September 21, 2006

Now here is a great title for an essay:

"An Arrow Against All Tyrants and Tyranny, Shot from the Prison of Newgate into the Prerogative Bowels of the Arbitrary House of Lords, and All Other Usurpers and Tyrants Whatsoever; Wherein the Original, Rise, Extent, and End of Magisterial Power, the Natural and National Rights, Freedoms and Properties of Mankind are Discovered and Undeniably Maintained; the Late Oppressions and Encroachments of the Lords over the Commons Legally (By the Fundamental Laws and Statutes of This Realm, As Also By a Memorable Extract Out of the Records of the Tower of London) Condemned; the Late Presbyterian Ordinance (Invented and Contrived by the Diviners, and By the Motion of Mr Bacon and Mr Tate Read in the House of Commons) Examined, Refuted, and Exploded, As Most Inhumane, Tyrannical and Barbarous, by Richard Overton, Prerogative Archer to the Arbitrary House of Lords, Their Prisoner in Newgate, for the Just and Legal Properties, Rights and Freedoms of the Commons of England"

Moving past the title, Richard Overton's actual essay from 1646 is pretty darn good, too.

September 19, 2006

"Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text." This looks really cool. I like that it consumes the screen to block out all the other software I use for procrastination. Recently I switched over to using Notepad for just about all of my word-processing. With all those formatting buttons and menus in Word (even after I customize and pare down the options), the distractions were just too tempting. Too many things to fiddle with. Notepad lets me focus on generating ideas--essentially a faster version of pen and paper. I save all the tweaking, proofing, and formatting for later.

September 13, 2006

Photos of Chernobyl, still a ghost town some 20 years after the nuclear reactor meltdown. I love seeing how the trees have grown in and reclaimed the land.

September 13, 2006

In light of William Chace's recent article about what he would tell today's college students, I really liked this article excerpted from his new book about the difficult, tangled roles and responsibilities of the college President:

New college and university presidents find that changes they want to make in the administrative structure are not accomplished easily or quickly. That was my experience; it is the experience of every president. The administrative colleagues I had inherited had been at the institution for a long time. Each of them had allies, networks of memory and friendship, and a sense of rootedness. For me to make personnel changes was to challenge the weight of institutional history. While some observers might believe that a university president can behave like a CEO, striking with impunity down through the layers of personnel to achieve an instant result, everything the president does is subjected to the closest and most protracted possible reading.

Universities, not being corporations, are profligate with time. Hence nothing on a campus is viewed only once; every change, as well as every possibility of change, is scrutinized again and again. Moreover, the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” as literary scholars term it, is visited upon all new things.