New this season, shoes designed to make everyone two meters tall.
As you may know, following the passage of the Health Care Reform bill these shoes are now mandatory for all Americans.
From the category archives:
Et Cetera
Seen on campus this morning:
Via Brian Leiter, a list of the 200 Best Occupations ranks Actuary at #1, Historian at #5, and then, a little further down, this:
I guess if the Life of the Mind is good, it follows that the the Life of the Head must be even better.
CLYTAEMNESTRA
Citizens of Argos, you Elders present here, I shall not be ashamed to confess in your presence my fondness for my CEO, billions of dollars of losses notwithstanding.
First and foremost, it is a terrible evil for a wife to sit forlorn at one of her several homes, severed from her husband, always hearing many malignant rumors, and for one messenger after another to come bearing tidings of disaster, each worse than the last, and cry them to the household. Because of such malignant tales as these, many times others have had to loose the high-hung halter from my neck, held in its strong grip. It is for this reason, in fact, that our boy, Timmy, does not stand here beside me, as he should. For he is in the protecting care of well-intentioned taxpayers, who warned me of trouble on two scores—your own peril beneath Ilium’s walls, and then the chance that the people in clamorous revolt might nationalize everything, as it is natural for men to trample all the more upon the fallen. Truly such an excuse supports no guile.
CASSANDRA
Are you sure you should be paying out this money?
Somewhere back in the mists of time, I seem to remember our own Daniel criticized academics for not taking seriously the fact that management is a job, something that can be done badly or well (the only cite I can find is here, but I’ll link to the long version if someone finds it for me, if, that is, it isn’t something I just dreamed). I suspect that there are two (respectable) reasons for this. One is that academic managers are drawn from the ranks of academics and given little if any training. This narrow pool has already selected out a lot of people who might actually be good at it, and as a result academics rarely get to experience good management directly. Second, management is something that is much easier to recognise as a real and important skill if you have seen some good examples of it than if you have only seen bad or indifferent examples. (I think of it as a bit like my experience with dental work; the first time I had work done with a good anaesthetic it was something I couldn’t possibly have imagined before).
Here’s a long post from aaron swartz which I recommend to all who doubt that management is an important skill, and recommend, even more, to anyone who is being thrown into management tasks without much training or help, especially in an environment with unclear lines of authority and/or an anti-authority culture. If you’re planning to become principal of a school its all useful, but you might especially want to look at Point 2a and Point 9.
Five.
I especially liked this:
A newspaper columnist once told of her shock when, having struck up a rapport with a man over dinner, she was told at the end of the meal he had no vacancies for friends. He was operating a “one-in, one-out” policy. Six months later she received a card stating he was now available for friendship.
There’s a lot of fretting about Facebook in England these days, because it is creating attention-deficient friend-flators. When Henry announced that he had joined and pressed the rest of us to, someone criticized him for assuming that it was reaching a critical mass just because he, and his friends, had joined. I, by contrast, assumed that it was about to go belly-up because I had joined (I’m the classic late-adopter, as evidenced by my recent desperate bulk-buying of cassette tapes and tape players before they stop making them because the rest of you have started using ipods). That was a while ago, but I’ve got to tell you that its days are now definitely numbered, because not only has my wife joined but, worse, I just became friends with the mother of one of my secondary school friends.
To be honest, watching the anchors and reporters draaaaaaag out the joke and gnaw it to death makes it clear that the real zombies are holding down well-paying jobs presenting local news. I especially liked the vox pop with the caption “Jane Shin / Drove by sign”.
Donated Kidney is Center of Divorce Dispute:
A Long Island doctor is demanding that his estranged wife give him back the kidney he donated to her seven years ago. Dr. Richard Batista’s lawyer Dominic Barbara says his client would also be satisfied with the value of the kidney: $1.5 million. Newsday reports that Batista married wife Dawnell in 1990 and that he donated the kidney in 2001. According to Batista, their marriage was on the rocks then, but “My first priority was to save her life. The second bonus was to turn the marriage around.” Dawnell Batista filed for divorce in 2005. Dr. Batista told WCBS 880, “She had an affair, then would not reconcile, then handed me divorce papers as I was going into surgery trying to save another person’s life.
All in all the very archetype of a wacky organ donation story, right down to the mandatory quote from Arthur Caplan.
As you may know, Stephen Fry, John Cleese, The Cassini Probe, Britney Spears, Shaq, 10 Downing St and, more tenuously, Darth Vader and the Fucking Pope are all on Twitter. But who is responsible for crookedtimber? Not me. The fact that the one person CT follows is a blocked account makes me suspicious.
By the way, if you neither like nor understand Twitter, that’s perfectly OK: no-one is making you follow anyone.
Soc Blogger Jeremy Freese won this year’s Interactive Fiction Competition, where the goal is to write a text-based puzzle game in the tradition of stuff like Infocom classics. The premise of Jeremy’s game, Violet, is summarized by the Chronicle of Higher Education:
It’s noon and you’ve still got 1,000 words to type. That might not seem like much, but it’s been months since you’ve last worked on your dissertation and distractions are plentiful. To make matters worse, your girlfriend, Violet, says she’s out the door and flying back to Australia if you don’t finish the paper by the end of the day.
What’s your next move?
This is the premise for Violet, a text-based computer game in which a graduate student is the main character. As the student, you must fight through countless distractions and solve a number of puzzles to finish the paper in time to save your relationship. The story is told by Violet, who allows you to examine objects in your office and ask for hints.
Here is a review. Naturally, a sequel must now be in the works. Who should the protagonist be? What situation should they face? Obvious possibilities include a disaffected English professor teaching somewhere in a state beginning and ending a vowel, whose only creative outlet is bitter, overwritten Chronicle columns; a busily networking scholar-blogger desperate to finagle an invitation to appear on Bloggingheads.tv; or perhaps the crisis of a senior faculty member whose long history of abusive pseudonymous commenting is suddenly and inadvertently exposed.
“Classmates.com User Sues; Schoolmates Weren’t Really Looking for Him“, reports Wired:
When Classmates.com told user Anthony Michaels last Christmas Eve that his former school chums were trying to contact him, he pulled out his wallet and upgraded to the premium membership that would let him contact long-lost fifth-grade dodge-ball buddies and see if his secret crush from high school had looked him up online. But once he’d parted with the $15, Michaels learned the shocking truth: No one he knew was trying to contact him at all. Classmates.com’s come-on was a lie, and he’d been scammed. … “Upon logging into his Gold Membership profile in order to view the classmate contacts … Plaintiff discovered that in fact, no former classmate of his had tried to contact him or view his profile,” the complaint reads. “Of those www.classmates.com users who were characterized … as members who viewed Plaintiff’s profile, none were former classmates of Plaintiff or persons familiar with or known to Plaintiff for that matter.”
(Via.)
Via John Gruber.
Over at her own place, Belle suggested McCain ’08 should run with the line, “Let’s Start a Land War in Asia!” But then, in response to comments, she decided on “Let’s Get Involved In Another Land War in Asia!” instead. This is more accurate, but lacks teh snappy. It seems to me that if the canon is “Never Start a Land War in Asia” then McCain really ought to go with “Never Finish a Land War in Asia”.