May 26 2025
Dear Committee Members, Julie Schumacher – delightful!
“… I argued that the arts are a form of diversity [which was] sadly characterized as ‘divisive'” p28
“… watching me pull at what remains of my hair while I stamp back and forth in paroxysms of incredulty caused by the half-baked ideas casually lobbed in my direction from the back of the room.” p55
“I would also eschew the twin barbarities of ‘attendance’ and ‘participation’ as grading criteria …” p55
“… ability to form coherent sentences not randomly punctuated by ‘like’ or ‘really’ … ” p55
May 25 2025
Does advertising really work? Prove it.
So this obsession on the internet with clickbait. I get that the more clicks on an ad, the more money the company will pay a website to have their ad on the site. And I get that more clicks mean the ad is being seen by more people. And I get that the more people who see the ad means the more purchases will be made. No. Actually, I don’t get that.
I can’t think of one thing I’ve purchased because of an ad I saw. Not my house. Not my car. Not my kayak. Not my new tv. Not my laptop. Not even any of my groceries.
Show me ten studies that find otherwise. Ten independent studies. That consider and rule out other causes. That prove that seeing an ad for a product or service does indeed lead to a person’s purchase of that product or service.
May 14 2025
from “Emergency Skin” by N. K. Jemisin
” … the Founders told us that the Earth died because of greed. That was true, but they lied about whose greed was to blame. …”
“What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else.
May 11 2025
From Picoult’s By Any Other Name
“… he’d said the main character in her play was unrelatable, because she made questionable choices. At the time, he was producing a revival of Sweeney Todd, about a barber with anger-management issues who murdered his patrons.” p163
“Grief was the tax of having something precious.” p324
May 03 2025
“How could an interaction that …”
“How could an interaction that had colored the last decade of her life have been so forgettable to him?”
from By Any Ohter Name, Jodi Picoult
Apr 14 2025
a couple good John Varley bits
“Humans are a time-binding species, existing, in the eternal now. The future flows through them and becomes the past, but it is always the present that counts.” from “Overdrawn on the Memory Bank”
I’ve been thinking that I am UNlike my dog in this respect, in that SHE lives only in the present b/c she can’t imagine the future or remember the past (consciously). So this comment is interesting to me …
*
“When a 20th [century person] gets to talking about his ‘rights’ and what he is ‘owed’, things can get out of hand.” from “Air Raid”
Yeah. I always want to ask, ‘On what basis are you OWED such-and-such?’ The phrase ‘I owe it to myself’ in particular annoys the hell out of me.
Their response, if they could think, would have to be something like the premise ‘I am entitled to everything’ or ‘You are obligated to give me everything’. An indefensible claim if there ever was one.
Mar 14 2025
some nice bits from James Tiptree, Jr.
“Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. …”
…
“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.”
“Do they?” .. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars …” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefields. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. …”
…
“For Christ’s sake, Ruth, they’re aliens!” [when she asks to go with them]
“I’m used to it,” she says absently. …
from “The Women Men Don’t See,” James Tiptree, Jr.
*
“Intelligence simply hasn’t evolved there,” they reported. “Social structure is at the level of crude incubation ritual with some migratory clanning. Frankly, it looks unnestworthy. A pesky lot of mammals have clobbered up the place with broken shells. Of interest only to students of pseudo-evolution.”
from “All the Kinds of Yes,” James Tiptree, Jr.
Mar 10 2025
Yeah … because global warming isn’t a real thing
“Many government webpages that have the word “climate” in them have been removed in recent days, particularly at EPA, where on Jan. 27, all information about climate change was removed from its homepage and other prominent areas of its website, burying it deep in sections that are harder to find.”
I swear the States is single-handedly killing us all.
fiction
