Miscellanea #29

A continuing series of noteworthy tidbits gleaned from all over.

(Today is (sic) day on Miscellanea.)

Blogs as Course Management Systems: Is their biggest advantage also their achille’s heel?
Elizabeth Lane Lawley, assistant professor at the department of information technology at Rochester Institute of Technology, has begun an experiment using Moving Type as a course management system for her ‘Introduction to Multimedia’ class. Already, her early efforts demonstrate the unique advantages blogs hold over conventional course management systems. But her work also uncovers what commercial course management systems offer that blogs lack…. (del.icio.us/tag/education)

Just deserts
This morning a dark, handsome, mysterious man appeared on my doorstep with an offer. I could use his time-machine for five round-trips. On each trip, I could kick in the shins the person of my choice…. (Rosemary for Remembrance)

Lizard in the Mailbox
Once upon a time there was a man who lived in Paradise. He lived with his great wife and his three great cats in a creamy yellow house that reminded him of sunshine. His job was to write. It was a fun job, and he did it eight hours a day sitting in front of his computer in an office in his house. The man went to work each day dressed in a bathing suit, a t-shirt and flip-flops, which was perfectly OK with his great wife, his great neighbors and all the great stores and shops in Paradise. Late one morning, the man took a break and walked to the end of his driveway to collect his mail. He was hoping to find the Quentin Tarantino DVD he had ordered through EBay. Instead, he opened the mailbox to find the usual small stack of junk mail. But this time something was different. A lizard was sitting on top of the stack of mail…. (Book of Life)

Pet Detective Kathy Albrecht
Albrecht is a former police officer who used to work with search and rescue dogs. She now searches for lost pets using her specially trained bloodhounds, and a Weimaraner. Along the way she is developing data about how lost animals behave, and how to best find them. Her new book is The Lost Pet Chronicles: Adventures of a K-9 Cop Turned Pet Detective. Albrecht also founded, and is executive director of, the non-profit National Center for Missing Pets in San Jose, Calif. (Fresh Air)

Coming Soon? Tour of California endorsed by state
ProCyclingTour.com | State Endorses Week Long Tour of California. The new event is expected to be part of the Pro Cycling Tour, along with the T-Mobile International in San Francisco, the BMC New York City Championship, and the Wachovia Cycling Series in Philadelphia, and will be run by Threshold Sports LLC and California Pro Cycling…. (Tour de France 2004)

One Thing After Another
In the May/Summer issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, Karen Mattison offers an interesting essay (…) defending the use of coincidence in fiction. Subtitled ‘An Essay Against Craft,’ the essay commends the use of coincidence as a way of taking risk, which Mattison feels is discouraged in a literary world dominated by the workshop ‘rules’ implicitly taught in creative writing programs. Writes Mattison: ‘I don’t think directions or rules are available, just terms…that undeniably simplify discussions of writing and literature.’ Such simplification is at times useful, but ‘the problem arises when we begin to draw conclusions from succesful choices, assuming that what works once will work in every instance.’ … Although Baxter and Mattison don’t use the word, what they are both describing is the influence on early novels in English of the ‘picaresque’ narrative. The picaresque story—derived from the term identifying the protagonist of such stories, the ‘picaro’—was introduced by Spanish writers of the 16th and 17th centuries, and is essentially a journey narrative in which the picaro, usually a rogueish character, embarks on a journey in which, literally, one thing happens after another. There’s not really a sense of progression in the picaresque narrative, just a series of episodes, and usually the protagonist remains more or less unchanged, undergoing no transformation or ‘epiphany.’ The most famous picaresque novel is undoubtedly Don Quixote, in which Cervantes alters the form by making his protagonist a deluded but not antisocial or rascally character…. (The Reading Experience)