Accidental Blogger
A general interest blog
Category: Educational, Cultural & Social Matters
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Again, via 3 Quarks Daily, an excellent article.
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About a week ago, I read a blogblurb raving about some new phone app, which would use the power of GPS to tell you where you were and highlight the most interesting thing in the vicinity.For instance, if you were in France, walking near the Eiffel tower, your phone could superimpose cool factoids and trivia…
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Set aside the fact that a recent story about the privatization of public libraries isn't really news. Library Journal was reporting on the company featured in the Business section of the NYT, LSSI, in a series of stories back in 1998. Ignore the recourse to the usual platitudes about the public library, the bits about…
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Abercombie & Fitch, the upscale clothing retailer has long been suspected of discriminatory hiring practices as also, criticized for marketing what many consider tasteless t-shirts. (The Chinese laundry logo, "Two Wongs Can Make It White," is priceless; I wonder how many high fives were exchanged after this particular witticism was coined.) Given the image of the store, it is not surprising that an…
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San Francisco has at least one "writer, editor, and dad" too many. The Bay Area is famous for its assortment of self-centered, self-righteous, self-pitying, well-educated, enlightened boorish parents, but Simon is special. Evidently he is having a difficult time confronting the ordinary ambivalence of being a new parent. Evidently it hadn't occurred to him before…
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An interesting article in the New York Times on the conventional wisdom about study habits and what really works. Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to…
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Is plagiarism a transgression if only one profits from it and because we have agreed that it is not the right thing to do as a business practice? Two views on the issue of plagiarism – first Stanley Fish followed by our own author Narayan. ….[in] order to have a basis, plagiarism would have to stand on some philosophical ground.…
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An evaluation of the 2010 Beloit College mindset list for the graduating class of 2014 in the Christian Science Monitor. The class of 2014 considers Nirvana to be classic rock, they have never played with a telephone cord while talking on the phone, and do not find Korean-made cars unusual. They think of Clint Eastwood as a…
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A Museum of Tolerance backer says 'No' to the 'Ground-Zero Mosque'. Oh, the irony! Twilight years in a strange land: An article about the elderly parents of Indian-American immigrants facing the challenges of adapting to a very different culture and lifestyle.This is probably a universal quandary for all nouveau-immigrants. Well-meant Aid and a Pig Story:…
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She gazes out at you, eyes defiant, yet vulnerable. The face is a beautiful one, but hardly conventional, framed by carefully styled thick black hair, draped in a thick purple scarf. She has lost her nose, with a triangular hole framed by scarred flesh around it. It's a striking image that will stop any casual…
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By now everyone who has been paying any attention to the US national news, knows the sorry tale of Shirley Sherrod and the cowardice of the Obama administration. Some people are calling Sherrod's unfair dismissal a case of being "Vilsacked," after the secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack who fired her. But I suspect that she was probably also "Obamaxed." …
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The air has started to shimmer with the heat. Red, white and blue flags hang waiting for the next touch of breeze outside the homes. A faint odor of fireworks of the smaller kind lingers around some yards, grilled charcoal in others. So what is the Fourth of July about, if not cookouts, fireworks, picnics,…
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At the outset, let me confess that for the most part, I enjoy Facebook. To me it is like a huge interactive, chatty blog where one can find out what others are reading, thinking or doing, depending on what they care to divulge. I am under no illusion that it is about any "real" exercise in friendship which is more complicated than the cyberworld is able to…
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There has to be a middleground between martyr and world conqueror (at least, I believe there is one)
In actress Ingrid Bergman's autobiography, she describes an argument she had with director Ingmar Bergman while making Autumn Sonata, a film about a concert pianist who leaves her family to pursue a musical career and does not see her children for seven years. The actress explains that she did not understand how a mother could bear to be apart from…
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Three interesting stories from Texas to distract you from your weekend activities. Slave Trade? What slave trade? It was all about sugar, rum and molasses. If you carry, you have nothing to conceal. "Dude Perfect" redefines air ball.
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