Evidence that I'm still grading, or something

It came up in the car on the drive up to Sacramento. It was one of those moments of kizmet that pop up in the non-sequitir stream of commentary on long drives, between curses directed at aggressive drivers and asides pointing out the beautiful, the strange, and the silly. I can't quite remember precisely how it came to this point, but it did: The terrorists may already have won.

I don't mean that in any political sense. I mean that when the new TV Guide sweepstakes comes out, it will inevitably be mailed to a Mr. Al Qaeda, in a big gawdy quasi-official envelope declaring in big red letters: "GRAND PRIZE WINNER!" Underneath, of course, it will bear the usual disclaimer, "If the code number on your official entry form is selected at random."

So yes, indeed, the terrorists may already have won.

All of which leads me to think that somebody in Homeland Security (Heimatssicherheit in the original German) should be identifying an address to begin a massive campaign to undermine funding for terrorist operations, by sending a constant barrage of unrequested magazine subscriptions and other junk mail offers to them. Imagine the time and energy it will take away from planning attacks, if they're constantly on the phone to Wine Spectator, or Hustler, or Field and Stream, trying to stop a subscription. ("No, no, you don't understand. We are not hunting and fishing enthusiasts! We do not want your decadent magazine!")

Rally

Lauren and I took time out of finals week to go up to Sacramento to join a few thousand of our closest friends to protest Governor Schwarzenegger's continuing campaign against education, nursing, and public safety. The news stories from papers across the state all resemble The San Francisco Chronicle story (a fact which holds its own lesson): all understate the crowd size considerably, all tell a story of conflict between the Governor and a group of vocal protestors. This discourse decontextualizes, for instance, by referring to competing claims about whether the Governor promised to fully fund schools according to Prop. 98, and competing claims about whether his budget does fully fund schools (he did make the promise, he did reneg on the promise).

Standing in the heat, yelling, chanting, hearing the speeches making our case, all felt very good, but it was also terribly exhausting. And today, back into the fray.

Resistance

Grading papers forces me to confront anew the difficulties of a semester. This term, I decided to push for open dialogue as much as possible, and did everything I could to make that happen. Of course, it didn't work all the time. When it did work, notably in Professional Ethics, the students took initiative, thought things through, brought their own ideas and experiences to bear, and respected differences of opinion and the dialogue itself. When it didn't work, I am fairly convinced, the students didn't find a way into the dialogue, or the spirit of the dialogue. I am at a loss why, because I do believe my approach didn't vary all that much between classes.

And I don't say this to single any class out or to assign blame to any group of students, nor to assume blame myself. bell hooks desribes a class that didn't work in Teaching to Transgress. She concludes that teachers can't create dialogue all by themselves, that it takes the response of students to make it work. Obviously true, but hooks seems to evade the issues of (a) whether that means it's the students' fault when a class doesn't become dialogical, and (b) to what extent a teacher can, after all, make it work. She also isn't terribly specific about how to make it work.

What I tried to do this semester is threefold. First, I tried to take as much grade-pursuing pressure and behavior out of the courses as possible, basically by making them easy to pass, and frankly, easy to ace. The goal there is to turn attention away from the need to produce a pleasing performance and toward the material under consideration itself. Second, I tried to show myself to be an interested dialogical partner pursuing knowledge along with them, rather than as a possessor of knowledge monologically presenting it to them. This is an attempt to be honest about the nature of philosophical inquiry, specifically its openness to revision, reflective reconsideration, etc. It was also an expression of my changing attitudes, beliefs, and understanding of life, the universe, and everything. It was also an attempt to invite students to be part of the dialogue, not to assume they will be fed the answer I'm expecting back from them, and to take responsibility for contributing to class discussion. Third, I tried to keep the tone light, which is something I usually have done anyway. Even when the course material gets into dark areas - issues of death and dying in Pro Ethics, for instance, or the existential dread of choosing in the Intro class - I attempt to inject levity of some sort. Mainly, this is because I am funny. But it's also a deliberate and conscious technique.

Anyway, these don't always work. Sometimes people don't get the jokes. Sometimes people don't get the point. Sometimes people seem to deliberately obstruct me, or others, or even themselves - which is mystifying. The most mystifying thing is when I'm taken absolutely wrongly: when I'm taken to be lording knowledge or power over my students, or something like that. This is deeply weird given my demeanor in class. I believe I make the classroom open to saying just about anything. The only limit I impose is that you should take philosophical points of view seriously, not be dismissive.

But that's what it appears to boil down to in many cases of abiding resistance to dialogue: an absolute refusal to consider that philosophy may be relevant, that something other than one's own point of view and habit of thought may be significant. That may be the point at which bell hooks' account is most pertinent.

Penumbra

Last night we went to the annual reading and celebration of the release of Penumbra, Stan State's literary and art mag. Lauren has two poems in this year's issue, and decided she would read.

She absolutely stole the show. It turned out that Lauren was the last one to read, luckily for everybody else. She read "A Letter to My Lover, while waiting for a Northbound to pass," complete with rhythm, complete with sway and swing, complete with line breaks that she used to give herself a backbeat. Hubba hubba. It was a very sexy reading of a very sexy poem. I think five people stopped her on our way to the parking lot, after two or three came up to her at our seats, all glowing with praise, richly deserved. I think that was the poem that my pal Jim ("The Most Optimistic Man in America, in a Miata") Williams responded to by asking me, basically, if I was going to be able to deal with Lauren being a poet, and a better one. Well, yeah!

On the way home, Lauren wondered how inspiring her performance might have been. She was hopeful that everyone went home in right randy states.

Judges and filibusters

Far be it from me to accuse Senate Republicans of being over-aggressive. I don't really need to accuse them of anything, because moves like banning filibusters in order to get 10 crazed judges appointed aptly demonstrate it. The news as reported lately (see, for instance, Heated senate showdown opens on judges) completely de-contextualizes the situation. For instance, it's not reported in this story, nor, I'll bet, in 90% of the stories on front pages of newspapers today, that while Senate Democrats are filibustering to stop 10 Bush appointments from being approved, Senate Republicans, controlling the Judiciary Committee, stopped numerous Clinton appointments to federal judgeships, simply by not considering the nominees. (See Senate Rules Meltdown for more context.) The stories also fail to point out that close to 170 of Bush's appointees have been approved, and that the federal bench has its lowest level of vacancy since 1990.

It almost sounds like Republicans are seeking absolute authority to do anything they want, in Congress, in the judiciary, in the executive branch. Checks and balances? Not for them, not when they hold the majority.

Impervious to irony

Courtesy of my pal Owen Kelly, who shared this at the Society for Phenomenology and Media conference (Owen teaches in Finland): America We Stand As One. Owen claims that this says something deeply meaningful about American social reality. And maybe it does.

How to go to conferences

I actually wrote this yesterday, but since getting in last night at 11:20, I let it wait.

Often the best things that happen at conferences don't happen at the conferences. I've only learned how to enjoy the setting of a conference over the last few years. I've learned that the way to get the most out of conferences is to do two main things: (1) find the right bar, go there, and stay there as long as everyone else does, and (2) spend some time with another conference-goer or two checking out the locale.

Obvious, I know now. But I had had such an angst-ridden posture, really a defensive one, that I didn't get into the right frame of mind.

One thing missing at the Helsinki conference was the right bar. For one thing, Helsinki was so incredibly expensive, but also a difficult city to be a tourist in, I'd say - at least, to be a typical American tourist, or at least me. But Oregon's coastal towns boast a generous helping of good pubs, and the one we found served local brew on tap, including a dynamite stout that the conference probably bought a keg of over the days. The wait staff were ridiculously nice, which threw me. (That became sort of a theme - everywhere we went, the clerks, cashiers, waitresses, etc. were all terribly, not to say suspiciously, nice. Dave finally asked at the Malt Shop in Manzanita, Oregon for an order of whatever medication the waitress was taking. Myself, I looked around the place, and thought, well, why wouldn't you be nice in a place like this?)

When SPM went to Helsinki in 2003, I ended up spending my last day wandering the city on foot with my friend Paul. Along the way we checked out an international fair at a park in the middle of town; found a store selling odd decorative and art items, mainly from Russia; and ran into Lars, who had hosted the conference, because we had blundered into his neighborhood. This year's conference ended Friday evening, and today I spent the afternoon on the Oregon coast with Dave and Owen, wandering along the beaches, checking out caves and such (at low tide, since they're inaccessible other times).

So now I'm in the Portland airport, waiting out my flight to Sacramento, to be followed by the long drive home. I'm exhausted, but mostly eager to be home.

Stuff going on

Busy.

Lauren and I went to see the university's production of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead last Friday - one of my favorite plays. This was her first time seeing it, my second. It was well done, especially Roque Berlanga's Rosencrantz. I thought the last half of the second act and beginning of the third lagged a bit, but that can happen. As Lauren pointed out, it's gotta be hard to inject a lot of energy into dialogue about inevitable doom.

Saturday I tried writing more on the paper I'm presenting to the Society for Phenomenology and Media on Thursday of this week. I'm nowhere near satisfied with the paper. I leave tomorrow for the conference, up in Oregon, which I face largely with dread, to be perfectly honest.

After that, there's only one more week of classes, a disturbing number of papers to read, and then the school year will be over. I would like to spend a week going for walks every day, whenever we feel like it, to wherever we feel like going, for however long we like, alternating walking with cooking, playing games, reading, and a generous amount of blissing out (which is not a euphemism per se).

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy flick

Some context: I don't go to movies often. I don't enjoy the experience, and I tend to be hyper-critical of movies. I'm also a big fan of Douglas Adams, especially, as I suppose would go without saying, of the Hitchhhiker's trilogy.

Lauren and I had read the first four books in the trilogy together just recently. I hadn't read them in years, and it was wonderful to get back into them. At his best, Adams' writing tickles my brain in a very particular way that pleases me tremendously.

So we were sure to go see the movie when it came out, and yesterday, opening day, there we were, at the matinee. Lauren was guardedly optimistic; I was prepared for it to be bad. You see, we'd been reading reviews of the thing days before. The balance was on the negative side, but it was clear that some of the reviewers who panned it either didn't understand science fiction or didn't understand Adams. One actually criticized the film's plot for not making any sense - clearly this person hadn't read the book. Those who had were often upset that good lines were omitted or rewritten, with the effect of making them less funny. The positive reviews were often odd, too. Some of them were just enthused that it got made (there's a long history of failed attempts to get the project off the ground, beginning in the early 80s). Others seemed to be speaking in opposition to the harsh criticisms, offering that Mos Def wasn't too bad as Ford Prefect, for instance, or that the way they handled Zaphod Beeblebrox's having two heads could have been worse.

So we went to see it. It was pretty bad. Almost none of it retained Adams' sense of the strange, almost none of it retained his sense of humor. The best bits were the sections from the book and the visual effects of the Vogon constructor fleet and of Magrathea. The opening credit sequence, featuring a song-and-dance number that many critics decried vehemently, was actually kind of fun.

The two main problems are these. First, nothing that happens in the movie seems motivated by anything. Adams' stuff relies on exposition - provided humorously by the book's narration in the original radio series, by that and additional text in the books. His jokes are not generally one-offs. Adams' versions of the events sketched in the movie are driven in a particular direction, arbitrary or disjointed as that sometimes is. All that is missing. If you didn't know the book, you wouldn't understand what was going on, basically from the beginning. If you did know the book, you wouldn't understand why they did what they did with it.

But above all, the very worst thing about it, is that it just wasn't funny. There were bits that were amusing, but I think I laughed once, quietly.

Ain't nobody here but us chickens

I roasted a chicken tonight. Hot damn, I love roasting chickens. Tonight's was a free range hen courtesy of Trader Joe's, which came out splendid. I also made mashed potatoes, and put together a little salad replete with my first ever batch of croutons (an excuse/opportunity to use up a drying baguette).

It has been an intense, soul-searching weekend. We've both been under stress lately, the end of the semester looms, and on top of it all, up pop the occasional ghosts from lives past.

Mainly I remember being 20-21, driving around Charlotte in my 1978 Honda Accord with the paint sandblasted off ("The William F. Buckley, Jr." after the columnist), noting as I went by certain corners that person(s) with whom I had a past could be right there and I could happen to cross paths with them. I remember a sometimes overwhelming sense of the place being haunted. The one thing I liked about the experience was the exhilaration of potential danger or conflict.

Conflict never ensued. If it had, it would have run its course, as these things do. This may seem machismotically stoic, but I think it's true nonetheless: most things run their course. Even curses obey statutes of limitations. And what I still possess from those weird tense days is a set of memories, most of which are pleasant enough, and a few of which focus on the perfect freedom one can only experience at 20-21, in an old junker, driving in warm afternoon sun with all the windows down and good music on the stereo, with one's first tastes of Pyrrhic victory, craziness, politics, emancipation, and wine on one's lips.

I learned there aren't really any ghosts. There's just jerks in white sheets saying "boo."

The fine art of sneering

I've concluded, after some time spent studying the matter, that sneering is a subtle act, requiring a finely tuned sense of minute and evanescent social interactions. Most of the sneering I've been watching hasn't been terribly impressive, so for what it's worth, here are some dos and don'ts:

DO:

* sneer in concert with others
* face the target of the sneer
* combine the sneer with whispered snide comments to someone next to you

DON'T:

* sneer at someone further than 10 feet away
* sneer at someone who doesn't care what you think of him/her
* sneer at someone who is feeding you
* attempt to sneer and smile as if warmly at the same time in an effort to mask the sneer

I think that if you follow these simple guidelines, your sneering will improve vastly. You're welcome.

Meanwhile

It's been another ridiculously busy week. Lauren had a paper to write and a couple tests. I had appointments upon appointments, union stuff happening, etc. By last night we were quite well prepared to do nothing, which we utterly failed to do: we went to my colleague and our friend Val's birthday party. It was a potluck affair, and for it I made a gorgonzola, red onion, and asparagus tart (food porn forthcoming). She had originally planned a small gathering, but apparently kept expanding the guest list until, during the height of events last night, there were in fact 6.6 million people there.

I am now the duly elected and first lecturer rep to the CSU Stanislaus Academic Senate. So next fall, unlike the previous 4 falls when I was the rep from the philosophy department, I'll do something completely different with my Tuesday afternoons, and go to senate meetings again. Sometimes I enjoy listing the different things I've gotten myself into: Academic Senate rep, IRB member (I think I might be vice-chair), Campus Community Building Committee member, CFA lecturer rep from Stanislaus, lecturer subcommittee on evaluation member, lecturer rep to the Contract Development and Bargaining Strategies committee, chair of a new lecturer subcommittee on faculty governance.

So there.

CFA Assembly weekend

So, as of this morning, I am now a member of the California Faculty Association's Contract Development and Bargaining Strategies committee, or CDBS. I ran unopposed for a seat from the Lecturer's Council, so I wasn't permitted by union rules to give my speech, which would have mentioned that my chief qualification is that I can see de b.s. clearly.

The rest of the Assembly was a bit of a disappointment. For one thing, there was more than the usual amount of highfallutin' speechifying, and less than the usual strategizing. We heard two speeches in the Assembly about the political future of the public good in the state. They were fine, but I had a feeling of being preached to as a member of the choir. But there were some interesting notes I'll have to get back to later.

Mainly, I think these kinds of events are scheduled for odd year spring assemblies because that's when we elect officers, the board, and CDBS - the policymaking core of the union. The last time I was there for this, there were many more contested seats, and a lot of conflict and political wrangling. This year there was much less of that, at least surrounding voting.

Plus, I've been working long hours lately, and I've got more appointments, meetings, and so on than I'd really like coming up.

But tonight, we're getting some relaxing time. Lauren is cooking corned beef; we've watched the King of Iron Chef semi-final, and plan on more audiovisual entertainment, because we can. So there.

It could be worse... It could be raining.

The worst part of my job is grading papers. In a typical semester I have 4 classes of around 30 students each. If I have each class write a couple papers that I have to grade, that's 240. The worst part of grading is not, however, the quantity of work.

I get frustrated, eventually, when I hit a patch of papers written in order to complete an assignment and nothing else. When students think of writing papers as merely something to get done and over with, as a chore, they write pretty lousy papers. I would hope that the act of writing a paper could be something more than a hoop to jump through, but I haven't found a way yet to make that sufficiently clear, or to produce assignments that elicit a more interested response. I fantasize about grading papers that each take a unique and provocative position and make new and vivid sense of the student's ideas and experience.

It's not much to complain about, really, and I'm not really complaining much. It is a problem in my life, one for which I'd love to find a solution.

Compared to what could be happening to me, I don't have much to complain about in general. This realization came to me in full force while watching an episode of Farscape with Lauren last night, and considering that (so far as I know) there's nobody trying to take my planet hostage or destroy it, nobody torturing Lauren to find out where I am, and I don't have to travel into an alternative reality to try to find out where she is from alternative versions of my friends, meanwhile having to watch what might be an alternative version of her get killed by my nemesis,...

It's practically Stoic wisdom: there's nothing on Earth that can happen to you that can't be helped by doctors or lawyers.

Celebrity deaths, Bill Buckley

I've been out of the news loop for a while, having abandoned the Modesto Bee last summer, and having chosen not to subscribe to a paper since. Recently, however, I was rummaging through comics on the Yahoo news feed, realized they now allowed you to have comics on your main Yahoo page, and also noticed you could add columns as well. I added Bill Buckley's.

I've been reading Buckley since I was 14. The habit peaked in high school, when I would read his column three days a week while I was delivering newspapers.While I was in college, I became addicted to his PBS show, Firing Line. I even named my first car after him - the William F. Buckley, Junior. But along about then something happened to the Buck. His dad, WFB Sr., a spy, was killed. Buckley seemed to lose a bit of his stamina, then some of his cussedness, then some of his wits. Firing Line went from an hour to 30 minutes, and often the show drifted into chatter. He even hired Michael Kinsley, the weenie editor of New Republic, to ask questions. So, sadly, I lost interest.

No sooner did I add Buckley's column to my Yahoo feed, but this first item comes up: A Farewell. "Yikes!" I thought, "Buck's quitting!" But no, it was worse. Buckley, good Catholic boy that he's always been, was saying farewell to the Pope. But worse still. Buckley's account of the Pope seems only to say that he was charismatic. That flash of light in the Pope's eyes Buckley noticed in Havana that hot day, he doesn't ascribe to the divine, but to nothing grander than the Pope's being Pope.

Now, I would be among those who'd agree with Buckley's assertion that what makes people famous is fame, and his implicit argument from this premise that what makes someone Pope is being Pope, but I find myself disappointed. If I agree with Buckley's next column, I'll have to dump him. There's no point in there being an agreeable Bill Buckley.

Coincidence?

Spring Break ends as of this morning. We're not amused by this. Yesterday was the start of so-called Daylight Saving Time (sic: it's Daylight Saving Time, despite what people call it). We're even less amused by this. Is it only by chance that the two events fall together? Perhaps I'm a bit nervous, maybe even slightly paranoid, but I do in fact believe that both are the actions of a vast conspiracy involving the Illuminati, international petroleum corporations, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, the Federal government, Bill Gates, the Trilateral Commission, and the University Educational Policies Committee - Subcommittee on Academic Calendar.

Yesterday we cleaned the Apartment of Earthly Delights. It wasn't unclean. Our desks had gotten messy and there were the occasional things that could be in better places, a little dusting to do. So it's gone from being not-at-all-not-clean to being rather clean indeed.

Meanwhile I baked a focaccia bread with some herbs in it - basil, sage, but mostly parsley and rosemary. This was to accompany home-made fettucine with bechamel sauce and chicken. Though I slightly overcooked the pasta, otherwise it was probably the best batch I'd ever made. Lauren was extremely pleased with the way the chicken and sauce tasted and felt - the chicken not overcooked as it always seems to her to be in yer typical Itie slop house. I hypothesized that this was because I had roasted the chicken, two days prior, to an absurd degree of perfection and juiciness. But we didn't pursue this line of inquiry far.

This weekend we also finished Life, the Universe, and Everything and began and finished So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish. It had been far too long since I'd read Douglas Adams. I'm holding us back from Mostly Harmless, the fifth (5rd) book in the trilogy.

For now, it's off to fight the good fight against the great and evil conspirators.

Newz!! Congress to intervene in Pope case

[This'll be timely for approximately 2 hours, but heck.]

REUTERS. Calling to order a special session of Congress, Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Tex) and Sen. Bill Frist (R-Tenn) have challenged fellow law-makers to "protect the unprotected" in the case of Pope John Paul II.

The Pope has been admitted to an Italian hospital for the third time in three weeks, suffering complications from a series of illnesses. In addition, a nasal feeding tube implanted in the Pope two days ago has begun to cause the infection such extraordinary medical treatments almost always cause in the very sick and dying.

"This is a matter of principle," Frist explained. "We cannot sit by and let the Pope be victimized by Italian medical meekness." Frist called for "immediate action" by the US Supreme Court to hear the case to keep the Pope alive "by any means necessary."

Responding to reports that the Pope had already settled the matter, having provided in a living will that all possible medical means to keep him alive should be employed, Frist said, "that goes to show that we must act now. Time is short."

DeLay added, "if we can't protect the lives of those whose lives would otherwise be protected, then whose lives can we protect?" During the last days of Terri Schiavo, when Congress intervened to call for a 5th hearing by federal courts, it was revealed that DeLay had decided to pull the plug on his father.

Responding to charges that Congress has no authority, nor indeed any interest, in the Pope's case, DeLay said, "That's a matter for the courts to decide. I'm no authority on law."

Meanwhile, in Rome, the Pope lay dying, but peaceful and serene. After having the Stations of the Cross read to him, he reportedly asked to see his favorite film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Lies and the faithful?

A recurring question I have is, why does anyone believe lies they are told through media? The latest bizarre series includes the Bush administration lying about social security and Paul Wolfowitz lying about his intentions as head of the World Bank. What I can't get my mind around now is what I've never been able to understand: why, given the more than ample evidence that these are lies, to people act as if they believe them?

For instance, Wolfowitz is going to be affirmed as head of the World Bank, despite the fact that he is known to insist on lying to the public. Now, the handmaidens of capitalism who function in governments in the US and Europe may have good reasons to bring Wolfowitz on as Official Liar, but it doesn't explain how or why he's allowed to get away with it.

But then there's social security. On its face, the Bush plan is clearly stupid. Subjecting public funds to the volatile stock market makes no sense - it's not "security" in any meaningful sense. Besides which, as very recent experience should amply demonstrate to anyone with an attention span longer than a moth's, the stock market also goes down. A $10,000 investment in NYSE blue-chip stocks in 2000 is now worth very nearly $9,000. Suppose we dump a bunch of social security money into the stock market. Will it go up?

Besides, the social security "crisis" is a fraud cooked up during the Reagan administration by nutjobs who didn't believe in any public good whatsoever. Social security is funded fully, with no changes whatsoever, for at least a decade - and "no changes" includes the usual expropriation of funds out of the system to make up for the deficit figures released by the administration (an accounting lie of some years' standing).

Lauren's theory is a simple, straightforward one: repeat something to people enough times, and eventually they'll parrot it back as though it were true. That makes sense, but I think because it annoys me to think of people being so apathetic, abject, gullible, careless, or stupid, I resist it. There must be something else, I imagine, some way in which people think that this will somehow benefit them. The hypothesis that fits here is that people engage in magical thinking: somehow, if they do what the wealthy elites want, they might get rich too. But again, that supposes people to be remarkably stupid, though it does realistically suggest they're motivated by greed.

I don't know. A couple years ago I struck upon the interpretative strategy of considering that people don't in fact believe any of it, but act in a sort of subjunctive mode, specifically, one that affirms a counterfactual. An example of this kind of thinking is: "If I were to sprout wings and gain the ability to fly..." So, perhaps people approach these official lies thus: "If it were true that there was a crisis in social security..." "If the stock market was necessarily always to rise..." "If Paul Wolfowitz weren't genetically incapable of speaking truthfully..."

Just in case

You might not have seen or heard this story alleging that the Bush administration paid a "journalist" to present their political platform as though it were news.

Note to the rest of the world (complete with Daffy Duck voice): HAAALP! HAAALP!

New personnel, and a little self-congratulation

I'll begin with the self-congrats. About two and a half years ago, I got involved in a little research project into the policies and procedures for lecturers to get promoted, which is called range elevation in our collective bargaining agreement. The policies and procedures are not specified in the CBA, so they are set locally by academic senates. But on many campuses (our included), lecturers didn't have representatives in academic senates, hence they had no voice in the estabishment of policies by which there own careers would advance or not.

So I began inquiries into establishing lecturer representation on the academic senate at Stanislaus. At first, I got a mixed reception, but I started to win people over, and by this time last year I had managed to convince the senate to approve a resolution amending the faculty constitution to include a lecturer rep on senate. The general faculty ratified it, but then the university president rejected it, saying that this was because it lacked specific procedures for electing a lecturer rep (of course, there are no specific procedures for electing a department rep, either).

I had resisted writing procedures last year on the advice of some who pointed out that it didn't seem fair to require lectureres to have procedures no one else did, and also because I was concerned that negotiating procedures would mean negotiating limits on elgibility that I didn't want to include.

This fall we started over again, and I managed to persuade people involved with working out procedures to keep eligibility as open as possible. It passed the senate again, then the general faculty ratified it again. Today I found out the president approved the resolution.


The new personnel includes one live and one stuffed animal, who isn't really that new to us. The real animal is a betta fish, a salmon-to-red colored guy who sometimes gets magenta streaks in his tail. I thought Harpo might be a decent name (he doesn't talk, he's red, he gets puffed up to act tough), but it doesn't seem quite appropriate somehow. So for now, he's just "Fish Fish."


The stuffed animal is a beanbag rabbit Lauren kept spotting in an open field on Del's Lane on the walk home from school. Eventually, she started mentioning she wanted to bring it home and wash it up, because it looked rather sad and forlorn there. Finally, one cool and gray afternoon, we grabbed it. It was filthy. It probably had critters living in it. But Lauren bleached it and washed it a few times, and now it remains here with us. We call it Homeless Bunny, or HB for short.

While I'm at it, here's a picture of the other living creature, Lancelot. Lauren spent the better part of an afternoon chasing the beast around, trying to get him to look at the camera for a picture. In almost all cases, the resultant photo has him looking the wrong way.

Although there's a good explanation for this, I prefer to think he's looking around him, trying to figure out where that sound is coming from that seems to be the sound of his name being called. While Lancelot is pretty, very affectionate, and has acquired a ridiculous quantity of nickmanes (Lance, Mr. Lance, Him, Lancey, Bunky, Binky, The Boy, Bunky-Boy, Sir Pukesalot, Stinker, Stinky, Minky, Spelunker, Spunky Winnebago, Nummy Muffin Cocoa Butter, Circus Peanut, Lance Without Pants, Lance With No Pants On, Schpunky, Schtinky), he can't be accused of being over-intellectual.

Q: How can you tell if Paul Wolfowitz is lying?

A: If you can tell he's making articulate speech.

In other news, it's nearly Spring Break. I have a large quantity of anecdotal evidence to suggest that the academic calendar for this semester is crushing students and faculty.

I also have a large quantity of anecdotal evidence to suggest that my perspective on the Terri Schiavo case reflects the majority opinion even in the far-right-leaning Central Valley. When most folks living in a Republican Party stronghold say they went too far, then man, they went too far.

Or perhaps everyone is too exhausted to put up any opposition.