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Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
ELA Podcast
Check out this fun podcast featuring a group of Brits discussing comics: plot, characterization, history, what's new in the most interesting comic narratives:
http://goodcomicbooks.podomatic.com/
http://goodcomicbooks.podomatic.com/
Monday, June 27, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
Video Project Comments
Please open the link in the navigation bar to the right of the page to our Wikispaces pages. You can open it in a new tab and then comment here. No anonymous comments, please. We're all ladies and gentlemen here. I hope. Thank you.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
I remember: 1st draft
Hey! any of you casual blog readers. I'm just posting this so that a couple of classmates can respond to it, 'cause we didn't have enough time in class. And if you're reading this, Cassandra, I'm sorry. I really do wish I could go back and redo the 7th form year, just for fun.
I remember...
I remember many things about my childhood but none of the details.
I don’t remember why I hit my best friend’s brother up on the mound behind our house, but I know I did once.
I don’t remember building the tree house in the border of the farmer’s fields or why we were scared to be caught stealing materials from his dump.
I don’t remember why any of the caterpillars we collected from the eucalyptus tree at the edge of the reserve never became butterflies.
I don’t remember who first dared to dive off the fence around the pool into the water or why we even decided to try it.
I don’t remember why I felt astonished when my father took my brother out with a hockey stick but I never forgot he did it.
I don’t remember ever having any of my friends visit inside our house but I can’t believe that it never happened.
I don’t remember why I visited Cassandra A’s house one day and I’ve been sorry ever since that I hadn’t done so when we were both young and shy.
It’s sad. I hardly remember any details at all.
But I do remember this: I remember lying on my back in the yard once and watching the clouds go by and seeing their shapes change, just because looking at clouds was the most important thing to do, on that day to which I have always wished to return.
Monday, June 13, 2011
The Merits of Print Encyclopedias in the Age of Wikipedia
Okay, we checked out an obscure entry on a guy named Abel Buell in the 1999 edition of Encyclopedia Americana. The guy merited two paragraphs, detailing his birth, his death, and the stuff he did in between to get himself in an encyclopedia. It is pretty basic stuff. Enough to fill a school report about, oh, two paragraphs long, maybe three with clumsy paraphrasing. No picture of the guy or the stuff he invented so I still don't know what a lapidary machine is.
Sure the entry is probably sound. Some other guy probably had a chance to see records of birth and death and perhaps some contemporary reports, so we can reasonably expect the information to be correct, at least enough so that there's no point in trooping up to Connecticut to see the records for ourselves. But it's not very lively stuff. There's no way to make sense of the entry. It says he invented a lot of things but there's no sense if they were useful or not, or if he got taken to the cleaners. He died penniless so there's no way to know from the print entry.
Sure the entry is probably sound. Some other guy probably had a chance to see records of birth and death and perhaps some contemporary reports, so we can reasonably expect the information to be correct, at least enough so that there's no point in trooping up to Connecticut to see the records for ourselves. But it's not very lively stuff. There's no way to make sense of the entry. It says he invented a lot of things but there's no sense if they were useful or not, or if he got taken to the cleaners. He died penniless so there's no way to know from the print entry.
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