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Bathroom Graffiti

mitcho — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 13:59:18 +0000

On my continuing quest for good audio content, I’ve recently subscribed to the University of Chicago Law School Faculty Podcast and so far I’ve been very pleased. Today I was listening to the latest installation: Dean Saul Levmore’s talk on “The Internet’s Anonymity Problem.” He opened the talk with an anecdote about graffiti at the Med and bathroom graffiti. This immediately reminded me of a Scav Hunt item which I completed in my first year:

From the 2004 Scav Hunt list:

Item 80. Brain Farts: The Collected Works of The University of Chicago Bathroom Graﬃti (organized by theme, but attributed to location). [102 points. 15 bonus points for an inset detailing the entirety of the “Grout Work.”]

I spent a day or so going around campus with a friend (so I didn’t have to be snooping around in ladies’ rooms) taking pictures and compiled the booklet. In good Scav Hunt spirit, I opened the booklet with this tongue in cheek forward:

The anonymity and collaborative nature of bathroom graffiti makes it an amazing reflection of the world we live in. People can write what they want to in their own honest words—it is a clear window into the modern human psyche.

Oddly enough, the latter part of this passage on anonymity jives with Dean Levmore’s talk. For posterity’s sake, I’ve made a compressed—but still pretty big—PDF version available here:

Brain Farts: The Collected Works of The University of Chicago Bathroom Graﬃti
4.9 mb - pdf

Make sure not to miss the highlight: the three pages of grout-fiti, collected from three different buildings. I might even venture to say it’s the groutest collection of egroutica ever compiled.

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Jerry Sadock’s Automodular Grammar on iTunes

mitcho — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 15:13:22 +0000

In my recent quest for podcasts, I just today discovered Jerry Sadock’s Automodular Grammar lectures on iTunes U, brought to you by the University of Arizona. This is essentially the first few lectures from his Automodular course I took my last year in college, which was one of my favorite and most thought-provoking and challenging (“thought-challenging”?) courses while at Chicago. While I still feel that having visuals (slides, or his handsome face, above), you can download his talks and handouts separately from their website, linked here:

Automodular Grammar 1. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 18, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
Automodular Grammar 2. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, January 25, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)
Automodular Grammar 3: The Passive. Jerry Sadock, University of Chicago, February 1, 2008. Lecture (mp3), handout (PDF)

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Podcast Pick: The Bugle, the Audio Newspaper for a Visual World

mitcho — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 09:34:08 +0000

Now that the Taiwanese presidential election is out of the way, the already pretty boring Taiwanese news has hit a new high in boringness, today asking if closer ties to the PRC (with Ma Ying-Jeou’s promise to open up the Three Links (三通)) means we can have a panda now. No seriously. The people have been waiting.

This, together with my currently daily train commutes, have led me to further explore the world of podcasts. I’m now a proud subscriber of “The Bugle: the Audio Newspaper for a Visual World,” with John Oliver of Daily Show fame and Andy Zaltman, distributed by The Times of London. Like a weekly audio Daily Show, except more British and thus more ridiculous. It’s fabulous fun, and perfect for those of us who hate reading.

Here’s a snippet from this past episode:

USA and Britain are once again at the top!, of the western world’s teenage pregnancies – also called the two countries most committed to the war on terror. … What it also suggests is, as nations, we get overexcited in the prospect of an easy conquest without really thinking about the long term consequences.

So true.

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Co-schooling in Dongshan

mitcho — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 15:21:40 +0000

The Fulbright program sets up an extra “co-school” to work at for a small period of time in the spring, as a means of giving us ETA’s increased variety and different school experiences, as well as letting us touch more students’ lives. For the month of March, I will be at Dongshan Elementary in Dongshan (冬山).

Teaching at Dongshan every day involves taking the train every day, and I’m fully psyched about that. I was first quite worried as there are, according to the online trip planner, only three trains a day that go directly from Nan’ao to Dongshan but this has turned out to be false. It still does mean at least an hour a day on trains, but I’ve got my iPod with wonderful podcasts, and I’m pretty sure my class schedule lets me avoid transfers.

I’m also excited about taking the train so often as Dongshan has the newest train station in Yilan county. It’s a beautiful new modern design of tasteful glass and steel.¹

The school itself is much larger than what I’ve been used to, with five classes per grade of about 30 students each… therefore about 700 students total. A special characteristic of the school is kites… the school has a kite museum and students make kites and fly them. The English classroom closet was also filled with kites.

On the teaching front, I’ll be teaching grades 2, 3, 4, and 6. I’ll be teaching all of those classes once a week, focusing on storytelling. Today I told Jump, Frog, Jump! to second graders. I’ve never had the chance to really use the same lesson plan over and over, and I already can see that I’ll be able to learn a lot through the iterative process.

The older Dongshan station’s charm involved night-time tube lights on the fence which spelled out 冬山… I assumed the new station would mean an end to the quaint tube lights, but I now see a single string strung across the metal ribs… ↩

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