Primrose Road

Shakespeare's Words, which uses the texts of the New Penguin Shakespeare series. (Most online Shakespeare editions have to use a late-19th century Complete Works because it's the only one out there that's in the public domain.) The main feature is a glossary that also serves as a concordance of sorts (though the concordance feature at Open Source Shakespeare is, in my opinion, more interesting) and has a neat character circles tool that would probably serve as a good study aid for high school students and first-time Shakespeare readers.

Measles is on the rise again in the United States thanks to celebs and M.G.'s (the respected "Master of Google" degree) pushing the belief -- to desperate parents in desperate situations -- that vaccines cause autism.

Read about it here and here.

Put really simply: this is why science education and critical thinking skills are so important.

Cousin: Nobody ever moves from Brooklyn to Queens.

Brother: Our mother moved from Brooklyn to Queens.

Cousin: Because she fell in love. Otherwise, nobody moves from Brooklyn to Queens.

SigOther: Nobody moves from Queens to Brooklyn, either.

Me: Lots of people move between Queens and Brooklyn. But everybody moves away from the Bronx.

SigOther: Hey! (pause) Well, yeah.

Cousin (to Brother): You should definitely move to Manhattan.

SigOther: Why does everyone think Manhattan's so special?

Brother: I think there's one thing we can all agree on -- Staten Island blows.

It's "האינטרנט זה גדול, כי יש בו פורנו כמו חול" (or, "The Internet is For Porn") from the recent Tel Aviv production of Avenue Q, featuring Katie-Fletzet and Trekkie-Fletzet:

The envelope was what first tipped me off: a return address from an organization called "Colleges in New York" located in Little Falls, New Jersey, with a message reading "Ever dream of earning a million dollars? Check out your personalized website inside."

Enclosed is a questionnaire that informs me that "according to the US Department of Labor, those who have a bachelor's degree earn about one million dollars throughout their careers than those who only have their high school diplomas."

(Quick statement unpack: If you work from age 22-62 at $25,000/year, you earn one million dollars throughout your career. If you work the same 40 years at $50,000/year, you earned one million more dollars throughout your career.)

The "questionnaire" never identifies itself as what it is (most likely a request for information from an unaccredited college program). only asking questions like the following:

Are you satisfied with your employment?
- Totally satisfied with employment situation
- Currently considering a job change
- Need more income, greater challenge, etc.
- Other

They also invite me to fill out the questionnaire on the web via a "personallized website," which turns out to be just a form with my name and address filled out, asking for my phone number and the best time to call. At the top, they tell me that they "look forward to helping [me] identify educational programs that will improve your earning power and enhance your long-term employment skills." The website http://www.collegesofny4you.com (without the extra info for my "personalized site") produces a 404 error. Further, I can't determine what institution the site is affiliated with because I cannot get past the "personalized" page without submitting my phone number.

Neither the site nor the questionnaire offers any identifying information, which I am fairly sure is not permissible in most states. A WhoIs search offers little more because the domain name was registered by proxy. And the return address on the envelope happens to be exactly the same address (P.O. Box) as a school that closed in 1990; thus, a quick Google search might lead a person to believe that the questionnaire comes from a valid, operating school.

In any case, anyone brave enough to proffer his or her phone number in order to determine who these people are and what their game is (I have enough diploma mills calling me already, thank you) wins $5 in chips from the Atlantic City -- or Council Bluffs, Iowa -- casino of your choice. ;)

Score one for posthumanism: at the University of Reading, they've developed a brain-like robot controlled by rat neurons. (Read about it here and listen to the report on The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe.) Apparently, the robot was able to "learn" within a week.

Some (over)excited commentators on newer media have posited that programming, hypertext, and/or networking serve as not merely metaphors but near-perfect models for how the human brain works. Posthumanism does something different: it starts from the idea that we can create consciousness in a lab. If consciousness can develop and function outside the human brain, "consciousness" is not necessarily human nor is it what necessarily makes us human.

This works out quite nicely for humanities-people seeking a philosophy that doesn't overvalue consciousness ("subjectivity" = thinking makes it so?) and for science-people who are (thankfully) challenging neo-Cartesian dualist arguments.

When some people are 19 years old, they drink / eat / smoke / sleep too much; when I was 19 years old, I :

1. Allowed a teen literary magazine that had published a (ba-a-ad) short story I wrote to reprint the story for a book collection and not pay me any royalties;

2. Published my college creative writing portfolio as a short story collection through a vanity press that was allowing employees of the chain bookstore at which I worked to publish for free as long as we talked the press up to customers;

3. Tried to establish an Internet presence in order to sell the above book;

4. Won 7th place in a vanity-press-promoting writing magazine's playwriting contest.

Before I started my Ph.D. program, I wrote a letter to the vanity publisher asking them to discontinue the book; they sent me back a letter informing me that they had. The book is still listed as for sale with several online booksellers, however, and this suggests to me that the publisher might be still willing to print a copy for those willing to pay (including my friend G., who last year ordered a copy solely for the purpose of taunting me; unfortunately, my attempt to feed the book to his cat failed miserably). And it's EVERYWHERE.

This concludes reason #8,756 why young, naive, "Yay, I'm a WRITER!"s shouldn't fall for vanity publishing schemes.

Also, this serves as reason #4,922 why we need a web service called "Eraseyourpast.net."

And reason #885 why the laws of physics need to be changed so that a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate can punch her 19-year-old self in the face.

This month, someone arrived at Primrose Road via a search for hamlet generating facility.

I wonder if Hamlet generating facilities can generate more Hamlet generating facilities.

I teach my freshman comp classes with three goals in mind for students:

1. Gain a working understanding of the rhetorical triangle, especially in terms of how they need to adjust their writing to the specific rhetorical situation (i.e. audience and purpose);

2. Learn how (and why) to write essays and term papers that engage specific examples as opposed to general clichés, and

3. Understand appropriate forms of evidence for different rhetorical situations as well as the how, when, and why of citation.

I've taught a handful of 200-level literature classes and have found that the major lingering issue that remains unresolved from freshman comp is #3. Students regularly hand in papers that cite essay mill essays (i.e. sample essays on the Web that serve to entice students to purchase pre-written essays that they can then turn in as their own) and often-random websites as support for their arguments.

While it would be naive of me not to attribute this to "English class doesn't really matter"-itis, I've decided that this semester, I'm doing what I'll call the "What The Heck Am I Looking At?" exercise with my two Fiction survey classes. Each group (50-student English classes being taught by lone adjunct = lots of group work) will receive printouts of the following Web pages, reached by Googling "baldwin sonny's blues" (one of the stories we'll be reading in class):

- Lecture notes from the UC Davis website;

- "Summary and Study Guide from enotes.com;

- Essay on biblical allusions in the story from findarticles.com;

- JSTOR article that they won't be able to access via their school's computers;

- 123helpme.com's essay (see two entries back for my 123helpme.com lamentation);

- Wikipedia entry on the story.

Then each group will discuss the sources in terms of (1) function (i.e. why does the site/page exist?), (2) credibility, and (3) ethical use.

Of course, "ethical" in this context probably means "not making yourself look like someone who is unaware that the teacher, too, has access to Google."

We'll see how this works out. The Freshman Comp / Business Writing Crap vs. Not Crap exercise is still going strong.

From the Hays (Kansas) Daily News:

The first book, "Honor with a Vengeance," was published in 2006, eight years after Sullivan finished writing it.

"It took four months (to write), but I wasn't getting any support from anybody," he said. After searching the Internet for publishers that weren't going to wipe out his bank account, Sullivan settled on PublishAmerica.

After a lackluster experience with the company, he saved up $700 to have his second book published by AuthorHouse.

This (1) is quite sad and (2) suggests that Poe's Law doesn't just apply to fundamentalists.