Do I have to read Twilight in order to have an informed opinion of Monica Hesse's theory concerning why smart, literate, feminist women find themselves being bitten by Meyer's execrable prose and frightening worldview [warning, link contains some abelist slurs]?

In "Twilight," Edward Cullen waffled between wooing and eating new girl Bella Swan. He ( Read more... )

Scientific knowledge is based on empirical evidence, and is appropriate for understanding the natural world, but it provides only a limited understanding of the supernatural, aesthetic, or other ways of knowing, such as art, philosophy, or religion.1
Here follows a very short rant. Maybe a rantlet ( Read more... )

I posted a new status on Facebook this morning:

[zingerella] would very much like to spend the day building a fort out of blankets and pillows, and hiding out there, eating carrot sticks and cookies and reading comic books with you.

I am not in a blanket fort, of course. I am at the office, on another interminable phone meeting. But ( Read more... )

Re-posted from Facebook:

Emma-Lee records Magical Flying Bathtub Machine

Notwithstanding my own questioning whether Emma Lee and the singer-songwiter ilk really count as "folk" musicians ...

( and other ruminations, shared by many others, about the nature of folk music. )

Some of you have heard this already, but here is where I'm going to be, next week, and what I'm going to be doing.

( Cut for them as don't much care )

Dear Internets,

Halp!

I need to come up with a title for a short article for a science textbook for grades 6, 7, and 8. The article is about the strange and fascinating reproductive practices of seahorses (short version: females deposit eggs in males' brood pouches. Males fertilize and carry the brood of seahorse babies, eventually going into ( Read more... )

There's a Tim Horton's almost across the street from my house. This means that at any hour of the day or night, I can look out my kitchen window, across the laneway and the parking lot, and see a police cruiser parked across Danforth. At eight o'clock in the morning, when parents are dropping their kids off at the school across the street, there's ( Read more... )

I do not watch Dollhouse.* Various friends do, and I'll probably download a bunch and see what Joss has been up to so that I can opine sensibly a couple of years after the fact. But troubleinchina's most recent post about Dollhouse ('ware spoilerz) has raised an Interesting and Important Question. It's a question that's been raised before, of course, but it's ( Read more... )

Two meetings today. One with the entire team of Project B, except for the designer, on how we're going to avoid losing money given that the budget is impossible (we're in the early stages of Project B, and haven't lost any money yet; we also haven't done anything yet). One with the Grunk of Grunk, about how the client loves our work on Project A, ( Read more... )

One of the best parts of my current project is coming up with ideas for features in science books. I do a lot of this: a publisher will often outsource all of the chapter-openers or end-of-chapter features for a programme. I'll receive a table of contents, some samples, a bunch of curriculum documents, and a list of criteria, and I'll wander off ( Read more... )