Thursday, January 31, 2008

Letter to Social Foundations of Education Professor

Professor Johnson -

I would like to meet with you tomorrow before class to discuss the peculiar educational challenges I am running into with your course and perhaps come to a mutually-ameliorable agreement about how to tackle them. Your regular office hours should be fine, especially if you would be wiling to allot the entire hour to the proceedings if it becomes clear that it will be necessary; I hope however, to take far less of your time than that. I offer below a brief description of the problem, that you may begin to consider it; if it seems to you our meeting will run long, please feel free to phone me into the office earlier at the number to follow.

In brief, I come to this class from the intellectual heritage of New College of Florida. As such, I find it terribly difficult to do even the smallest reading or writing assignment in a cursory fashion. Where this turns into a difficulty is that NCF raised the minimum bar so high for me that I have no concept of how to get the quantity of writing assignments expected of me done. I am flabbergasted as to how, for example, to skim the material, get a grasp on the ideas, and post a quick one-paragraph summary. I am unable to dedicate less than my full attention to the text, and as such I can treat it as a student might only through the lens of a scholar learning from and responding to a text. Examine any of my posts for evidence of this; I'm not showing off, I simply cannot do less without feeling disingenuous to my own education.

To make matters worse for this particular course, one of the consistent strains in my studies at New College was educational theory, so I'm familiar with conservative, progressive, and radical educational theories from the ancients through the oughts. We are being asked to read, analyze, and respond to between 50 and 150 pages of text per week on top of whatever other classes I'm taking. I was reading this much at New College, but the expectations for output were less often and more focused. You can, I'm sure, see my dilemma.

Thank you for your consideration, and if I do not hear from you sooner I will see you at 1230h in COQ 236D.


Unaluminally,


Joe McCue

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

Red Shift

So as you approach the speed of light, the things you're approaching begin to take on a bluer cast. Things growing more distant from you begin to look more red. This latter is known as the red shift, and it is used to measure our distance from far-off cosmic entities. This is pretty heady science stuff — and was intuited by artists decades before it was known to science.

So as we approach the speed of light, we also approach the optimization of energy use. To celebrate, I've changed the background of this template to a minimal, primarily black style ... for black, you see, uses no energy on a computer screen, and thus optimizes energy use.

I was clued into this concept through Blackle, a Google search engine with an entirely black interface. It doesn't have a Google Image search or any of the other bells and whistles of the standard Google site, but for your standard web search, it functions as a Google search. There's even a Firefox Searchbar Add-On for it, so you can restack your search engines within the bar to have it at the top.

Plus, being confronted by a large swath of black every once in a while can only be both good for the eyes and for the mind, right?

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

An American Tradition of Dynasty

An article about the dynastic nature of Bilawal (formerly Benazir) Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party appeared in the Los Angeles Times recently. Written by Georgetown University Law Center professor Rosa Brooks, it makes a comparison to the dynastic nature of the last 20 years of American politics. In particular, it warns of the distinct possibility of having had two families share the most powerful post in the country for 20, 24, or even 28 years. What a frightening thought for an American to have. That is not how we run our country! It certainly looks like we are turning into a dynastic state, and that bothers me only because of the tacit assertion that America hasn’t always had a long history of dynasty politics … an assumption that is patently false. For evidence of this, allow me to say the following names: Adams, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Bush. Among others.

This is not an endorsement of Hillary; I just voted for Barack Obama. Nor is it an endorsement of family politics; just a reflection that we are a country built on the idea of freedom from aristocracy … by aristocrats … for aristocrats. This is a problem our country needs to address, and one it has been addressing for a long while, but not one that will be fixed in the next few months. And while my reasons for disliking Hillary are growing broader by the minute as she campaigns in a dirty and unethical manner, I hope the two-headed (and Janus-faced) nature of her campaign becomes one more nail in the coffin of her presidential ambitions.

Saturday, January 26, 2008

Open Letter to Red Stripe

* burp *

Dear Red Stripe –


I was up late at night talking with some friends about beer and I revealed to them that I have never really found a light beer in a green bottle that I like: I don't like Heineken or Grolsch or (ugh) Rolling Rock and I just recently learned to like Yuengling OK. And while I know enough about brewing beer to know that different colors of glass allow in different wavelengths of light, I also know enough to realize that the brewing process doesn’t expose the fermenting beer to much light. Thus the influence of the bottle must approach the infinitesimal.

Giving examples of this, a friend said to me: “Red Stripe.”

Conjuring the image of your beer in a green bottle, I spat back at him, “Yeah, but only around Christmas.”

I suggest to you the following: around Christmas you release your beer in a green bottle and milk the holiday-related cash-cow, as long as it’s already there. Don’t bother to make a special holiday beer, just use a green bottle for thirty or sixty days.

In return, I would ask you for a hundred bucks or a case of your beer in recognition of my contribution. Of course this is not a contract and you wouldn’t have to do anything at all, but it would be kind of nice if you did.

Thank you for not making a shitty light beer in a green bottle,



J.P.P. McCue
110 19th Avenue S.
St. Petersburg, FL 33705
joseph.mccue@gmail.com
941.685.4845

Appellation et Traduction

For the sake of clarity, this is the title of the Marcel Duchamp piece:

Étant donnés: 1° la chute d'eau / 2° le gaz d'éclairage

This translates, with great accuracy and decent precision, as:

Given: 1st the waterfall / 2nd the gas in the lamp

Those of you with greater acuity en français, I would welcome a correction.

Friday, January 25, 2008

Twit History

Several months ago, at the persistent entreaty of the Reverend to give it a whirl, I joined Twitter. Twitter is the bastard child of a text message and a blog entry, with a limit of 140 characters per post and browser-optionality that extends to being able to post through IM or text message.

I thought I would hate it, but it turns out I'm a big fan. It provides just enough brevity and flexibility to be an exercise in the spirit of haiku and has a strict enough limit to both encourage eloquence and eliminate the intimidation to inaction stemming from white canvas anxiety.

It's most easily labeled a social-networking site because you can follow friends and be followed yourself and whatnot, but true to form I've not used it that way. Instead it has become for me an expressive tool to encourage creation and ideation.

Here's a tiny URL link to the first chronological page: http://tinyurl.com/3c7rnb
http://tinyurl.com/2624mw