femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

Those clever folks at Apple, embedding poetry for the pesky hacker! To find out what the hell I'm talking about click here.

Well, I have fulfilled one of my "must do before I die" goals by attending a live broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion. To listen to the Purdue-centric episode, click here.

A fellow graduate student sent out an email to our listserv today. Included in this email was a link to a drinking game, which I think will be helpful in dulling the pain of Dubya's slaughter of the English language and the sure to come in(s)anity. While the sending of a politically charged email has now sparked contention on the list, I am putting the email, in its entirety, on my blog 'cause it's just too funny not to. Thanks to Sol Neely for sending this and giving me permission to post it here.

If you plan to suffer the "Lies of the Empire"--I mean, "State of the Union"
address tomorrow night, don't forget to drink the pain away:

Rules for the 2006 State of the Union Address Drinking Game can be found at:
http://www.drinkinggame.us/

From my own experience, the drinking game provides a hands-on pedagogical means

will it have been worth it to cook dinner on the web? An article on slashdot.org reviews one of the newer (and monumentally expensive) web-cookware gadgets: a refrigerator/stove which allows you to begin cooking dinner from a remote location using--yes, that's right--your web browser. So, I thought the whole web-browser coffee maker was a bit over the top, but this...well, I'm just saying : have none of these people seen "2001: A Space Odyssey"? I mean, c'mon, have we learned nothing from the world of science fiction? Granted, not too many people will be able to afford an oven that costs $8,699, but for those who can and do, I ask only one thing: don't call it Hal. --Just because I'm paran

I found this quote on an online forum that one of my 421 students' is analyzing. I laughed out loud. That alone may be enough to convince the few holdouts that I'm insane, but what can I say? It amused me.

Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.
-Bill Watterson

I have spent a large portion of my life in doctor's offices and have always found the reading materials in the waiting rooms to be interesting and odd statements about the patients and practitioners. However, I believe that I may have found the loveliest example of bizarre reading material yet. Several weeks ago, while waiting to see my doctor at the Purdue University Student Health center, i happened upon a magazine that seemed oddly out of place in a university health center: the AARP magazine. Purdue is a university comprised mostly of "traditional" college students; that is, they are mostly eighteen to early twenties. I must wonder then, how the American Association of Retired Persons magazine fits into the reading material of this demographic. I am a firm believer in reading a broad range of periodicals, but how many eighteen to twenty-four year olds would be interested in reading a magazine targeted toward retirees.

Check it, I'm David Bowie! How cool is that? I was David Bowie (a la Ziggy Stardust) for Halloween one year. 'course everyone thought I was Liza Manelli, even though I had a fake penis and everything (rolled up tube sock, very effective).

You're David Bowie...and every guy wants to be you,
every girls wants to be in your pants. Or vice
versa, or both! You are innovative, always
weird, and aesthetically pleasing. Your lyrics
are literate, and your music is unlike any
other. You are always unique, no matter what
situation you are in. Everyone tries to bite
off your style, but no one can be you because
you are funky fresh. Be careful to keep your
mental health in check, because you have a

As odd as this is, it made me laugh. Perhaps the 105 degree fever that I had during our last flu vaccine shortage pickled my brain a bit. Anyway, here's a quote from Slate reporting on an article in The New York Times today.

As National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci puts it, "The critical issue now is, can we make enough vaccine, given the well-known inability of the vaccine industry to make enough vaccine?"