Nothing yet has made so crystal clear to me exactly how much I do NOT understand about what is going on in Iraq than this year’s Oscar-nominated film The Hurt Locker. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow, who has been endlessly (and a little annoyingly) praised for her skill at capturing the hyper-masculine emotional intensity and complexity…
Read MoreI’ve often said that if God speaks to humanity, he does so through Johnny Cash. Unfortunately for the rest of us, Cash passed away in 2003, officially of diabetes-related complications, but more likely because he was unable to stand this world any longer after the death of his wife, June Carter Cash, a few months…
Read MoreI don’t think I’ve said so officially on this blog yet, but the NBC sitcom “Community” is one of the funniest things on television in a long, long time. It’s about a group of ne’er-do-well’s attending community college who accidentally fall into a Spanish “study group” together. Much hilarity ensues. The group’s Spanish professor, Señor…
Read MoreLast week, University of Alabama-Huntsville Professor of Biology Amy Bishop opened fire in a faculty meeting, killing three of her colleagues and wounding three others. Despite our hopeful image of the Ivory Tower as a place far removed from the ugliness of “real world” violence, stories like these remind us that, regrettably, wishing doesn’t make…
Read MoreFirst, my apologies to regular readers of this blog for my extended absence of late. As some of you know, my department is hiring for a new tenure-track line this semester, a process which has the tendency to eat up every last moment of “spare” time for everyone involved. Second, I hope that you don’t…
Read MoreThanks to a nice bump in traffic today, courtesy of our friends over at Daily Kos (who linked to this blog’s transcript of Cornel West’s note to Obama), we just topped 40K hits! So, let me take this opportunity to thank all of the regular and non-regular visitors to this site. Please keep coming back….
Read MoreYou can read the whole story here of how my blog came to receive the illustrious “Chuck Norris Stamp of Approval.” I’m truly honored, I think.
Read MoreThe new film Up in the Air, directed by Jason Reitman of Juno and Thank You For Smoking fame, has gotten a lot of buzz lately, most of it surrounding George Clooney’s performance as a “corporate downsizer” (he fires people for a living) and for-all-intents-and-purposes homeless, constantly “up in the air” business traveler (his greatest…
Read MoreIt’s been a while since I’ve recommended a book on this blog, the last one being Junot Diaz’s tragic and beautiful The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Part of the reason for the absence of good fiction here is because I went through a bit of a literary drought recently, reading several books that…
Read MoreI just read an article in NewScientist about the “Peter Principle” (based on the theory put forth by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull in their 1998 book The Peter Principle: Why things always go wrong). The Peter Principle is a fundamental law of “Hierarchiology” that states: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to…
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