Two hundred people died in Spain when bombs exploded on commuter trains. Did you also know that 337 people were killed in Uganda last month at a camp for displaced people?
According to American media, mayhem in Europe is big news, apparently, but mayhem in Africa is not.
I don’t mean to neglect you, dear reader, it’s just that I’m having one of those periods of blogging crisis. You know, “What’s it all about?” and “What’s a blog for?” That kind of thing. *sigh* I’m being a selfish reader, not leaving comments, not sending trackback pings to entries on others’ blogs.
Well, here are a few links for ya:
I’ve been fighting a fever all day. Not much sleep last night and many weird dreams. The last words I remember from my last dream: “orgasmic retribution fiber.” I have no idea what it means, either.
And while we’re on the subject of surreal wordplay, I am saddened to learn that Dave Blood, bassist for the Dead Milkmen, has commited suicide. I can’t say I was ever a big fan, but the Dead Milkmen were the first band I ever interviewed back when I was a fledgling music journalist in Atlanta. Although I did a terrible job, and although they had a reputation for skewering morons, they were very kind to me, and I managed to write up an article that didn’t suck too badly.
Perhaps this isn’t a song Blood liked, but it’s one I think of whenever I hear of another suicide.
Via Slashdot: “By feeding PieSpy with the entire texts of Shakespeare plays, it became possible to produce drawings of the social networks present in his plays – it is now possible to visualize the relationships between the characters in his works.” I don’t have time to investigate this tool fully right now, but one thing I like is that it maps these networks through the course of the play using an animation. Texts are not static objects; they change over time as the reader or viewer experiences them. Our visualizations of elements of texts should therefore be dynamic.
We’re on spring break this week, and in addition to reading about the history of reading in preparation for finishing up my paper to be delivered later this month at ASECS, I’ve been watching movies. One of them, School of Rock, is just pure escapist fun that easily transcends a fairly tired trope: the substitute teacher who turns out not to be what s/he seems.
A highlight of the movie is Jack Black’s character, Dewey Finn, leading his young, prep-school students in a rehearsal of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Wanna Rock & Roll)”, originally released on the 1976 album High Voltage. While I now have fairly eclectic tastes in music, I used to be a big fan of hard rock and heavy metal, and AC/DC was one of my favorite bands in high school. The lyrics to this particular song, however, resonate in a completely different way now that I’m involved in a profession where so many smart people spend so much time in adjunct positions with meager benefits and no job security: “Gettin’ ripped off / Under-paid / Gettin’ sold / Second hand.”
Complete lyrics below the fold.