Thursday, October 9, 2008

Prance Around the Horn


  1. i am an unkempt, cave-dwelling Dungeons and Dragons character at this point, in case you were wondering. you were, right? srsly?
  2. Bill Sizemore - Oregon's very own ballot initiative villain - is spending NV Foundation money on braces for his daughter?
  3. Thomas Pynchon is rolling out a pulp-y detective novel?
  4. All this MLA talk about blogs and academic publishing makes me wonder if anybody's figured out how to export citations from blogs into already-existing bibliographic software.
  5. Listen, we all love Astral Weeks. But this sounds like a bad idea, Van.
  6. This clip of the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka speaking to the Steelworkers re: Obama, race and industrial unionism (?!?) is emblematic of labor's moving, pro-Obama spirit at the DNC. It's worth the five minutes of your time.
  7. There's too much anti-Acorn-hate-porn to count, these days, but here's an awesome, hilarious, drafty exposition about Saul Alinsky and the ACORN and godless socialism, etc., courtesy of the always-alert NW Republican.
  8. Philosopher Bill Martin writes an honest account of attempting to bridge the gap between intellectuals and the US Far Left, which in this case includes collaborations with Zizek and RCP Charismatic Figure Bob Avakian. Some of my favorite reading of the last month.
  9. I would love to hear some Michigan-type-people's opinions on the $25 Billion Detroit bailout, by the way. Is this what "The Treaty of Detroit" looks like in the neoliberal era: 1950 as tragedy, 2008 as farce?
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6 comments:

  1. drOctober 9, 2008 at 3:41 PM

    The bailout of the big 3 is ridiculous. My bullshit take is that all of the economic growth in this area is linked to three sectors: (1) Tech; (2) Movies; and (3) Amway. Of those, only tech is really all that promising (though it is kind of exciting to walk out of your front door onto a shooting stage). Some versions of the proposed big 3 bailout included provisions for funding green-tech automotive startups. I'd say $100 million in capital for those startups will do more for the Michigan economy than $24,900,000,000 for the dinosaurs. So if that version of the bailout passed, then I'd grudgingly support it.

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  2. AnonymousOctober 9, 2008 at 4:31 PM

    Lex,
    Did I ever tell you that I played D and D heavily until about 8th grade?

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  3. lex dexterOctober 9, 2008 at 5:24 PM

    r_b guy,
    you were a Rogue, non?
    what level?
    how was your dexterity?

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  4. mike3550October 9, 2008 at 5:50 PM

    hey lex, check out zotero for bibliographic software that incorporates blog posts. i'm not sure you meant that you have a list of citations you want to import or the ability to import a blog post. zotero has a format for the latter -- although for most sites you need to write the info yourself (but, hey, at least there is actually an entry-format for blogs). Also, you can put a request in for site translators to get it to download info automatically from certain sites (like blogspot.com or wordpress.com).

    good luck with the diss, man.

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  5. drOctober 9, 2008 at 6:04 PM

    What Mike said. Also, you should use Zotero rather than Endnote, because the makers of Endnote are currently acting like dicks.

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  6. AnonymousOctober 10, 2008 at 12:50 AM

    I never would have taken you for a D&D guy. Nice library. I would like to peruse that sometime.
    And thanks for the zotero reminder. I've been meaning to get that.

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