Count me in with the Amazon reviewers who would like to see Days of Our Lives on DVD. There are so many lovely, campy mashups that can be created with clips from that show. Examples:

• That time Marlena was possessed by the devil
• That time Carly was buried alive
• The time during which Eileen Davidson played four different characters, including the unforgettable Susan. "That weird Vivian girl! Little Elvis!"
• Vivian's machinations: "I've got a plan..."
• John Black uttering "Stefano!" angrily and ruefully to no one in particular

I'm sure there are great moments from the 60s and 70s too. I was a soap opera addict during pretty much all of the 80s and most of the 90s: All My Children, Days of Our Lives, Another World, and Passions.

I'm putting together a course pack of readings for a class I'm teaching in the fall called Functional Grammar. On deck are Rhetorical Grammar by Martha Kolln (though that's the textbook), "Authority and American Usage" by David Foster Wallace, and "The Principles of Newspeak" and "Politics and the English Language by Orwell. I'll also assign Silva Rhetoricae and Grammar Girl podcasts. I also want to assign at least one essay by Geneva Smitherman, but I don't know what would be a good one for an undergraduate course. Any recommendations?

On Thursday in my Introduction to Rhetorical Studies class, we're going to be talking about Rationes dictandi, or Principles of Letter Writing: an excerpt of it, anyway, from The Rhetorical Tradition. I was thinking about famous letters to show in class, and Thomas Jefferson's letter to Benjamin Banneker came to mind, as well as the correspondence between Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, though it's dense and maybe not as well suited to a quick class exercise. Emily Dickinson's letters to Susan Huntington Gilbert Dickinson might be good.

Anyway, I was thinking that it would be anachronistically cool to take a collection of famous correspondence and reproduce it in two email accounts. Gmail might be good for the way it displays emails as conversations. You could create email addresses like, say, malcolm.cowley@gmail.com and symbolic.action@gmail.com. The letters could be typed out as emails, and the public could have access to the usernames and passwords to check the inboxes as new letters were added. I guess it would get vandalized and spammed pretty quickly, but it would be interesting for a while.

Got tagged by Joanna to answer the question that's going around: "What are five things I do every day to contribute to my success?"

1. Review active projects. This is in keeping with the GTD philosophy. I use Nozbe liberally.

2. Think about all the work that other colleagues are probably doing right now. I'm very competitive, and if I remind myself that other people are working and if I slack off, I'm going to fall behind, I get really motivated.

3. Do crafty, creative stuff. It's a kind of wax-on, wax-off for my mind, a way to think nonverbally that complements all the verbal work I have to do. The craftiness includes playing around with media (images, video, and audio), cooking, knitting, making soaps and bath salts, and tinkering with jewelry -- making new jewelry out of vintage jewelry using needle-nose pliers, a drill, and a vice.

4. Spend time with my husband.

5. Evaluate objectively the stakes of whatever it is I'm stressed out about. Sometimes I blow things out of proportion and devote more time to tasks than I should.

At CCCC, I made sure to pick up my copy of Take 20, Todd Taylor's documentary film about teaching writing. For those of you who don't have access to the DVD, you can watch the trailer to get an idea. The premise: take 22 writing teachers and ask each of them twenty questions about teaching writing. I wasn't one of the 22 people tapped to be interviewed in the film, so I decided to answer the questions and make my own movie. Enjoy:

By the way, if you want to upload videos longer than ten minutes (YouTube's limit -- my movie is a little over sixteen minutes), DailyMotion gives you twenty minutes.

I HATE iMOVIE. I'm working on two multimedia projects right now, and this issue with muxed MPGS is ruining EVERYTHING. Does anyone know of anything I can do? I was willing to take every single one of my clips and use FFmpeg to convert them to DV, but I couldn't get it to work. I also tried to see if my camera would record non-muxed video (which would mean having to re-shoot the whole thing), but it apparently will not.

UPDATE: Okay. Looks like I might be able to do it with MPEG Streamclip. We'll see.

At least I hope it'll become a meme. What books are on your coffee table?

That's mine. The books are (L-R):

1. Heavy Metal, by Mick St. Michael

2. I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence by Amy Sedaris

3. Photo album with pictures from our wedding

4. Untitled Film Stills, by Cindy Sherman

Via PZ Myers:

Your results:
You are Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic)

Kaylee Frye (Ship Mechanic) 75% Zoe Washburne (Second-in-command) 65% Malcolm Reynolds (Captain) 60% Inara Serra (Companion) 60% Wash (Ship Pilot) 60% Derrial Book (Shepherd) 50% Dr. Simon Tam (Ship Medic) 50% River (Stowaway) 45% Jayne Cobb (Mercenary) 35% A Reaver (Cannibal) 35% Alliance 25%

You are good at fixing things. You are usually cheerful. You appreciate being treated with delicacy and specialness.