Don't bait your English teacher; you may regret it

My National Novel Writing Month adventures continue. I've fallen behind in my word count, so I'm trying to catch up. In this excerpt, Hannah has given her class an exercise similar to the one that I give in this post, in creating descriptive writing that aims to show, rather than tell, a highly emotional moment in the students' past. In case you're wondering, yes, this sort of thing has actually happened to me, more than once. And no, I didn't respond quite as, um, graphically as Hannah does -- much as I would have liked to -- or I probably wouldn't still have my job. But I did respond in a toned-down version of Hannah's response. Since this is an all-ages blog, I'm also redacting what the student actually wrote.

When she got to the end of the descriptive writing exercise, she had one student volunteer to read his piece, a student who had been something of a class clown while completing almost no homework and turning in essays that were so under-developed that they were really just outlines. As he stood to read, he and the other members of his group started to snicker. He held up his paper, on which Hannah could see he had scrawled only a couple of lines, and began to read: “I went in the room with the girl and she took her clothes off and laid down on the bed. I took my clothes off and laid on top of her, and then I ----ed her and she said she liked it and I did it again and she said I was the best that she ever had and it was my first time.”

By the time he got to the end of his reading, his group-mates were having a hard time containing themselves, but the student himself was looking less and less sure of himself, his voice becoming weaker and his face turning red. Hannah guessed he was now beginning to regret that his buddies had talked him into this. Still, she knew the original plan the the four of them had hatched was probably intended to shock her or otherwise disrupt her composure. She decided to take the offering with a straight face. “Surely you can do better than that,” she said. “We want description, and you had only two adjectives and only two adverbs in that entire piece – and two of those were in what the girl said to you. Since it was your first time, surely your memory of it was more vivid than that.

“What did the girl look like? Short? Tall? Young? Old? What color was her hair, blonde, brunette, red? Was it natural, or did she have roots of another color? Was she fat or skinny? What did her body look like after she took off her clothes – and what sort of clothes were they in the first place? How did you meet her, at a party or on the street or in a brothel? What did you say to each other before you went to the room? What kind of room was it – a motel room, the girl’s bedroom in her parents’ house, some other sort of room? What condition was the room in – was it clean, dirty, with new furnishings or beat-up stuff? What did the air smell like, musty, smoky, flowery air freshener? Was the air in the room cold or hot or just right? Was the lighting dim or bright?

“When you got into the bed with her, what did she smell like – was it some sort of perfume or just sweat or something else? What did the bed sheets smell like – were they clean, or did they smell sour from being used a whole lot since they were last washed? Were they smooth or rough? Did the bed springs creak when you moved? Did the girl make any sounds? When she told you that she liked it and that you were the best that she had ever had, what were her exact words? How did she say them? Did she have any sort of accent?”

Hannah knew that this line of questioning was perhaps a bit cruel. But what she wanted to get across was that vivid descriptions were essential to effective writing, no matter what the subject matter. She knew the old saying about people with inadequate vocabularies being the ones who resorted to obscenities, and perhaps that was the case with this student. She was hoping that thinking a little more deeply would lead the student to write a little more deeply. This was a student who turned in essays that were three-quarters of a page long, triple spaced, and she was trying to get him to stretch a bit. If he wanted to write porn, more power to him, if doing so helped him to provide descriptive words and phrases.

The student was now seriously red-faced, as were his group-mates. The rest of the class had mixed reactions. Some had gone red, some had gone pale, and a few had started laughing, especially a couple of the young women in the class who had previously found this student’s behavior annoying or maybe even offensive. They clearly enjoyed seeing him get some comeuppance.

“Um, Ms. Montgomery,” the student said in a somewhat subdued voice, “I’ll have to get back to you on those answers.”

Back from the dead

Well, I wasn’t REALLY dead, but I don’t blame you if you thought that I was.

How time flies. I’ve been working on all sorts of other things, and now it’s been more than a month since my last post (“Father, I have sinned …”). The truth is that my life has gotten filled up with so much going on (most of it, for a change, of a happy sort) that all I’ve had time for lately is more short-attention-span media. But I hope to get back to the blog on a regular basis now.

I was teaching two classes over the summer term, which is condensed, so more time per week is required for each class, especially with the vast number of papers I have to grade. Yeah, I’ve had students suggest that if I didn’t assign so much work, I wouldn’t have to work so hard either. But then they wouldn’t be getting their money’s worth for their tuition dollars.

We’re also still dealing with Pat’s dad’s estate. The Old Soldier died a year and a half ago, and some things are still up in the air. That’s been a drain, especially on Pat’s time.

Meanwhile, in the happy news department, this spring, we closed on a house in Mesa, Arizona. “Why?” I hear the two or three people who still follow this blog ask. Well, Gerald is attending college at Arizona State in Tempe, plus taking a few classes at Mesa Community College that count for the same credit but cost less than a third as much in tuition (gotta love community colleges!). Instead of sending him rent money every month, we will now be sending him compensation for household maintenance and fixing things up. Also, we will no longer have to pay for a hotel room when we go to Arizona to visit him. In addition, at some point Pat and I will be retiring, and we already know we want to get rid of the house in Albuquerque. If we keep the cabin at Heron, we will be able to migrate seasonally between there and Mesa. Finally, home prices in Arizona are in the basement right now, but they’re bound to rebound, at least some. So we may have an investment that makes money even if we decide not to use the place as a retirement residence.

The upshot of the home purchase in Mesa is that we’ve been directing a lot of time and energy to getting that house up and running, learning the ins and outs of agricultural-style irrigation, and furnishing the place. While I was teaching, we took some long weekends for whirlwind trips out to get things done. Then the break between the summer and fall terms was only two weeks rather than the usual three, so we had to pack a lot of activity into a short time span that included a quickie trip to San Diego for some touristing.

Furnishing the house has been fun. One of our friends commented on the short-attention-span media that it must be like right after we got married. Actually, it’s lots better. When Pat and I first got married, we had no money whatsoever, so we took what we could get, which was mostly castoff furniture that friends and relatives had no use for. For nearly all of our adult lives, we’ve felt like we’ve been living in a junkyard. With this new house, we have a fresh start. We can buy things that we specifically like, and we can make things match. We’ve bought a few new things, but mostly, we’ve been getting great deals on high-quality furnishings at used-furniture stores. Serendipity plays a big part with used furniture – we may not know exactly what we want when we go into the store, but I will find something that just feels right, such as the bedroom set with the magnificent headboard that is now in the master bedroom. We also now have a place worthy of some of the art that we have picked up from family over the years – an elegant ceramic black cat, a bowl of fruit carved out of African wood, a pair pictures of prancing horses, an R.C. Gorman print, and more. It feels good to get those works out of the junkyard.

Of course, the house isn’t perfect. It was originally constructed in 2000 with high-quality materials and workmanship, but one of the previous owners took out the original bedroom flooring and replaced it with the most God-awful, crappy, plastic pseudo-laminate, and didn’t even install it properly. So we’re now replacing it with high-quality engineered wood flooring, natural red oak. Actually, Gerald’s doing most of the work – that’s part of the aforementioned compensation for home improvements instead of rent subsidies. He got most of one room done by the time we had to return to Albuquerque, but since he’s taking a heavy course load this fall, it may take him a while to get all of the bedrooms done. Still, what’s been done so far is beautiful.

Meanwhile, now that we’ve got most of the time-consuming stuff out of the way on the house, I should now have time to return to the blog. Glad to be back.

More long and winding roads

Exercises in getting from here to there, or there to here

In planning for this weekend, we had a bit of a problem. I had to return to Albuquerque to teach my classes Tuesday, but Pat has to stay at the lake until his dockmaster duties end Wednesday. So we had to drive up Friday in separate vehicles; Pat took Enterprise with the fifth-wheel, while Dulce and I had Galileo.

Being in a larger, clumsier rig, Pat took a route that emphasized big roads and faster travel. According to Google Maps, this route is 166 miles and takes 3 hours, 11 minutes. That seems about right.

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Meanwhile, Dulce and I took a more scenic route. It's shorter in miles, but it's decidedly not suitable for bigger, clumsier rigs. Google Maps says it's 153 miles and takes 3 hours, 55 minutes. The time estimate is WAY off. This trip, Pat and I left at the same time, and while he had to stop for fuel and spent 15 minutes getting lunch, I arrived ahead of him by about the time he spent on fuel and lunch. On other trips, Gerald and I have arrived sooner via the scenic route than Pat on the big roads. My guess is that Google Maps underestimates the travel speed on New Mexico's state highways, some of which are unpaved but still can be traveled at a fairly high speed. Sure, I had to stop a couple of times to wait for some cattle to mosey out of the way, but, hey, that's part of the appeal of the back roads.

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Then for the trip home, I chose a route that I already knew was going to be more time-consuming, but that would also be fantastically scenic. If Google Maps had an option to select the most scenic route, this is how it would tell people to go. It's 193 miles and 4 hours, 8 minutes -- an accurate assessment, probably because none of the roads are unpaved. For out-of-state visitors, the reverse of this route is what I would recommend to get from the airport to Five O'Clock Somewhere; it provides the best of the best of scenery, plus a nifty bonus: the chance to stop at Viola's Restaurant in Los Alamos for lunch. On this route, it wasn't cattle but deer that I had to stop for until they decided they wanted to wander over to the side of the road.

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In case you're wondering, I hate freeways. I also dislike road construction. When a route involves both, I'd rather find some other way to go.

The Long and Winding Road

Not all who are lost wander …

The few people who frequent this blog might have noticed a lack of activity lately. That’s primarily because Pat and I have been on the road for most of the past three weeks. For a detailed travelogue, including pictures, you can look at Pat’s blog, Desert Sea, where he’s gradually putting up posts about the journey. I’ll just touch on highlights here.

The trip seemed to have two major themes: barbeque and detours. Just about every day, we had at least one great barbeque experience – when I travel, I want to sample the best of the local food, and we kept stumbling on great barbeque places. And just about every day, sometimes multiple times in a day, we ended up someplace we didn’t intend to be, sometimes because of road construction, sometimes because of our unfamiliarity with the territory, and sometimes because of a little of both.

Barbeque, May 2: OK, this doesn’t officially count as part of the journey, but we had lunch at JR’s Bar-B-Que in Albuquerque with the guy who was helping his buddy sell the fifth-wheel trailer we just bought, and exchanged a check for the title to the trailer.

Detour, May 2: Not a really big deal, but our favorite motel in Gallup had no non-smoking rooms available, so we had to spring for a suite.

Barbeque, May 3: Big Belly’s BBQ in Tempe, run by former ASU and KC Chiefs defensive tackle Bryan Proby, serves up massive portions of KC style barbeque. I didn’t have enough appetite for it this trip, but I’ve been told the giant potato is an experience I should have at least once in my lifetime.

Detour, May 6: This one was on purpose. On our way to the cruise on Saguaro Lake, we went to Arizona Cactus Sales to see what we might want to put into the landscaping if we buy a house in the Phoenix area – many of the properties we’ve been looking at have been bank-owned or otherwise neglected, and so the landscape is pretty much dead. We’d want to put in water-conserving landscaping, rather than recreating Scottish golf courses in the desert. We learned a lot about cacti and how to take care of them – which mostly means leaving them alone and absolutely not watering them or planting them anywhere water is likely to drain.

Barbeque, May 7: Right near our motel in Bakersfield was The Grill Hut. The menu is extremely limited (beef tri-tip or chicken breast, plus sauces and sides), but what they do, they do very well.

Detour, May 8: Trying to get from the Nimitz Freeway to Alameda Island is insane. The bridges that go to the island are not lined up with the roads the freeway exits lead to, and there’s road construction that makes things really “interesting” – such as semi-trucks turning left from an extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall into another extremely narrow roadway bounded by Jersey bouncewall, during the extremely brief green-light interval of the temporary traffic light suspended from flimsy cables above the intersection, such that one truck takes three cycles of the light to complete its turn because of all of the other drivers who try to get around the behemoth and end up getting in its way, so it has to halt until they figure out that they have to back up to get out of its way. Apparently, “reverse” is not a setting that exists on the shift levers of most Californians’ cars.

Detour, May 10: Visited a friend on his boat in Marina Bay in Richmond, and then sort of got lost on the way out. Found the cheapest gas in the East Bay area, and also the mini-mart that was featured in the movie “True Crime.” Didn’t go in to see whether the potato-chip display had been moved.

Detour, May 11: Needed to do some financial transactions involving our credit union, so we used the credit-union branch-sharing network to find a participating CU in Berkeley. Google Maps got us there, but not back. We ended up taking a scenic tour of Berkeley and Oakland, including Chinatown, that we hadn’t intended.

Barbeque, May 11: We had already looked at our schedule for our time in the Bay Area and saw that the best time for us to hook up with family was Wednesday evening. My brother had the suggestion that maybe we could meet at Sam’s Bar-B-Que in San Jose, where our cousin often plays with a bluegrass band, Dark Hollow. As it turns out, the band was playing there that night, so my cousin saved us a table and we had a great time. The band played “Detour,” written by Paul Westmoreland and played by Spade Cooley, then subsequently by Patti Page and Willie Nelson, among others.

Detour, May 12: We had a coupon. We were hungry. We wanted seafood. Gerald’s Droid told us that Panama Joe’s atmosphere was “boisterous” but the noise level was “moderate.” I guess it depends what you mean by “moderate”; it was college night.

Barbeque, May 13: OK, we didn’t get to eat this, but our motel room was suffused with the aroma. We were right around the corner from the laundry room, which was also the housekeeping staff’s lunch room. Beneath the open window, they had set up a little electric grill, and the bulgogi smelled heavenly.

Barbeque, May 14: Free hot dogs and beer at the Alamitos Bay Yacht Club open house. Those folks are really proud of their new elevator, which is done up inside like a fine yacht, with wood paneling and cabin sole. We’ve been told that Black Magic used to be part of the Etchells fleet there.

Detour, May 14: Met Silver Girl and visited the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach, then took an extended side trip to the Coyote Grill in Laguna Beach.

Detour, May 15: Sunday Brunch on the Queen Mary, followed by wandering all over the ship for several hours. We only got lost a couple of times …

Detour, May 16: Dropped Gerald off with the ASU sailing team for several days’ training at the US Sailing Center in Long Beach and made it out of the LA area with only one or two wrong turns along the way. Made it to Tempe, dropped off a couple of things and picked up a couple of things at Gerald’s apartment.

Detour, May 17: Less than an hour from home, we saw smoke rising and lots of red flashing lights up ahead. We got off the freeway onto Old Route 66 and meandered through the village of Paraje before getting back onto the freeway, which we then had all to ourselves until we got to the outskirts of Albuquerque.

Detour, May 18-20: You thought we were done traveling? Nope. First, Pat went to Los Alamos to pick up Dulce, who had been getting royal spa treatment at my folks’ house (dinner whenever she wanted it, an electric blanket to sleep on at night, and other general spoiling). Then we took the big truck (Enterprise) south to pick up the fifth-wheel trailer and learn how it works.

Detour, May 21: I had been scheduled to teach only one class during the summer term, but I was given the opportunity Friday to add another – this one on the West Side campus, where I haven’t taught before. Pat and I took a scenic drive to assess the layout of the place, and man, is it far away!

Today: No detours, but maybe some barbeque – chicken “wings” from JJ’s (they’re actually thighs, and therefore really meaty) should go well with the hockey game. Now I’m getting hungry!

Food project results

Not such a great turnout, alas …

All right, so the turnout for the invitation to write about cuisine was less than spectacular. We had a total of four entries, by three contributors.

First, we had Tillerman with his entry answering New Mexico’s Official State Question: “Red or Green?”

Next, O Docker popped up with “A Kernel of Truth,” technically past the deadline, but close enough.

So then, I extended the project deadline in hopes of getting more entries. Captain JP came in with two, both having to do with coffee: “My favourite drink” and “Alas poor cafetiere.”

Thanks to the three who entered. But, dear readers, you may not have heard the last of this topic. Some of my students wrote great essays, and I plan to invite them to submit their work as guest posts. We’ll see what cooks up.

Woo-hoo, new shoes!

The time of financial austerity is over ...

For the past few years, Pat and I have been operating on an austerity budget. Part of that program has meant that I haven't had much in the way of new clothes for a very long time -- we've been shopping at thrift stores for most clothes. But now, at long last, I have the first pair of actual new shoes that I have had in about five years. And they're magnificent: delightful little black numbers that fit my feet like gloves, but with just enough extra stretch that in really cold conditions I can wear a pair of wool socks underneath.

Especially over on Facebook, many friends, including old high-school classmates, have reveled in their shoes -- how many they have, the special virtues of each pair, the stylishness, the excitement of finding just the right pair. Now, I can join them.

Meanwhile, it's not just my feet but also my boat, Black Magic, that is enjoying the end of austerity. We came down to Elephant Butte Friday with the hope of sailing with Zorro as well as working on boats. As it turned out, it was too windy to sail. First, I helped Zorro with patching some cracks in Constellation's deck and re-rigging the outhaul, which had been fouling far too often. Then Pat joined Zorro and me at the mast-up storage lot where Black Magic is, and we replaced a lot of the rigging: backstay control, mainsheet, jib sheet, traveler (including some blocks and other hardware), jib tack, mast block shock cords, and tiller tamer. Zorro also mixed up some epoxy filler, which he used to patch up some gouges in the keel as well as some dents in the deck.

Saturday, we had hoped that at least in the morning, we could get in some sailing; the weather forecasts predicted a breezy morning and a windy afternoon. But it was blustery from the get-go, much too windy for sailing. Zorro did some work on Constellation while Pat and I paid a visit to our favorite used-book store in the universe, Black Cat Books in Truth or Consequences. Gerald has a rule of thumb that a used-book store is not a proper used-book store unless there is a cat on the premises. I think I agree. Pat and I ended up getting a wide range of books, including a German grammar book, a collection of essays about what it means to be human in a technological environment, and a James Patterson (plus one of his more trustworthy co-authors, Maxine Paetro) thriller.

After that, Pat and I stopped by the hardware store to look for bolts to use when replacing the old cam cleats on the boat. In stainless steel, the longest bolts the store had were two inches, so we bought only four, two flathead and two pan-head, with the idea that whichever fit best, we could come back and buy more, and if neither fit, we weren't out much money.

Then Pat and I returned to Black Magic, where Pat set about working on replacing the old cam cleats on the console with the new ones that we had ordered. The old cleats were ancient and decaying even when we first got the boat, but we had never had time or money to replace them all -- when one of them failed, we put a new one in, and we kept saying that we needed to get them all replaced. It took Pat 20 minutes to remove just one cleat. We discovered that flathead bolts were the best for the new cam cleats, but two inches was too short -- we needed three-inch bolts.

Meanwhile, Zorro had done some more work on Constellation but had learned that the Sunday weather forecast was for even more wind, far too much to go sailing, so he decided to put his boat away and head back to El Paso. He stopped by Black Magic before heading south, and he and Pat worked on the shrouds -- we're looking at replacing turnbuckles at the very least and possibly at replacing the shrouds completely. We made plans to do more boat restoration next weekend, including new bottom paint at least on the parts of the keel that got patched. In the meantime, we can get the three-inch bolts and a few other bits of hardware we need. Top of the agenda for next weekend is completely redoing the outhaul on Black Magic so we can depower more effectively in a gust. There have been a lot of those lately.

Zorro is super-eager about all of these repairs and refurbishments, because he really, really wants to see Black Magic racing next weekend. And I do have to admit, I'm excited about seeing my boat finally getting back into a condition where she can sail well. But I'm feeling ambiguous about actually racing. I'm not sure I want to support the RGSC's current leadership -- the current commodore who, when he was vice commodore, tried to call meetings of the board even though the club constitution doesn't give him that power, and on shorter notice than even those who have the power are permitted to do; Zorro's replacement as race committee chairman to whom I gave the blog nickname "Space Invader" because of his creepy behavior toward me even before I learned of the New Mexico court records about him and the many restraining orders women have taken out against him; the club management that failed to notify one of our favorite restaurant owners that the sailing club was planning to hold a skippers' meeting in the restaurant's back room and thereby royally pissed off the restaurant owner ... I don't know that I want to race and thereby seem to support the current club leadership.

I think I'd rather just go sailing. And wear my new shoes.

A new writing project

Imagine you're a student in my class ...

OK, I've been accused of trying to turn this into a food blog. It does seem lately that I've been digressing into food-related matters. Well, here's another digression -- and everybody is invited to go foodie.

The origin of this writing project is an assignment in my Essay Writing class. During the term, the students write two in-class essays as a way of learning how to take essay exams -- preparation, time management, and those sorts of skills. The students are given readings on the essay topics and discuss them in class ahead of time, and then on the day of the in-class essay, they have the whole two-hour class period to write the essay in the form of an open-book, open-note exam.

Because I believe students write better when the topic is something they care about, I let them choose the in-class essay topics each term. Usually, the topics are fairly standard issues: DWI, the death penalty, same-sex marriage, and the like. This term, however, the students chose two unusual topics: Egypt and cuisine.

Egypt is a challenging topic because it's such a rapidly moving target. One of the students has proven to be a great resource in class discussions -- her husband is Egyptian and they lived there for seven years. With the insights she provided, the students had really good background to write their essays.

And then there's cuisine. There are all sorts of directions a writer could go with that one. The readings I gave the students included an article about the revival of home cooking and a very, very scholarly treatise from the James Beard Institute.

By the time I got done writing the essay prompt, I realized I had some interesting questions that might be fun for more than just my class. So I'm opening it out to my readers in the form of a writing challenge. Pick one of the topics in the essay prompt below and write a blog post about it. Unless you're actually enrolled in a college-prep composition course, you don't need to restrict yourself to the conditions of an essay exam; just write what you want to write about the topic. Once you have written your post, put a link to it in the comments here. Or if you don't have a blog, email your entry to byrnes.carol.anne (at) gmail.com and I will post it here for you. Deadline for entries is March 31.

Essay 4 (in-class)

Choose one of the following topics and write an essay that meets the English 0950 course objectives (clear main idea, good support, consideration for an educated reader, organization, reasonably correct mechanics):

· What is your favorite cuisine? Give details to explain why.

· Define “American cuisine.” What sets American cuisine apart from others?

· How does the enjoyment of food bring people together? Give examples from your own experience and/or from materials you have read.

· Red or green? Explain.

· Write a review of your favorite restaurant. Use details and examples to show the reader why he or she should eat there.

· In what way does the cuisine of a country or region reflect its culture? Show the connection using specific details.

Saturday sailing at the Butte

It's been a long time ...

At long last, I got in my first sail of the year. Pat had managed to sneak off to the lake a couple of times to go sailing with Zorro, but often it was mid-week, which meant I had to work. The one previous time I had gotten to the lake, the wind was just too fierce -- if the temperature had been warmer, it might have been good exciting sailing, but that day was just too cold.

Saturday, however, was much less windy. In fact, when we got to the lake, there was barely any wind at all. We joined Zorro and set sail on Constellation, hoping that perhaps some wind would fill in.

We had been drifting for about an hour when the wind did, finally, show up. It wasn't much, maxing out at probably 7 or 8 knots, but that's enough to make an Etchells go. Zorro had his handheld GPS, and we got up to 6.2 knots upwind and even faster downwind with the spinnaker up.

Pat was in charge of the spinnaker. He kept the trim up, and he's getting good at gybing the pole smoothly; that's something he and Zorro apparently practiced a lot the last time they were out.

Overall, it was a good couple of hours on the water.

We sailed until near sunset.

There weren't many other boats out. One friend had gone out earlier but gave up on waiting for wind and came in (his wife had chores for him to do anyway). Another came out late in the day. You can tell he's from Michigan; he was sailing in shirt sleeves!

Maybe, in between things like taking care of Pat's dad's estate and working on repairs (both boat and house) and various other tasks, we will have more time to sail this year.

Spam tombstones

When headlines collide, 21^st century style …

Way back, eons ago, when I was taking journalism classes in college, one of the courses I took was in page design. In that class, I learned about the dread “tombstone,” when two adjacent headlines on the page seem to merge into each other, conveying an unintended, often humorous and/or macabre meaning. With modern page-layout software, tombstones seldom happen anymore, since page designers have considerable flexibility and can make sure that two headlines are offset enough not to appear connected. But in the old days, that was not always the case. The headlines were written by copy-editors, who often knew only what typeface and size the page designer had specified, not where on the page the particular headline would appear. And if the newspaper was large enough to have more than one copy-editor, two adjacent stories could easily have headlines written by two different people.

Nowadays, tombstones don’t happen so often in a newspaper. Most often, it’s not two adjacent news stories, but the juxtaposition of a news story with an advertisement, since the news and advertising are produced in two different departments with little, if any, coordination between them. The most memorable such tombstone that I can recall came in late 2008. On the day following the election of Barack Obama, the Albuquerque Journal had published a front page making note of the historical nature of the event. A few days later, the Journal ran a reproduction of that front page, on page A4, in full, glorious color. On that same day, Macy’s ran a full-page, full-color ad launching its Christmas sales. Because of the way newspaper printing presses are set up, only some pages in a section can have full color, and the result was that the Macy’s ad was on page A5, directly facing the front page reproduction. Thus, page A4 had the headline “Obama Wins!” while page A5 had the headline “Yes, Virginia, there Is a Santa Claus!”

All of this is a roundabout way of announcing the newest addition to the links over in the sidebar on the left, naked in public and other things I didn’t know I’d be when I grew up. This is a blog by Harlean Carpenter, the Poetic Pinup, who is a fiction, but who is still somewhat associated with my brother Jer, of Muddled Ramblings and Half-Baked Ideas.

Harlean often comments about the vagaries of the English language, as well as about how people misuse it. I am afraid I will have to agree to disagree with her on punctuation associated with closing quote marks (she insists on being logical, while I must stick with the rules of American Standard Written English, even if said rules are illogical, if for no other reason than that I have to make sure my students produce writing that conforms with the standard). But most of what she says, I do agree with, and her observations go beyond mere grammar. I found myself especially amused (translated into tweetspeak, that means ROTFL) with her recent post on Why I Love Spam. No, she doesn’t enjoy junk emails any more than anybody else does. But she does look in her spambox on a regular basis. Maybe she originally did it to make sure that her email filter hadn’t accidentally sent some non-spam there, but now, she likes to look for the juxtapositions in which the subject lines of two adjacent spams accidentally make a humorous phrase. She calls these juxtapositions “chunks,” but really, they’re the same thing as the old tombstones. Here are some examples that she cites:

“Want those stretch marks to vanish?
Conquer the language barrier”

“Improve Your Sex Life!
Nursing Assistant Courses Online”

“Your kidney failure may
Earn generous revenue online”

“men have experienced bigger
Sprouts in as little as 5 days”

“Begin a rewarding career with
Secrets of scoring with women”

“When Wall Street crashes
We can keep your male instrument”

“Asbestos exposure is shown to
Enlarge your penis in a safe way”

“Express your feelings in an elegant way
Quit talking and start shagging”

So what’s in your spambox?

The best of 2010

Highlights from a year that didn’t have many

Once again, Captain JP has issued a request for his fellow bloggers to submit their top 10 blog posts for the year. As my previous post indicated, this has been, yet again, annus horribilis, with too many disasters to count.

But I did find 10 posts that were, at least in some way memorable. Here they are:

I started the year with observations about astronomy, tides, and how Pat and I got into sailing, with A tale from the past.

Those of you who have known me for some time know about my love-hate relationship with photocopiers, including how a copier figured strongly in my novel Murder at the Community College. In February, I had an ironic experience, recounted in The copier temptation.

Also in February, Tillerman issued a challenge: Write about the worst sailing innovation ever. My contribution: Work.

In March, a fellow instructor at the community college, whom I also knew through the sailing club, died suddenly and unexpectedly. Then a week later, Pat’s dad passed away. The Old Soldier had lived a long life, and he didn’t want a fancy funeral – no fancy church service or procession or anything like that. What he got was a very simple graveside service, with his fellow veterans from the American Legion providing an honor guard to shoot a 21-gun salute and blow “Taps” on a bugle. He would not have wanted anything fancier. I reflected on his life in Sending the Old Man Home.

As it turned out, the Old Soldier had chosen a beautiful time of the year in Texas to die, and according to the people who follow such things, this past spring was one of the best ever for Texas wildflowers. Planting wildflowers along highways was a passion of former First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. We took many great pictures on the way home from the funeral, and I put some photos online in Thank you, Lady Bird.

May 1 was the most devastating day of the year. Our extremely dear sailing friend Marty Stevenson went overboard from the boat he was on as we were preparing to hold a regatta. I wrote about how much he meant to us in A few words about Marty. I had been planning to deliver those words at his memorial service. Unfortunately, his widow would not let me or anyone else from the sailing club speak. So nobody heard those words. Only those who read them in the blog or the sailing club newsletter ever received them.

On a lighter note, I did get into one of the more specialized cooking techniques that I know. I have known all of my life about Beer can chicken, a tradition I probably learned from relatives in Arkansas, but for many others, it was a novel method.

July was funeral time again. Another sailing fried passed away. This time, it was not so shocking; he had been in declining health for some time. And his widow and family welcomed me to speak at his funeral, In Memory of Richard Dittmar. It is good to laugh at a funeral, when it’s remembering what made us all so joyful about the person who is now no longer among us.

There was another memorial in July. My colleague had died in a car accident in June; his family and very close friends had had a small, private funeral. But long before his death, he had made his wishes clear to his family and partner: He didn’t want mourning; he wanted a party. So that was what he got. I summed up that party in Remembering Herman.

In September, we had car troubles. Babe, the Ford Expedition, has been increasingly having problems with electronics. As it turns out, the troubles that led to When machines rebel were not electronic but physical – the rear differential and axle essentially disintegrated – but at the time, it was easy to blame the computers.

Then I had another trip down memory lane, thinking about classic cars and beautiful times on a European road trip nearly 30 years ago. I don’t like big roads; I like little ones. I don’t like big places; I like little ones.

So 2010 on the blog was often melancholy or wistful. It’s been a rough year. I will very much miss the people who are no longer with us. But I know I will go on.

The latest accusation of bias

Courtesy of The Onion ... possibly NSFW, depending on your workplace ...

In The Know: Are Tests Biased Against Students Who Don't Give A Shit?

I'm just waiting for TPTB to come down with edicts that there is yet another class of students that we need to make sure we don't discriminate against.

A back-to-school message

Kids, love your library!

This is especially true of your college library. It has tons of resources that can really help you. The narrator of this video is only slightly exaggerating when he extols the benefits of studying there. He makes a brief mention of one of the most powerful resources available through a college library -- databases. They're a gold mine of research information.

One caveat: Not all libraries have a Snack Zone. Otherwise, the information about the BYU library transfers to campuses everywhere.

Time for a breather

The summer term draws to a close …

Because the summer term is shorter than the fall and spring terms, it's more intense. Classes have 12 weeks to get through 15 weeks' worth of material. At least I'm not at a university where the work is packed into eight or (gasp!) four weeks. Still, even condensing the term by three weeks makes for a more intense experience.

Making matters worse is that this has been a rough time for both instructors and students. Some of it has to do with economic woes – both institutional (state funding being cut) and personal (unemployment and underemployment are rampant among my students). But it's not just about the economy. In just my department, four colleagues have died unexpectedly this term. And many of my students are going through various sorts of turmoil – illnesses and injuries, relationship problems, deaths of loved ones, and more.

Last year, as part of efforts to alleviate possible H1N1 outbreaks, the college issued each instructor with a bottle of hand sanitizer and a box of tissues. But it was a very small box and didn't last very long. This term, I brought my own, jumbo-sized boxes of tissues – one to keep at each of the campuses where I teach. Now I'm nearly out of tissues; my students and I have used a lot of them.

So, this week is the last week of the term, and I have my students working on their portfolios, so I'm not buried under papers to grade. Friday will be intensive portfolio grading; then I will enter grades into the computer system, and then I will have two weeks off before the fall term begins.

And if you hear an enormous sigh of relief coming from the Southwestern U.S. late Friday afternoon, you will know it's me, looking forward to that breather and hoping I won't need so many tissues next term.

Remembering Herman

He didn't want a funeral; he wanted a party

My colleague Herman Jottman died back in June in a car crash. His close friends and family had a very quiet funeral shortly afterward, but they wanted the public commemoration of his death to be delayed a while.

This evening was the celebration, and a celebration it was. His companion, Nina, said he didn't want a funeral – he wanted a party. And I agree. I knew Herman as a colleague for the entire 12 years I worked at the community college from when I hired on until his death. He had a great sense of humor, and he loved a good joke. He enjoyed socializing after-hours, and we kept saying we ought to get together more often, but it never happened.

At work, he and Nina were both colleagues; at the campus where I do most of my teaching, my cubicle is between his and hers. It was always fun interacting with the two of them.

After his death, I learned things about Herman that I wish I had known before. For example, I knew that he was an outdoorsy sort, but I didn't learn the extent until I read his obituary – he was an avid backpacker and adventure traveler, and he had climbed all of Colorado's fourteeners. And, for a while, he had worked in Los Alamos.

At the celebration, I learned even more. I learned how extensive his outdoor adventuring had been, how he had been to the Himalayas, and how once in Europe, he had fallen off a mountain and broken his neck, but had pulled his tent around him for warmth and been rescued the next day. I learned that he was also an avid photographer, mostly taking pictures of nature, although he also had some delicious art photos of his second ex-wife.

Herman was a practical joker, I already knew, but I heard about jokes he had pulled, such as making a gift of a Noam Chomsky t-shirt to a colleague who wasn't a Chomsky fan, in such a way that the recipient of the shirt didn't realize Herman was joking. I heard about how, shortly after he had worked in Los Alamos and had relocated to Albuquerque, he was a fan of a particular Albuquerque pizza place, and he would get pizza from there and hustle it up to Los Alamos so his friends could enjoy it. I heard about how he was fond of "anything with a two-stroke engine" – including chain saws, which were a particular favorite of his.

Later, I was talking with Nina, and she and I agreed that this ought to be an annual event, the Herman Jottmann Annual CNM Faculty Party, complete with chain saw competitions. Yeah, that would be good.

Fifth anniversary ... one day late

Oops, almost forgot ...

July 14, 2010, marked the fifth anniversary of this blog. I had meant to create an elaborate post with a retrospective of the best of the past five years, but, well, that isn't happening. I've been buried under piles of papers to grade for so long that I don't even remember what it's like not to have all these papers that always have to be graded in far less time than is available.

And of course, I still haven't posted the final recap of the waterbloggers' food tour, either, so there's that unfinished business hanging over my head.

OK, here's an idea: Those of you who have been watching this blog for a long time, nominate your favorite posts from the past five years. Once I have time to come up for air, I'll nominate a few of my own as well.

Trying to return to normal

Whatever normal is …

It's been more than three weeks since Marty disappeared beneath the waves, and three days ago, his body was recovered. Eventually, the medical examiner should be able to answer at least some of the questions about his death.

As time goes by, I'm getting better. The summer term at the community college is about to begin, and getting immersed in work should help. Also, as the events surrounding Marty's death fade into the past, they're not so painful any more.

We had a couple of Gerald's buddies visiting up at the cabin this past weekend, and they're both just fantastic guys who really made the weekend a success, helpful, courteous – their parents should be proud of them. We even had a bit of comic relief when the State Parks people put the ranger boat into the water and forgot to put in the drain plug; Gerald's buddies helped to save the day, along with the current NMSC dockmasters.

But I do still get spells. I have thoughts and memories, and sometimes I find tears leaking from my eyes even without a triggering event. I took a nap, and I had a dream that I was riding in Marty's truck with him. There was no conversation; he was just driving and smiling that smile.

Where am I?

Sometimes cyberspace can be deceptive

Every thousand visitors to this blog, I take a moment to look up statistics about the x-thousandth visitor. I'm most interested in the route by which the visitor arrived (link from another blog, web search, etc.). However, it is also interesting to note where the visitor is from. Actually, I ought to say, where the visitor's internet service provider (or the provider's contractor) is located.

In my own case, this information only sometimes accurately defines where I am. When I log on from work, for example, I am pegged not only as connecting from the community college; the precise campus where I am is pinned down. Over the dial-up connection in Albuquerque, I have also still been accurately placed. However, the dial-up connection at Five O'Clock Somwhere is pegged as being in Santa Fe (with the same provider as my parents in Los Alamos, who also show up as being in Santa Fe). When we logged on at Cornhusker's house in T or C, we used to be labeled as being in Little Rock; now we're supposedly in Dallas.

Pat and I are in the process of ditching the landlines and the dial-up ISP, instead opting for high-speed Internet through our cell phone provider. So far, it's worked quite well – except we're now supposedly in San Jose, California. Gee, you'd think we're right around the corner from my brother and his sweetie.

Academic dishonesty revisited

The technology war escalates

Last year, I wrote about discovering that I had had a visit to the blog on a search for a distinctive sentence from an earlier blog post, with quote marks around it, a common method used by teachers to ferret out academic dishonesty. At the time, I warned students not to attempt to copy something from the Internet to turn in as their own work, with the admonishment, "Don't even THINK about it. You WILL get caught!" – a standard warning I always issue to my students at the beginning of each term.

Still, this term, I have had two students who have attempted to turn in plagiarized papers. It's frustrating, and it really eats up a lot of my time to document the incidents and file all of the paperwork. The college where I teach requires that I report all incidences of academic dishonesty, no matter what. I consider this to be an excellent policy. I do not believe that academic dishonesty should be tolerated in any way, shape, or form. However, it eats up lots of my time, which, especially toward the end of the term, is a scarce commodity.

Part of the time-consuming aspect of documenting plagiarism is verifying that the work is plagiarized. This is usually done by doing an Internet search for distinctive phrases or sentences to find the original. The first student this term made the task time-consuming by pasting together material from four different sources. The second student, however, stymied me – every distinctive phrase I entered into the search engines turned up nothing. I knew the papers were plagiarized, and some other instructors who looked at them agreed – this was a student who couldn't put together a coherent sentence or develop a paragraph, and these were well written and well developed essays.

Then I discovered the latest online "service" provided to lazy students who just want to get a good grade rather than actually learning anything: plagiarism "prevention." These sites will allow a student to upload a paper, and then they will somehow modify it, changing words and phrases, and possibly making other adjustments, so that a teacher who does an Internet search on distinctive sentences will come up empty. The websites make such claims as "remove all plagiarism from your papers before you turn them in."

Bullshit. These websites don't remove plagiarism. They only disguise it. A paper is just as dishonest after being run through one of these websites as it was before.

And you know what? If you're a student and you turn in plagiarized material, even if you use one of these websites, you still WILL get caught. Even though I couldn't confirm an original Internet source for my student's essays, there were still enough glaring differences between this student's work and the plagiarized material that it was obvious. I just filed the report to the Dean of Students this afternoon.

Okay, I hear some students say … that was a student whose writing was really poor, so the plagiarism was blatant. What about students who write well enough that a plagiarized essay isn't going to be obvious? Well … if you're already writing so well that plagiarism won't be noticeable, then you don't need to plagiarize, do you? Your own writing will stand for itself. Don't cheat yourself out of an opportunity to hone your writing skills.

Work: the worst sailing innovation ever

The number one cause of people not sailing

Over at Proper Course, Tillerman has issued another writing challenge. This time around, he's asking members of the sailing blogosphere to write about what they consider to be the worst sailing innovation ever – the one invention that most detracts from the experience of sailing.

I would nominate work as the worst innovation. In the Peanuts cartoon, Snoopy once commented, "Work is the crabgrass in the lawn of life." It is something that sucks the time out of one's week until there is little or no time left for sailing. Take a look at just about any sailing venue, and especially on a weekday, you will mostly see people sailing who do not work – typically, they're retired. Those of us who do have to work are often working 40 hours a week, and sometimes more. That's time that can't be spent sailing. It's also time that can't be spent working on boats to keep them in sailing condition, or reading about sailing in order to improve one's ability to sail, or blogging about sailing.

I'm somewhat lucky in that I don't generally have to work on Fridays – those are reserved for faculty meetings, and my contract specifies that, as a part-time instructor, I can't be compelled to attend them. But even though I only get paid for five hours per class per week (generally 15 or 20 hours), I do still have a lot of other work to do: grading papers, preparing lessons, copying class handouts (or cursing at the copier for preventing that task). In reality, I probably do work close to 40 hours a week.

Other people have even more demands on their time. For example, Bonnie of Frogma frequently complains that she has to work overtime, at night, or on weekends. And in the current economic climate, many companies have laid off some workers and overburdened the others, who in turn feel compelled to work overtime in order not to risk being the next one laid off. Then these overworked people are so stressed out about work that even when they're not at work, they have a hard time enjoying themselves at pastimes like sailing.

As someone once said, "Work is a four-letter word."

The copier temptation

Oooooh, so close …

One of the tasks I find myself doing often at work is making copies. Sure, the community college where I work has a central copying service, but it has a couple of strikes against it. One is that it takes time to get documents processed, copied, and delivered to my mailbox, and I'm often printing things on short notice. The other is that, while it does offer a while-you-wait service, that service is only available limited hours of the day, and those hours don't include the hours that I'm usually on campus, since most of the classes I teach are evening classes.

This means that I have come to know the copiers in the faculty workrooms very well over the years. The one that was at the campus where I'm teaching this term was getting to be like an old friend – or sometimes a familiar adversary. I knew exactly which buttons to push, where the paper was likely to jam, how to run a butcher knife along the edge of the paper supply in the bottom drawer to straighten the stack and prevent false "out of paper" messages. (Why there's a butcher knife in the faculty workroom is another story.) My familiarity with copiers even led to my first National Novel Writing Month mystery, Murder at the Community College, in which I used a copier as the murder weapon.

But that old machine really hadn't been adequate for the burdens placed upon it, and lately it had been having more problems than usual – jamming more often, doing a half-hearted job of punching holes when asked to, claiming to be out of toner when it wasn't, and not responding to the persuasion of the butcher knife.

Wednesday, I stopped by the workroom to check my mailbox before going to teach my afternoon class, and I was treated to a heavenly vision. There in the place where the old machine had sat was a gleaming new one, bigger and more powerful, all shiny, with a heavy-duty paper magazine. It seemed to have a glowing purplish aura about it, and in my head I heard heavenly music – the sort that plays in the film It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World whenever somebody spots the big W.

"Whooooa!" I found myself involuntarily gasping. I was soon to head off to teach my class, but once it was done, I had some heavy-duty copying to do. I was really looking forward to taking that baby through its paces, multiple page handouts, simplex to duplex and duplex to duplex, collating, stapling, three-hole punching. I was drooling.

Two hours later, when I returned to the workroom after teaching my class, a sign had been taped to the copier: "OUT OF ORDER. Technician has been called."