"...there’s something very potent occurring here from a behavioral and a biological perspective. I mean, I’d put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined. I find the reality of it far more enthralling than all our past whale mythology.”
Interesting thoughts on the value (or lack thereof) of charisma, on time management, and then her own life:
The way I got to this was that I was in a desperate funk my senior year in college — when I realized somehow for the first time, in October, “I have to figure out what I’m going to do next year.” I just thought, “Well, I’ll apply for jobs.” But it hadn’t really clicked that I was actually going to have to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life.
And I was just uninspired. I just couldn’t find the thing that I really wanted to do. And that led me into a funk for the first time in my life.
And that’s what ultimately led me to this. Because I thought, “You know what I’d want to do?” Having never previously even contemplated teaching, I thought, “I’m going to go teach in New York City.” And I started exploring it and realized what a maze it was to try to teach in New York City.
If she's resigning because of a scandal, it'd better surface soon.
If she's pursuing the presidency, then strategically, Palin's resignation may not look particularly smart: she's not even a one-term governor now. But Palin strikes me as brazenly arrogant, and as a person who believes (not without reason) that experience and excellence count for little in the minds of American voters. (Hell, who heard of Palin before MacCain elevated her from nowhere to be a VP candidate in the last national election? And so what if she isn't going to even be a 1-term governor? Neither was Obama.)
What she has right now is personality, a household name, and the goodwill of guns-n-god conservative voters. Now, her positive-name-recognition factor is likely to diminish in the coming years -- Alaskan governors rarely make the political news -- so if she's going to stay a national figure, it makes a certain kind of sense to focus, not on her job, (hey, since when did that ever matter?), but on solidifying her support within a divided Republican party, doing book tours and making speeches.
Maybe it'll emerge that she resigned because of an Appalachian trail hiking accident involving full latex body suits. But I think we have to brace ourselves for the possibility that Palin recognizes that if she stays put as governor, she'll probably fade back into obscurity. Fundamentally she's an opportunist, and I think she smells opportunity.
VERY interesting. This looks to me like the start of a presidential bid (why choose a low-Washington-news weekend unless you *want* attention?). At the very least, she seems to be gunning for control/dominance of the Republican party. At least that's how I interpret her resignation. Whether or not that's a good strategy is another idea.
I submitted my first Clarion story tonight, and returned to the Real World to find Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett dead, as well as Jerri Nielson FitzGerald, the scientist who diagnosed and operated on her own breast cancer in Antarctica. It's given me plenty to think about, and no doubt I'll repost that Michael Jackson Billy jean video when I get a moment.
But I promised a Clarion update. And so I note that I picked a way-too-ambitious story project for week one because it happened to be the one I wanted to write. I think I'm already noticing a "Clarion improvement effect" in that for the first time in many years, I actually *plotted* the story. My usual thing is to just start with an image and keep going. I think (read: am hoping) the story structure is better as a result. Certainly, I predicted to my classmates around scene 1 that this would be a 6000 wd story, and it ended up clocking in at 5,995 words. Behold the miracle of plotting! ( Read more... )
....aaaand that's it for tonight. I need sleep. So I'll post more later.
It's official, "Futurama" is coming back with Comedy Central delivering an order for twenty-six episodes to run over two seasons says the trades, confirming and adding additional detail to a scoop that first emerged at Collider yesterday.
In less great news, the Alien reboot is plagued with crazy. (note: I heard this was a prequel, not a reboot, which is kinda important given the awesomeness of Weaver-as-Ripley.)
This sounds like a great idea. I grew up with a number of fruit trees in my backyard, and there was always too much fruit to eat, and it just kept coming. At a certain point you'd just have to rake up all the fruit and put it in the garbage, and even then the bears would still come to check out the remaining fruit, and you'd have to stay in the house cursing the goddamn bears. Good times.
All over the country, the underground fruit economy is growing. At new Web sites like neighborhoodfruit.com and veggietrader.com, fruit seekers can find public mulberry patches in Pennsylvania and neighbors willing to trade blackberries in Oklahoma.
In Royal Oak, Mich., a woman investigated how to start a fruit exchange modeled after Fallen Fruit (fallenfruit.org), an arts group that designs maps of accessible fruit growing in Los Angeles neighborhoods.
So I'll be bidding farewell to Bloominton this upcoming weekend. It looks like I'll be drinking on Wednesday night to (hopefully) celebrate the dissertation defense and then again on Friday night to bid farewell to many of you folks.
I'm not wedded to Finch's on Friday, but since the demise of tutto bene it's the only quietish gourmet drink + food place I can think of. (Any other suggestions?)
But anyway. The point of this post is that I'm leaving town, and if you'd like to join me on Friday you will be much welcomed.
To train for my first marathon, I’m using the “run-walk” method, popularized by the distance coach Jeff Galloway, a member of the 1972 Olympic team. When I mentioned this to a colleague who runs, she snickered — a common reaction among purists.
But after interviewing several people who have used the method, I’m convinced that those of us run-walking the marathon will have the last laugh.
The horrible dissertation intro is written. And it is horrible. But it also brings my dissertation wordcount up to 79728 wds. And that's after cutting out a lot.
Final verdict: the acting was excellent, particularly Jodhi May as Anne Boleyn. She's easily the best actress I've seen in the role. But the BBC production departs dramatically from the book in some weirdly anti-feminist (to my eyes) ways.
The other DVD I watched recently? Hitman. It wasn't as bad as I feared (though my taste may have been blunted by a back-to-back viewing of Star Knight and Bloody Mallory). The visuals and editing were pretty slick, which begs the question of how they could have cut such a boring-ass trailer from such interesting material. ( cue trailer-rant )
So the movie had interesting moments of potential, but it was hampered by a really dumb & poorly written script chewed on by drooling toddlers. The acting (despite Timothy Olyphant's monotone voice) is actually not bad, though I do agree that Olyphant, much as I love him, seems miscast. Every scene he's in with the thuggish-looking Dougray Scott I wanted to tap Olyphant on the shoulder and say, see that guy playing the dangerous, semi-psychotic lawman? That's YOUR part. If he and Dougray Scott had just switched roles, I would have been a lot happier.
Also: Olga Kurylenko is a model who can act. I love her.
Also: Ave Maria needed to be used more often, for god's sake.
It was called “the shot that changed the republic.”
The killing in 1967 of an unarmed demonstrator by a police officer in West Berlin set off a left-wing protest movement and put conservative West Germany on course to evolve into the progressive country it has become today.
Now a discovery in the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi, has upended Germany’s perception of its postwar history. The killer, Karl-Heinz Kurras, though working for the West Berlin police, was at the time also acting as a Stasi spy for East Germany.
It is as if the shooting deaths of four students at Kent State University by the Ohio National Guard had been committed by an undercover K.G.B. officer, though the reverberations in Germany seemed to have run deeper...
Canadian short story author Alice Munro has won the third Man Booker International Prize.
She saw off competition from 13 other nominees, including Australian two-time Booker winner Peter Carey and Briton James Kelman, to win the £60,000 award.
[The judge's statement read:] "Alice Munro is mostly known as a short story writer and yet she brings as much depth, wisdom and precision to every story as most novelists bring to a lifetime of novels.
"To read Alice Munro is to learn something every time that you never thought of before."
...which I agree with.
I tend to be suspicious of so-called "literary" fiction. I've read a lot of it over the years that, frankly, isn't that good, and I've noticed as I read that the stories are often as formulaic as their "popular" equivalent.
But Alice Munro really deserves all the praise she gets. Her short stories are amazing examples of craftsmanship. When you're reading them, you really feel like you know the people she's talking about. Her well-turned sentences are almost invisible, because they serve the story, as opposed to trying to draw attention to their calculatedly arch "cleverness."
So, if you have time to read a short story, here's The Bear Came over the Mountain. It was turned into the movie "Away From Her," which came out a few years ago.
tired
contemplative
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