In the Fantasy Baseball draft the weekend before last, I took Toronto starting pitcher R.A. Dickey with my fifth pick. I'd had Dickey on my team last year, picking him up as a free agent mostly because of the novelty that he was a knuckleballer. It turned out to be a genius move, as he won 20 games for the Mets and was the NL Cy Young Award winner ( Read more... )

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So, for Lent, I'm going to try to write every day. On many days, that may mean posting here. Today is the first day of WNEC's Spring Break. I don't have any big plans. I have a stack of papers to grade. I have been so far successful at procrastinating on starting them in earnest over break. I was supposed to have some time today while A. was at pre ( Read more... )

Spent the day grading papers. Got depressingly few done. I had my students write about this David Brooks column in the New York Times, "The Revolt of the Nihilists." It was my "text wrestling" essay. It perhaps wasn't the easiest piece of writing to grapple with for my students. Brooks wrote on deadline in the middle of the economic crisis and didn ( Read more... )

This morning, I read an article by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic, "Why I Blog." I've been thinking lately about this blog. I know, that's funny, because I haven't been writing in it much. After totally missing September, I tried to be a little better about it in October. But I've found myself peeking back through my archives here and there, ( Read more... )

For a while now, I've thought it would be fun to write about train travel. I thought that Amtrak should post train stories on its website. Well, I just recently discovered that they have. It's called Whistle Stop. Now I just need to figure out how to write for it!

In my job search, I've come across a number of websites that purport to pay freelance writers for online articles at their sites. Sites like Suite 101, Associated Content and Helium. I'm not sure what to think of any of them. They all seem to promise some nominal fee for contributors, payable to a PayPal account, and bonuses for people who ( Read more... )

Looking over some old writings, I came across this essay that I attached to my first self-evaluation at The Recorder. It was written in January of 2001, when I had been working at The Recorder for about six months. I would work there for three years before taking on my present assignment at the Valley Advocate. It strikes me, reading this again, ( Read more... )