Author: mongreldogs
-
Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 8: Mummy on the Orient Express
Meh. Haven’t we been here before?
-
Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 7: “Kill the Moon”
Ugh. This hasn’t been a great season, and this is far from the best. Let’s begin with the very-overused flash forward. It’s getting kind of old. Used well, it can be very effective. But Doctor Who isn’t using it very well. They’ve used it as a cheap dramatic tool. Actually the episode was full of…
-
Review: Doctor Who Season 8 Episode 1 “Deep Breath”
I finally got around to watching Season 8 Episode 1 (“Deep Breath”) of the revived Doctor Who. It’s the first one with Peter Capaldi as the Doctor. (What do we call him, anyway? Is he the 12th Doctor, even though we know that Matt Smith‘s 11 was really the twelfth?) So it’s probably worth a…
-
What is a library?
I am far from the first to ask this question in an increasingly-electronic age, and I am sure that my answer will be far from unique. But my wife and I have batted the question around a couple of times and I wanted to get my thoughts down. The proximate cause of our discussion was…
-
The persistence of “factory”-style schools
Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute asks “Why Do ‘Anti-Corporatists’ Defend Factory-Style Leadership?” There’s a lot in there I’d like to respond to; here’s my first swing at it. It’s easy to blame hidebound educators for educational malaise, and some of the blame lands justly. But you cannot begin to understand the problem until…
-
Pat Buchanan is an idiot
Sorry for being so obvious. But I’ve read his latest ill-informed anti-immigrant screed and couldn’t stay quiet. Buchanan’s thesis is that we were once a unified country but now since 1960, we’ve been in decline. First off, it’s a little suspicious that the magic time was exactly when Pat Buchanan (born in 1938) had just…
-
All good things may come to an end, but you can sometimes revisit them
Today (2014 May 23) is the 20th anniversary of the airing of “All Good Things…”, the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. It cannot be denied that this series is directly responsible for the resurgence of American sci-fi on television – without the Enterprise-D, there would have been no Babylon 5, no Stargate,…
-
Happy Tax Day!
And I mean that non-ironically. I don’t like paying taxes, but I am proud to do it. Taxes are not only necessary to maintain the way of life we value. They are a direct investment in the very concept of civilization. Taxes are the explicit statement that we are a community and we have…
-
Lunacon 2014 (2e): Magic and Religion
Saturday 3 PM. Panelists: Carole Ann Moleti; Michael F. Flynn, Raymond Feist, Jane Sibley Interesting tidbit: religion = re+ligio = a rebinding of society (to join again). Religion has always had a social purpose, to increase community and tie society together. The panelists offered a definition of magic as “a belief that mundane objects have…
-
Lunacon 2014 (2d): Gamification in Education
Saturday 2 PM I sort of felt obligated to go to this panel (and the one on The Future of Education), seeing that I am a teacher and all. It was OK. The title proved to be inaccurate: This was more about the use of existing games in a school setting. Gamification usually refers to…