Almost 20 years ago, I was accused by the then-Dean of UNM’s Division of Continuing Education of “biting the hand that feeds me.” It wasn’t the first or last time I was thus accused — I take it as a compliment. At the time, an article had appeared in the paper in which a UNMCE instructor — vital to the program and long since gone — raved about the value of classroom training for computer users. I wrote a letter to the editor (this was years before blogs) saying classroom training isn’t for everyone. Heresy, albeit true. (I’ve found no perfect means for learning or teaching.)
I dredge this up as I think about UNM as a community. UNMCE has really made me a professional computer trainer. Foremost, my students deserve the credit for enduring and improving me, but UNMCE gave me many opportunities. I certainly could not have enjoyed self-employment (or, in truth, long-term semi-retirement) without the continued support of my friends, colleagues and students at UNMCE.
Even though Wiley Publishing has given me new opportunities, UNM continues to make what I do possible. Already, UNM has been much more generous about spreading the word about the book than Wiley has. (Does Wiley feel a nibble on its fingers?) UNMCE’s blog was the first “press” (beyond advertising) the book received. Now Benson Hendrix on main campus has written a very generous story for UNM Today: UNM Continuing Education Instructor Pens First Book [emphasis added]. (I am half-amused and half-embarrassed to be compared to Sisyphus, who is still toiling, if you believe such stuff.) mjh
PS: It occurred to me today that people will soon be asking, “what have you done lately?” Then my 15MB of fame will be full. (I’m tech-editing someone else’s book.)
Yearly Archives: 2007
The Web That Joins Us
So much about Tim Berners-Lee’s invention of the Web was brilliant, but perhaps especially so the use of the word “web.” This Web connects us through tools Tim couldn’t have imagined — like blogs.
I am happy to write and, if you are happy to read, everything is great. But unlike so much media, a blog provides easy means for feedback. You are welcome to write me directly (mark@mjhinton.com). You are welcome to comment publicly (see the link near the end of each entry). I understand the hesitation in commenting, but it is part of the process — it’s good for us all.
Now, you are also welcome to rate any entry. Ratings are averaged and highest and most rated (high or low) entries are highlighted to the left near the top of the sidebar. (WordPress users may want to know this involves a plugin: WP-PostRatings.)
I assume many entries won’t warrant any rating at all. I also assume few will merit 5 stars and I hope none will merit 1 star. But the system is in place for you to use, to help me and to show other readers those entries they shouldn’t miss. mjh
Cal Thomas Defends Liberals — Tomorrow: Hell Freezes Over
Patriotism, By Cal Thomas
As with religion, some people on the right have used patriotism, which should be a unifying theme, to divide Americans. My liberal friends love America as much as I do. They might disagree on some, or all, of my political and religious beliefs, but that does not make them less in love with America, much less un-American. …
Leaders of many nations, including America, have used patriotism to persuade citizens of policies that are not always in their country’s best interests. Hitler’s deputy, Herman Goering, cynically observed: “Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
And still we love America for opportunities that do not exist in such proportion in any other nation. A person who criticizes a particular policy does not necessarily love his country less than one who supports that policy. G.K. Chesterton said, “‘My country, right or wrong’ is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'”
After 231 years, we still try to make wrong into right and cheer the right and the nation that makes change possible when we succeed. That’s patriotism.
http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/thomas070307.php3
Calcified Cal is never your typical conservative. I do appreciate him coming to the conclusion that even liberals can be patriots. I only wish he had trotted out the Goering and Chesterton quotes during the build-up to the Invasion of Iraq (Operation Enduring Fuck-up). Clearly, Rove has studied Goering. Where was Cal when the Talk Radio Brownshirts were burning Dixie Chicks records? mjh
The Longest Daze
I was surprised to learn some years ago that the latest sunset does not occur on the Summer Solstice, nor the earliest sunrise. Curiously, the days grow shorter and the sunsets later. A similar discrepancy occurs with the Winter Solstice. I was doubly surprised that I could grow so old and pass so many solstices before learning that and never observe it myself. And I thought I was educated.
To those few readers who noticed a long pause in my entries, thank you for noticing and for coming back. Forgive me, but the next few entries may be downers. Stay with me. mjh
PS: Please look at my Flickr photos. I’m depressed that so few people have seen what I regard as one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken. I have many newer pix to post but can’t bare for this one to sink unseen. Yes, that’s my heart you see on my sleeve.
The Sun Stands Still (but not for long)
It’s minutes until sunset and already 8 hours past the moment of the solstice. Think of the sun at the top of a 47 degree arc, sliding now towards the bottom in mid-Winter.
It is interesting to read that this is mid-summer’s eve and, in some cultures, the *last* day of summer. A special day, any way you look at it. Darkness and cold loom — seeming a long way off, like death to a teenager. And then, light and heat again — a resurrection we witness but are denied. A cycle so long it seems never-ending, though even it will someday. mjh
Snake Handlers
Our neighbors called yesterday early evening to say a snake was on their porch. We ran across the street to find J using a push-broom to sweep a 3+ foot long brown and yellow snake away from the house. It moved like a wave in front of the broom. J & S hate snakes; S wouldn’t come out of the house. I heard fear more than hatred in J’s voice. I took a couple of photos that turned out blurrier than a hummingbird’s wing. Then I used the broom to sweep the snake away from J & S and towards the street. Certain it wasn’t a rattler, I grabbed it from behind as close to the head as I could. It was strong as it coiled up tight against my arm. But it stopped struggling and stayed like that for the next half hour as we discussed what was best for it. The irony was I had a great photographic subject wrapped around my picture-takin’ arm. So Mer took a few. (J & S will never look at us the same after this.)
In all likelihood, it was a bull snake (or gopher snake). However, it never hissed or struck at anything, so I suspect it might have been an escaped pet — especially since we’ve never seen a snake in our mid-town neighborhood. We have experience handling a python, so we weren’t afraid. (Though I was less comfortable when someone said bull snakes have a strong bite.)
We decided we should release the snake in the foothills, but by then it was too dark. We put the snake in a pillowcase sealed with a couple of clothespins. Then we put the pillowcase in a plastic tub 6 inches deep. This morning, I looked in to see the snake coiled and still quite calm. About a half hour later, I heard a plastic cup fall over on the counter. The snake had moved — pillowcase and all — out of the tub and onto the counter, knocking over the cup. I put it back in the tub.
We drove to the foothills and walked a less-used trail a ways before striking off cross-country a short distance. Mer picked a spot near a big fractured rock with shrubs — lots of places to hide and hunt. My turn to take pictures of Mer with the snake and the city stretching away in the background. She put it on the ground and it moved magically under a shrub and vanished. Perhaps it will starve. Perhaps it will feed that roadrunner with the heavy beak we saw — or an owl, or another snake. With a 20 year lifespan, perhaps it will outlive us. I hope it remembers us, as we will it. Happy 1st day of summer to us all. mjh
PPS: I’m struck by the synchronicity of this incident from a few days before our snake encounter. I was spinning the dial and paused briefly to watch Franklin Graham eulogize his mother. He said that as a boy, he and his brothers loved to kill snakes — rattlers, any kind of snake. One particularly good summer, they killed over 70 snakes. He spoke with pride to an appreciative audience that smiled and chuckled. I wondered what kind of religion produces such a man. God bless the atheists.
See Merri’s Save A Snake for Humanity
[mjh: With the help of a friend, I heard from UNM biologist Howard Snell. This is an excerpt from his email.]
It isn’t a good idea to move [snakes] very far as they then encounter areas that they don’t know and often die as a result of not “knowing” where to find water, shelter, and prey.
If you think the snake has been in captivity it is important not to release it in the wild. Snakes in captivity can come down with diseases & parasites (often caught from other individuals in captivity) that can then be transferred to wild snakes upon release of the previous captive.
Sunday Christians and Pretend Hunters
Sunday Drivers – Los Angeles Times, by Dan Neil
The pre-race activities of the Indy 500 and Coca-Cola 600 were all about the troops. In addition to the usual F-22 flyovers and color guard presentations, Lowe’s track director “Humpy” Wheeler arranged for the U.S. Army to “secure” the front stretch of the racetrack, with troops in full battle rattle, armored personnel carriers, helicopters and a Howitzer. Eight Nextel Cup race teams surrendered $8 million in advertising when they repainted their cars with military-themed graphics as part of an “American Heroes” program. In the money-obsessed world of NASCAR, this was no empty gesture.
Perhaps I was the only one made uncomfortable by this welding of sport and militarism, but it seemed at times I might have been watching the German Grand Prix of 1938. It also seemed to me more than a touch neurotic. It’s possible that, given the fool’s errand on which we have sent our military in Iraq, we feel we can’t say thank you enough, nor can we bring ourselves to say the obvious and more appropriate thing: We’re sorry.
And yet, for all the troop-honoring and American hero worship, the U.S. public is astonishingly illiterate about Memorial Day, which is officially observed on the last Monday in May. ….
The United States wrestled with Sabbatarianism through the latter half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century, but by the 1950s, the Puritan Sunday had given way to enormous pressures for leisure, entertainment, commerce and sports. Particularly sports. Harline begins and ends his book [Sunday: A History of the First Day from Babylonia to the Super Bowl] with Super Bowl Sunday, an event that in its rituals, prayer breakfasts, helmeted heads bowed during the invocation, represents the sacralization of the secular. NASCAR too has its showy effusions of pre-race piety that innoculate it from charges of sacrilege. Thank God and Goodyear.
According to a 2006 Pew Forum survey, 60% of white evangelicals—an audience not unknown to NASCAR—believe the Bible should have more influence on U.S. laws than the will of the people. But are they willing to live by that? If they check their Deuteronomy, they’ll see racing on Sunday is not allowed. The same goes for football, baseball and golf.
It is a curious corner of the American character that allows people who neglect the simplest conventions of patriotism to wrap themselves in the biggest flag imaginable, that permits people who couldn’t name the Ten Commandments at gunpoint to swear they are the divine law of the land.
We’re a deeply patriotic and religious people. Just don’t bother us with the details.
[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]
[mjh: Cleanse your palate before you read this bonus Neil.]
A Nation Wallows – Los Angeles Times
Dan Neil
June 17, 2007
There once was a pig named Fred who came to a very bad end in Alabama, as I suppose all pigs in Alabama do. Fred was 6 weeks old when he was purchased by farmer Phil Blissitt in 2004 and given as a Christmas gift to his wife, Rhonda. This brings us to the first of this story’s many truisms: Christmas sucks in Alabama.
For 2 1/2 years, Fred was a happy pig. He would play with the Blissitts’ grandchildren and the family Chihuahua. Fred liked sweet potatoes, according to an AP story, and that may have been his undoing. For Fred grew large, more than 1,000 pounds and perhaps 9 feet long, with huge tusks jutting like Ka-Bar knives from his endlessly rooting maw. Dear, sweet, saber-toothed Fred started to worry the Blissitts, so one spring day, Phil sold him to the Lost Creek Plantation, a private, fenced-in reserve where he would be free to gambol and play, until he was shot.
Which, only days later, he was, and with extreme prejudice too. On May 3, 11-year-old Jamison Stone, hunting with his father and three rifle-toting “guides,” killed Fred with a .50-caliber handgun, shooting the erstwhile pet half a dozen times and chasing it for three hours around a 150-acre enclosure surrounded by a low fence. The trophy picture—of young Jamison posed with his apparently VW-sized quarry—exploded across the Internet, while the story made headlines around the world. “Jurassic Pork,” the New York Post slyly offered.
I smelled a large dead pig the moment I saw the picture. First, the now-famous picture of Fred and Jamison —one chubby and overfed, and the other a pig—used a common trophy-picture trick of having the animal much closer to the camera than the hunter, thus making the animal appear larger. I used to edit a hook-and-bullet magazine and, believe me, hunters and fishermen use the forced perspective gambit more than Roger Corman.
Second, no foraging wild boar gets to be 1,000 pounds. Only a domestic pig—and one fed generously with agricultural feed, table scraps and fast-food leftovers—can pack on that kind of weight. Domestic pigs do frequently get loose and, in the wild, revert to a lean and feral state. The most frightening thing about Fred is that he might be the half-ton, hormone-laced canary in America’s dietary coal mine.
The Stones claimed they thought they were hunting a feral hog, but come on. Fred might as well have been wearing a rhinestone collar. …
[A]s the Fred episode fairly illustrates, hunting today is a sick satire of the sport as it was in the days when Teddy Roosevelt took to the field. The number of hunters is declining rapidly, for all the reasons you’d expect. Increasingly, hunting is confined to private game “reserves” that cater to well-to-do sportsmen, a reversion to the royal game lands of England. In these confined areas, the principle of fair chase is a joke. …
And so at the intersection of our reckless meat-based food system, our swinish media obsessions, our weird nostalgia for tradition-affirming blood lust, there lies an enormous dead pig. What a country.
[read it all (free LATimes account may be required)]