Saturday, April 03, 2004
The most unfun game ever
This afternoon I decided to see if I could figure out how many words per minute I am typing. I figured it would be an important thing to know.
I searched "timed typing test" and came up with a site that would fit the bill perfectly--conveniently enough, it's typingtest.com. Pretty simple.
As it turns out, you can select your choice for times--up to three minutes--and one of four passages, including something from Huckleberry Finn. I took the test and ended up with 68 WPM, which I thought was rather respectable, as I was going to be happy with anything over 45. My completion accuracy was also something like 91%, which I didn't think was so bad, either.
When you finish you get the option of looking at the highest "scores," and that was when I realized that, for some people, typingtest.com is more of a game than a curiosity. A very important game, at that. It felt like Spaced Penguins all over again--I know what I would have to do to get 181 WPM with 100% accuracy, and it involves memorizing 181, 362, or 543 words of Huckleberry Finn (depending on the length of the test, of course), not to mention typing it all in....
Is this what pianists do when they've mastered Rachmaninov?
Thursday, April 01, 2004
Less hair, more controversy
Susanne, after reading my blog this morning, reminded me why Arundhati Roy got her hair cut--she was sick of everyone making a deal about her good looks. Good for her, I'd say.
Susanne also told me that Roy'd been in jail several times--something I didn't know. She's tough indeed, that Roy. It turns out she's facing an obscenity charge for some of the goings on in The God of Small Things, and has been thrown in jail for her words more than one time. Common Dreams, an activist news source, has an article about Roy's style of feminism which is quite good. And normally, while chances are that I would look for the slant in an article from any site bearing an aggressive political agenda, this comes off clean--the sidebar features plenty more written by Roy herself. Good stuff.
Calls for papers
Susanne was talking tonight about how there is only one month left in the semester. I am not currently in school, but I found myself feeling gross--residual effects, no doubt, of having many (though not too many) years of only having one month left in a semester and far too much to do in that amount of time.
Even out of school, though, I'm still somehow involved in it--I find myself right now waiting again for decisions for graduate programs (for the third time in four years), and my own personal deadline looms later today with a paper submission for an award at the first annual Cultural/Literary Studies Conference at Emporia State University. I've never been to present at a conference before, so I'm glad I won't be going all the way down to Emporia myself for that--one of Susanne's classmates is presenting there, as well, and actually is the person who tipped me off to the conference to begin with.
As I looked for the address for the conference I found a super cool literary nerd dream blog--one that seems to focus completely on calls for paper submissions for different conferences and things. The dates on some of these are far past due, but it gives you a fairly accurate slice of the breadth and depth of the incredibly diverse scholarship going on in our field right now. There's something for everyone somewhere on this list. I could spent hours looking through all the calls for papers and comparing it to papers I've done--in just two minutes I already saw something for Flannery O'Connor for which I could have submitted. Jeez. Next I'll find myself stopping on Book TV as I flip through the cable channels.
Oh wait...I did that once. In fact, that's how I found out that Arundhati Roy (about whom I wrote on March 5) now has short hair, which was obviously startling after I got used to seeing her portrait in The God of Small Things with such long hair.
Yeah, other obviously startling fact: My transformation into a total nerd is now complete, and utterly irreversible.
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
The technological generation divide
There was an incredible post on Mamamusings today about parental censorship and child safety. I live in a fairly technologically advanced household, and always did growing up. I certainly learned faster about technology than my parents did, but there were and still are many things about computers that I learn from them. Even so, the post on Mamamusings is dreadfully important, at least for those of us who are or stand to become parents in this technologically speedy digital age.
How does one stay ahead of, or on top of, technology enough to not be outfoxed by one's children? That's not to say that good parents always know more about things than their kids do. In fact, I hope my kids--when they come far,far down the line--come to know far more about something than I do. As the blog says, though, there is a delicate balance to strike between being too in their face and encouraging the useful involvement in the new media. Parents, obviously, are increasingly going to have to be able to negotiate these waters, and it seems these waters could become increasingly foreign to navigate as our kids learn more about technology than we do.
I always teasingly say I'd like to be able to out-play my kids at video games. This is likely to be impossible, even though I've had years of training in my own childhood and young adulthood. The technology our children will be immersed in is going to be markedly different than the ones we grew up with, and though we can hope to remain literate in it, there's always likely to be a technological generational divide. It all makes me wonder if there's some essential--if not implicit--similarity between the technological and the youth cultures, and if the two are moving closer to merging. Both are fast-moving, and fast-changing; both involve the constant awareness and absorption of new things; and both on some level resist stability as a lack of progress.
It also seems that technology poses a generational divide even in literacy. There are totally new languages developing and standardizing beneath the computer programs we use every day. We've already established how youth are on average more technologically literate. I have no doubt that one day many of them will speak and write in languages their parents do not even know. Sure, this happens in school all the time, when our children learn languages neither their parents nor any of their ancestors ever spoke. I think, though, that French and German and Spanish open up fewer places to find trouble (wittingly or unwittingly) than deep technological literacy--and that's part of the intriguing and puzzling dilemma behind Elizabeth Lane Lawley's blog post.
I'm trying to think of other technological innovations that introduced such new questions to parenting. One of them, undoubtedly, was the affordability of the automobile. Cell phones seem to have the possibility to make parenting easier, if anything. I wonder what the next technology will be to change this landscape.
Monday, March 29, 2004
Check your sources
I was quite certain that snuff mull from yesterday's blog about weird E-bay auction sites was satanic, or some sort of thing. Never mind that the term "snuff mull" inherently doesn't sound too evil, though it is vague enough to lend itself to all kinds of arcane interpretations. I was simply wowed by the object's appearence, which though it was very clearly a form of careful workmanship still looked as though the flesh were rotting off it.
Well, turns out it's not satanic. It's Scottish. And you can see on this page, which is dedicated to all sorts of Scottish paraphernalia--including bag pipes and kilts and the rest--that the odd rotting-flesh ram's head is only the ultimate example of a flourishing fine art--the storing of things (like snuff, most naturally) in done-up animal horns.
Expensive done-up animal horns.
