Crooked Timber

I don’t seem to be doing too well playing rock, paper, scissors over on Facebook so I’ve decided to focus my energies on taking care of my adopted turtle Turquoise. It’s good prepartion for when I’ll get a real turtle likely in the near future (unlike some turtle plagiarists, it’s a plan I’ve had for a while).

Unfortunately, you can only earn munny to feed your pet by having your pet pet by someone else or petting other people’s pets. (That’s not as hard to say three times fast as it may seem at first read…) And it turns out that despite having over 150 friends on Facebook, only three of them have (fluff)Friends, one because I asked him this morning. So this is a request that if we are linked on Facebook (or should be since we know each other) then can you please come over and show Turquoise some affection? Thanks!

Anyone wondering why I would spend time on Facebook has to understand that it is imperative for the legitimacy of my research to familiarize myself with these services. It’s a sacrifice, but all in the name of science.

I should add that I have been thinking about a more substantive post concerning Facebook and hope to get around to it one of these days. Lots going on there, it is spreading like wildfire way past college students, and there are some understandable reasons for that. More later. It’s time to check in on Turquoise now.

Our 5-year old, Zoë, is very bad at losing at games. Today she wept copiously, following a painful defeat in tic-tac-toe. (In her defense, she was exhausted and feeling frazzled for independent reasons. But really: one should chill, when it comes to this game.) Zoë: ‘It’s not FAAAAIIRRR!’ Daddy [against better judgment]: ‘Why isn’t it fair?’ Zoë: ‘Because I tried my very best, but I still didn’t have fun.’ There is something to that, as a theory of justice.

.. but actually I find this pretty funny:

(From yesterday’s Bay area NYTimes.)

Dynamically coupled vaguely squid-like fun.

Among the many reasons to love the late Pierre Bourdieu, quite apart from the range and quality of his scholarly work, is the fact that he was willing to appear in the 1977 film Slap Shot as the character of Moe Wanchuk. He wrote about the experience many years later in Contre-feux, but most English-speaking readers remain completely unaware of Bourdieu’s brief career as a Charlestown Chief. I mean, talk about putting your cultural capital at risk:

Continue reading “Hogging II: Son of hogging”

OK, we’ve worked out a hockey playoff format. I’m going to cover the Eastern Conference, and the redoubtable Scott Lemieux of LGM will provide your guide to the Western. Perhaps we’ll even include some vlogs of ourselves watching the games and offering commentary with a couple of large glasses of red wine! That sounds like good fun. I haven’t got my predictions ready just yet, because I’m not done with the best-of-777 coin-tosses I traditionally use for the first round of the playoffs. I’ll have those ready within the next 24 hours or so.

But when the Islanders scrambled into the playoffs over the weekend by sneaking a few pucks past the Devils’ little-known backup goaltender while everyone else was watching the Masters (how little-known is Scott Clemmensen? Apparently he got an email after the game from his parents, who were relieved to know of his whereabouts and thrilled to learn that he was still on the Devils roster), it occurred to me that I might do well, this year, to apply to the NHL playoffs the nearly-flawless prognosticatin’ method I have used in the past for the annual Grand Championship of American Foot-Ball, namely, predicting the outcome of the contest by determining which team is wearing the more masculine jersey.

That’s when I realized something that has probably been obvious to many of you, even though (solicitous of my feelings as you are) you have refrained from telling me all these years: NHL logos suck. Really bad. Almost every one of them sucks, and collectively they suck in many different ways.

Continue reading “Logocentrism”

Commemorating the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, the USPS is coming out with Star Wars stamps in May. Woohoo! Limited edition express mail envelopes will also be available and this fact has me contemplating what I should send to myself in express mail. Yes, it’s a great marketing ploy, I am sold.

The site is collecting votes for the stamp that will “reign above all others”.

And now, for only the second time in its 256-year-history, the U.S. Postal Service invites you to vote for your favorite stamp. The winning stamp will become its own stamp sheet.

More on my dedication to Star Wars in another post.

Thanks to Scott Feldstein for the above photo. Apparently there’s such a mailbox in Palo Alto as well, I’ll have to look for it.

.. just start marching.

It’s cute. I had already found the dinosaur steps blogworthy two years ago, but this newer option is even more amusing.

Jim got such great response to his academic haiku contest that he decided to categorize the submissions by field. You are requested to cast your vote in the following categories:

• tech/computer/Internet haiku
  
• social science haiku
  
• humanities haiku
  
• physical science haiku
  

I’m surprised by some of the classifications, but I’m sure it wasn’t easy with some of those submissions. Why my paper that was published in Social Science Quartery was not classified as social science is beyond me, but perhaps Jim needed some excuse to create a fourth category to make things manageable and thus put some entries in the the fourth interdisciplinary tech/computer/Internet-related, but otherwise unrelated group. Even in the realm of academic haikus my work lands in a heap of confusion, the story of my academic life.

In any case, this was a really fun exercise and I thank Jim for inspiring so many of us to think about our work in 17 syllables. If you haven’t done it yet, I recommend playing with the concept even if you are too late to enter this contest. Go read the submissions and vote to get inspired.

Grad school pal Jim Gibbon launched an academic haiku contest a week ago. I only noticed it today (Wednesday),which happens to be the deadline for submissions. If you still have time, head on over and submit something. If it’s past Wednesday then feel free to add your creative output in the comments here.

The idea is that the haiku should represent some of your work (a paper, a book, a dissertation, etc.). Here are my two submissions:

I am an expert.
I am man, you are woman.
I exaggerate.

From: *Hargittai, E & S. Shafer. 2006. “Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of Gender.” Social Science Quarterly. 87(2):432-448. June.

RSS, widgets,
Don’t know one from the other.
Average Web users.

From: Hargittai, E. 2007. “Wikis and Widgets: Differences in Young Adults’ Uses of the Internet” Paper to be presented at the 2007 ICA meetings.

[*] I have to add that it’s actually not possible to tell from the findings whether men overestimate or women underestimate their skills, but perhaps that amount of artistic freedom for the haiku is allowed.

One of the nice things about blogging is the way you get to find out about new things, read books and watch films you’d never otherwise have come across, and so on. Eszter recently persuaded me to take part in a Flickr project where you take one photo per day. Some days, especially dark cloudy ones with British weather, can be a challenge, and I’ve sometimes been reduced to taking a pitiful snap of a household object. But I’ve also noticed a real impact on my perception of the world. Walking around, camera in pocket, being open to the opportunity to take a picture has a striking effect on what one sees. An interesting form here, an odd pattern of rust there, a splash of colour, an unusual building or a surprising or funny scene…. And the competitive/comparative element comes in too: you hope for comments, or for a given image to be “favorited”. You quickly get to notice, too, that there are some pretty interesting people on Flickr here and there. There’s this guy, for example, who has a nice line in images of buildings taken from the same point, but 20 or 30 years apart (and he supplies the architectural and social commentary to match). Or this one , (a kind of latter-day Cartier-Bresson) who captures street scenes in New York in black and white and has a sharp eye for the incongruous. So thanks, Eszter, for opening my eyes a bit.

(I can see that this is going to get expensive too: I’m already looking to buy a digital SLR and puzzling over the Nikon-Canon version of the Apple-Microsoft divide.)

Not interested in football, but still want to get into the Superbowl spirit? Check out Jeremy’s “The Boy Detective” dance choreographed for the occasion. Try at your own risk.

Requisite addendum from a Chicagolander: Go Bears!