Toasted Cheese!
June 1, 2008Toasted Cheese 8:2 is up!
A Midsummer Tale!
May 8, 2008Guess I should remember to publicize my own contest. 
AMT is a creative non-fiction contest. Please, resist the urge to make up crap and call it non-fiction. I know it’s hard, Margaret B. Jones, but you can do it! As per usual, the word limit is 3k, and stories must take place in the summer. This year’s theme is:
The theme of the June 2008 A Midsummer Tale contest is: Snapshots. Photographs can trigger memories of events you thought you had forgotten. Has it been a while since you’ve looked at the dusty albums or boxes that hold your family photos? This year’s AMT contest is a chance for you to dig through your yellowing snapshots and reminisce. Choose one old photo and write about the events surrounding it.
Official announcement here. General contest rules. And the AMT specifics.
Now go tell me a story!
This seemed apropos.
April 18, 2008(I’d post more of these silly memes if I didn’t have to mess with the coding every time to get WordPress to display them correctly. Kind of spoils the spontaneity.)
| You Are a Question Mark |
|
You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning. And while you know a lot, you don’t act like a know it all. You’re open to learning you’re wrong. You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more. You’re naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises. Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. (But they’re not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!) You excel in: Higher education You get along best with: The Comma |
| What Punctuation Mark Are You? |
What It Was
March 8, 2008March 8 is International Women’s Day.
When I was growing up, I took feminism for granted. Of course I was a feminist. Why wouldn’t I be? I don’t remember ever even consciously thinking about it. It just was.
Of course, I did go to UVic. At UVic, you could be a feminist liberal environmentalist and still only be slightly to the left of center. Perhaps this is why I never felt particularly radical. But that was later. Before that I grew up in a series of very small towns, surrounded by very average people. I didn’t know any “intellectuals.” For a good part of the time we only had access to two channels of TV. And of course, there was no internet. There were books, of course, and I read a lot. But it was mostly mysteries and horror and those 800-page historical romances, not Gloria Steinem.
And I still felt that way.
But now it seems that feminism has become a bad word. The same way liberal has.
What the fuck is up with that?
In one of my tutorials this week, we somehow got into a discussion of feminism. One student said that perhaps the current backlash has to do with the natural tendency for kids to rebel against whatever their parents did. Maybe. Another said that her problem is that she doesn’t really know what feminism is. And that turned into a discussion of Women’s Studies and why it’s called women’s studies. Someone said, “Yeah, why no men’s studies?” and a bunch of them jumped into say that it’s because everything else is men’s studies (so all is not lost). A number of them (male & female) said they were interested in taking a Women’s Studies course, but felt intimidated. Some said that Gender Studies would be a better name (I agree with this, but mainly because “gender studies” reflects a continuum rather than a polarity, not simply because it would be more inviting). A few said they had been warned not to take WS courses by friends/siblings who had taken one. But the one student who had actually taken a WS course declared that it was to his (yes, his) surprise “normal.”
Yay. And whew. I guess all has not gone to hell in a handbasket. Yet.
So for my student who wasn’t sure about it, and for anyone else who has ever said “I’m not a feminist, but [insert right you believe women should have here]“, here’s the definition of feminism:
1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests
You believe that women have equal rights? Then you are a feminist. No buts. You are.
It makes me sad that so many people seem to think feminism is something scary or shameful when it should be just what it is. (I mean, seriously. You don’t believe in equality? You’re not just an anti-feminist, you’re an ass.)
There’s a Grammar Day? Who knew?
March 7, 2008Not me. Apparently March 4th was National Grammar Day… and I missed it! This is what happens when you don’t keep up with your feeds. The irony, of course, is that my feeds were piling up because I was grading midterms that were full of guess what? Yes, bad grammar. And spelling. (And abused apostrophes and unnecessary quotation marks.) But that’s par for the course.
At least I’ll know for next year.
AB Article
February 19, 2008I have another new Absolute Blank article at TC: Poetry 202: Sight and Sound. It’s a follow-up to Poetry 101: Getting Started.
Didn’t plan to do another so soon, but we had an opening that needed to be filled… and now back to our regularly scheduled programming (a.k.a. thesis-writing).
An old favorite from the TWoP FAQ:
February 11, 2008One of the reasons I got so hooked on TWoP back in the day was because they didn’t take any crap.
Q: I love typing in all lowercase or all uppercase, ignoring proper grammar and punctuation, and writing my messages like I’m text-messaging on a cell phone with an eight-year-old. That’s cool, right? I mean, who cares? This is the internet!
A: Well, we care…but the sad truth is that other posters might skip over your posts if they’re too hard to read. Things like proper spacing, capitalization, and punctuation make your posts much easier on the eye, and they make you look like quite the Captain Smartypants, too.
Look, we’re not grading you. You won’t get banned for misspelling “definitely” or anything. Just try your best to write neat, coherent posts. Don’t type “2″ for “to,” or “U” for “you,” or “l8r” or “LOLOLOL!!!!!!!!!!!” or any of that nonsense. Throw in a carriage return now and then to break up the text, and please use proper capitalization. Your computer comes with two shift keys. Use ‘em.
Emphasis added by me. Link.
