Whereas the English-speaking world was formerly perceived as a hierarchy of parent (Britain) and children (‘the colonies’), it is now seen rather as a family of varieties. The English of England, the original source of all the World Englishes, is now seen as one of the ‘family’ of world English varieties, with its own peculiarities [...]
A while a go I wrote a post asking, why can’t academic research be more like blogging? Well, I’m happy to say that I am not the only one thinking this. Here is Timothy Burke at Swarthmore: Electronic catalogs, wherever you go in the academic world, have become a horrible crazy-quilt assemblage of incompatible interfaces [...]
For those who don’t know about Slashdot, here is the wikipedia entry: Slashdot (frequently abbreviated online as “/.”) is a popular technology-oriented weblog, primarily consisting of short summaries of stories on other websites with links to the stories, and provisions for readers to comment on the story. Each story generally receives between 50 and 700 [...]
On the heels of a post in which I highlighted key points from Mike Davis’ account of urban slums as the new face of global poverty, Davis has a new article about the ways in which the US Military sees Iraq as a test case in the upcoming battle against the world’s urban poor: The [...]
Did you know that Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman was also known as Melvin Coznowski? And that images of the gap-toothed “What, me worry?” kid existed long before they became associated with the magazine? This is from one of Robert Alphonso Taft’s (son of president Taft) primary campaigns: More campaign memorabilia here. (via metafilter) Design [...]
Our initial bake sale goal was $100,000, but MoveOn members always surprise us — we not only brought in $750,000, but we gave out 40,000 flyers on John Kerry and registered thousands of voters. We estimate that over half a million people baked, bought, or sold food. One sale in Ft. Lauderdale, FL, raised more [...]
I just learned a new word: Coprophagia is the technical term for eating feces. This has been studied in dogs by several people with no definitive answer for “why” being found. Here is the context: Panic set in not among the students—a large number of whom must have come of age watching There’s Something About [...]
It seems that there are three major factors leading to the widespread popularity of the T-Shirt: war, Hollywood, and politics. According to The T-Shirt Book by noted screenprinting industry expert Scott Fresener, the beginning of the T-shirt is credited to the navy. No one, says Fresener, really knows when the first T-shirt was produced. But [...]
This site shows electoral polling data by state, with the number of electoral votes added up. I think this early on we can discount the fact that one candidate or another might be ahead by X number of electoral votes (it shows Bush winning by 18). What is really interesting is if you sort by [...]
In my last post I quoted leftist scholar, Mahmood Mamdani, as saying that the problem with the War on Terror was that the united states viewed Iraqi’s as little more than “collateral damage.” Well, reading a news story from the Telegraph I’d bookmarked last week, I found out that British officers agree with Mamdani’s assessment. [...]