Month of January , 2008

I've been thinking a lot lately about what direction my career is headed in and whether I'm happy with that. At the moment, I have a kind of split career. In one career, I teach college students about important stuff like race, class, gender, and culture. In the other career, I write for several websites and other outlets, including some commercial writing. Both make me happy while I'm doing them, and both are incredibly rewarding.

But I can't tell you what, yet. Sorry...

I read a lot of other people's writing, in both my role as a teacher, grading papers students hand in, and as an editor at lifehack.org, preparing contributors' work for publication on the site. Lately, I've been noticing a strange phonemenon: the gratuitous Capitalization of random Words.

It's as if suddenly we've returned to the days of Pilgrim's Progress, where Words are capitalized to show that they represent Important Concepts -- except the words That are capitalized are often not All that important. Or it's like we suddenly adopted German Grammar, where all the Nouns are capitalized -- except it's not Just nouns. In fact, I've searched in vain for a pattern, and can't find one.

I'm starting to regret having built this site with Drupal. Don't get me wrong -- Drupal is amazing software.  But it's a little bit overkill for my humble blog and portfolio, and I'm not sure I can easily maintain it as new releases come out.

Wordpress I know much better, having used it for various projects for years, and I know how to do complex stuff like moving it to a new server or re-importing the database.

Break's over, classes are back in session as of today. This semester I'm doing something a little different -- 5 sessions of "Gender, Race, and Class" in Women's Studies. I'm teaching no anthropology classes at all, for the first time in 4 1/2 years. I'll still be at the community college, though -- 2 of my WMST sections are community college classes. I'm really looking forward to teaching the stuff I've been teaching at the university to the students I get at the community college. For one thing, I can virtually guarantee my classes will be a lot more diverse, and likely not a white majority, which should change the dynamic considerably.

A couple of years ago, I started a new blog dedicated to my research on sex and sexuality called ThinkNaughty.com. Unfortunately, ThinkNaughty.com was swallowed whole when LeafyHost, my former webhost, collapsed last year. I still haven't been able to get the domain name unlocked or access to the files there.

Fortunately, I had a fairly recent backup when LeafyHost went under. Since it doesn't look like I'll be able to get control of my domain name back, I've decided to import the posts here. That means there's some slightly risque material on the site now, but nothing prurient or gratuitous, I promise -- this is research, folks, not porn.

I just heard from my publisher that my book, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA, has just arrived from the printer and is ready for release! They're mailing me my copies tomorrow.

So after three years of telling everyone in my family that all I really wanted for Christmas was an MP3 player, this year someone finally stepped up to the plate and delivered. My partner, bless her, bought me a Zune.

"A Zune?!" I hear you sputtering.

And after a moment's thought, I her you thinking, "OK, well, those new Zunes are pretty cool, what with the squircle and all."

Except I didn't get a new Zune.  I got one of the old, 30GB models.

"Well, OK," you're thinking.  "The white and black ones are kinda OK-looking."

Except I didn't get a white or black one.  I got a butt-ass ugly, Soviet-era design, monkey-crap brown (with baby-crap green highlights!) Zune.

I just finished a 3-part series of long articles detailing how I put together and got published my forthcoming edited volume, Anthropology at the Dawn of the Cold War: The Influence of Foundations, McCarthyism and the CIA.  If you'd like to see how an academic work gets from idea to published (technically, "almost published" since it's not quite out yet -- but soon!) check it out at the anthropology blog Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen at HD BizBlog follows a train of thought from the Kindle's terms of service through Fahrenheit 451 to Webster's definition of "kindle" in his post, Why Call it "Kindle". Now, I kinda like the Kindle (or, rather, I want to like the Kindle), but I do share Stephen's curiosity about how the product got its name. I can only imagine it went something like this: [swirly fade out]

[Scene: A conference room at Amazon's secret underground headquarters high above the Arctic Circle]

Read the rest of this entry »