Monthly Archives: December 2008

My review of Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters appeared a couple of weeks ago in the New Haven Advocate & the Fairfield Weekly.  I will say that shit never gets … Continue reading →

Grades are due at 8am tomorrow, a deadline I will largely make.  Also, winter session courses start tomorrow, which will be a little dicey . . . but I’m pretty sure I can get us through the opening of Bleak … Continue reading →

Writing in his Chronicle-sponsored blog today, Mark Bauerlein notes that psychologists have identified rising rates of narcissism among teenagers over the past several decades.  There are multiple causes for this, the research suggests, but Bauerlein focuses on one in particular: … Continue reading →

We have a new IT governance committee* on our campus, thanks to lots of arm-twisting by the CIO, and some (ongoing) redefining of the faculty senate’s information technology committee.  (For background, see these two pdfs.)  What’s interesting about this committee … Continue reading →

From yesterday’s New Britain Herald:  A brazen bank robber pulled off a drive-through heist at the Bank of America on West Main Street Monday afternoon by making a “significant threat of violence,” police said. Police declined to comment on the … Continue reading →

A nearby town, Vernon, has Dickens Days every year: a holiday celebration loosely organized around a Victorian theme.  Students in my Victorian novel class could get extra credit if they went and could prove it.  (In the interests of anthropology, … Continue reading →

(This isn’t quite my slide presentation, but a list related resources.  Here’s the slide presentation itself.) It’s nice to start with an epigraph.  Here’s Jo Guldi on what humanities pedagogy could look like today:  A characterization of humanities pedagogy based … Continue reading →

I am a sucker for Dickens-related holiday humor, and so can’t help linking to Yankee Pot Roast’s   (even if it is a year old).

A local blogger is reporting that a New Britain Herald reporter was arrested over the weekend on DUI & drug charges.  I’m not one to moralize when someone’s down, and in general I have a fairly libertarian take on the … Continue reading →

I have terrible handwriting.  This doubtless follows from various moral failings, but it is literally true that I was never properly taught cursive handwriting: I was promoted out of 2nd grade, when they were first starting to teach it, and … Continue reading →