May 2010 Archives

OK, OK, I haven't done well in keeping up with this thing lately. Mea culpa. But there's been a lot going on, some of which has happened fast enough (or frequently enough) to keep my attention on things other than the interwebs. Among the bits of information in which you might be interested:

1) My application for a sabbatical was approved. I will not be in the classroom during the spring trimester for 2011, allowing me the opportunity to do some writing, some relaxing, some traveling, and (if I'm lucky) a Special Project about which I can't tell you until the details are worked out. But if I get to do it, it'll be COOOOOoooool.

2) Thing Two has decided not to return to Woodberry for his senior year. While we're disappointed that he won't be spending another year honing his dramatic skills in the Walker Fine Arts Center, it's not a decision he arrived at lightly. Speaking as a parent, I want him to be happy and go into his college search on a positive note; speaking as the director of the fall play at WFS, I'm not happy to be losing the best actor* in the class of 2011, but I'll cope.

*This is not just parental pride talking; he was awarded the Underformer Drama Award for his contributions to the drama department this year, which included playing three roles in mainstage plays (Yossarian in Catch-22, Carmen Ghia in The Producers, and Bob Ewell in To Kill a Mockingbird, which shows something of his range), playing two roles in our black box productions (Detective Tupolski in The Pillowman and Milton the Chimp in Words, Words, Words), and directing two OTHER black box productions (Nocturne and Sure Thing). I won't be the only person in the theater missing him next year.

3) It's been a busy week for awards. I had one of my student advisees win the Director's Award for his contributions to the drama department (playing the lead in The Producers, three roles in Catch-22, and Ariel in The Pillowman, directing Words, Words, Words, and designing, hanging, and/or running the lights for just about every show this year), while the other won the Johnny Mercer Medal as the outstanding musician in the senior class. We feel pretty darned artsy at our house this week.

4) Kelly has knocked off two more library school classes.  That leaves her 7/12ths of the way toward her master's degree in Information and Library Science, and that much closer to being able to call herself a Librarian.

5) The indigo bunting I was awaiting finally showed up. He appeared at the feeder a couple of days ago. Today he was sharing it with a male cardinal--always a great color combination.

6) Ian is back from his freshman year at VCU. He loves it, and loves living in Richmond, though next year he'll be living in an apartment, not on dorm. He's declared himself a history major (with a minor in anthropology). He's going back to work on the Woodberry grounds crew starting on Monday, a job which starts early in the morning, but which gets him out in the fresh air, pays pretty well, and lets him work with some really great people. It'll be his third straight summer on Grounds, and it's one of the best educational experiences he's ever had.

7) My honors students liked doing their Literature Circles again. Over the last two weeks I had my junior honors English class do a second Lit Circle assignment, duplicating an activity they did back in December with non-fiction books, only this time with novels. Each boy picked a category of book (science fiction, historical fiction, realistic fiction, etc.) and was assigned to a group of three or four guys who'd picked that category. Then I gave each group a list of ten books from which they picked a title. The books chosen were Larry Niven's Ringworld, Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men, and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club. I think it went pretty well, and we had several good final presentations on the books.

8) I've been a used CD-buying machine. Recent purchases include: Richard & Linda Thompson's Shoot Out the Lights, the White Stripes' White Blood Cells, Elvis Costello's This Year's Model, the Roches' No Trespassing EP, Paul Simon's There Goes Rhymin' Simon, and Tom Lehrer's That Was the Year That Was. I've also been enjoying a compilation of songs by Cloud Cult that Thing Two pressed on us.

9) I'm looking at a busy time in early June. I give exams on the 1st and 3rd. The year-end faculty party is the night of the 4th. My grades and comments are due on the 6th. We'll have our year-end faculty meeting on the 7th. And my two-day recertification class for my Wilderness First Responder card will be the 9th and 10th. But there's bound to be a summer vacation in there somewhere.


5:18 PM

*I'm just now wrapping up a month of staying off Facebook and other online social forums (or "fora" for those of you in a Roman mood), and I've got to say it was a good idea. In addition to lowering my blood pressure by ignoring online arguments and allowing myself more time for such things as grading papers, I also gave myself more time to read books, which came in handy (see below). I'm starting to believe I have an addictive personality, but I'm not physically capable of getting addicted to the few drugs I've tried--I just don't enjoy vomiting all that much, frankly--while I'm perfectly capable of falling into a pattern of reading/writing online. And because I am a voracious reader, a teacher of rhetoric, an experienced debate coach, a pretty fair typist, and an unrepentant know-it-all, I can easily find myself spending a LOT of time arguing on the web. I suspect, therefore, that periodic sabbaticals from FB and its ilk are going to become necessary for me, especially when I need to get something written.

*Speaking of written things, I've got a short story in the slush pile (or its electronic equivalent) at a magazine and a query (for my maybe'it's-YA/maybe-it's-not novel) on an editor's desk. Prayers, good vibes, and crossed fingers are, as always, entirely welcome.

*I'd forgotten about a further complication to this year's NBA playoffs: the Celtics have acquired former Duke center Shelden Williams, who gets playing time only rarely, but who would earn a ring if the C's were to win the title. Thus, if the Magic or Celtics win, the UNC grad's ring would be matched by a Dookie's ring; if the Suns win, Dookie Grant Hill would earn a ring, but at least he's the Duke grad I hate the least; and if the Lakers win, only L.A. general manager Mitch Kupchak (UNC '76) gets a ring, but I haven't been counting executives in my totals.

*That extra time I gave myself with my moratorium on online social networking was largely filled with reading books, and the books themselves were both large and filled. Back in March, when I was out in Texas with Ian and Dad, the former finished the only book he had with him, and I felt his pain. Ian reads really fast; he started outpacing me when he was about 12, and he was reading faster than Kelly within a year or two after that (and reading faster than Kelly is an accomplishment, let me tell you.) When the fifth Harry Potter book came out, he plowed through the entire thing in something like 36 hours (without bothering to sleep, of course), so I was well aware of his ability to whip through a thick book when he had a plane ride or a long stretch of downtime in a hotel room, both of which he was facing during our last days of vacation. Luckily, we found a Barnes and Noble in Midland and I grabbed a big, thick book for him: A Game of Thrones, the first volume of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. He dove in, and I'm happy to report that the book's 800+ pages (not including the appendices) lasted him well past our landing at Dulles. He took it off to VCU, where he finished it in short order, and he returned it to me when he came home for a weekend soon after.

So there I was in early April, having wrapped up Ian McEwan's Saturday, looking for a new reading project, and I flipped open the Martin and was immediately sucked in. There are some things about the series I'm not happy about, mind you. The names, in particular, are often too prosaic for a fantasy world where magic and dragons and decade-long seasons exist; with such enormous differences in geography, physics, climatology, religion, etc., it's a little off-putting to meet characters with mundane names like Jon, Robert, Ned, Catelyn, Jaime, and Brandon. Tolkien managed it with "Sam," but that was the ONLY name he tried to slip into what was otherwise a linguistically consistent universe. Still, the plot is gripping, the created universe intriguing, and the conflicts between characters numerous and engaging.

This is good, because now that I've finished the fourth book, I've discovered to my horror that I was wrong: it's not a five-volume series whose fifth volume is coming out any day now. It's a SEVEN-volume series, and readers have been waiting for the fifth volume since 2005.  And since HBO just bought the rights to the series and is doing the first book (with Sean Bean, Peter Dinklage, and Stargate: Atlantis's Jason Momoa), I worry that GRRM may be a little too busy with television details to devote the necessary time to finishing the next three books. Worse, the fourth book ends with several nasty cliffhangers, so I've set myself up to be drumming my fingers impatiently for some time.

Great.

*The year's first Wood Thrush popped up today, following the arrival of the year's first Blue Grosbeak a week or so back, and the year's first Red-eyed Vireo a few days after that. Now if one of the Indigo Buntings singing out back will show his face at my feeder, it'll really feel like summer.


9:20 PM

I'll admit it outright: I've lost interest in the NBA. I used to watch it religiously, at least during the playoffs, but then the series started to expand until EVERY round was a seven-game job, and the progression from sixteen teams to two became a march not unlike that of Napoleon into Russia (with similar watchability, but less drama).  I've never liked the 24 second clock, which in my opinion stunts the beauty of a basketball team's offense the way thalidomide stunts a healthy limb, and the teams' generally indifferent defense means that most NBA possessions seem to involve two passes and a jump shot, which isn't a whole lot different than watching professional bowling in terms of variability. The announcement that in this year, a player stepping toward the basket for a layup/dunk would be allowed TWO steps was to me just one more admission that the league has perverted the game of basketball to the point where it's hard to watch even with the greatest players on earth.

Now the only thing keeping me interested in the NBA is the presence of former Tar Heels.

Carolina's long and storied success at the college level has been echoed at the professional level, and a great many former Heels have won themselves NBA championship rings. As best I can recall:

6 rings - Michael Jordan ('91-'93, '96-'98 Bulls)
3 - James Worthy ('85, '87, '88 Lakers)
3 - Scott Williams ('91-'93 Bulls)
3 - Rick Fox ('01-'03 Lakers)
2 - Kenny Smith ('94, '95 Rockets)
1 - Billy Cunningham ('67 76ers)
1 - Charles Scott ('76 Celtics)
1 - Bobby Jones ('83 76ers)
1 - Pete Chilcutt ('95 Rockets)
1 - Rasheed Wallace ('04 Pistons)

That's 22 rings. Even if you fold in Williams' 3 rings (won as a reserve on Jordan's Bulls) and Chilcutt's 1 ring (won as a reserve on Smith's Rockets), that's still a solid 18 professional titles won in the last 50 years by former UNC players. (And it doesn't include those won by coaches, such as Billy Cunningham's 1983 Sixers, or by executives such as Mitch Kupchak, whose Lakers have won 4 titles since he took over as general manager, or by ABA teams, such as the 1969 title won by Larry Brown of the Oakland Oaks).

Naturally, every UNC fan is deeply proud of this record, and will note it loudly and publicly, particularly if there are Duke fans within earshot, given that Duke players have won, as a group, exactly two NBA championship rings. One of them was earned by former Blue Devil Jeff Mullins, who averaged 8.2 points per game for the Golden State Warriors back in 1975; the other was claimed by Danny Ferry, who snagged a ring in 2003 as one of the deep bench reserves (1.9 points per game) for the Tim Duncan-led San Antonio Spurs.

In his current role as GM of the Cleveland Cavaliers, however, Ferry has come to see the value of UNC players; this year the Cavs drafted Danny Green, a starter on the Heels' 2009 NCAA title team, signed free agent Jawad Williams, who started for the Heels' 2005 champions, and traded for former ACC Player of the Year Antawn Jamison to give Cleveland more offense during the playoffs. I don't think it's coincidental that the Cavs are the number one seed in the Eastern Conference.

But in fact, ALL the Eastern squads have Tar Heels on the court. Rasheed Wallace is the Boston Celtics' sixth man; Marvin Williams starts for the Atlanta Hawks, now on the edge of elimination at the hands of the Orlando Magic; and starting for the Magic is Vince Carter. In short, if an Eastern Conference team wins the title this year, UNC will be up to 23 rings (at least).

Not all the UNC alumni have had  such success, alas; Wayne Ellington's Timberwolves, Brandan Wright's Warriors, and Sean May's Kings didn't even make the playoffs. Out in the Western Conference, Brendan Haywood's Mavericks and Ty Lawson's Nuggets lost in the the first round, while in the East, Jerry Stackhouse's Bucks lost to the Hawks, while Raymond Felton's Bobcats fell to the Magic. Then again, with so many former Heels playing, they can't ALL win.

Personally, I'm hoping for the Cavs to win it all. For one thing, that would give the Heels a total of 25 rings earned by players, and for another, I don't want a Heel-less Western Conference team to take the title. (Neither the Lakers, the Spurs, the Jazz, nor the Suns have a UNC alum on the roster.) Worse, should the Suns or the Jazz pull off the upset and win it all, a third ring would go to a former Duke player; the former feature Grant Hill and the latter Carlos Boozer.

I wouldn't object to Rasheed winning his second ring, or Marvin picking up his first, but it's not my preference. And though I'd love for Vince Carter to get a championship (and maybe get ESPN.com's Bill Simmons to quit ragging on him in the process), I'll admit there's one thing that may make rooting for the Magic more difficult.

One of their reserves is J.J. Redick.

Oog.


9:30 PM

I don't watch Fox News. Not a shock, since I don't have a working TV, but even if I were to watch TV news, I wouldn't watch Fox News.

This is one reason why.

Having not read it for myself, I don't have a lot to say on the study by the LSU professor who blames the sense of entitlement among today's students on their viewing of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, but I do have to say this about the Fox News crew's "discussion" of the issue:

You can insult Jim Henson and the Muppets. You can mock the comic books on which I cut my literary teeth. You can cast aspersions on the cheap and easy animation shortcuts of the Hannah-Barbera studios. You can call my favorite childhood cereals sugar-loaded crap. I'm a grownup. I can handle it.

But if you're going to call Fred Rogers "evil" in my presence, I will fuck you up.


Sorry, Mr. R. It had to be said.


9:13 AM