Immediately on arriving in Korea, I noticed how (a) so many people seem to think that speechmaking is absolutely necessary for any function, gathering, or context, and (b) so many people seem to be bad public speakers, not making any attempt to deliver speeches that interest, involve, or relate to the audience except as...
Read more →This one takes the cake. On a recent exam, three students plagiarized wikipedia. This was an in-class exam. Instead of just learning the material, the students memorized vast hunks of text from Wikipedia by rote and then wrote them on their test papers. No citation, nothing. (And, as usual, the rote memorization made it...
Read more →I’m reading John Strasbaugh’s history of blackface performance in America, Black Like You, and finding it fascinating, though I suspect that some of his arguments have angered a lot of people. (Even I feel vaguely uncomfortable with some of them, though others seem less objectionable that they are probably thought to be.) In any...
Read more →While the selection of shows is disappointingly small — cheesy Pat Metheny, cheesy Japanese jazz-fusion, or a potentially cool concert with Joe Sample — those of you in Seoul might nonetheless might be interested in seeing something at the upcoming Seoul Jazz Festival. One interesting thing is that some of the local opening acts...
Read more →For those who participated in the discussion of my post, Frankenstein, Bad? you may find Lauritsen’s response just as pathetic and feebleminded as Greer’s blatherings. How do they get people to publish this crap?
Read more →It’s a meme, y’all: scififanatic and jade park have both posted lists of ten currently favorite short stories, and I guess I feel driven to do the same. Maybe because I’m taking a grading break. 10 exams down, 20-something more to go. (And then the midterm essays.) One thing I have to say is...
Read more →Uncle Ben, CEO? A slideshow of racist advertising Alexis linked to.
Read more →Okay, so I was discussing the pathetic understanding of science, and especially our developing scientific understanding of us humans, among the so-called scholars of the humanities, with a co-worker of mine. I was specifically panning Deleuze and Guattari, who have written some total claptrap about science, so bad I remember cheering when I finally...
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