Philophers of the Interweb…UNITE!

Eh…this quiz kind of annoys me, because it makes the assumption that everyone taking it’s going to have a religion that has a sacred text/sacred law…

 But what can you do?  It’s the Interweb, not the Oxford English Dictionary.  And I thought it was pretty alright.

Here’s what I scored:

You scored as Existentialism.
Your life is guided by the concept of Existentialism: You choose the meaning and purpose of your life.“Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” “It is up to you to give [life] a meaning.” –Jean-Paul Sartre “It is man’s natural sickness to believe that he possesses the Truth.” –Blaise Pascal More info at Arocoun’s Wikipedia User Page…
Existentialism 100% Utilitarianism 75% Justice (Fairness) 75% Hedonism 60% Kantianism 40% Strong Egoism 30% Nihilism 25% Apathy 15% Divine Command 10% var graph_str1=” Existentialism 100% Utilitarianism 75% Justice (Fairness) 75% Hedonism 60% Kantianism 40% Strong Egoism 30% Nihilism 25% Apathy 15% Divine Command 10% You scored as Existentialism. “+result_str1+” What philosophy do you follow? (v1.03) created with QuizFarm.com

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Wanna take it?

http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=13060

While wives sleep….

Law School students and MFA students are defeating the evils of Azeroth…or at least riding around on their My Little Ponies.  (You do all understand that videogames are My Little Ponies for boys, right?)

The Dread-beast Santa, and all his Witchy Minions…

I found this photo-album of pictures of children who are terrified by Santa.  Santa is a little bit creepy, don’t you think?  The weird thing is, I don’t find the more traditional, European “St. Nicholas” images of Santa as scary…those just look like an elderly priest handing out presents…but the more neon-red and elf-like santa becomes…the scarrier he gets.  Here’s the link to the entire collection of photos:

http://www.southflorida.com/events/sfl-scaredsanta,0,2245506.photogallery?index=1

What was that Alex?

Hmm…I guess it’s nothing.  For a second there, I thought your jealousy was so loud that I could hear it…

Does this make me strange?

Okay, so, recently I submitted some poems to a pretty good journal and I got a personal note back from the editor asking for some more stuff.  Also, after a poetry reading in Manhattan the editor of an online journal approached me and asked me to submit some poems to them.  These incidents, understandably, made me very excited about my writing life.  The funny thing is, there is another incident that has gotten me even more excited.  What’s that, you ask?  I’ll tell you.

I have a little gnome character named Tiktok in the online videogame World of Warcraft that I play with Alexander Gard.  This guild of people who play the game started a monthly short-story/instant-fiction contest.  They provide a line of inspiration each month, and then people submit stories incorporating/inspired by the line they provided.  After that everyone who uses the website votes.  The winner of the contest receives a 16-slot, Mooncloth Bag for their character…and fame and glory.  Currently, my story is in first place with the most votes:

Ashthra	1 (7.14%)
Dalin	1 (7.14%)
Kesler	1 (7.14%)
Nihlia	2 (14.29%)
Oakenthew	0 (0.00%)
Pook	2 (14.29%)
Shandala	0 (0.00%)
Tiktok	4 (28.57%)
Xyra	3 (21.43%)

Voting stops on the last day of November.  I have my little, gnomish fingers crossed.

Ug

I hate being sick.  I’m so sick that I can’t even sleep, and I had to miss going to Whitewater to see my sister, her husband and my nephew.  It’s making me feel a lot like this:

DONE

That’s right, I’m done with giganto-essay number one.  The bad thing is that I had to come to campus today and I really want to take a nap.  I have to go to my poetry workshop tonight as well.  This is a boring post, but writing that essay made me go a little crazy.  Now I have to start the next one on Friday, but for a few days…I will sleep the sleep of the just.

I take it all back…

All the years of complaining about having to wedge evrything into MLA format have melted away from my mind.  How could this be? You may ask…here’s the answer:

“Verse quotations of more than three lines should begin on a new line.  Unless the quotation involves unusual spacing, indent each line one inch from the left margin and double-space between lines, adding no quotation marks that do not appear in the original.”

–MLA Handbook, 6th Edition

And there was much rejoicing.

What’s your favorite “portmanteau?”

 

Mine is probably “Trustafarian,” to describe people with trust-funds who dress like hippies and pan-handle for change while parking their SUV around the corner so nobody can see it.

Portmanteau
A portmanteau (plural: portmanteaux) is a term in linguistics that refers to a word or morpheme that fuses two or more grammatical functions. A folk usage of portmanteau refers to a word that is formed by combining both sounds and meanings from two or more words (e.g. ‘animatronics‘ from ‘animation‘ and ‘electronics‘). In linguistics, these folk portmanteaux are called blends. It can also be called a frankenword (incidentally, this is another example of a portmanteau). Typically, portmanteau words are neologisms. In short, it’s a word that combines two words to form a single word. One of the most well-known examples is cyborg, a term which is commonly used to refer to a cybernetic organism.

Etymology

The word was coined by Lewis Carroll in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871). In the book, Humpty Dumpty explains to
Alice words from Jabberwocky, saying, “Well, slithy means lithe and slimy … You see it’s like a portmanteau— there are two meanings packed up into one word.” Carroll often used such words to a humorous effect in his work.“Portmanteau”, from Middle French “porter” (to carry) and “manteau” (a coat or cover), formerly referred to a large travelling bag or suitcase with two compartments, hence the linguistic idea of fusing two words and their meanings into one. “Portmanteau” is rarely used to refer to a suitcase in English any more, since that type of a suitcase has fallen into disuse. In French, the word has the different meaning of “coat rack,” and sometimes “coat hanger,” and is spelled “porte-manteau.” The french word for “Portmanteau” is “mot valise”, which translates literally as “suitcase word”.“Portmanteau word” was the original phrase used to describe such words (as listed in dictionaries published as late as the early 1990s), but this has since been abbreviated to simply “portmanteau” as the term (and the type of words it describes) gained popularity.

Sometimes it pays to be a sappy poet…

So, I’m embroiled in this very long reserach paper that I’ll be writing this weekend and turning in on Tuesday.  It’s about H.D., who I mentioned in one of my earlier posts.  I’m pretty frustrated with the “Cannon” right now, because I’m working on my second graduate degree, and until this semester, I had never read H.D.’s poetry.  This is directly related to the fact that H.D. is a female poet, and there’s a historical prejudice against female writers and poets in our country.  I love her poetry and it turns me on more than Pound or Elliot, even though she’s doing a lot of similar experimentation.  Anyways, I was reading this critical article as part of my research in my tutoring office the other day when I didn’t have any students in there.  The article is written by a very prominent feminist literary critic, and I started getting very emotional reading it because her writing was so beautiful and she was articulating so much of what was in my heart about this particular writer and her work.  After I read her article I had this really strong urge to thank her for writing it.  After a few minutes I said to myself, “aw hell..the internet is used for stupid stuff all the time…why not?”  So I googled her, found out where she taught, and then wrote her a brief letter, trying not to sound like a crazy person, thanking her for her critical work and particularly that one article about H.D., because, as a poet, I had never read H.D. until this semester and I think that work by critics like her is the reason that I’m reading H.D. at all…and I think it’s very important to read H.D.  SO, I open my e-mail this morning, and Susan Grubar wrote me back.  Here’s what she said:

Well, this has made my day!  It is rainy, some students cut class, there was a long departmental meeting, but your email brings me such pleasure.  Many thanks,

Susan Gubar

Also, here’s a link on Susan Gubar:

http://smpcollege.com/litlinks/critical/gubar.htm

Who knew the internet could do good things?

–Ben