While I was grading this afternoon, Dan identified a new, harmless (to the teacher, anyway) species of snake that had infested our apartment: Bad Grade Snake. The Bad Grade Snake slithers around the grading teacher, hissing “Fffff… Fffffff….”  “What’s that, Bad Grade Snake? The student used triple-space to make her paper meet the page minimum?” [...]

I was so moved by Alice Walker’s piece on Obama in the Root today: “When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he [...]

Slate’s advertising journalist, Seth Stevenson, is currently chronicling his five-day trip to Disney World from a marketing perspective, and I’m enjoying reading his dissection of Disney’s presentation of its image through the parks. For one thing, I think he expresses very neatly my dissatisfaction with Epcot (which Dan rated the best of the parks after [...]

My 23-week status report on Baby Center yesterday said that, at this stage, “Loud noises heard often in utero — such as your dog barking or the roar of a vacuum cleaner — probably won’t faze your baby when he hears them outside the womb.” I can only hope that also applies to the yard [...]

I was pleased to see this article today, about how the producers of The Dark Knight have decided to move forward with promoting the new Batman movie precisely as they would have if Heath Ledger were still alive. As director Christopher Nolan says in the article, “I think he’d be very pleased to see we’re [...]

First, my lit theory course was all about Lacan, so I had to sit through all the discussion of mother-child bonding, followed by the castration complex, after which the child experiences nothing but lack for the rest of his life. So, nice to know that I have that to look forward to. (And, as a [...]

As Dan and I have taken to watching the Nightly News, we’ve seen quite a lot lately about the rising rate of foreclosures and the mortgage crisis. Even after such prolonged exposure to the trauma that families are facing, no longer able to afford their homes, I remain hardhearted to any kind of bailout. I [...]

I’ve noticed lately that when I look at the Weather Channel’s ten-day forecast, it occasionally has hints underneath the temperature bar. When they’re things like, “Get the Golf Forecast,” I tend not to pay attention. But today, TWC is advising me to “Get the family out of town” three times in the next ten days. [...]