Op-ed in the NY Times kicks Case's butt
An op-ed piece in today’s New York Times by Stephen Budiansky describes in vivid and hilarious terms the extent to which university’s will go to attract “customers” (formerly known as students). The prinicpal example is my fine employer, Case Western Reseve University, which a couple of years ago decided (after an expenditure of many dollars–rumored to be over a million, but a closely guarded secret–and numerous “focus groups”) to style itself as CASE, based on the idea that all great universities have one-word names: think Harvard, Yale, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern. (Sorry, we’re not in the same league.) The only flaw in the plan was that they failed to “focus” on the the zillions of old ladies and old gentlemen who didn’t graduate from CASE, but instead have allegiance to Western Reserve University or Adelbert College, or Flora Stone Mather College–all of which were swept away in the name change.)
The Times piece goes on to describe Case’s new undergraduate curriculum, SAGES (Seminar Approach to General Education and Scholarship), which is sucking up untold resources in terms of faculty time–time that is subtracted from the time they have available for research–and classroom resources. Most damning is the quotation from the SAGES web site about the coffee shop that supports the SAGES program.
Working for an institution whose president just resigned more or less in disgrace, which has a $40 million budget deficit it is trying to make up in one year, and currently seemingly nobody in charge, this piece on op-ed page of the New York Times is the last thing we need. It’s all pretty pathetic.
Shoe laces
Regular readers of this blog will realize that I am easily thrilled. Such was the case the night before last when at Target I found a pair of black 27″ round, unwaxed shoe laces. Do you have any idea how hard they are to find? Shoe stores don’t carry shoe laces anymore. (I guess the theory is that when the laces break it’s time to throw away the shoes and buy a new pair.) You have to go either to Wal-Mart, Target, some drug stores, or a shoe repair shop. Waxed laces won’t stay tied, and flat laces look weird in this particular pair of shoes. And 27″ laces are almost impossible to buy. (I have always supposed that lots of people want them, but stores can’t figure out that they need to stock proportionally more of them.)
This morning I installed the new laces. They tied beautifully and stayed tied all day.
Bad News, Bushie!
It’s been a bad day at the end of a bad week for George W. Bush. I can’t think of anyone more deserving. At mid-day today it was revealed that Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s name, was indicting Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney’s Chief of Staff. Yesterday, Bush’s nominee for the Supremes, Harriet Miers, withdrew after withering criticism from the far right wing of the Republican party. The Bush administration still hasn’t gotten it together after the Hurricane Katrina fiasco, and it doesn’t sound good about the relief efforts after last week’s Hurricane Wilma in Florida.
I guess it is too much to hope that this fraying around the edges of this most disciplined of White House administrations will turn into a general unraveling. I am still hoping that Karl Rove will “get his” big time (Fitzgerald has not yet closed the book on his investigation, and he’s still sniffing around about Rove.) But the good news is that these “little difficulties” mean that Bush is no longer invincible, and his opposition likely will be emboldened, especially if Rove is out of the picture.
Maybe the Union will be saved yet.
New Residential Village Open House
There was an open house for the new North Residential Village at Case Western Reserve University (my fine employer) today. It is very lavish (and reminded me that the dorm I stayed in during my first two undergraduate years was a prison in comparison). I took some pictures and posted them to my flickr.com site. You can find them here. I don’t see how any kid can complain about these accommodations (which make the dorm I stayed in in college look like a prison by comparison), but I expect that they will, since for our privileged American youth, nothing is ever enough. (Sez they: “Whoa back, Grandpa, get a grip. Did you also walk five miles each way to school in a blinding blizzard? What do you mean you didn’t have personal computers and high speed internet back then?”)
It was a (mostly) bad weekend
Last week I received a notification from the web hosting company that hosts the AGO web site (which I manage) that the software that I used has a significant security vulnerability. I knew that I was three or four versions behind in upgrading, so I decided that last weekend I would do the necessary upgrades.
Having some knowledge of technology (although I am more an interested amateur than a true geek), I dutifully made (I thought) a backup of the MySQL database that stored the data, as well as a backup of all of the program files.
I then proceeded to upgrade the software, version by version to the next. The first three went just fine, no problems, everything worked great. It was at that point that I only needed to go, because that was the version at which the security issue was resolved in the software. But I decided that I was on a roll and that I would just go ahead and upgrade to the latest stable release. That turned out to be a bad decision, because the whole thing bombed and I lost the whole site.
So…. that’s what backups are for. But when I tried to restore the data from the backup, it turned out to be corrupt as well, so I was really screwed. I ended up having to start over from scratch, and totally rebuild the web site.
I try to take an optimistic view of things, and in this case, starting over from scratch allowed me to change software (from XOOPS to MAMBO, another open source content management system), and to plan more carefully how the site is structured in relation to security and allowing users to do things. In the end, it is a better site. I would never have otherwise spent the effort to do it.
I worked all afternoon Saturday, all afternoon and evening on Sunday and Monday evening to get pretty much everything back. Now I can relax a bit.
All this “badness” was redeemed yesterday evening when I went for my monthly Weight Watchers weigh-in, and I had lost 1.8 pounds since last month. So I’m doing a good job, and I don’t need to be quite so fussy next week when George and I go to the Iowa State Fair.
Rosenberg's Latest Hatchet Job
Yesterday’s Cleveland Plain Dealer had a so-called “Cleveland Orchestra Season in Review” by the PD’s music critic Donald Rosenberg. Rosenberg has had an ongoing briar in his butt about Franz Welser-Möst, the Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Rosenberg routinely publishes negative reviews every time Franz conducts the orchestra. So this “season review” is just more of the same writ large. He picks and chooses negative blurbs to print from other recent reviews elsewhere of Franz’s performances to buoy Rosenberg’s thesis that Welser-M??st doesn’t have any individual ideas to project.
Interestingly enough, the conductor to whom Rosenberg compares Welser-Möst is Leonard Bernstein, on the basis that Franz has apparently expressed admiration for Bernstein. But admiration does not necessarily translate to slavish copying of style. Bernstein, of course, was capable of extremely exciting performances, but also highly mannered, affected and quite musically odd performances that were more Bernstein than the composer. Welser-Möst’s temperament is not that of Bernstein and never will be. One might also ask Rosenberg about Lorin Maazel, who indeed has individualistic ideas about performance; however, they are not universally admired, and especially were not so admired during Maazel’s Cleveland Orchestra tenure in the 1970s.
I have to wonder what Rosenberg’s motives are for this piece. What is the outcome he is seeking? Does he want the orchestra to fire Welser-Möst? (Franz’s contract runs through 2012.) Is he suggesting that people stop attending? Should donors stop giving money? Does he not like Franz because Franz is not Christoph Von Dohnanyi or George Szell? Folks, they’re either dead or they’ve moved on and we are in the Welser-Möst era now.
So, Donald Rosenberg doesn’t like Franz Welser-Möst’s conducting style and interpretive ideas. Should we care? Since I regularly exercise my God-given American right not to read the Plain Dealer, Mr. Rosenberg’s opinions have never had much effect on me. You should skip the critic and make your own judgments. (Let’s face it, Cleveland audiences are not that critical, or there wouldn’t be standing ovations at every concert. But that’s another sermon….)
Dear Edmund White: Who cares?
Is there anyone else who finds the American author Edmund White as precious and boring as I do? (Well, I can think of at least one, who can remain nameless here.) This week’s issue of The New Yorker has White’s latest navel-gazing installment called My Women. Now the fact that Ed White is gay and always has known that he was gay makes this a doubly irritating exercise in narcissism. Why would we possibly care why a woman would get involved with him?
Edmund White came to public view in the mid-70s as part of the self-named Violet Quill, a group of New York-based gay writers who wrote some of the best gay-themed books of the era. Many of them died during the first wave of AIDS-related deaths in the 1980s. White is himself HIV+. After several early novels, he has devoted himself mostly to a series of four thinly veiled autobiographical novels and a large biography of Jean Genet. This New Yorker piece is apparently the latest installment of his life he’s foisting on the reading public. (I admit I got about halfway through the article and gave up in irritation. It is The New Yorker at its most annoying.)
The only author I can think of with an ego of similar size to White’s is the composer Ned Rorem, but at least Rorem’s published diaries have enough salacious gossip in them to make it worth turning the page to see who or what he’ll dish next. But over the years Rorem’s diaries have toned down the gossip in direct proportion to the brilliance of the music he composes.
Please don’t give me Ed White’s next book as a Christmas (or anytime) gift. Please don’t make me read any more pre-excerpts in any magazines either.
Happy Days Are Here Again
Today about 1:00 I looked out the kitchen window and saw a miracle taking place. The jerk (overgrown fratboy) who used to live next door in the townhouse who had installed the illegal hot tub had a whole crew (including the woman he married) there removing the hot tub.
It was wedged in between the posts holding up the balcony decks of the two places, so they had a hell of a time getting it out. I was not so secretly hoping that it might fall on someone while they were messing around, and they would be seriously injured, but that didn’t happen and they did finally get it out. I took pictures just to prove that it is gone. Those people made my life a living hell for two years, and I can’t think of enough bad things to say about them–racist, homophobic, obnoxious, foul-mouthed drunks. They made me afraid to be at home, especially on weekends. The guy who was the owner has not aged well. He can’t be more than 30 or so, but he has put on a lot of weight, his face is very puffy, and he looks old. All that drinking doesn’t do you any good.
Good riddance.
How many Bush officials?
How many Bush administration officials does it take to change a light bulb?
None. There’s nothing wrong with that light bulb. There is no need to change anything. We made the right decision and nothing has happened to change our minds. People who criticize this light bulb now, just because it doesn’t work anymore, supported us when we first screwed it in, and when these flip-floppers insist on saying that it is burned out, they are merely giving aid and encouragement to the Forces of Darkness.
Blog Spam
Today I had my first brush with that plague of the electronic world: blog spam. It’s the same crap as email spam, but posted as comments in one’s weblog. Some casino spammer posted well over 150 messages as comments on Virtual Farm Boy. I’m surprised that it hasn’t happened before. It took me about twenty minutes of mass deletes to get rid of them.
So…. although I will still allow comments, if a person posts, they will have to respond to an email message that will be sent automatically by the system. Then their comment will be posted. Otherwise, any comments will go into a queue and will wait until I get around either to posting or purging. If the situation gets out of hand, I’ll turn off comments altogether.
I can’t think of enough bad things that should happen to spammers.
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