Reviews
Earlier tonight I saw the best show I've seen in a long time. How I learned to drive was billed as "for mature audiences", and they might have added "trigger warning!", because this show is dealing with some seriously dark...
13 Apr 2013
I'll start by saying that there's a lot of good things to say about the show. It started with a strong hand. We knew going in that it had a great story, a good script, and fantastic songwriting. Most of...
30 Dec 2012
So I ended up waitlisting my way into the midnight show tonight—Longwood's mainstage is The Rocky Horror Show, which is, yes, the show on which the movie was based. It was a crazy fun experience, because all the serious Rocky...
26 Feb 2012
Just got back from Hampden-Sydney, where I saw their production of Picasso at the Lapin Agile, a crazy little show written by Steve Martin (yes, that one) about what would happen if Einstein had dropped in at one of Picasso's...
24 Feb 2012
As I mentioned earlier, the current audiobook that I'm working on is Left behind. As usual with my audiobooks, I listen in installments that correspond to whenever I'm driving someplace in my car (for more than a fifteen-minute ride), so...
23 Dec 2011
Religion
I was just reading 1 Samuel (that sounds like a lead-in that has a back-story, but it doesn't, really), and the footnotes in this edition (New American, i.e. Catholic) are remarkable. Here's one on verse 13:1: A formula like that...
16 Feb 2014
I feel like I've been saying and typing the word "misogyny" an awful lot lately, such that it becomes bleached of its meaning, but seriously, it's getting difficult to even imagine alternative explanations.
17 May 2012
My old diocese (Peoria) is still occasionally sending me updates because they haven't noticed I moved, and against my better judgement I just read part of one. In it, Bishop Jenky is going on about how he's willing to go...
9 Apr 2012
So I walked out of church today. My complicated relationship with the
Roman Catholic Church took a turn for the even-more-complicated when I
finally got fed up with them turning Mass into yet another political rally over
the contraception mandate. Today it was right in the homily, and I
closed my book, grabbed my stuff, and walked out of the church, and
didn't look back; I went down the street and joined the Episcopalians
for their Mass, already in progress.
12 Mar 2012
These links came up in a recent Facebook discussion. They address points that I've mostly made myself, but they do it rather more elegantly: Do they really believe abortion is murder? (Spoiler alert!: no.) Do pro-life policies reduce abortion? (Spoiler...
8 Mar 2011
Politics
Several things are going on at the same time, precluding a pithy response to any of it. A short post only about violent protest, or about cops, or about looting, would have some implications that are quite the opposite of...
1 Jun 2020
Y'all, seriously. If you support Biden you need to be supporting looking into the allegations. If he didn't do it we need to get this out of the way now. If he did do it, we need to get this...
29 Apr 2020
There's a meme going round facebook that claims the following about the US Constitution: Article II Section 4: If the President is impeached for treason, the Vice President and all civil officers shall be removed. That's really not what it...
17 Jul 2018
The other day I was reading an article about the (un)affordability of housing in the US. It contained an image illustrating the hourly wages required to afford a 2-br rental in each state; which inspired me to make a map breaking out the metro areas separately from the states that contained them:
21 Jun 2018
I've come to the conclusion that people who are against gun restriction, including and especially those who nonsensically argue for more guns as a way to prevent gun violence, really just believe that the occasional culling of our young is...
27 May 2018
Nutmeg
The newspaper was predicting ten inches of snow for today and the usual websites 6–12". My ass. That's more than a foot out there, and it's wet, sticky snow at that, so an enormous pain in the ass to shovel....
1 Dec 2006
A dog who is about to get a bath but does not want one looks so sad. (Smells better afterwards, though....) "Memo to the City of Chicago: Crossing the street should not require tide charts." --Shalom Owen...
7 Oct 2006
A rundown of my activities on this Spider-Man-themed Flunk Day.
18 Apr 2005
School
This week Eric Zorn included in his weekly Tweet of the week poll one that lamented the cost of textbooks: Hi, I'm a college professor. Years ago I wrote a terrible book no one wanted. Anyway you have to buy...
11 Mar 2015
On Friday I attended a required training wherein we (faculty and staff) were informed/reminded about our obligations under (the current interpretation of) Title IX. In case you've been hiding in a cave for the last few years (or decades),...
25 Oct 2014
It dawned on me the other day that I started teaching ten years ago. I still sometimes feel like I don't know what I'm doing, though of course the experience makes it easier to roll with the punches. I can...
12 Aug 2013
Linguistics
I've just come to the realisation that I hate, hate, HATE the verb "humble", particularly as used in the passive voice and referring to oneself, though with a number of related variants. I hate it because the word in that...
18 Jan 2009
During Spring Break of 2003—my last at Brown—I went on a road trip to Québec with my friend Theresa. It was a great trip, but I remember being disappointed in one respect: she vetoed playing French stations on the radio,...
30 Aug 2007
This is so gratuitous, and so Apple. I just filled out a survey about my recent AppleCare call, and after I clicked submit, I was presented with the following page: It is, in case you can't tell, a massive (and...
28 Aug 2007
Crafts
Well, perhaps I'm being slightly hyperbolic there. But I sure was grateful. Last time I was in Champaign, I made a stop at their most excellent yarn shop and bought some stuff. Among other things, two skeins of laceweight yarn....
27 Jun 2006
My weekend started last Friday, with a party in honour of a few of our new faculty at Heather Hoffmann's house. It was the best sort of party: most of the time, most of the people were standing around the...
24 Oct 2005
Dancing
That's how many people were at tonight's ballroom class.* It was overbalanced with women, but only about 2:1, so that's not as horrible as it might be. The encouraging thing is that the guys that were there appeared to be...
13 Sep 2007
Ages ago, I TiVoed a showing of The story of Vernon and Irene Castle, a Fred-and-Ginger flick about the founding mythology of modern ballroom dance. I knew of the Castles, of course, but not a lot about them; and (as...
13 Jan 2007
Misc
(adapted from two FB posts) tl;dr: Population vax percentages count some people in different counties for the numerator and the denominator; jurisdictions with high proportions of college students in dorms are likely to have higher vax rates than reported. If...
18 Nov 2021
The starting point for the idea of cultural appropriation is solid: it's problematic when some people (usually white) are rewarded or praised for displaying or producing or performing something when the originators of that thing (usually POC) are put down...
1 Mar 2021
This is such a weird article to be reading in 2020, as a long-form essay featured in the Post. It probably would have come across as relatively progressive ten or fifteen years ago, but it's a weird in-between now: it's...
14 Sep 2020
Work from home, 9 to 5, conference with Zoom or FaceTime Ooh, binge that show, watch that scene Living in quarantine Friday night and you sit at home knowing there's no place to go Netflix or some nice music, watching...
26 Mar 2020
German Lopez claims that Stephen Colbert veered into homophobia in a recent insult-rant against Trump. It's possible that you could make a case that even with the specific context, such Trump-Putin insults are homophobic. But I think that case requires a heavier lift than Lopez is making in his article.
2 May 2017
