We read books, out here on the prairie

I always notice these things at the last minute, and I should pay more attention to all the excitement that goes on around Morris. I just learned that the Prairie Gate Literary Festival starts tomorrow.

We hope you will be able to join us for the 5th Annual Prairie Gate Literary Festival this weekend, October 23-24. Events start on Friday night in Briggs Library with a reading by Hugo and Nebula award nominee Emma Bull at 7pm. Saturday morning sign up for a writing workshop with one or two of the writers and then stick around for lunch with them (included in the registration fee). Saturday afternoon starts with a panel discussion/Q&A session with the authors and is followed by a reading from YA writer Eric Smith at 2:30pm, Translator Ebba Segerberg will share her work at 4:15pm. After dinner stop by at 8pm for a reading by Minnesota Book Award nominee John Hildebrand and poet Vandana Khanna. All readings are free and will be held in Briggs Library.

Whoa, Emma Bull is going to be in town? I know where I’ll be on Friday evening.

Soooooooup

soup

I’m giving an exam on Friday, so I’ve offered the students extended office hours today and Thursday, so that they can stop by and get any questions answered. Many hours of office hours. Hours in which I cannot leave. So I’m noodling about on the internet a bit, because of course none of my students have come by, and I run across this little article about Oprah Winfrey, and her new project, a show about Belief. “Oh god,” I thought, “please let a student come by to ask me lots of questions. Even to offer lots of excuses. Anything to prevent me from reading any of this.” But no students came by.

There is no god.

Free of any responsibility or obligation, my eyeballs involuntarily swiveled to the open page, and my brain slurped down the anecdote Winfrey offered. I couldn’t help myself. I read everything. I can’t not read something. I’m like a rat, who eats but has no emesis reflex, so the toxin just enters and simmers there, in my head, making my consciousness regret ever waking.

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Captain America, Socialist

captain-americaFox News threw a fit over the fact that Captain America, the comic book character and movie fantasy, was just too darn liberal. In the latest iteration of the character, not only is he black, but his enemies are home-grown American fascists who hate immigrants, which is just cutting a little too close to the Republican bone.

Amanda Marcotte has a good factual rundown of Cap’s genre history, but I have to say my favorite treatment is this work of fiction, told from the point of view of Steve Rogers’ 21st century publicist.

Something else she didn’t see coming: it turned out Captain America was basically a communist.

“More of a socialist, really,” he said, when she tiptoed toward the matter over lunch on Monday. Luckily, there hadn’t been any fallout from his weekend. It wasn’t that the media had suddenly developed a sense of restraint, more that neither protest had been deemed worthy of press coverage in the first place. Of course, if he kept at it, he would become the reason for said coverage.

“Went to meetings sometimes,” he was saying now, “but I worked a lot and I was pretty much always sick so sometimes I couldn’t—” He gestured vaguely with his chopsticks, then indicated the stone bowl in front of him. “This is really good, what is it?”

“Bi bim bop,” she replied, mostly on auto-pilot, still trying to process the way he’d shrugged off the question as if it was about something totally innocuous. Ice cream flavors. Sports teams. Favorite models of car. Steve experimentally added another couple dollops of hot sauce to his rice, and then it hit her: “Oh my god,” she said, “you slept through the fifties.” He looked up from his bowl blankly. She stared at him. “The whole thing. You missed the entire Red Scare—”

It’s a strange historical phenomenon that people came out of the Great Depression appreciating the role of government in providing security, and then went through the 50s and suddenly turned paranoid against the government.

What is Intelligent Design Creationism?

Obvs, he did it.

Obvs, he did it.

Larry Moran discusses some apologetics from Jonathan McLatchie, in which McLatchie briefly argues for intelligent design. I think the fact that it’s in the context of Christian apologetics already gives away the store, but at least he gives a succinct definition of intelligent design:

The study of patterns in nature which bear the hallmarks of an intelligent cause

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Ethical skepticism

Since you’ve all already made your travel arrangements (or wished longingly that you could make those arrangements), you all know that Skepticon is less than a month away. I’ll be there, taking it easy and just enjoying other people’s efforts…although Lauren made some noises about drafting me to do a workshop. But no! I shall be lazy!

One thing I wanted to mention, though, because it’s important, is that Skepticon is totally transparent about their financials. When you donate to Skepticon, you can see where every dollar goes — and it’s all plowed right back into the conference. It’s not a profitable fundraiser for an organization or an individual who’s up to something else, it’s entirely for the purpose of educating the public at a yearly event.

It’s a good cause, and if you can’t go this year, you should drop them a few dollars (only if you can afford it!) and try to go next year. It’s always worth it.

Rationalizations

molumen-transparent-cube

Even skeptics do them. Brian Dunning is out of prison, and he’s written a lengthy rationalization to explain that he wasn’t really a criminal. His excuses: he’d been suspicious, his partner in the scheme was the shady one, he hadn’t been scamming eBay at all, he was just a scapegoat, he was only sentenced to 29 months, not 20 years. He just explains that all he did was imbed 1×1 invisible pixels in his site that got eBay to willingly plant cookies on visitor’s sites, that allowed him then to reap rewards every time that visitor bought something through eBay. Not his fault!

Of course he also reveals that the 1×1 invisible pixel publishing business was astonishingly lucrative, bringing him an income of $1.1 million. But hey, that’s just about what a good corporate job would pay. So it must have been all right!

I make nowhere near that amount at the education business, and even less at the blogging game. Maybe my mistake is that I need to make my efforts very tiny and invisible, and then I’d get rich?

The Morris Area High School Gay-Straight Alliance: The Revisioning

Well, gosh. We thought the local Gay-Straight Alliance had won a victory, and they did…but of course the conservative status quo had to strike back. New rules have been posted in the school.

Notices of non-curricular student club meetings may be posted only on a bulletin board designated for non-curricular clubs. Such notices may include the name of the club; a brief description of the club; the dates, times and locations of meetings; and a statement indicating that students are invited to attend the meetings. Also, all notices posted by non-curricular clubs must include a disclaimer that states: “This is a non-curricular student club. The School District does not endorse or sponsor the goals, objectives, activities, or opinions of the club.” Any distribution or display of other information/materials relating to non-curricular student clubs, other than the bulletin board posting, may only be provided to students who choose to attend club meetings.

Materials related to non-curricular clubs may not be distributed or displayed in school hallways, classrooms or common areas, nor may announcements be made over the School District’s public address system or in school-sponsored publications.

The first rule of gay-straight alliance club is no one talks about gay-straight alliance club.

That’s a bit draconian. So to forestall the possibility that there might be gay signs or gay announcements over the PA, they’ve declared that no “non-curricular” club can make any announcements at all.

As a local parent points out, homecoming is a non-curricular activity. So are senior prom, pep rallies, and athletic events. I’m sure the students will enjoy the newly drab, somber, staid hallways of their institution.

That notice really ought to be signed by the proud author, so we could all know who the puritans are.

I support #BoycottStarWarsVII

Every time I go on the damn internet there’s this terrible annoying “SQUEEEE!” noise everywhere. Some new movie trailer is playing on half the computers on the network, I think.

I confess, I felt a strange Force tugging at me too when I saw that — I saw the original on opening day in 1977, I enjoyed The Empire Strikes Back, felt the disappointment of Return of the Jedi, although I had a kid then who was totally into it. And then came the horrible, awful, tedious prequels, and now JJ Abrams is in charge? Bleh. I’m not expecting much, which means I might actually enjoy it, thanks to diminished expectations.

But then there is other optimistic news: the racists have announced a boycott, because it features a black character in a leading role. I approve. Just stay home, racists, from everything.

Apparently the two leading characters are a black man and a woman. Can we dare to hope that the MRAs will also announce a boycott? If all the awful people would just withdraw from the world and sit and stew and fume all by themselves in hermitic isolation, the world would be a better place.