Skip to main content

Lightning Links!




#1!!! A sweet trans-Atlantic ground-effect wingship hypothesized in Popular Science, way way back in 1984, and featured recently on BoingBoing's new Gadgets site.

#2!!! A revisiting of Rain Man from the Onion's wonderful pop-culture studies site, The AV Club. Highly recommended because of the perspective of its author, and because of said author's insights (which I guess must stem from that perspective...I guess I have only one reason to recommend it, but it's a reason that branches and evolves in beautiful ways...).

#3!!! An essay by genius Bill Watterson (creator of Calvin and Hobbes). Watterson embodied a perhaps never-to-be-repeated synthesis of brilliant draftspersonship (control of line, depth, and gesture), insightful and understated use of color, and penetrating worldview of sufficient depth to grasp the mind of a brilliant and hyper six year old and those of his parents with equal sensitivity and wit. That might be the worst sentence I've ever written, but hopefully I get my point across.

Okay, on to the business of the day.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Three Good Things for Thursday, March 7th

No time to waste, let's hit those Three Good Things: 1. "Fifteen bucks for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge, Edge, EDGE!" An impossibly red, impossibly cute 1997 Suzuki X-90. It looks like a real-life Barbie car, a mini two-seater pickup, minus the bed and with a little spoiler on the back. Also it has a T-top. In college some buddies and I drove up to Cleveland one weekend to see the monster truck rally at the Gund Arena. Were we genuinely interested in it? Was it an act of willful irony? We were the last gasp of Generation X, so there is truly no way to know. What I remember most aside from the noise and fumes was that the promotion ran a contest in between "acts" where local schmoes could try their personal vehicles on the motocross track they'd constructed on the arena floor, with the fastest time taking home a cash prize.  One of the first contestants roared out of the gate in a huge, very obviously brand new, very obviously expensively

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to