It is TOO good:

Also known as Bullets of Random Crap:

• I'll admit it: I love that show Sunset Tan on E!. How can a reality show about a tanning salon be so good?
• I hope that in the next year or two, I will have a child. Things that terrify me: weight gain, postpartum depression, not being able to produce milk (I have nightmares about this one). Things I'm strangely not that afraid of: stretch marks (I actually think they look kind of cool), medical/technological intervention in the birth process.
• A couple of years ago, my good friend Pamela emailed me and some other friends a list. She said, "Think of all the people we hung out with in college." She had an impressive number of names, but a lot of them were just first names with a couple of identifiers, like "so'n'so's ex" or "lived in Florence Arms Apartments." We filled in the list, but we forgot about it for a while. Then Pamela started talking about organizing a reunion in August 2008 for the whole group, and by "the whole group," I mean our network of friends, rivals, enemies, frenemies, and acquaintances you merely tolerated for the sake of the group, all of whom were students at the University of North Alabama in the early-to-mid-1990s or Florence townies who were twentysomething in the early-to-mid-1990s. The list, which has turned out to be impressively long, is another instance of Dunbar's number. We've found some of these people on MySpace and set up a MySpace group for the reunion. In an attempt to find as many of the other people as possible, I'm listing their names here so that my site will come up if they Google themselves, or if a close friend or family member Googles them.

  1. Jason Bean
  2. Clay Bedingfield
  3. Todd Beene
  4. Amanda Lewis Belmares
  5. Blake Beverly
  6. Greg Biggers
  7. Trey Blanke
  8. Wendy Seay Bostich
  9. Marcia Bowling
  10. Allison Brazier
  11. Amy Bridenbaugh
  12. Bradley Brock
  13. Seth Brown
  14. Zane Brown
  15. Jimmy Burke
  16. Becca Cardin
  17. Willy Cardin
  18. Kitty Cobb
  19. Brian Conner
  20. Kurt Conner
  21. Nani Warrington Cooper
  22. Nathan Cooper
  23. Paul Cox
  24. Chelie Curran
  25. Carolann Daniel
  26. Jeff DeQuattro
  27. Cali Devaney
  28. Rich Dodson
  29. Steven Draper
  30. Nick Dugan
  31. Jason Elmore
  32. Jason English
  33. Bob English
  34. Eli Faulkner
  35. Roddy Fernandez
  36. David Flack
  37. Andy Frith
  38. Christie Gann (or Christy Gann)
  39. Michael Garrison
  40. Channing Givens
  41. Jason Glass
  42. Ann Glass
  43. Jon Gregory
  44. Michael Gregson
  45. Jason Haney
  46. Meagan Rikard Haney
  47. Cory Hannah
  48. Scott Harbour
  49. Blake Harrison
  50. Peter Heim
  51. Evan Heird
  52. Mary Helgamo
  53. Denys Hemen
  54. Pamela Hicks
  55. Earl Hicks
  56. Wally Hodges
  57. Toby Holder
  58. Amber Holder
  59. Mike Hollander
  60. Wendi Holt
  61. Patterson Hood
  62. Adam Howard
  63. Charity Howard
  64. Allison Stack Irons
  65. Bill Johnson
  66. Felicia Kaldi
  67. J. Lee King
  68. Shane Kirby
  69. Lisa Koontz
  70. Carrie Comer Kyzer
  71. Wendy Lawson
  72. Amy Rutherford Letson
  73. Tina Lott
  74. Libby Lynn
  75. Sara Simpson Martin
  76. Kory Martin
  77. Todd Mason
  78. Jason Massey
  79. Melissa McCaleb
  80. Molly McCanless
  81. Adam McCook
  82. Erin McCook
  83. Paige Motes
  84. Trillissa O'Quinn (or Trilissa O'Quinn)
  85. Steifon Passmore
  86. Michi Pendelton
  87. Daryl Pendergrast (or Darrell Pendergrass, Darrell Pendergrass, Daryl Pendergrass)
  88. Eric Peterson
  89. Samantha Mayer Peterson
  90. Amy Pieroni
  91. Linda Pinnix
  92. Tom Piper
  93. Scott Platzer
  94. Andrea Porter
  95. Marti Powell
  96. Michelle Provence
  97. Clancy Ratliff
  98. Crosbie Ray (or Crosby Ray)
  99. Tim Rea
  100. Kathy Richards
  101. Jason Roberts
  102. Brooke Robinson
  103. Chris Rohling
  104. Nathan Ruffrage
  105. Alexandria Satt
  106. Rondi Nerstad Shefrey
  107. Sunshine Shumate
  108. Jenny Simpson
  109. Walt Smith
  110. Sara Snodgrass
  111. Justin Snodgrass
  112. Sean Springer
  113. Christie Snodgrass Steadman
  114. Blake Stevenson
  115. Rebecca Eve Brown Styles
  116. Ronnie Taylor
  117. Annie Thomas
  118. Erin Thomas
  119. Katherine Thompson
  120. Wesley Thompson
  121. Stacey Thompson
  122. Angela Thornton
  123. Wade Thornton
  124. Melinda VanRensselaer Thornton
  125. Joey Tittle
  126. Kerry Tolleson
  127. Amy Tomlinson
  128. Susannah Moore Torres
  129. Myles Tucker
  130. Amanda Underwood
  131. Blair Underwood
  132. Lyndsay Van Vickle
  133. Neal Vickers
  134. Brad Wallace
  135. Andrew Walter
  136. Margaret Walter-Cain
  137. Cathy Ward
  138. Scott Weaver
  139. Shannon Wells
  140. Johanna White
  141. Todd White
  142. JJ Whitten
  143. Shannon Williams
  144. Ashley Williams
  145. Kim Williams
  146. Whit Williams
  147. Matt Wood
  148. Kevin Woodis
  149. Alison (*) Woodward
  150. Matt Woodward
  151. Lewis Yuille (or Louis Yuille)
  152. Devi Zulkifli
  153. Carolyn (worked at Hickory Hills Cinemas, strawberry blond hair, might have been in Alpha Delta Pi briefly)
  154. Jen (of Jen and Jimmy)
  155. Cyd (went to Daryl's parties)
  156. Camille (Toby’s ex)
  157. Tyler (Kim's friend)
  158. Drew (of Drew and Devi)

As part of my new position as a first-year writing director, I will be teaching the composition pedagogy practicum this fall. I already have a lot of ideas for readings and such, but the practicum meets once a week for 75 minutes, so I need to be judicious about how I use the time. In no particular order, here are some topics I'm thinking about covering. How would you rank these? If you could reorder these based on importance (1 most important, 18 least important), how would you do it?

POTENTIAL TOPICS TO COVER:

1.syllabus design
2.assignment design
3.eliciting class participation/discussion
4.activities for class (exercises)
5.grammar (when to bring it in and how)
6.grading papers – norming, time management, techniques
7.class observations: why they're done, how they're useful, etc.
8.classroom management, teaching persona, authority
9.teaching philosophy statement
10.teaching portfolio
11.how to teach argument, logic
12.ways to use technology in teaching
13.watch Take 20
14.responding to student writing (not grading)
15.plagiarism, citation, authorship
16.how to organize peer review activities
17.designing short, informal writing prompts (minute papers, weekly posts/responses, etc.)
18.student evaluations: how to interpret the numbers, departmental mean, how they're used, mentoring procedure in case numbers are very low, how to put them in perspective, etc.

These are images from a book I loved as a child. The prints are poster sized, and the book came to me via my dad, who owned a wholesale grocery company when I was growing up and who got it from a tobacco company salesman. Almost all my dad's customers owned small convenience stores, so he carried tobacco products in addition to groceries. Growing up, I got all kinds of tobacco swag, like the Benson & Hedges compilation tape. Anyway, I gave some of the images titles, as you can see. I've placed the titles next to the images to which they correspond.

And here's what I put on the back cover, shown larger for effect:

Apparently girls could peek in the book. Perhaps I was concerned with the privacy of the painted ladies. At any rate, I still really like that book, and I'm tempted to frame one or more of the prints and hang them in my house and/or office. Which one is your favorite? I don't like either of the images of the men.size=l

Why not make it an annual tradition to announce something on June 15, if I have anything to announce? It just so happens that I do.

I'm excited to say that starting in August, I will be an assistant professor and the Director of First-Year Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. That we've been traveling to the heart of Acadiana to find housing and eat delicious food is part of the reason I haven't been blogging much.

Laissez les, etc.!

Today is our first anniversary. I'm still very glad we did a court house wedding.

Wow. This story about a case involving two professors at Arkansas State is eerily similar to Joyce Carol Oates' excellent 2002 novella Beasts.

Posting will likely be on hold for the next couple of weeks. In her journal, in an entry titled "Back to School Commandments," Sylvia Plath wrote, "There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get." To be sure, lots of things for me are going fine right now, but we have a lot of costly and irritating little calamities to contend with of late, such as the incident on the Natchez Trace. Point is, I'm too grumpy to write much of anything on the blog, as I don't want to sound unhappy when I'm really not.