• Teaching Carnival #14 is up at M2H Blogging. It rawks.
• I was able to spend some time with Hub Bub artists-in-residence Brian and Justin last week. The People’s Republic of Sparkletonia is lucky to have them here for the year, along with Emily and Leah. Such good people…smart, creative, funny. I wish I had more time to spend at Hub Bub. I’ve had a book checked out for so long from the Closet Vandal‘s lending library that I fear my card will be suspended, if not confiscated.
• “Next week Christie’s and Sotheby’s will conduct multimillion-dollar sales of 18th-century antiques. Can the market handle 500 pieces of 18th-century furniture in such a short time?” I don’t know. Let’s find out!
• What’s a good way to unwind after last week’s National Coming Out Day busyness? Hey, how about taking a busload of students to New Orleans this week for four days! Remind me to scale back my bright ideas next semester.
• I’ve been Netflixing season 3 of the Wire. The show really is that good.
• I’m in love with the video for the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Tell Me Baby,” in which unknown musicians/performers dance and lip synch to the track, sometimes with the band themselves as backup. I believe that like the Tilly and the Wall video I linked to earlier, this is an attempt to assimilate the aesthetic of fan-generated videos posted on such sites as YouTube. As such it’s kind of a conservative move: pruning what could otherwise be a chaotic media garden where anything goes. However, the video is just so sweet, sexy, and celebratory that it’s hard not to read it as a loveletter from the band to their fans and to all the unknowns who move to L.A. and don’t hit it big (the latter of which is arguably what the song’s lyrics address).
• A stack of papers awaits my grading attention. I’m so very tired, but I feel up to the challenge. Must. resist. desire. for beer. Otherwise, before you know it I’ll be Little Nemo in Slumberland.

*Random bullets of pure blogging gold.

• Dooce and family are in San Francisco, and Leta’s rocking her awesome footie pajamas. Does anyone know where I might buy some that would fit my 6′ 2″, 175-pound frame?
• Geeky Mom shares a few interesting thoughts on success in academia.
• Emily has been reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, and finds herself thinking about fear, imagination, and the life of the writer.
• I dreamed about the beautiful Weez and her beautiful family last night. Sometimes I wish I lived in Rochester.
• North Carolina’s Sparklehorse (aka Mark Linkous) has a new album out and is touring…Europe. Well, he was in Asheville recently, but I didn’t know.
• Via SHARP-L, we learn that the 38th Annual College English Association Conference will take place in New Orleans next April. You can submit paper proposals online.
• Pencil me in, Kansas City, ’cause I’m coming for a few days. One of my former PhD students is taking her oral exams, and a couple of friends are getting hitched.

What do you want to be when grow up? An astronaut?
No.
A scientist?
Yes!
You’ll have to go to grad school for that, you know.
Is that where you learn how to dance?
No, it’s… Well, actually, yeah, in a manner of speaking. Can you show me your grad school dance?

“We have so many problems in our country that deciding whether you take off your top or wear a thong is so trivial,” said Monique Ferrero, a 42-year-old government employee whose bikini bottom was rolled to show off her buttocks. “What’s more important is that people who have to work all summer have a place to sunbathe and feel like they’re on vacation. If it’s forbidden to be bare, I don’t care.”

Things I learned by reading this story:

• Paris has a man-made beach along the Seine. (It didn’t have one the last time I was there, which was a long time ago.)
• You will be fined if you wear a thong or bare your (female) breasts at this beach.
• There are 42-year-old, politically minded Parisian women who will adjust their bikini bottoms to show off their…uh, bottoms.

Don’t ask me why, but this story has been stuck in my head for the last day or so.

• Go check out Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s “Introducing MediaCommons,” which is “a wide-ranging network with a relatively static point of entry that brings…[participants] into the MediaCommons community and makes apparent the wealth of different resources” available.
• I spent last week in Cape San Blas, Florida on the Gulf of Mexico with my sister’s family. It was lovely. The water was very warm, in part because the sun was so intense, which made sunbathing problematic. In fact, I got sunburned on Tuesday, and so I spent the rest of the week doing my best imitation of a lobster in the shade.
• While in Florida, I made what I think was my best batch of shrimp gumbo ever. If you want good gumbo, you need to simmer the empty shrimp shells in about 3 cups of water, then strain them out and add the stock to your gumbo. Hmm, perhaps I should post the entire recipe.
• I don’t have kids, but after spending a week around my nieces and nephew, I suspect that I would have a lot more insight into my own upbringing if I did.
• I finally got some decent hair care products, which smell great and make my hair and scalp feel good. I haven’t had a haircut in about two months, and I’m currently trying to figure out whether to continue to let it grow or to get it cut short again.
• Post-divorce, I have no television, which is fine by me. Nor do I have Internet access, which is a decision I made for the summer in order to encourage me to get out and meet people. I’m spending a lot more time reading than usual, too. However, now it looks like it might be impossible for me to get any high-speed Internet access. Comcast says they don’t provide service to my building, and now BellSouth is saying they can’t get DSL into my building, either. This doesn’t make sense to me, but I guess I can live with it if it means I’ll be reading more and mindlessly surfing less. Plus that frees up about $50 a month for me to spend on other things.
• I recently attended the opening of an exhibition featuring the work of four artists-in-residence at Hub-Bub, a Sparkle City arts center. I was particularly taken with the work of painter Brian Hitselberger (blog) and poet Emily Louise Smith (blog), so I made a point of chatting with each of them a bit. During the year, Hub Bub says they will have events going on up to four nights out of the week: films, music, lectures. If so, I plan to spend a lot of time there. I like being around interesting, creative people.
• Last semester, I was pretty good about getting to the gym regularly, mostly because I had a very good workout partner. Since then, however, the best I have done is pay a membership fee at the gym that is, quite literally, a two-minute walk from my apartment. I have not, alas, actually made it inside to use any of their weight machines or cardio equipment. Any suggestions for helping me break this inertia? And does anyone have any advice about buying a bike for riding some of the trails around Sparkle City?