While you’ve no doubt been impressed by my recent culinary Blogging, you may also wish to have a look at Champaign Taste, which keeps an eye (or a tongue?) on the food scene here in CU.

In case you don’t notice it on Champaign Taste, here’s a list of recipes from the blog which, if you scroll down a bit, also includes an alphabetized list of restaurants the author has reviewed.

I’ve agreed, rather late in the game, to pick up a section of E200 in the Fall.  Putting the course together, I’ve come across Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle’s Introduction to Literature, Criticism, and Theory (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2004).  It’s in the 3rd edition, but new to me.  Quite a neat anthology, very useful for introducing theory in a “post-theory” way.  I’ve only looked it over briefly; however if you’re putting together an intro lit class, I’d recommend you have a look at it, if you don’t know it already, especially if you’re looking for some interesting entry-points for sophisticated (for an entry-level course, in any case) discussions of literary and theoretical questions that gets aways from the Shark/Jet “schools” of literary theory that you may remember from the 80’s and early 90’s.

i have this purplish men’s bike that needs some work. it is a 1960s columbia with a sturmey archer three speed hub. the nuts that go on the rear wheel and a couple of washers are missing, these parts are specific to the sturmey archer so you’ll probably have to get them online 10-15 bucks i suppose. otherwise it’s a decent bike. I paid 10 for it but i’ll let it go for a brick of cheese and some ritz crackers, these can’t be schnucks brand though, i have some schnucks brand cheese and ritz knockoffs and both taste terrible. or a six pack will work too, but i’d prefer cheese, yes i’m 21.

i need this gone fast so half a brick of cheese and one roll of ritz would work as well. or 3 beers if they’re decent

Gotta love Craigslist.

Thank God for the gas station down the street.

Dave Trampier was the author and illustrator of Wormy, a comic-strip that appeared in Dragon Magazine, in the late 1980’s.  The confusing, subtle and ambivalent tone of Trampier’s comics is preserved however in The Wormy Archive (warning, website may crumble), which contains most (though not all) of the installments of Wormy.  Disillusioned with his editors at Dragon, and disaffected from TSR, Trampier vanished from the public eye, and was rumored to have died, until (apparently) resurfacing as a taxi driver, amid the woods and party schools of Southern Illinois.  Trampier was also one of the primary illustrators of early Dungeons and Dragons materials.  If you think you haven’t seen his work, think again.

I happened to be in the Art and Design Building today, where I chatted briefly with a guardian-docent type about plans to “improve” the link gallery.  I’m not sure what was meant here, but one suspects that it involves a snack bar and a swankier space for cocktails with the Von Dollars.  Here’s hoping that the Art & Design people will know enough to appreciate a beautiful space as it is, rather than authorizing improvements of the most horrible kind.

I posted this to Metafilter a few minutes ago:

>>>>>PASS THIS ON! (emails from the right)
My Right Wing Dad is a new-ish and rather informal blog that aims to provide “a chance for folks to examine the unrestrained rhetoric that is quietly passed from in-box to in-box in America,” by hosting a collection of the emails that form an often untraceable and unacknowledged part of public discourse in the U.S., especially on the Right.  Tagged by category (for example: God, college, flag,  liberal, and World War II), the amateur archive presents a range of colorful opinion, not all of it strikingly accurate, and some of it offensive.  In efforts to understand liberal and conservative habits of communication, it may be worth considering the role of forwarded email in the electoral process, and the reasons that the forwarding of email is popular among some people, and whether this behavior tends to correlate with particular political opinions.  The emails hosted on MyRightWingDad may in any case be enlightening, unless you’re already on the forward list of someone in the know.

Have a look at the comments over at Mefi, if you’re so inclined.

I’m quite surprised that there isn’t already a more proper archive of the conservative emails that are forwarded around in a kind of Kitchy Tristero, here in the U.S.  Thanks to my own right wing Dad, I occasionally receive these myself (usually I only get the global warming ones, however).

Thankfully, I’ve been spared most of the forwarded emails that are stored on MyRightWingDad, including those that imagine a new Post-Horowitzian species of classroom activism.  My favorite:

RE: Hello God!

A United States Marine was attending some college courses between assignments. He had completed missions in Iraq and Afghanistan . One of the courses had a professor who was a vowed atheist and a member of the ACLU.

One day the professor shocked the class when he came in. He looked to the ceiling and flatly stated, “God, if you are real, then I want you to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes.” The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by and the professor proclaimed, “Here I am God. I’m still waiting.” It got down to the last couple of minutes when the Marine got out of his chair, went up to the professor, and cold-cocked him; knocking him off the platform. The professor was out cold.

The Marine went back to his seat and sat there, silently. The other students were shocked and stunned and sat there looking on in silence. The professor eventually came to, noticeably shaken, looked at the Marine and asked, “What the hell is the matter with you? Why did you do that?”

The Marine calmly replied, “God was too busy today protecting America ’s soldiers who are protecting your right to say stupid shit and act like an ass hole. So, He sent me.”

KEEP IT GOING………….

I’m not sure how I’d would go about filing a complaint against God, should he engage in such classroom smiting during one of my courses.  Lucky for me, I’ve never witnessed a military student become an instrument of The Lord as the young marine in this story was fortunate to do; in fact, the military students I’ve had have been pretty much the opposite of the fantasy version described here, despite my persistent in-class requests for God to come hit me in the head.

Did you you watch the Democratic Dailykos debate?  You can have a look at it at this link.  Watch part three if you want to see Hillary brought to the brink of Exorcism-style explosion as she tries to stall for time to avoid further “boos” while explaining why she accepts lobbyist contributions.

I briefly watched the Republicans on television this morning as well.  A creepier collection of hostile dotards I’ve seldom seen.  Rudy was repeating a line I seem to recall him having used before: that he failed to hear the Democrats use the words “Islamic Terrorism” often enough during their recent debates.  Then Mitt Romney started calling Obama Jane Fonda and Dr. Strangelove, and I was moved to change the channel.

I’m not too enthusiastic about the Dems, but these republicans remind me more of the colorfully evil leaders who fight it out in the Kupurlu Sector, than of anyone a sane person would elect as an executive of a real-world state.

In any case, I’ve been eagerly awaiting the arrival of Starcraft II (you haven’t already forgotten the iconic surprise announcement video, have you?), and I’m quite happy to see that many of the New Terran Units have been revealed.  I have to say however, that the Protoss seem to have received cooler upgrades, and that I have no idea why Blizzard has chosen to make waddling the distinctive feature of the new unwieldy-looking Terran units (and how did the tough but still-somewhat-naive Jim Raynor character morph into a hairy badass from Alabama?) Still, unless you are some kind of Zerg sympathizer, I’m sure you’ll appreciate some video of the revamped Terran units.

It’s been a while since I posted anything on this dear dark qualm, so yesterday I sat down in the Espresso Royale on campus, and wrote up some reflections on the early writings of a certain seventeenth century philosopher.  I’m writing about him now, as I try and finish up my final chapter, and it turns out that there are some rather interesting somewhat fun things that just won’t fit into the diss.  So I took what ended up to be more than an hour, to carefully write up a lovely post on the subject. 

Then I hit “Post,” and was of course taken to the “You’ve Been Inactive for Awhile” Espresso Royale homepage, and all the lovely meditations I had produced for you were forever lost, tossed into a deep cave, as it were.

Now it’s dusk, and I’m sitting outside cafe Kopi, surrounded by smokers, and the air is as usual unbreathable, and I have just enough time to share with you a consolation revelation which I had yesterday afternoon, concerning pipe cleaners:

They’re used to clean pipes!  Like, the kind you smoke.  Remarkably, I somehow didn’t realize this until yesterday.  (Side note: one of the smokers just spent about a minute clearing his throat before standing up and spitting in the street right across from me. . .).

I suppose that prior to this, I’d somehow assumed that these were made mostly for children’s projects involving gumdrops or marshmallows.  Who knows what revelations will dawn upon me tomorrow?

Another side-note: Have you all been watching Everyday Edisons on PBS?  Of course you have!  But did you know that my brother’s one of the featured product designers on it?  He’s had quite a lot of camera time during the past several episodes, actually.  We here at tdq are quite proud.  I think the final episode will be airing this coming weekend, so be sure to watch and see if you can spot the tdq relation. 

Try and guess whether this is from: The Onion, or the New York Times:

Obesity can spread from person to person, much like a virus, researchers are reporting today. . . The effects, Dr. Christakis said, “highlight the importance of a spreading process, a kind of social contagion, that spreads through the network.” …

It also may mean that the way to avoid becoming fat is to avoid having fat friends.

That is not the message they meant to convey, say the study investigators, Dr. Christakis and his colleague, James Fowler, an associate professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.

You don’t want to lose a friend who becomes obese, Dr. Christakis said. Friends are good for your overall health, he explains. So why not make friends with a thin person, he suggests.

Sheesh.

At 109 years old, he is England’s last surviving veteran of World War I.