Someone Break the News to David Horowitz

News flash: there are a lot of Republicans on the PGA Tour. Finally, David Horowitz has a chance to prove how fair and balanced he can be by mounting a campaign for a golfer's bill of rights, promising to discover the networks behind this nefarious conspiracy to exclude liberal golfers, and publishing a list of the 100 Most Dangerous Golfers.

The Day the Earth Stood in the Balance

Or, what I did on my winter vacation. Read it and weep. Happy new year!

How to Do Things with Ghosts: Student Web Projects, Fall 2008

Thought for QSMS I'd pass along links to the web projects some of my students chose to do as an option for their final research project in my introductory/general education world literature course, Novels and Tales. Our focus this semester was on How to Do Things with Ghosts. Here's what they came up with:

Two Cultures of Ghosts
The Uses of Ghosts

Ghosts in Comfort Woman
Ghostly Hearn

Concepts of Death
Beyond Mortal

So, what's your verdict?

All Future Assignments Must Be Facebook Pages...at Least in '09

Be sure to check the comments, too. Seriously, if all of us assign this every course we teach in '09, we'll have populated teh intertubes with so many entertaining plot summaries that no college student will be inclined to pad an analytical or interpretive essay with needless plot summary...evah!

Forget XMas...

...or any other ways you have of abbreviating "Christmas." Onechan just invented the best one ever. It happened this evening when she was trying to write a card to one of her day care providers. What she was trying to write was "Have a nice Christmas." What she actually wrote was four hearts in a row, followed by "QSMS." Not bad, eh? Reads just like she says it: kwissmiss. Her 5th birthday is 24 days away....

On Hawthorne and Douglass: A Research Note

I haven't done too much with Hawthorne's "Egotism; or, the Bosom-Serpent" (1843) since I mentioned it here and here, but this passage from Frederick Douglass's "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" (5 July 1852) got me thinking about it again:

Oh! be warned! be warned! a horrible reptile is coiled up in your nation's bosom; the venemous creature is nursing at the tender breast of your youthful republic; for the love of God, tear away and fling from you the hideous monster, and let the weight of twenty millions crush and destory it forever!

I don't think Douglass was intentionally reallegorizing "Egotism," but his switching of the gender of the afflicted victim and the location/actions of the serpent sure puts Hawthorne's short story in a different light, doesn't it?

On the Double Positive

Onechan (five in late December) and imoto (two-and-a-half today!) were building a room for their dolls in the play room in our house this past weekend, complete with bunk bed (a kids' bench, turned upside down), pillows, blankets, and all the necessary accessories: a plate filled with small change for snacks, a bucket of golf balls (some real) for entertainment, a shovel, and an assortment of other doll-appropriate toys. I was grading in another room, while the Full Metal Archivist was doing homework in still another one. Because mine was closer to the play room, onechan kept coming in to update me on their progress. The first time I saw their room, I was impressed. I think I even called it "awesome." Perhaps that's why, in an effort to get my attention a few minutes later, onechan deployed the double positive: "Dad, it's more awesomer! Come on!" She may even have reached for the triple positive still later: "It's even more awesomer now!" And indeed it was.