Entries from December 2005 ↓

The Animal Personality Test says:

Your Animal Personality

Your Power Animal: DeerAnimal You Were in a Past Life: Panda You are a fun-seeker – an adventurous, risk-taker. While you are spontaneous, you are not very rational.

The thing is, I got this from Tabitha, who remarked on the peculiarity of the description of herself, contrasted with the image of a squid.

Now I am wondering (a) why I have exactly the same results as the only other person I’ve seen who has taken the test, and (b) what’s up with that squid, and (c) do they only have one set of possible results, and (d) damnit– now that I think of it, if this isn’t a “rational” response, I don’t know what is.

I love New York. Because only in New York would one young, macho, early-20′s American male walk out of a store, turn to his friend (of similar demographic) and say,

“I’m just going to grab some hot nuts.”
“Hot nuts?” his friend said, and he was not horrified, just intrigued.

Of course, by then he could smell them.

I think I spent too much time teaching ultra-homophobic Catholic republican teenaged boys in the midwest. I love New York.

A UMass-Dartmouth undergrad was visited by Federal Agents after he ordered a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book via the college’s interlibrary loan service. According to the agents, the visit was triggered because the book was on a “watch list.” I would love, love, love to see what other books the government is monitoring. Agents brought the book when they visited the student, but they did not leave it with him.

He needed it for a paper for a history class on fascism and totalitarianism. Irony, anyone?

What’s also disturbing is that a second UM-D history professor, Brian Glyn Williams, was considering not teaching a course about terrorism, since it might subject his students to this sort of federal scrutiny:

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.
“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.
Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.
“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”

When I was in high school, little revolutionary me went to the local college library to get a copy of the Little Red Book, among other resources, for a paper about Mao. Since the government did not intercept the book, I was able to learn that while Mao had some great ideas, he also had some terrible ones, and subjected a lot of people to a lot of trauma. I am glad I was left alone to read about that for myself.

More on the story above here, from Inside Higher Ed.

And then, an update on the story from the South Coast Today, which broke the story and the subsequent “it’s a hoax” story. Yeah, it’s a hoax. As Williams says in the follow-up piece, “it’s safe to do research” again. Let’s all go and order us a copy of the 1965 Little Red Book from Interlibrary Loan, eh? Thanks to Bicyclemark for pointing out the new developments.

I just want you to know that in the last few days before this current post was written (and this post will no doubt skewer my statistics contained herein), googlers found my site rated:

#4 with the search “Picture of a man giving chapati to a dog”
#5 for “sagittarius chameleon”
#6 for “the strangest chameleon”
#9 for “Matt Groening volunteering”

I’m also inexplicably #2 on yahoo for “Jorge the chameleon,” and people also surfed in from Yahoo searches for “washing machine humor,” and the more disturbing “video of jeff weise walking through hallway.”

Let me also take this moment to apologize to all those students (Hello Birkbeck College, London!) whose attempts at finding entries for +chameleon and +zoology here so miserably failed them. As an education professional, let me take this moment to encourage you to begin your research in your university library’s electronic databases.

Today I was walking down Jackson Avenue, and I came to an intersection. On a lamppost near the corner, there was a piece of paper (carefully affixed) and a string holding a pen. The piece of paper said, “Write what happens here.” And some drunk people had written something about being drunk. And I wrote something mundane about waiting for the light to change (I was not feeling very inspired, dear reader, but I did participate, you have to give me that). As lame as the responses were, I liked the idea. It was nice to be asked. Perhaps someone else will pass by with a better story.

There was no explanation of who put this there or why. But when I encounter such things in my neighborhood, I always attribute them to the artists.

Another example: the appearance last year of plastic professionally-printed stickers (about 3 x 4 inches) pasted over the “push button for walk signal” button on crosswalk posts. Last February, New Yorkers found out from the NYTimes that those buttons–in the vast majority of cases, I believe it was something like 75% or 80%–do not work. Here’s a link to the article, but it’s no longer free. (Hey, I am an academic, I must compulsively document my vaguely remembered sources.) Anyway, the stickers that some wise folks had posted over the directions now said, “Push Button for Luck.”

They gave me many smiles, and I consider that lucky, don’t you?

The other thing that’s great about living in this neighborhood, with its low population and high percentage of arty folk, is that fashion-wise, anything goes. I am not talking about the dirty old 70′s t-shirts that pass for arty on the less-creative hipsters who stumble off the G-train from Williamsburg, confused and disoriented, looking for that happening party at PS1.

I’m talking women on bicycles with spiked hair, orange workmen’s boiler suits, and combat boots (dirty, not couture) speckled with paint. You can wear anything in this neighborhood and not look strange. And if you’re a woman with no makeup, they assume you’ve got something else going on. (That’s kind of true of true in NYC in general, except that on the big island of Manhattan, the tourists are always there to gawp and point at the more creative locals, like my tripped out transvestite comrade riding the D train, looking like a Chrismahanakwanzakah Tree in full technicolor-patterned skirt and very-much-contrasting blouse, faux fur, and tinsel. He was beautiful.) But here in artist-central, anything goes. It’s heavenly. Perhaps a bit on the mundane side of daring, but it suits me.

By the way, you’ll notice that the new verbal chameleon does not apologize for not posting in a month. The new verbal chameleon is an older, wiser, more economical, less apologetic, shinier, fluffier verbal chameleon. In short, the new verbal chameleon has been busy, but will do her best to keep you informed.

She wishes you all the best for the season. Um, if you’re still there?