News and Updates

1. When you have five classes at a campus that’s a good hour and a half away without traffic, two of which are essentially new preps, plus a part time job on the campus right here in Our Little Town that has most of its responsibilities concentrated in October, it tends to leave little time for blogging.  Or much of anything else. 

2. On the other hand, I have no idea what if anything I will be teaching next semester, so I should enjoy this busy time while it lasts.  Such is the life of an adjunct.

3. Why is it that most of the ammosexuals I end up arguing with online could not pass the Turing Test?  You try to engage and you get the same nonsense talking points regardless of what has been said before or will be said next.  It is possible that they’re not NRA-sponsored chatbots, but you couldn’t prove it by me.

4. There is a certain insufferable irony to being a straight white middle-class man trying to teach a class on Multiculturalism And Diversity to a room full of students where half of them are non-white and another non-overlapping half are immigrants. 

5. My impression of the presidential debates so far is that the Democrats spent their evening arguing over whose ideas for addressing substantive issues were better while the Republicans spent their evenings calling each other names, bringing up distractions, and behaving in a way that would cause embarrassment to self-aware kindergartners.  It is disturbing how much this does not bother most GOP base voters I have listened to. 

6. You should read The Martian.  I have no idea if the movie is any good or not and right now I’d put the odds of my ever seeing it at around 50/50 because that’s just how I am with movies, but the book was well written and enjoyable.  The biggest surprise for me was how funny it was.

7. We spent last weekend up in Michigan at my brother-in-law’s annual Halloween bash, which occurs on Columbus Day weekend every year for reasons that probably made sense at the time.  It’s different now, ten years into it – the kids are all bigger and not as easily scared by the Haunted Trail through the wetland, and the adults are all busier – but it’s still fun.  And when you can top off the evening with a bonfire built from a thousand pounds of wood and two gallons of actual jet fuel, well, what can you say?  Life is good.

8. I will never make a living as a travel agent.

9. The chickens seem to have adjusted quite well to the disappearance of all those roosters.  You’d think they didn’t miss them at all.  Chickens are not sentimental creatures.

10. Students still get the joke when you pronounce Socrates as “SO-crates” the way Bill and Ted did.  I find that strangely reassuring.