Wow--Chun's really gone. This morning I looked at his blog, and he had posted saying he wasn't going to blog anymore and, moreover, was going to try to stop reading blogs. I'll admit, I thought it was a joke, but I guess not. I wonder what brought this on?

First, there's Lost Highway; I haven't seen it yet, and it looked interesting, although I might not have rented it had I read the review I linked on IMDB. Next, we have (gulp) Uncle Saddam. I have no defense save pure, morbid curiosity. From reading the case, it looks to be a Juvenalian satirical representation of Saddam Hussein's personal life. We'll see if I'm able to watch the whole thing.

Uh, I have a DVD in my CD-ROM drive, and it won't come out. It has been in there for several days (I was trying yet again to make the DVD player work, and it still doesn't), and I've periodically pushed the eject button, but it won't budge. I've tried pushing the button and holding it for a few seconds, and still nothing. Is it time to open up the tower and get it out from the inside?

(Right about now, I wish I had a Mac, so I could select the icon on the desktop, go to Special, and select "Eject.")

Eleven years ago, when I was first getting into photography, I used to dress up in bizarre costumes, gather up props, take my camera and tripod out to random locations like this old abandoned warehouse, and take self-portraits. Doesn't the melancholy shine through? :)

I was again elated after class last night. We managed to have a pretty interesting discussion about memos, bringing in references to the movie Office Space and using examples of how crucial memos can become when a tragedy or debacle occurs in an organization. We talked about the memos involved in the Challenger disaster and touched upon the torture memos, which I might circle back to on Monday. Using these political examples seems to work pretty well and make for engaging discussions; I think I'll continue in this vein and assign the Gap, Inc. Social Responsibility Report. Lots to talk about there: audience, exigency, purpose, rhetorical strategy, etc.

Gap report via Desert Dragon.

Comic Cats via Burningbird.

Via the Creative Commons Weblog, the Naropa Collection:

Thanks to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Naropa University,
you can hear hundreds of hours of lectures and readings by Burroughs,
Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and others all of which have been
posted to the Archive as part of the Naropa Collection. As of this writing there are 147 (!) uploads to the stunning collection.

What a treasure for the public, free for download under an Attribution-No Derivative Works-Noncommercial Use Creative Commons license.

Yesterday was the first day of the summer term, and I'm thrilled with how well class went last night. My students are so bright and quick to catch on to the kind of writing we're doing in this class (Professional and Technical Writing) and concepts such as rhetorical purpose and primary and secondary audiences. To get an idea of how great these students are, consider this: On the agenda for last night's class was defining technical communication. I was going to pontificate about it, but as soon as I got in there, I looked around the room at the students and asked them what they thought it was. Their answers, which I wrote on the white board:

• information
• relaying messages in scientific/technical fields
• representations of data
• writing for a non-expert audience
• purpose-driven writing
• science writing (e.g. New York Times science columns)
• presentation of research
• business communication: memos, etc.
• inter-office, organizational communication
• concise way to exchange information

This was a baseline reading; I hadn't said a word about the concept of technical communication, and they presumably hadn't read the textbook yet. I'm impressed. :)