Blogs

I have now enabled avatars for comments, if you'd like to start using one.

Also, does anyone know how to keep Drupal from automatically sending trackbacks every time you link to someone's blog? It's a little embarrassing! It happens whether you link to an individual post or to the main page (in which case it just sends a trackback to the first post, I think).

UPDATE: I've also changed the comment settings to allow you to leave your email address and/or URL without having to register, so now it's more like MT and WP.

Years ago, my mom had a yard sale. We got rid of a lot of stuff, including many of my old books, but I kept Emily because it was my favorite of the Sunfire romances. When I was about eleven years old, I devoured these things. Each was about 400 pages of historical romance fiction, set at various times and locations, all in the U.S., if I recall correctly. One was on the Titanic, one was in the early 1940s, one was in the California Gold Rush, one was in the 1840s, etc. The title was always the heroine's name, and she was always torn between two men, each of whom was perfect, but the heroine had to follow her heart. Did anyone else read these? I'm thinking Wolfangel is the most likely to have, heh. (Click thumbnails for larger images.)

A lengthy excerpt follows. Read it!

A book I read as a child on how to breakdance, found in my bedroom last night (click thumbnails for larger images):

More than just a how-to book with silhouette diagrams of how to do the dance moves, Breakdancing has a lot of other information about hip hop culture, including detailed descriptions of breakdancers' clothing and a glossary of terms. There's even a bit of history of hip hop. From p. 10-11:

To fully appreciate the Breakdancing you see, the kids doing it, and their dedication and belief, then you should see Breakdancing in the larger context of Hip Hop.

Hip Hop is a social and cultural movement that began in the Bronx. It includes Breakdancing, graffiti art, and rapping and scratching. In case you don't know, rapping is the rhyming jive talk of D.J.'s, and scratching is when these D.J.'s turn the record they're getting ready to play under the needle to create amplified scratching-type rhythms. The records don't actually get scratched. Hip Hop is the cultural movement of the Zulu Nation in the Bronx. Zulu Nation means to kids that they will get more from their dancing, singing, and painting than from fighting. It means believing in yourself so much that in spite of all odds against you, you can achieve something worthwhile and get somewhere -- if you stick with it.

The physical and spiritual presence of Afrika Bambaataa of the Soul Sonic Force is at the heart of Hip Hop. It was Bam who got kids to stick to their perfections and believe in themselves. Bam convinced them that they would get more from their creativity than from their fighting.

Austin Lingerfelt has just posted a fine essay on using weblogs in the classroom (Via Chuck).

Visual Rhetoric Bibliography (Via Delicious Jill.)

A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books): This story examines the tactics of savvy authors who are trying to get a publishing contract; some have been successful at using their weblogs to demonstrate that there's an audience for whatever they're working on, and then there are the Julie/Julia and Salam Pax precedents -- I think Ginmar also has a book deal -- as proof that it's possible to get a book out of a blog. It's great, but I worry about how this will go over in academia. I would like to, if not see everything go online, at least to remove the electronic scholarly publishing stigma once and for all, and I'll be dismayed if weblogs are used as a means to a (proprietary) print end. I don't mean to come across as this paranoid about it, but the thought has crossed my mind.

Oh, and I'm about to go home for three lovely weeks, so I might not be blogging all that much.

I don't dislike many things about Drupal, but one of them is the fact that, when I create a collaborative book, I can't put it in categories in the taxonomy. Here's a redundant link to my series of blogging handouts for my Fall 2004 section of Rhetoric 1101 so that someone who clicks on my "Teaching" or my "Blogging" categories can find it.

Jenny and I were giggling knowingly about this the other night, and I thought I'd share. The following is from Sweet Valley High #4, Power Play, p. 7, but a similar physical description can be found in nearly every book in the series.

Though Elizabeth and Jessica certainly didn't have Robin's figure problems, they still watched their diets carefully. Slim, five foot six, the sisters were both beautiful: shoulder-length, sun-streaked blond hair, flashing blue-green eyes, and perfect skin. Elizabeth was four minutes older, but they were identical right down to the tiny dimple each had in her left cheek. Although they wore the same size clothes [that would be a size six, as in "their perfect size-six figures"], they never dressed alike, except for identical lavalieres that they wore on gold chains around their necks. The lavalieres had been presents from their parents on the twins' sixteenth birthday.

Also, in this post I'm trying out one of the new Drupal 4.5 features, which allows me to upload files to posts. I want to see how it displays. The file is a scan of the cover of Power Play.
UPDATE: Okay, so you have to click on the title of the post in order to see the attachment.

For the love of God, please stop messing around with the stylesheet. You've basically got it where you want it for now. It's not THAT big a deal that you're having trouble locating the .xtmpl file to change the background color of the cell that contains the banner image so that it will extend to the edge of the right column. So there's a little padding between the banner image and the columns. You can fix it later!

How is it that I lived my entire life except for the last 2.5 years in the south and never heard or even heard of Leroy the Redneck Reindeer? My attention has only been brought to the song today by Joanne Jacobs and Joe Kelley, who point to a controversy surrounding the song; a school in Texas is planning to perform it in the Christmas show, and a parent -- the white mother of a biracial child -- is complaining, citing embedded racism in the lyrics. There is, for example, a reference to a Confederate flag. Jacobs and Kelley reacted the way one might expect given their political affiliation; they're disgusted at what they perceive as PC's having gone too far. I find a couple of things interesting about this case. First, the Houston chapter of the NAACP is apparently supporting the parent, Jennifer Scott. Second, the story doesn't really give us any context, and I have all kinds of questions that need to be answered before I can form an opinion about this case. Is this boy the only child of color in the school? If not, can we assume the other parents are fine with the song? Have the children already been rehearsing the Christmas show and singing the song? Has the singing of the song contributed in any way to the little boy's getting teased (which I can imagine would be heart-wrenching for any parent, so perhaps she was desperate for recourse?)? Putting the song aside for the moment, do the school and its employees have a history of racist remarks and practices? Are any of the parents of the other children members of the KKK, and do they feel that their views are somehow approved by the inclusion of this song (yeah, I know that's a long shot, but I'm wondering)? How are the Civil War and the Confederate flag presented to the children in history class? And so on.

Oh yeah, and Charlie has just upgraded me to Drupal 4.5 (thanks, Charlie!). I'll have this default template for a while until I can carve out a little time to tweak the style sheet.