January 2012
1 post
Don’t Die Alone in a Nuclear Holocaust, Bitter... →
I like everything but the final clause. Of course these words will pass away.
December 2010
2 posts
“Yes, an idea is the worst thing to start building a poem from. By that I mean a...”
– Les Murray
November 2010
3 posts
Praying Drunk →
An amazing poem deftly written in blank verse.
Solved: Moving image attachments between pages in...
Uploading and attaching an image to a page is dead simple in WordPress 3+. Unfortunately, changing the page that an image is attached to isn’t so simple. You can either delete the image and upload it again to a new page, or you can open up phpMyAdmin and get to know your database tables. I frequently use WordPress pages as defacto image galleries, and frequently need to move images between...
October 2010
4 posts
MARRIAGE PANTS →
A fun poem for the dreadful emergency that is each and every Monday morning.
Condolence Note: Los Angeles →
A poem of iPods, etiquette, and loss.
Choir by Bruce Bond →
Breathtaking poem by Bruce Bond.
September 2010
3 posts
“It’s the quality of not grabbing for entertainment the minute we feel a...”
– Pema Chödrön, On The Practice of Mindfulness and Refraining
August 2010
6 posts
“You have to decide who you trust before you decide what to believe”
– Author Simon Singh Puts Up a Fight in the War on Science | Magazine
DRUNK →
When William Blake came fashionably late
to parties he’d blame it on archangels,
prophecies broadcast between the leaves
of ordinary trees in the orchard:
those who restrain desire do so because
theirs is weak enough to be restrained…
dwClickable: Entire Block Clickable Using MooTools... →
So I don’t forget where to find it again.
At Lowe's Home Improvement Center →
Book review: Higher Education? →
More on “Higher Education?”, this time from the Wall Street Journal, which pulls this statistical nugget: The administrator-to-student ratio at American universities has doubled since 1976.
July 2010
32 posts
What's Wrong With the American University System →
The Atlantic interviews Andrew Hacker, author of Higher Education?, a critique of the modern university system.
Hacker on tenure:
What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That’s a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave. There’s hardly any turnover in the senior ranks—not just at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford but at small colleges in...
“I Will Away,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Keetje... →
Terrific use of a loose refrain.
Introducing the Protean theme for Wordpress →
Protean is new Wordpress theme from Landau Reece that allows bloggers to customize their website design for individual blog posts. We think it’s a world’s first, and so we decided we’d give it away for free.
Note to self: upload this to your WP test install to play with later.
50 Useful Tools and Resources For Web Designers →
I feel dirty every time I link to one of these round-up posts, but there’s some legitimately useful stuff on this one.
“I think avant-garde fiction has already gone the way of poetry. And it’s...”
– David Foster Wallace, quoted in Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself.
"Prayer for the Man Who Mugged My Father, 72" by... →
Love the use of rhyme in the last two lines.
The Top Idea in Your Mind →
I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting...
SCARY, NO SCARY →
One of the creepiest poems I’ve ever read. Well done.
Negative health effects of sedentary work not... →
Worth reading only for this comment:
Thank you for this exotic pile of research ordure. You — that is the pea-brained hippogriffs who designed these studies — have managed to finagle reality into some existential nightmare that might make even a dour, gymless rat like Jean Paul-Sartre collapse in despair — even though he was already in despair. Despair squared! Cubed! Mega-Cubed. We’re talkin’...
Question by May Swenson →
Incredible poem.
I Write Like →
Paste a sample of your writing, and machine analysis matches it to a famous writer’s prose style.
My zombie essay returned Margaret Atwood.
The pot and how to use it →
Wonderful food writing from Roger Ebert, via Bobulate.
First, get the Pot. You need the simplest rice cooker made. It comes with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Not expensive. Now you’re all set to cook meals for the rest of your life on two square feet of counter space, plus a chopping block. No, I am not putting you on the Rice Diet. Eat what you like. I am thinking of you, student in your...
Self-Employed →
Wonderful use of the title as a metaphor. Some days I’d like to fire myself, too.
Frank Chimero on the designer's crisis of faith →
I will say this as squarely as I know how for the students and young professionals reading this. Within the first year or two of working as a professional designer, you will question if you want to do this any more. You will get beat up and overworked, you will produce a giant pile of work that you are not proud of.
“The dancer’s trembling heart must bring everything into harmony, from the...”
– Federico Garcia Lorca, In Praise of Antonia Mercé
More, on the Buttafuoco Point →
Andy Ihnatko, on the importance of reclaiming your attention:
If you’re spending every waking moment distracting yourself…what are you distracting yourself from? What is your brain clamoring to tell you, if it were ever to get your full and complete attention? An experiment: The next time you have a little time to kill and you instinctively go to your phone to launch your email client or your...
“[A] book design should be inevitable — a book demands its own shape just as an...”
– Chris Ware on the art of book covers [via] cf: John Updike, who claimed he could not begin writing a book until he first imagined its spine, “You can, possibly, tell a book by its cover, but the cover isn’t the contents.” (via bobulate)
jQuery for Designers →
Beautifully done.
Share of College Spending for Recreation is Rising →
“This is the country-clubization of the American university,” said Richard Vedder, a professor at Ohio University who studies the economics of higher education. “A lot of it is for great athletic centers and spectacular student union buildings. In the zeal to get students, they are going after them on the basis of recreational amenities.”
40 Beautiful Examples of Minimalism in Web Design →
Also grid-based layouts and strong typography.
Stories & Novels →
Nicely done example of a single-author online library. An individual writer does what entire publishing companies can’t.
Wordpress Performance: Why My Site Is So Much... →
Tips for increasing WordPress performance, some of it new to me.
"Breasts Like Martinis" by Jill McDonough →
Funny and surprising, a welcome addition to a dour Tuesday morning.
Support Details →
Useful site for troubleshooting web design and coding issues in different browsers, especially when working with clients who are unfamiliar with their own systems.