Canadian Bacon Barbie

If there is such a thing as hell, I’m 90% sure that most of my appliances would live in it. Not to supply people with fresh laundry or microwaved burritos, but to annoy people with their constant beeping. I’m not sure what appliance designers are thinking when they build automatic beeps into things, except that perhaps they believe they are being helpful. But they really aren’t. My microwave beeps 3 times every 30 seconds or so if you leave something in it after it is done cooking. My clothes dryer beeps 3 times every 30 seconds when the clothes are about to be dry. (Not when they are actually dry.)  The weird thing about both of these beeping functions is that they are pretty much superfluous, because both the microwave and the dryer are loud enough on their own that you can hear them stop. So what’s the point of the beeping? Both of these appliances are valuable in part because you can *do other stuff* while they are working. But there’s no real drawback to forgetting stuff in the microwave or the dryer, really. So your burrito gets cold and you have to heat it up again. So your clothes get a little wrinkly if you don’t take them out immediately. Who really cares? You can just heat it up/dry it a little longer. Not a big deal. In the lower-archy of hell’s soundtrack, though, I’d probably give the absolute lowest spot to that sound that Microsoft Windows used to play when you’d do something wrong. It kind of sounded like a cat stepping on a piano, but it was called “chord.” Probably the most annoying beep in history. Why can’t any of these beeping noises be pleasant in some way rather than making me want to tear my hair out?

Dear Sunday New York Times;

I thought I loved you. Seriously, when we were “dating,” before I made the big commitment, I couldn’t get enough of you. Maybe it was the fact that you played hard to get, appearing only on the mornings when you hadn’t already been picked up by someone else at the few local stores that stocked you. Sometimes I’d just have to settle for going to the coffee shop on Sunday morning, hoping to see you there in the arms of a stranger.

But now that I have you I mistreat you. I generally ignore you except for a few of your less demanding features–the “Modern Love” column, the magazine, the pictures of New York fashion trends. I read your front page and the week review out of duty. I don’t always appreciate your intelligence. And I hardly ever tackled your crossword puzzle. Half of your pages (business, sports) go straight to the recycling bin.

Sorry, but I’m just not that into you.

***

Dear New Yorker;

We met casually once and it you seemed interesting, if a bit old for me (those cartoons… really?) But once I subscribed to you you turned into one of those stalker type dates who wouldn’t leave me alone. Maybe if you only came around once a month I’d be more interested. But every week you show up on my doorstep, and in the end I just tossed you aside. Unless you had an article by David Sedaris. It wasn’t enough to keep me around.

Once I rejected you things just got worse. The letters, the e-mails, the last chance bargaining, the ultimatums. I mean come-on. You’ll just have to face the truth: I’m just not that into you.

***

Dear Glamour,

We have an on again, off again relationship. I just can’t seem to shake you. You’ve been in my life since I was a teenager, always there with a word of advice or a fashion tip. When I see you in the grocery store I’m always happy to see you, and want to pick you up and hold you. But you’re kind of predictable, and I don’t think you’ve changed over the last 15 years as much as I have. Everytime you start talking about the best forms of birth control or new skin cleansers or how spring florals are in (again) I just want to tune out. But somehow I’m a sucker for your do’s and don’ts. So I guess I’ll stay with you for now, but really, I’m just not that into you.

***

Dear Wired,

You think you’re so hip, with your flashy colors and shiny pages and articles about tech-y things. But I only brought you here out of mild curiosity, and a free voucher from some air miles I figured I’d never use anyway. Your attempts to seem cool seem kind of like you are trying to comb over a bald spot. I guess I’m just not into geek chic. Or you.

***

My xylem v-neck noro sweater pattern is now available here.

I wil add it to my Ravelry page shortly.

I’m a bit of a science nerd, and I’ve recently been attracted to microscopic images. This sweater was inspired by images of xylem, which are part of vascular plants’ circulatory systems (see below).

Xylem is knit top-down. After casting on, you first knit back and forth, increasing for the sleeves and the v-neck, and then join and continue in the round. While I’ve used a garter stitch pattern on the yoke and body, you could also choose to save the garter ridge pattern for the bust area if you’d rather emphasize that.

I chose to finish the sweater with garter stitch rows around the sleeves, hem, and neckline.

This sweater takes 5 skeins of Noro Kureyon (or 550 yards) on size 7 needles.

This New York Times article reports that teenage girls are more prolific content providers than teenage boys–they are more likely to create and contribute to blogs, online networking profiles, or web pages. The article suggests that this imbalance is not likely to translate into greater representation for women in the computer science field, which remains largely male-dominated. Providing content is not the same as the “hard core” activities of coding and programming, apparently. Might it be that the assumptions behind the content vs code division are part of the problem?

The article states

It is possible that the girls who produce glitters today will develop an interest in the rigorous science behind computing, but some scholars are reluctant to draw that conclusion.

I know programming requires math, but it is also a kind of writing. After all, we refer to different computer “languages,” scripts, syntax, and so on. Separating coding out from “content development” might not be as effective as drawing parallels between the two, perhaps.

I don’t know much about computer science curricula, but the very fact that technical communication remains a separate profession suggests that computer scientists are not required to do a lot of content development. I think this is changing; endeavors like Carnegie Mellon’s Women in Computer Science program are trying to use women’s and young girls’ interest in content development, graphics, and so on to attract more of them to computer science. Too bad that stuff wasn’t around when I was a teenager. I actually enjoyed programming but got in trouble in computer classes for creating girly quizzes in Turing (a language that I believe is now defunct?) like “Do you have knee fat?” and “What kind of girlfriend are you?” when we were supposed to be programming a caterpillar to move across the screen on our Icon computers (also now defunct). Speaking of which, does anyone remember these:

For better or worse, I live right next to a thrift shop and am often tempted to wander in on my way home from the coffee shop. I usually look for wool sweaters I can recycle, or the occasional kitschy item from the “art” department, but I had never gone downstairs to the book section before today. I assumed it would be a jumbled mess of cheap paperbacks, but I was wrong. The thrift shop in question has organized its book section like a used book store–everything is categorized and arranged on shelves. There’s a section for older hardcover books, but they still only cost 50 cents to a dollar. This is where I happened across Carpenter’s book, and heeding Sharon Crowley’s advice about building your own archive, I added it to my pile.

My particular copy was used by a Mary Richardson in 1911.

I have yet to take more than a cursory glance, but I did encounter this snippet from the introduction, which might interest some of you body/athletics and rhetoric people. Carpenter is distinguishing rhetoric, as an art, from sciences like chemistry. Among the arts he lists engineering, as well as “music, dancing, painting, swimming, and many similar kinds of activity”:

The engineer,–to a very great extent,–and even the swimmer,–to a very small extent,–must understand the principles on which their arts rest, and these principles may be considered as constituting the science of engineering and the science of swimming; but the success of the practising engineer and the practical swimmer depends upon the skill with which they apply these principles. Now, rhetoric is essentially an art. In order to write well we must, of course follow–consciously or unconsciously–certain principles; but theknowledge of these principles is not the main thing. The essential part of rhetoric is that we shall act, that we shall acquire skill in the application of the principles we study, in the practice of the art we are learning.

Carpenter doesn’t go so far as to enumerate some of the bodily aspects of rhetoric except for a section on handwriting (p.15), where he says that bad handwriting can be due to “tremor or stiffness in the muscles,” defective eyesight, or “a deficiency in the writer’s power of visualizing” (15).
Also, in his section on “barbarisms,” Carpenter notes that the term “dude” appeared “about fifteen years ago,” which would place it in 1895. Who knew?

Mark Bauerlein posted this critique of the field of composition–a critique he bases on a cursory examination of the 2006 program for the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

I posted this response to the article itself:

I heartily second the comments above, and would also remind Bauerlein that the discipline of rhetoric has its roots not (at least not primarily) in the teaching of grammar (historically a separate discipline), but in the teaching of argumentation, persuasion, and critical skills that prepare students to participate in what the Greeks called the agora and what we now variously call the public sphere, democratic politics, or civil society. It is because many of us ground our scholarship in this tradition that we take on topics such as race, gender, sexuality, class, and current events—topics which shape the public sphere in which we encourage our students to participate through their writing. Good writing involves understanding the ideas, concepts, and ideologies that shape contemporary arguments about these and other issues, the audiences that advance these arguments, and possible strategies for engaging in these debates—not just in the proper use of semi-colons.

I would only add that the field of rhet/comp would be a very dreary one indeed if it were confined to the kinds of issues Bauerlein seems to suggest for us–what he calls “basic writing.” I assume he means that we should be teaching only the mechanics of writing, not the content of writing. If this is true, then we end up with the same content/style split that we’ve been battling against for ages. *SIGH*

In addition to my job as a Mountie, I’ve decided to embark on a couple of side projects. We all know that government jobs don’t pay so well.

Side project #1: Teaching legal writing. I’ve been doing this with my partner, KRGP, for some public defenders in the state, but we’re considering extending the practice into a side consulting business for other lawyers (hopefully the ones with a little extra cash).

Side project #2: Writing a knitting book. My partner in crime and I are starting to get the ball (of yarn) rolling over at Fiber Smarts. The idea is that we’ll use our status as rhetoric professors as part of the gimmick. We’ll be the Knitty Professors, offering insights and occasional historical/literary illusions. More importantly, I plan to translate my experience as a technical writer into knitting patterns you can actually understand, since many of them have obviously not undergone user testing. The knitted items themselves will be as intuitive and user-friendly as possible, too. For instance, any color pattern will make sense and will allow you to know what you need to do by looking at your work rather than consulting the written pattern continually.

Anyway, I’m wondering if these side projects are really a good idea? Do any other academics out there have side project or opinions on them? I’m of course not going to let them distract me from my main job but it does seem like fun to work on something else for a change.

If literature scholars consider reading literature work…

Then as a rhetorician I can consider watching political speeches on TV work too.

Right?

This New York Times article suggests that reports about climate change rely on a technique called the availability cascade, which seeks to fix numerous, recent examples of climate change in people’s minds in order to convince them that global warming is a problem. Here’s a snippet:

Slow warming doesn’t make for memorable images on television or in people’s minds, so activists, journalists and scientists have looked to hurricanes, wild fires and starving polar bears instead. They have used these images to start an “availability cascade,” a term coined by Timur Kuran, a professor of economics and law at the University of Southern California, and Cass R. Sunstein, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The availability cascade is a self-perpetuating process: the more attention a danger gets, the more worried people become, leading to more news coverage and more fear. Once the images of Sept. 11 made terrorism seem a major threat, the press and the police lavished attention on potential new attacks and supposed plots. After Three Mile Island and “The China Syndrome,” minor malfunctions at nuclear power plants suddenly became newsworthy.

The “availability cascade” seems to combine the rhetorical notion of kairos (right timing) and a ubiquity topos–find a threat everywhere, and it seems more urgent to people and deserving of action. While I don’t think the “availability cascade” is anything new, it does seem to nicely capture the idea of momentum within rhetorical situations–the ways in which arguments and also affects are produced and gain force over time.

In other news, I was watching Ovation last night (they were showing a program called “Art or Not,” in which regular people and art experts weigh in on the merit of various artists, including this guy.

Anyway, there was definitely an “availability cascade” going on in terms of Ovation’s advertising, which featured at least one infomercial type product during every commercial break. Here are the top 4 most ridiculous ones I saw:

4) The AeroGarden.

Infomercials always want to show you how useful their products are by demonstrating multiple uses. Ever need to cut metal cans in half? Buy a Ginsu knife! The AeroGarden shows us that we can not only grow herbs, but also tomatoes and lettuce (or by extension, any other kind of vegetable, I’d guess).

3) The Listen Up personal sound amplifier, which allows you to “turn the volume up for yourself” on everything from church sermons to tv shows. But it’s not just for older people who are losing their hearing. In case your neighbors don’t think you are creepy enough already, you can also use it to eavesdrop on their conversations while you pretend to be checking your mail.

2) Napa Grape Lights, which you can use to create the perfect atmosphere for everything from gourmet dinners (create a centerpiece) to rockin’ parties (use the strobelight setting) to a romantic spa bath (string them around your tub).

1) Kinoki foot pads, which remove toxins from your body while you sleep:

The Kinoki foot pads infomercial makes the best use of the “availability cascade,” because it lists all the toxins found in the typical persons foot pad after use (mercury, lead, etc.) and shows people taking the pads off their feet to reveal a bunch of brown/black gunk on them (presumably, the toxins they have removed from their bodies). By showing the commercial, oh, every 20 minutes or so, Kinoki does a pretty good job of making gullible people think they can purify themselves of environmental hazards through their feet.

1) Milk that comes in bags instead of jugs

2) Corn Bran Squares ™. You can buy them in the US, but they can be hard to find.

3) Timmy’s

4) Toques

5) Constant high profile hockey coverage on TV and in print that makes it easy to keep up to date with little to no effort on your part. I doubt I’ll be hearing anything much about the World Junior Hockey Championships once I’m back home.

6) The Kit-Kat bars taste better.

7) Kilometres, centigrade, and other units of measurement that actually make sense. What does 18 degrees Fahrenheit mean anyway?

Things not to miss:

1) The cold, dreary weather.