Procrastadabbler

Ruminations about life, teaching, literacy, research, and anything else I can think of when I am procrastinating

extreme makeover

August 22nd, 2009 · No Comments

If an industry is doing some good, but the good they are doing is in the spirit of making them money, is it still doing good? Is a show like Extreme Makeover exploiting the lives of struggling people even as it “helps” them?
I would like to know the tax ramifications of being helped by Extreme [...]

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Hodge-podge of messy thinking

October 12th, 2007 · No Comments

I read the NYTimes online. Every morning, I receive an email with selected headlines (I selected the categories when I subscribed). Some mornings I scan the headlines and don’t find too much of interest. It could be my mood, or the news itself. On other days, I find quite a bit that I want to [...]

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Tags: Everyday life · Uncategorized

My Summer Reading

August 7th, 2007 · No Comments

Much of my summer has been taken up by the Genesee Valley Writing Project, but I did manage to fit a few books in.
Micromessaging by Stephen Young. I read this at the beginning of the summer as part of the Fisher diversity program. It’s really conversation analysis (Sacks, Schegloff) taken into the corporate world. But [...]

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Why We Fight

April 8th, 2007 · No Comments

I just got around to watching the documentary, “Why We Fight.” Incredibly well done, but devastating.
One person makes the comment that capitalism is winning. We send our soldiers not to fight for freedom or liberty or any of those high ideals. We send them to keep what Eisenhower warned us against–the military industrial complex.
One other [...]

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Some insights into me

January 5th, 2007 · No Comments

I’ve just started reading Limbo: Blue Collar Roots, White Collar Dreams by Alfred Lubrano. This is not a scholarly book. Lubrano is a journalist. But it’s thus far a well written and well researched book. Lubrano, the son of a Brooklyn bricklayer, tells his story of transitioning from being a blue collar child to a [...]

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