• 07:50 ginmar.livejournal.com/1825637.html ginmar on respecting those who serve #
• 15:55 @johnnyeponymous a book, a pillow, and peanut oil? dare I ask what KIND of book? #

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OED's word of the day came up skank, and of course I thought, "Well heck, I know what that means!"

Well heck, apparently I didn't.

skank, v. DRAFT ENTRY June 2005

orig. Caribbean.

Brit. /skak/, U.S. /skæk/, Caribbean /skak/ [Origin uncertain. With sense 2 cf. skank n. s.v. SKANKING n. Cf. SKANKER n.
R. Allsopp Dict. Caribbean Eng. Usage (1996) considers sense 3 to be earlier than sense 2; cf. SKANKER n. 1.]

1. trans. To throw (a person) over one's shoulder. rare.

1971 Daily Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica) 14 Jan. 6/5 When they beat me and cut me up he..hold me from behind and I tried to skank him (throw him over my shoulder).
2. intr. To perform a freestyle dance to reggae music (cf. SKANKING n.); (hence) to perform or play reggae music. Also (colloq.): to sashay, strut.

1973 Weekly Gleaner (Kingston, Jamaica) 24 Jan. 13 The dancer, according to his mood, can rock slowly to the bass, or go all out and skank to the drums. 1987 Observer (London Suppl.) 20 Sept. 38/1 In London, you can..skank along Railton Road in Brixton until you come to The Legend, a bar built to celebrate the memory of Bob Marley. 1995 Wired Aug. 150/2 Under Cover has a talented DJ/singer skanking in a pleasing dance-hall style. 1998 C. CHANNER Waiting in Vain (1999) xix. 344 Behind her, beneath the thatch-roofed pavilions, the guests were skanking to old rock-steady choons and slamming dominoes on plastic tables and telling duppy stories.
3. trans. and occas. intr. To con, swindle, or cheat (a person).

1981 Westindian World 31 July 4/1 Apparently Jaybird..a try skank him out of his hard earned bread. 1989 Independent 22 Mar. 19/7 Some of the younger girls on the Line try skankingtaking the money up front and then jumping out of the car. 1994 Sunday Times 16 Oct. (Style section) 26 You always buy from people you know, otherwise you get skanked and find you've spent, say, £50 on half an ounce of hash and they've given you less.

You want wotd? Visit OED's homepage: http://www.oed.com QED!!

Or is it just my account?

My latest contribution to The Daily Cabal has gone up today, called "Androcles Again."

Continuing the Looking Downward series started by "Mini Buddha Jump Over the Wall" and "The World, Under," this piece is a bit of a retelling of Aesop's fable concerning Androcles, the runaway slave who befriended a lion through a simple act of kindness. I always liked this fable as a kid (and still do, as an adult), as it illustrates quite clearly how if one commits kindness for its own sake, the rewards for those good acts will return later; it was my first introduction to karma (though I didn't realize it at the time), and it was an important lesson to remember as I was growing up.

This piece is a transitional one, in that it get our protagonist, who may or may not be the seven-year-old version of my newborn daughter, from point A to point B, and so I don't know how well it works on its own. But as I'm writing a periodic serial tale, I'm not sure how much importance to place on that particular goal, or whether I should assume folks have read the previous entries in the series; regardless, I have begun linking to those entries at the bottom of each new piece, so that new readers can catch up if they like.

Oh, and I should mention that this story contains a dimension-hopping elephant.

As before, I'm disabling comments here to encourage discussion on the story page. If you feel motivated to comment on the story, whether you loved it or hated it, please do so there. And if you did like the story, please do spread the word.

Enjoy!

Tags: publishing

LiveJournal: The First Decade

Just in time for holiday shopping, we're thrilled to announce the release of our ten-year anniversary anthology. Published by Blurb.com, the book showcases a decade of extraordinary talent drawn from LiveJournal users around the world. This must-read compilation features stories, memes, photos, comics, editorials, graphic content, and more, including:

1. Excerpts from Oh No They Didn't (a/k/a ohnotheydidnt), the largest community on LiveJournal, covering celebrity gossip, entertainment news, and pop culture
2. A look at post-Katrina New Orleans from the journal of Poppy Z. Brite
3. Gripping narratives, including a poignant reverie on a blind date
4. Photography that spans the globe, ranging from old-fashioned Polaroids to underwater photography
5. Mouthwatering dishes from food_porn

What began as a late-night inspiration back in Brad Fitzpatrick's college dorm in 1999 has grown to encompass nearly 25 million users worldwide, with journals and communities covering every conceivable hobby, passion, and topic. To get your copy, please visit the Blurb Bookstore. For updates and entries from book contributors, please join lj_turns10.

Tweaks and enhancements

• You can now ban a user from all of your communities and journals at once. To access this feature, hover over the person's userpic and choose Ban user everywhere from the drop-down menu.
• Follow LiveJournal on Twitter!

Give a little to help a lot!

In honor of National AIDS Awareness month, we've added a new charitable vgift. For each red ribbon you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to support the development and global distribution of an affordable HIV vaccine (we'll cover credit card fees). You can read more about IAVI at lj_cares. While we're on the subject, we raised $740 from our November fundraiser for Love Without Boundaries, which supports emergency healthcare and adoption of Chinese orphans. We thank you for helping us help others.

Photos of the week

We're back with more incredible pictures from our super-talented LiveJournal photographers. Congratulations to ilya_gorokhov, who is the winner of our very first lj_photophile poll.

We hope you'll continue to post, vote, and comment! A gentle request: Please post only one photo at a time and limit size to 350x350 (so images display properly on friends pages). And now, without further ado, get ready to cast your ballot and view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Stay safe and snug out there!

Tags: aids vgift red ribbon fundraiser, blurb, livejournal: the first decade, lj_photophile poll

Just watched a longer commercial for snuglis (those backwards bathrobes) and it occurred to me: these adults in public places in cowled long sleeved robes? they look just like future humans/aliens in any of the 60s scifi shows.

The future has arrived, and its name is "Snugli."

Gonna go cry now.

scottedelman posted a great excerpt from Lucius Shepard's novella, “Dog-Eared Paperback of My Life,” which takes aim at many of the writers and also the "writers" one meets at a science fiction convention. Actually, I first thought to make it a poll—people could choose which type they were—but the lines didn't quite fit. There are a lot of types you see, all arrayed against the narrator. "They had dragged me down to their level, seduced me into becoming a populist," he frets. But it is not as though one cannot also whip up a description of the sort of people one would run in to at, say, AWP's annual conference.

And it might go a little something like this:

...all the corridors of the hotel packed with deflated, shriveled women, their jewelry more like satellite dishes than decoration and their perms reminiscent of chemical plant explosions, women who chirped about the discontents of identity and sweated out their afternoons in yoga class to align their chakras in the Oprah-approved manner; all the semibeautiful young students with their flapper haircuts and their I-said-fuck-in-my-thesis-seven-times daring, who sometimes even dreamt of being the cardigan-wearing first year mental patient to be pawed at by the tenured and enjoweled professors whose red pens seemed so merciless yet erotic; the mad portly men with their Whitmanesque beards and bellowed couplets about the rain and the sound of locomotive trains, whose wives generously subsidized the publication of Handworn Wagon Wheel, a literary quarterly perhaps headquartered on Jupiter as it comes out every thirty months or so; all the well-toned brown people, the upper class of the lower orders, plucked from the postcolonial provinces to attend the best Western schools and then write a book about the struggles of the people they saw starving on the curbs on the way to the airport at the start of that summer they spent in France, their English impeccable and accents pure BBC; all the dull hustlers with their Buddy Holly glasses and blog handles like QuillnHatchet420 whose novel of the indie rock scene of Butte, Montana was almost done and could finally be finished if one of those grants would just come in, or if just 5 percent of his readers clicked on the DONATE button set up on the left-hand column of his online webzine (dare us! challenge us! enthrall us! we're not for profit so we cannot pay! read the submission guidelines, where 90 percent of the traffic goes); all the tenured trangressionalists who just stopped proofreading their work long ago and settled into the editorship the house organ of Institutional Revolution, all some variation on The ____ Review; all the lesser fantasists with their fantasies of one day becoming a famous corpse like Andre Breton and whose latest publications came to us courtesy of Squalling Hammertoe Woo Hoo Press [<--This one is actually from Lucius's story, but it works in both environments!—NK]; all the ultrasuccessful Important Writers of Our Time who publicly lament the days gone by when they had a small audience of fifty good Bolsheviks who really understood the blood and tears that went into perfecting the craft of the novel; the various social climbers whose mystery novels feature ambiguous endings or whose tales of cubicle life are well-observed enough to get a chance at an adjunct appointment; all those freshmen composition teachers, their arms filled to overflowing with journals and bookmarks and flyers for this or that new venue that just might one of these days respond with something other than an automatically generated form rejection letter and goddamn it when will their break come but that was why they came, right, so back it was to networking, networking, networking and more material and more detritus and absolutely one day they were going to win a pair of golden handcuffs somewhere down in a third-tier college in Dumbfuckistan but at least he and Mindy or she and Jerome would be able to buy a house and give their children a hyphenated surname and one day that child would grow up to marry the offspring of a nice tenured sociologist who would also have a hyphenated surname and then god knows what would happen to the grandchildren. Armageddon, probably. They'd drown like polar bears in the lukewarm arctic. Say, that reminds me...isn't the guest editor of the special Wither Whether Weather? issue of Tenure Farm Review on a panel in five minutes?

ABYSS & APEX MAGAZINE OF SPECULATIVE FICTION is apparently giving away a free copy of my book, PUSH OF THE SKY.
"Post early and often." -- straight from the horse's mouth on abyssandapex . At 'em, at 'em.

While most of us weren't looking, the world of research shifted mightily. When I was a grad student, research meant hours prowling the stacks in the library. At U.C. Davis, the library had a section with what seemed like seven-foot ceilings, poor lighting and narrow aisles between shelves crowded with hard to read book titles. You wanted to take a penlight with you to scan book bindings for the call numbers. That part of the library smelled of old paper and dust.

I loved it.

You could become pale, cave like and sickly doing a research paper. I would cart pounds of information to my study carrol, read, write, sort note cards and swim in the info (much of it irrelevant to what I was researching but fascinating nonetheless).

Today research is mostly done at computers. Students cruise databases or use Google to find resources. A major component of the teacher's job is to show kids how to evaluate the authority of web sites. Note cards are gone--it's a cut-and-paste world--as are the endless hours agonizing over how to format a bibliography (http://citationmachine.net/ or http://www.easybib.com/ solve the problem).

I don't think the old way of doing research papers was better than the modern technique, but it's certainly different.

Yesterday I introduced a research project to our sophomores. I'm not interested in them writing a paper yet. I only want them to develop skills in finding resources. The project is to complete a short, annotated bibliography that would be relevant for research on a question the kids come up with. My challenge yesterday was to help them with their questions. The purpose of the question is to help them to narrow their topics. A kid might want to do a paper on Babe Ruth, for example, but that's too broad, so what do they want to know about Babe Ruth? Questions might be, "How was Babe Ruth seen by his fans?" or "What impact did Babe Ruth have on baseball?" etc.

Some students have tough times coming up with good questions, though. In two classes, five kids came up with "Will the world end in 2012?" So I had to explain that the question isn't researchable, at least not in a recognizably academic way. A better question might be, "Why do people believe the world will end in 2012?" although I don't like that one much either. I also had a fair number of faith based questions, like "Does God exist?" Most of these kind of questions don't start out legitimately because the students aren't really interested in finding an answer as much as they are planning on "proving" a previously held conviction. Then I get into weird conversations about why the Bible is not a legitimate or authoritative source for a paper that is trying to answer the research question on God. Brrr!

The other problem I have is that the Internet is full of unsorted stuff. A student who wants to research the question of "Who killed J.F.K." for example, has to wade through a gazillion trash sites to find serious information to answer the question. Students don't like to do that, and they don't want to do it. For many kids, research means typing in one search string--"Who killed J.F.K.?"--and then, if they need four sources, to cite the first four that Google throws at them. They don't feel any better about it that I won't let them cite encyclopedias as sources.

I'm taking my regular level 10th graders to the library today to start their research. I know how it is going to go. Teaching research is important and noble, but I've already taken a couple of pain killers for the headache I know I'll have in about an hour.

Tags: teaching
Current Mood: calm
Current Music: "Pirates of the Carribean," theme

Shauna Roberts, Andrew Barton, Ken Edgett will sign copies of Return to Luna

When: Sunday, December 6, 2009, 2pm
Where: Mystery & Imagination Bookshop, Glendale, CA

Return to Luna is the book of winning stories from the National Space Society/Hadley Rille Books lunar fiction contest featuring a foreword by astronaut Harrison Schmitt and Intro by for Exec Dir of the NSS George T. Whitesides.



Shauna Roberts will also sign copies of her new novel Like Mayflies in a Stream.



Hadley Rille Books

Tags: andrew barton, book signing, ken edgett, like mayflies in a stream, mystery & imagination, return to luna, shauna roberts