Professional Blog Launched

That’s just what I need.  Another blog to not post to.  Anyways, it’s more like a professional webpage with updates of what I’m doing.  A W3 CV, if you will.  You can check out all of its nerdiness at:

*edit* moving the blog, will update soon

The big news is that I’ve been accepted to the Digital Humanites 2009 conference.  Competition was really stiff this year so I feel especially honored to be a part of the program.  This conference is the premier conference in the field so to be accepted as a lowly grad student is a nice little boost.  The paper reviewers had lots of nice things to say along with some very good constructive criticism.

Blossom Dearie has Passed Away

I was very sad to hear that Blossom Dearie has passed away.  She was an incredible talent, but lives on through her music.  I’ve uploaded a song in the box on the righthand column if you’d like to have a listen.  There’s another tune in the above link.  Thanks to Blossom for the beautiful things she left us.

Maryland Strains my Relationship

[19:53] desistere amare: Do you want me to make a reservation for Valentine’s day?
[19:57] desistere amare: Nevermind
[19:57] desistere amare: Apparently, there are no white castles anywhere near here
[19:57] desistere amare: Sorry hon

Maybe it’s just me

I am taking a course in Shakespeare and Montaigne and another course in  Digital Humanities.  I am also teaching ENGL 101 right now.  My car has a mystery oil leak and I am praying that it is not the head gasket.
My paper on the rhetoric of infinity and calculus was accepted for presentation at a conference.  I’m still waiting to hear if I’ll get accepted to the Digital Humanities 09 conference *fingers crossed*.

I feel like the lone blog survivor even though I haven’t written anything in months. I’m thinking about a lot of things.  Reading Montaigne and Shakespeare is like gluttony.  Larry Austin is sweeping the corners of my mind.  Everything fits this semester, but that doesn’t make it less lonely here.

I feel the world changing, or maybe it’s just me.

I don’t know how to feel

It took me seven hours to find the mistake in my proof.  Seven hours!  That’s an entire day of work to find one simple summation error.  I don’t know if I am exhilarated that I actually found it or disappointed in my own idiocy.  At any rate, the paper rolls on.

Semester coming to an end

I am very busy with the end of tehe semester.  You may have noticed me becoming invisible.  I am working on a paper regarding the rhetoric of numbers, infinity, and the calculus.  I promise I will come back and post real things once the semester is over.  In the meantime, listen to minibosses.com.  They are awesome.

This Decade: My Balls are Much Too Big

My inner Jew, the part which just snagged an awesome deal on a laptop, just made these gigantic matzo balls.  That poor puny spoon.  I made the chicken stock out of a chicken carcass and mire poix.  Mire poix is the holy trinity of French cooking: celery, carrots, and onions.  So, I should have thought of a cold swimming pool and ball shrinkage.  Hot soup equals massive expansion.  In fact, the balls ended up being deformed because they were vying for space in the tiny pot.  Oh well, they still tasted kosherly delicious.

In other news, I think the Miata either needs a new CAS o-ring or a new valve cover gasket.  I guess I better get the wrench out before it’s too cold.

Last Decade: MTV Played Music Videos

And now they do again!  So long as you can discount the television part.  MTV has launched a new website where you can watch all your favorite videos for free:

http://www.mtvmusic.com/

I guess MTV got tired of youtube getting all the publicity for doing their jobs for them.  At any rate, if you grew up on MTV, this is a treasure trove of classic videos and stuff you may never have seen before.  You miss out on the commentary/banter of the people introducing the videos, but you get the videos and isn’t that the most important part.

Kudos to MTV for sucking a little less hard and remembering what the M in MTV stands for.

Last Decade: My Jeans were Big

Last decade my jeans were big.  I’m pretty sure I could fit the pant leg around my waist.  Bullheads, Jncos, Billabong, Vans.  Anything one might procure at Pacific Sunwear, now known as PacSun.  The pic is me being 16 at the twelve oaks mall.  I’m pretty sure there’s blonde highlights in the front of that hair.  It has occurred to me that I had better start writing down my stories because I’m forgetting all the stupid things I did.  Of course, I don’t mean to write those things here!

My freshman year in high school I underwent a huge fashion change.  In ninth grade, I became preppy.  No, it’s true!  Look at my 9th grade photo.  That year I wore only aeropostale, eddie bauer, american eagle, and, of course, abercrombie and fitch.  For some reason in 10th grade I decided to become a skater that doesn’t skate.  I think it was because I started to listen to music.  In 1996, I went to my first concert: The Smashing Pumpkins.  I was 13.

I can distinctly remember the smell of burning leaves.  I remember thinking to myself: Why would anyone burn leaves in the palace of auburn hills?  My attention was also drawn to the fact that the woman in the row in front of us decided to flash the band repeatedly. I think I learned a lot of things before I was supposed to know them.

Sometimes I miss the big swoosh of Bullheads.  The large expanse cavernous pockets which held my cd player- always in direct link to my brain- filling my head with nonsense.  Back then, there was a reason to be angry at the world because I still felt like I could change it.

Last Decade: The Cake

So I’ve decided to create a new segment on my award winning blog.  I call it: last decade.  Basically it shows something from last decade of significance.  And here it is:

Now you may ask, what is this?  I reply, “It’s a cake, good sir!”  Not just any cake, it was THE cake which haunted our confectionary dreams and nightmares.  You see, some time ago, a decade more or less, there was a cake that sat in a coffee shop known as the Coffee Trader.  Before I frequented the Bean in Plymouth often and after the local joint known as Cup O Joe, which was hosted by the sweet gothic girl named Courtney that I marched in high school with, there was a local independent coffee joint known as the coffee trader.  The Coffee Trader was your only hope of drinking coffee that was not from a chain in our whole city.  Alas it was not to be and the place where the Coffee Trader stood is vacant to this day (somewhat similar in history to the Cafe once known as the Grand Cafe in Farmington).

Soooo… what the hell is the cake?  The cake is this:  a very giant carrot cake.  So giant in fact, that it was said that no team of men could eat it.  The idea was that if you could eat the cake, it was free.  Or some such thing which I would foolishly partake in at Denny’s later as well as Mr. Zanskas when he poured his diet soda over it in disgust of his paltry pie eating efforts.  The cake was a dare.  It was a dare proffered by one Jim.  No one knows what happened to Jim when the Coffee Trader closed.  We never saw him again.  But in kinder days, he was our barista.  He didn’t call himself that because it’s kind of a douchebag thing to call yourself if you serve people coffee for a living.  Jim, who drove a mustang?, was our coffee dude.  He chatted us up and we came back.  It was one of those local neighborhood things where you feel like a small town, even though your downtown was artifically created and precipitously everything in it went out of business until the bars came in.  At any rate, Jim our coffee dude, would always prod us to take the challenge of the cake.  This is the cake.  We never took the challenge and now we never shall.  Quite sad I know.  Thanks for tuning in for episode 1 of “Last Decade: The Cake.”