Miscellany – Page 311

I’m trying to make this thing as much like a virtual sketchbook/scrapbook/notebook as I can, and avoid the regular trappings of blogging, like long link rolls and book reviews. (Even though I like those trappings on other blogs.) However, if you want that stuff, check out the del.icio.us and LibraryThing feeds on the sidebar.

THE SPIEL THAT BRINGS THE SUCKERS INTO THE TENT

Monday, January 29, 2007

I’m currently slogging my way through Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, much of which I, like the academic film dope in Annie Hall, don’t understand at all. What better way to celebrate our favorite TV night (Prison Break, 24) than by quoting from the introduction:

McLuhan notices, correctly, that it is the bad news-reports of sexual scandal, natural disaster, and violent death-that sells the good news-that is, the advertisements. The bad news is the spiel that brings the suckers into the tent. Like the illustrations in a fifth-grade reader, the sequence of scenes on CBS or CNN teaches the late-twentieth-century American catechism: first, at the top of the news, the admonitory row of body bags being loaded into ambulances in Brooklyn or south Miami; second, the inferno of tenement fires and bumming warehouses; third, a sullen procession of criminals arraigned for robbery or murder and led away in chains. The text of the day’s lesson having been thus established, the camera makes its happy return to the always smiling anchorwoman, and so-with her gracious permission-to the previews of heaven sponsored by Delta Airlines, Calvin Klein, and the State Farm Insurance companies. The homily is as plain as a medieval morality play or the bloodstains on Don Johnson’s Armani suit–0bey the law, pay your taxes, speak politely to the police officer, and you go to the Virgin Islands on the American Express card. Disobey the law, neglect your insurance payments, speak rudely to the police, and you go to Kings County Hospital in a body bag.

WiiMANIA!

Saturday, January 27, 2007

After 23 years, I finally own a Nintendo. By sheer dumb luck yesterday, I checked Target.com and saw that there were Wiis in stock 5 miles from where I work. Drove right over after work, got the second to last in stock. Brought it home, and the wife and I played Wii sports for the rest of the night. (I would post a YouTube video of her boxing, but I think she might divorce me…)

Review: believe the hype. It’s sleek, intuitive, and amazingly fun. Worth every penny so far. (And we don’t even have Zelda yet.)

Add to that, the remote feels totally revolutionary. The closer we move towards touch and motion, and the further we move away from keyboard and mice, the better computer interfaces are going to get. Check out this unbelievable video of a multi-touch driven computer screen, posted by Peter Durand. The future, people.

And let’s not forget the importance of play. “It’s through playing that children learn, among other things, skills essential to thriving in and protecting democratic society — critical thinking, initiative, problem solving and empathy.”

Thank God we’ve found a diversion from February in Mordor — err, Cleveland. Because it’s coming…

WESTERN MUTATES, SURVIVES, LIMPS ALONG

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Yesterday, President Hodge announced that Western will become a program in Miami University’s College of Arts and Sciences in July 2008. We were all hoping that it would become a department in CAS, but beggars (supplicants?) can’t be choosers. Whatever else WesternLite© is going to look like, they’ve promised a self-designed major, a living/learning community based in Peabody Hall, a core faculty, and a culminating senior project and Senior Conference.

The crucial step will be re-designing the curriculum. I’m assuming that since Western will be a program in CAS, it will have to stick closer to the “Miami Plan” than in the past. This will probably mean a more robust science requirement, along with a foreign language. I personally think it’s a crime that Western didn’t previously require foreign language courses — in a setting where multi-culturalism is supposedly such a value, why would students not be required to learn the language of another culture? Surely, it would be a better exercise than some lame seminar on colonialism…

Yesterday, I had coffee with a creative writing teacher, and we were talking about how well groomed all college students are these days — they have all the right grades, all the right extra-curriculars…but they don’t know a damned thing. They don’t have any truly interesting experiences. Western wasn’t immune from this overall phenomenon, but it still tended to attract more offbeat, quirky, somewhat intelligent and freethinking students than main campus. With Western “integrated” into CAS, who knows what’s in store.

All in all, I’d call this a small victory. We’ll see what happens.