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Here's some stuff to listen to. Beatbox guy. Lost to a teenage Canadian for an online thing. He wuz robbed!

Just got back from a run. This was the last song playing.

Emma and I watched this movie, "Tell No One". It was really very good. I'd say watch it, but don't actually watch this trailer. Also, it's in French.

I'm going to pick up some melatonin and see if that does anything for me.

This past term, I have received praise on two occasions for my instructing ability. The first instance, the prof. specifically came and found me outside of class time to tell me how impressed she was with my ability to explain complex statistics. The second time a different professor ran into me in the halls and stopped me to say that my 'talk' was on a completely different level from my peers.

Now, its not like I haven't recieved acknowledgement of my abilities before. I recieve essays with grades and comments on them all the time, and they might include a nice word or two. Heck, I've even been nominiated for an award for academic accomplishment. But the truth is that these don't compare to the simple act of personally telling a person that they did a good job.

In retrospect, a big part of what made my summer co-op so enjoyable was that my boss, Amanda, was not hesitant to tell me that I had done a good job if she thought it.

It's a simple thing, really, but very effective.

On murder as entertainment:

"This is probably something you've never heard, but as soon as somebody tells you, you're like 'right, of course'... you know how murder figures into so much of American pop culture (cop shows, video games, CSI-murder-mysteries, etc.)? Well, if you knew somebody that got murdered, you might not be into that stuff so much."

& murder mystery theatre:

"Let's pretend you were going to have a 'Rape Mystery Dinner', and you were going to show up and the rule of the game was that someone was raped and we are all going to find the rapist. That wouldn't go over. People would find that distasteful and creepy... why would you want to put yourself in that role?

Kinda puts thing in perspective doesn't it? It's easy to forget how desensitized we've become to muder as entertainment, and it's easy to imagine how that would all change if you knew someone that was murdered.

As a function of listening to people present, or make comments in a classroom environment (and I do a lot of this), I have started to compile my list of annoyances. (Consider this an addendum to my previous post about not having enough training as educators)

#1. Up talking. (or HRTs) I know a lot of people don't even notice it, but it drives me totally bonkers. Females and teenagers are particularly prone, but males and other age groups are not immune.

#2. Not forming concise statements. The whole world benefits when you attempt to communicate ideas in fewer words. I know you love to hear your own voice, but really now.

#2.5 Unnecessary repetition. Some phrases just bear repeating ("Yes we can."). On the other hand, repeating your same idea over and over as you attempt to make it clearer in your own mind just fills the room with additional hot air.

#3. Slow talking. When combined with #2, time slows down to an improbable level, and even light cannot escape. I think Keanu Reeves used this technique to avoid bullets in The Matrix.

#4. Poor word choice. Granted, sometimes in the heat of the moment, we all choose the wrong word. But, please, don't just pull words from thin air. I know the big ones are so juicy and tempting.

#5. Filler phrases. "Um" and "er" are bad enough, but when you insist on adding "You know?" to the end of every sentence, well then, I don't want to.

Anyway, the reason I asked was because I listened to a piece on This American Life where John Hodgman asks this very question of his friends & other people, and asks them to defend their reasoning. He lays out the ground rules that I used. Funny to hear some people initially choose invisibility, and then finally argue themselves over to flight. It's really funny, you should listen to it.

For example, I just shared a post that Sam shared from his Reader. It's like I "paid it forward" without all the touchy-feeliness and a stabbing at the end.

You might call those links my 'lazy-man's blog', since it requires almost no effort to produce, and they are all just someone else's stuff. It is the essence of the internet, my friends.

That post that I just re-shared was about how, in the age of facebook, we never have to lose touch with friends anymore; how we can hoard every person we've ever met, forever. The author suggests the 'fade utility', where those friends we don't communicate with much sort of turn yellow and gently fade into nothingness. A cute idea, but then, it kind of defeats the whole point of facebook. If I just used facebook to communicate with the friends I communicate with anyway, well, that would be just like real-life, wouldn't it?

To simulate the fading (without the disappearing), I set my news feed to mostly display feed information from people I want to get information about, and less for those other people who would probably 'fade' away if we had the utility activated. Facebook provides a number of ways to 'fade' out stuff. Every entry in your news feed as options, click it and you can choose "Less about so-and-so", and then it's done.

And frankly, if you want to delete someone you never talk to anyway, just do it. It's not like they're going to notice, right?