“I am not Master Lebowski; thou art Master Lebowski. I am the Knave, called the Knave. Or His Knaveness, or mayhap Knaver, or mayhap El Knaverino, in the manner of the Spaniard.” From The Two Gentlemen of Lebowski, Act I Scene iii Hat tip to the inestimable Fellow David of Berkman
All posts in January 2010
Activities
Just a word to say that my relative reticence online corresponds to a lovely time that Margaret and I are having together in Glasgow. It would be even nicer without the ice on the pavements and the sub-zero temperatures*, but we’ve had a spectacular fortnight anyway. Yesterday we went to the Hunterian Art Gallery, but…
On Bombers and Security
What makes something an act of terrorism rather than simply a mass murder? At the simplest level, it’s the intent to cause terror, to impose disruptive fear on people. Even if a terrorist act doesn’t cause any deaths, it succeeds if it engenders exceptional fear. So why aren’t civil authorities working to combat fear,…
JRER
The Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Religion is warming up to appear on a library shelf near you soon. If this touches on your area of interest, check it out!
Textbooks, Exploitative Academics, and Criticism
A brushfire developed when Andrea James made a side comment in her Boing Boing post about LaSalle University (itself a noteworthy pointer to the rich social history of distance learning); she observed in passing that “Like modern academia, a big part of [LaSalle’s] revenue involved selling overpriced books authored by instructors,” and when several commenters…
Stray Thought
If — as John Siracusa and various other Apple cognoscenti suggest — part of the forthcoming iTablet package involves a special format for electronic text/mixed-media publishing, “publicly documented. . . [with] an SDK available to all interested parties,” wouldn’t this be a spectacular opportunity-moment for a start-up academic publisher to step up to the plate…
As I Was Saying
So as if to prove my recent point about being a laughable old coot: Last night, I was making curried rice noodles for Margaret and me. I pulled out the ingredients, chopped a sweet pepper and onion, boiled the noodles; it turns out that I had made half again as many noodles as I needed,…
Glasgow and Me, Part Six Seven (Really, This Time)
Quick notes: I didn’t hear any fireworks before last night, and I didn’t hear the fireworks that went off last night either (having fallen precipitously asleep at 11:30); Margaret assures me that there were fireworks aplenty, from more than one location. I imagine that the subzero temperatures have diminished the inclination of amateur pyrotechnicians to…