wikipedians to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it for all time,” received attention for mere existence this week.

There was also quite a bit of brouhaha in various minor news sources about the fact that a professor required her students to write Wikipedia articles! And the students felt more invested! But then some of their articles were deleted! Haven’t quite a few of us in the Rhet/Comp field been doing this for years now? Why is this news?

Slashdot latched onto the Webcomic Deletion Controversy that raged among the webcomic folk much earlier this year. (I watched it happen through the Diesel Sweeties blog.) This wouldn’t be news either, except for the fact that Slashdotters called for a boycott of Wikipedia’s annual fundraiser until the notability policy changes. As far as I know, this is the first time that a digital community has organized a concrete protest of the notability and deletions policies instead of just complaining mightily about them.

Wired Monkeybites spotlighted WikiPediaVision, which, like TwitterVision and FlickrVision, visualizes contributions in real time.

Employees of San Joaquin County and the City of Stockton were ordered to quit contributing to Wikipedia while on the clock. The article notes that WikiScanner recorded significant daily activity on state-owned computers. (In fact, articles on WikiScanner were all over the place this week.)

Jimmy Wales is the inaugural speaker in iCommons’ Innovations Series. He’ll discuss the for-profit Wikia corporation and the launch of the South African Wikipedia Academies on Nov. 13. No word on a podcast/webcast, though one would assume there’ll be one.

Eastern Michigan U is conducting what they’re calling the first university-sponsored examination of Wikipedia. (Do we count Cambridge’s sponsorship of Wikimania 06 or not?) The English and History Departments are co-sponsoring a series of talks on the subjects. As far as I can tell the first talk is “Wikipedia: The Democratization of Knowledge or The Triumph of Amateurs?” by visiting prof Marshall Poe, formerly of The Atlantic Monthly.

Alternet has a nice piece on whitewashing, the increasing corporate practice of editing Wikipedia entries to remove unfavorable information. The Chronicle of Higher Ed also wrote about whitewashing by colleges.

The Signpost confirmed that page creation for unregistered users will likely be re-enabled this month on a trial basis. It was previously removed after the 2005 Seigenthaler Incident.

Posted at 7:40 AM | Permalink

Enriqueta came from a roadside shack in Oklahoma. She had a handmade bobble head that involved clay and a nail, and my klutzy self broke it fairly quickly. So these days she lives on the window sill next to Skull Barrister (they’re engaged, I think, although they haven’t formally announced yet), and she stores her head in various places. The heirloom aloe works pretty well, although sometimes she just keeps it by her feet for easy access.

Happy Dia de los Muertos! Before I die, I will spend a November 1st in Mexico City. Just you wait and see.

Posted at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)