Verbisaurus Blogicus

After over six weeks of no school, I returned to class for the spring semester just as January was ending (i.e., 2:30 on the 31st). Immediately after leaving class, I walked across campus to the school book store and allowed my wallet to be mugged (i.e., I left with the six books required for the class). Here’s a picture of what I’ll be reading between now and May 19th:

Perhaps, in a few months, I’ll have something to say about these books – in fact, I will have something to say, since participation is 20% of the grade and I aim to spout my thoughts on these books like an OCD over-achiever – but, in the meantime, I thought I’d offer brief reviews on the books I read while on college hiatus…

The 2013 St. Paul Almanac (compilation)

My primary reason for reading this is, as I’ve said before, my writings are in it. So, naturally, this book is awesome. No, really: it was a lot of fun to read. I learned a lot about my hometown, enjoyed the references to landmarks in my neighborhood I have heretofore been ignorant of, and loved the variety of writing styles. Some of the poems were great, and nearly every short story held my attention. The weird thing though, was the end of the book (the “December” section). It ends with half a dozen essays; I didn’t like any of them. I couldn’t follow some of them, and others weren’t written very well. I thought it was odd that so many mediocre essays were piled next to each other, and all right at the end. Oh well.

An Artist View (Arthur Videen)

After reading a portion of one of my essays to a UU congregation back in October, a churchgoer handed me a copy of a book – his book. He asked me to read it and tell him what I thought about it. I finally got to it during the Xmas/New Year’s break. I emailed Arthur, but he never responded. While it’s always interesting to discover why people rejected the religion of their upbringing, this book was very difficult to read. I couldn’t always follow the story, and I couldn’t find a unifying theme. Arthur is a sculpturist, and the best part of the book was the images of his sculptures; many pieces of his work grace the Twin Cities’ landscape, including a piece at the intersection of Grand and Summit in St. Paul, a place I’ve driven through dozens of times.

As a Man Thinketh (James Allen)

If you click on the link I provided for this book, you’ll see a silly, melodramatic cover image. In fact, if you search for cover images of the book, you’ll see that this book has no shortages of reprints. But the copy I read looks like none of these. That’s because, during the Great Hallway Haul of 2011, I made off with an old printing of the book. The book, originally printed in 1902, is short and contains tidbits for how a man can live his life without being an asshole. Good advice, if a bit pedestrian for today’s crowd. It took me about 50 minutes to read this slender work.

 A Brief Guide to Understanding Islam (I. A. Ibrahim)

I got this cheaply-made snoozefest for free at a bookfair I attended last fall. Like so much Witness literature I read, it’s replete with with apologetics, partial facts, and lazy leaps of logic that most humanity should find laughable, but that the devout probably find faith-stengthening. It also has a comic book, cartoonish look to it. Here’s a sample page:

I plan to write more about this book sometime later – a full review might be nice – so I’ll just leave you with this brief paragraph for now.

Damned Good Company (Luis Granados)

The publisher sent me a free copy of this book with the understanding I write a review. So I did.

Inventory (compilation)

I thought this would be a book I wouldn’t be able to put down: Written by the Onion, and featuring lists about movies, TV shows, and music. Wow! This should have been something I would voraciously read until I had devoured it entirely.

Yeah…that didn’t happen. The lists are often too trite, overwrought, and – unless you know every TV show, song, and movie from the past 75 years – unintelligible. Sorry, Onion, I normally love your stuff, but I couldn’t even make it to page 50 this time.

The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn’t) (Alvin Felzenberg)

I didn’t finish this book, either. Alvin purports to “rethink the Presidential Ratings Game.” And, to some extent, he does. He divides the Presidents up by catergory: foreign policy, vision, competence,  likeability, and so on. The book has five or six really long chapters, each detailing one catergory of his rating system and then discussing five or six presidents who best and worst exemplified this aspect. The problem is, once we get to his final scorecard, we don’t know why he rated each president the way he did. Oh sure, we know why he rated some of the presidents as he did, but not enough. In fact, since he gives Lincoln a perfect score in every category, we get to know Lincoln quite well, and others not at all. Despite claiming to rethink things, Alvin still lumps a President’s entire time in office all together (I, for one, think it’s very unfair to compare, say, FDR’s 12+ years in office with JFK’s two-and-a-half years) and concludes with no surprises (Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts are awesome; Nixon and Buchanan suck). But my main reason for tossing this one aside before completion was the stupid mistakes.

Alvin: why don’t you let me fact-check your book for you before you publish the next edition?

Maphead (Ken Jennings)

Fun, but kind of lame. I wrote about this book when I was about halfway done with it AT THIS BLOG POST. So just read about it there.

Robinson Crusoe (Daniel Defoe)

Here’s a book I’ve meaning to read for years. I check out an audio-book version from the library a couple weeks ago. I listened to about 10% of it, then shut it off. After having just finished Treasure Island (see below), I just couldn’t handle all this high-falutin’ gobbledygook.

Treasure Island (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Unlike Defoe’s novel, I did listen to this book all the way through.

Normally I love 19th century fiction. I’ve read lots of it. I’ve even read Stevenson’s other famous novel (the one with Jekyll and Hyde) and liked that one. But this was not to my liking. I couldn’t follow most of the story lines. The ones I could follow, I didn’t care about. Characters kept popping in and out of the story and I just had no interest in them. By about the 30% mark, I was contemplating cutting my losses, but I decided to give it a little more of a chance. By 50%, I figured I didn’t like the book, but I was too far in to quit. By 90%, I was just praying for it to be done, and was elated to discover most of the final disk was taken up by the reading of a critical essay. Needless to say, I didn’t bother listening to that.

Voice-of-the-Customer Marketing (Ernan Roman)

What can I say? I read this book for work. It provided some good insights for what I do for my employer. I even photocopied one page and hung it up in my cube. But it’s too boring to talk about here.

…I also read four books to my kids during this winter break (including the latest Captain Underpants novel), but I think this is enough for now. I gotta get to reading my schoolbooks…

I made a short video for my job this weekend. This marks the 22nd consecutive year in which I’ve created at least one filmlet.

There are pluses and minuses to being asked to make a video for my employer. One plus, surprisingly, is the tight time frame. If you read this blog, then you may have noticed that, every once in a while, I’ll post a new video creation and I’ll say something like, “Yeah, I filmed this 10 months ago, but didn’t finish it until yesterday.” Or something even more extreme. So, I like that I had to get it done this weekend.

The downside is having to run over to my computer whenever I had some free time so that I could complete it. I generally prefer to have less computer time on the weekends, so this past weekend was an unfortunate anomaly.

This morning, at a meeting, I showed the video to my manager and a few co-workers. They made a few suggestions. I heartily agreed. Then I spent about a half hour tweaking the video, then showed it to another co-worker, who came over to my desk about ten minutes later with more suggestions. He actually had a list of five suggestions (I took three of his five). Then, at 3:00, I showed it to another co-worker, who had two more ideas.

I think the lesson learned is: never show my videos to anyone until I’m all done, then just say, “Here’s the finished product.”

I’d like to post the video online to share with you, my loyal reader(s), but as it has proprietary information on it, I guess it can’t make it’s way onto the world wide web.

I have today, Monday the 21st, off of work.

My employer gives everyone 11 holidays per year. Some days are pretty much guaranteed: We always get Memorial Day and Thanksgiving Day off. Other days vary. If Independence Day lands on a weekday, for example, we get it off, but otherwise they apportion the holiday elsewhere during the year.

Lately they’ve been giving us off Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Which is today. To me, this seems like a waste. Like Presidents Day (which I will also receive as a paid holiday), there’s nothing to do today by way of the holiday itself. And while I am perfectly happy to get paid to not show up for work, I’d rather get paid to take off days when I have something going on, or on a day when there’s a pretty good chance I’ll have something going on.

Here are some days that I don’t receive as paid holidays, but which would be preferable to today…

-The Day after the Super Bowl

I’m not a football fan by any means, but since everyone of my fellow countrymen and women are football fans, I think a lot of them would like the day off to sober up. Me too, actually, since I often get invited to their Super Bowl parties where they assure me I can “just watch the commercials,” which, more often than not, is complete bullshit since no one shuts up to let me hear the commercials. Oh well. Free food.

-My Wedding Anniversary

Yeah, so…obviously this day varies from employee to employee (if they’re even married), but a few years back, my employer offered one holiday as a floating holiday. Essentially, it was another vacation day. I liked that.

-Halloween

Here’s a holiday, unlike MLK Day and Presidents Day, when I – and most of my employees – actually do something. How about a day to get ready for the evening’s trick-or-treating?

-Election Day

This one seems so obvious, I can’t believe more employers don’t give their employees this day off. Of course, I suppose workers are likely to vote different from the company owners, so it probably behooves the powers that be to not give their employees the day off.

I’ve seen this story floating around the web for a few years and, recently, I’ve seen it posted – in its entirety – as a status update on Facebook.

Here’s the story I’m talking about: Violinist Joshua Bell playing incognito in a subway station.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing (it’s not that long), I’ll summarize it here for you: Famed musician Joshua Bell, who’s concert seats sell for $100, played a famous and difficult piece on his violin in a subway station. He played for free, of course. Passersby tossed coins into his violin case. A few people stopped to listen, but most people just went about their business. One young child was enamored with the performance, but his terrible, terrible mommy whisked him away to catch their train. The morals of the story were summed up thusly:

[I]n a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?

One of the possible conclusions from this experience could be:

If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?

I guess the take-away lesson here is that we’re supposed to think, “Damn, I need to slow down and cherish stuff like music, even if I’m busy.”

But…um…I don’t care if Patrick Stewart is reciting Shakespeare, if I’m in a metro station, I got places to go and appointments to keep. My boss isn’t gonna care if I missed my train because I just HAD to listen to a street performer.

Obviously, if someone asked me if I’d rather pay $100 or nothing to listen to Bell play his set, I’d choose the latter. But maybe not. I mean, the subway station probably had bad acoustics, no seating, and lots of errant noises drowning out the virtuoso. Visiting a concert hall, on the other hand, is an experience in and of itself – regardless of who’s playing. I’ll also be guaranteed a good seat, excellent acoustics, and I won’t be in anyone’s way. I also would have set the time aside for such a concert, as opposed to being at a station, where I am almost certainly on my way to an appointment (why else would I be there?).

And here’s another thing: When I’ve been at bus, train, and subway stations, it behooves me to shut out most of the din around me. True, the street performer over in the corner over there mightbe a famed instrumentalist plucking out an amazing piece of art. But, statistically speaking, it’s probably just a so-so musician banging out an annoying tune for money. More often than not, street musicians have been an annoyance to me, and, if I was wealthier, I might be inclined to offer them fifty bucks to pack up and leave.

And besides the musicians, there’s also the noise of the other people, the bombardment of advertisements, and the frustration of trying to make heads-or-tails out of the schedules and maps. Truly, I’m better off blocking out most of the crap around me, even if it means discounting a world-class performance. I guess that’s just the collateral damage. I’d rather block out 100 things, knowing full well 99 of them are obnoxious attention-grabbers – even though I might miss out on that one piece of beauty – than to let in everything and try to figure out if any of it is worth anything. ‘Cause, especially at a subway station, I can almost guarantee it’s not.

Now, if I was three years old, and I didn’t care about anything and my mom was taking care of things like buying the ticket and checking the schedules, then, sure, I’d stop and listen.

My employer reimburses much of my college tuition. To receive reimbursement, however, I need to submit some paperwork, including official documentation of my grade(s) from the previous semester.

This past week, then, I visited Hamline’s website and logged in to their Student Services page. From there, I selected “Student Records” and then “Final Grades.” After selecting the appropriate semester, a page came up displaying my student information. This included the subject, course number, and course title of the class I just completed. Under the column named “Attempted” it showed a 4.0. Under the column named “Earned” it likewise showed a 4.0. This is typical, since I get all A’s.

However, under the column named “Final Grade,” all it showed was an asterisk. Why was that? I didn’t know. Maybe there is a hold on my account. So I backed out of that page and went to “View Holds.” That page opened quickly and simply said: “No holds exist on your record.” So then I thought maybe I still needed to fill out a course evaluation, but when I went to that page, it showed the time for doing that was closed. So why not display my grade?

So I called the good folks in the Accounts department. The woman who answered the phone explained that I must not have completed a course evaluation.

“Yeah,” I said, “That’s what I thought. But it looks like that option is closed now.”

She said yes, it is closed. When I asked how I could do the evaluation, she said I couldn’t. So then I asked how I get my grade, and she said that, if a student does not perform an evaluation, the grades get held for 10 days “as kind of a slap on the wrist” for not doing it. She then explained that, since grades were released on December 27th, mine will be released on January 6th.

Um…

So, I might be wrong here, but I thought that, in order to get a grade, all I had to do was show up for every class, turn in every assignment, participate in class, and pay thousands of dollars. I’ve done all that, so Hamline’s policy is downright stupid and, if any other college has the same policy, they’re equally stupid. Not giving me my grade after completing everything the syllabus and the billing department said I had to complete is ridiculous. It’s tantamount to a waiter not giving me my dessert because I didn’t fill out the restaurant’s comment card. I paid for that god-damned dessert, so he better do his job. I paid for that grade, so Hamline better give me the grade on the agreed-upon date. If I wanted a slap on the wrist, I would enroll in a 1950s elementary school.

This is especially egregious since my GPA is displayed right there and I can see that I have an A. This is the kind of petty mindfucking that makes me nauseous.

And here’s another idea: How about not closing down the course evaluation option so fast? According to the woman I spoke with, course evaluations were due by December 20th. My final paper was due at 5:00 on December 19th. This gave me exactly 31 hours from the time my class finished until the deadline for filling out an evaluation. Sorry I was busy with working fulltime, owning a home, being a father and a husband…but maybe they can give me a little more leeway here.

And who uses an asterisk without a corresponding footnote?

Anyway, I called up my transcript, and my grade was listed there, so I will just turn that in to my employer.

Also, I’m never filling out a class evaluation at Hamline ever again until they remove their corporal punishment policy.