Web Projects #1: Background and Motivation

In the summer of 2007 I accepted a one-year PA-ship as editorial assistant at an academic journal; it was my second such job, and my previous experience certainly aided in getting the job. Where this position differed from the previous was, among other things, in a non-editorial task I’d been assigned and for which I was hired: improving our office database. This as well as a previous professional project as well as personal projects, along with their complications, are described below.

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Tuscaloosa, First Full Day …

I bought: desk & chair, bookcase, pillow, pants, and a bottle of wine. And then: a bed … I will have it delivered tonight. I will move stuff to my new apartment (Bhavin’s place) tonight; but I’ll stay one more night in the motel.

I had dinner last night with Doug (he also picked me up from the bus and took me to campus), and received email greetings today from Elaine & Rasma.

It’s nice to be here.

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And so universalem begins …

I’ll write more … later.

A decade ago I played the title role in Gryphius’ Absurda Comica oder Herr Peter Squentz, in which Mr. Squentz refers to himself as a “Universalem.” Since then the word has stuck with me, and since then I had considered—off and on over the years—setting up that domain as an adjunct to my regular personal site, as a new site that might have “community” features. And so on and so forth.

As summer 2010 advanced, progressed, and withered I finally broke down, acquired the domain, and set up this, perhaps temporary, WordPress blog …

All I can say is: I’ll write more, later.

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Class dismissed …

… so for some reason I started up “X-Men 3” via mplayer … perhaps boredom. I know I should pull a book off the shelf, either fiction or non-fiction for my work … or non-fiction that’s unrelated to my work … but instead I feel as if (after my talk with Hans) that I have a “new lease on life” in a sense, and while that means I should be doing work and doing it as if nothing else in the world mattered, I instead feel the desire to watch movies.

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It’s fish-fry-Friday, but I had turkey.

Let’s clear some links:

  • Occam’s Razor: a webcomic, the first I’ll post today, but not the last.
  • In Praise of Bullshit: it cites On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt.
  • Pinky TA: a second webcomic, but not the last.
  • A Lesson Is Learned: webcomic number three … the one with the best, most surrealistic and beautiful art.
  • Hamas TV makes a martyr out of Mickey Mouse double: “A Mickey Mouse lookalike who preached Islamic domination on a Hamas-affiliated children’s television program was beaten to death in the show’s final episode Friday.” And: “In the final skit, ‘Farfour’ was killed by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour’s land. At one point, the mouse called the Israeli a ‘terrorist.'” And you wonder why most of us have NO sympathy for Hamas, and, alas, equate them with all Palestinians. Cl.. Hamas’s tactics are no better than the Nazi’s in their portrayal of Jews. And as long as they use such xenophobic rhetoric, they’ll never gain international respect (except in the eyes of Iran).
  • not included: webcomic number four!
  • Dresden Codak: I’ve posted this comic before … it has great moments.
  • poor thing must go through a ton of razors: an interesting work of “art.”
  • Beautycheck: virtual attractiveness (with Virtual Miss Germany)
  • Double uterus: “In a female fetus, the uterus starts out as two small tubes. As the fetus develops, the tubes normally join to create one larger, hollow organ — the uterus. Sometimes, however, the tubes don’t join completely. Instead, each one develops into a separate cavity. This condition is called double uterus (uterus didelphys).”
  • Films that may be more interesting with a letter or two missing: from McSweeney’s — including “Aging Bull,” Who Framed Roger Rabbi” and “The Earless Vampire Killers.”
  • Grass’s Fact and Fiction, Fighting to a Draw: The NY Times on Guenter Grass’s recent memoir, in English — “‘Peeling the Onion’ is a verbally dazzling but often infuriating piece of work, bristling with harsh self-criticism, murky evasions and coy revisions of a past that, Mr. Grass steadfastly insists, presents itself to his novelist’s imagination as a parade of images and stories asking to be manipulated.”
  • Tolkien tales come alive in Denmark’s Faeroe Islands: It would be lovely to visit.

My Firefox window has too many open tabs.

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Thorsday — no thunder

At Fair Trade I finished Prague, Arthur Phillips’s first novel. He has a new one out there, Angelica, which Salon recently reviewed:

The extravagantly talented novelist Arthur Phillips seems to be making a grand tour of all the best literary genres. He kicked it off in 2002, with “Prague,” a tragicomic bildungsroman about an ensemble of young Americans desperately striving to have an authentic bohemian experience in early-’90s Budapest, Hungary. Then he tried a literary/historical thriller with the diverting, if baggy, “The Egyptologist,” whose narrator slides irrevocably down the scale from unreliable to outright demented. For his latest effort, “Angelica,” Phillips has produced an elegantly sculpted psychological ghost story told from four different points of view; it’s “The Turn of the Screw” crossed with “Rashomon.”

It also shares a title with a 2003 Sharon Shinn novel, the fourth, it seems, in her Samaria series.

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Hump Day

The middle of the week; a meeting with Hans on Friday.

Today I decided to watch the new Die Hard movie — Live Free of Die Hard.

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More Kant, less Life

This evening I was reading a book on Kant & Schiller & Aesthetics … well, between episodes of rewatching Matrix Revolutions. Horst Nitschack’s “Kritik der ästhetischen Wirklichkeitskonstitution” — Critique of the aesthetic constitution of reality — from Verlag Roter Stern, 1976.

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Last night to tonight

I hate it when people write “tonite.” I’m known for my own range of silly abbreviations, neologisms and the like, but “tonite” and “lite” are the ones that get me.

Last night I re-viewed (I like funky hyphenation but am not phond of phunky spelling, you see) the January 1st Fiesta Bowl between Oklahoma and Boise State. The pregame show, with a trip to Boise and a talk about the Smurf Turf was precious, it was great — it featured locals saying “Boy-see” not “Boyz-ee” … there were a couple “Boyz-ees” in there but few and far between, and nothing like the lazy forms of Boise heard by commentators. Tokens, lots of tokens. Linguistic evidence, and I’m not even a linguist.

But I play one online from time to time.

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