{"id":1771,"date":"2009-12-11T20:56:47","date_gmt":"2009-12-12T00:56:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=1771"},"modified":"2009-12-11T20:56:47","modified_gmt":"2009-12-12T00:56:47","slug":"questions-while-procrastinating-while-grading","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=1771","title":{"rendered":"Questions while procrastinating while grading"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Friday-at-the-end-of-finals-week edition&#8230;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Did President Obama&#8217;s Nobel Peace Prize speech as a wartime president demonstrate that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2008\/11\/23\/fashion\/23irony.html\">irony is not dead<\/a>, or what?&nbsp;<\/li>\n<li>Is the last question rhetorical, or what?<\/li>\n<li>Is Hannukah a holiday that celebrates energy efficiency, oil wars, or insurgencies?<\/li>\n<li>Why do no schools have a food as a mascot (e.g., the Souffles)? (My tablemate at this &#8216;bucks is finishing up the last class for her associates&#8217; degree <i>this very hour<\/i> and thinking about culinary school. That plus my memories of latkes prompted this Very Serious Research Question.)<\/li>\n<li>Why do the three colleges with narrative evaluations that I have visited (UC Santa Cruz, Evergreen State College, and New College of Florida) all have odd mascots (respectively, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ucsc.edu\/about\/campus_mascot.asp\">banana slug<\/a>, the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.evergreen.edu\/athletics\/geoduck.htm\">geoduck<\/a>, and the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ncf.edu\/uploads\/BU\/1u\/BU1uR0NC9OOjiiP429vY-g\/NCSA-Constitution-Nov-5-2008.pdf\">null set<\/a>&nbsp;[Article 11(a)])?<\/li>\n<li>Is the fact that no Starbucks brews decaf in the evening a demonstration that the market works, or that it doesn&#8217;t?<\/li>\n<li>What was the metaphor for faculty moving to administration before the 1977 opening of the first <i>Star Wars<\/i> movie&#8211;i.e., in the b.t.D.S.t. (before the Dark Side trope)&nbsp;days?<\/li>\n<li>Has anyone else seen the parallel between Tolkien&#8217;s One Ring and the <a href=\"http:\/\/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com\/2009\/07\/12\/the-form-that-lets-you-say-more-forms-please\/\">General Services Administration General Form 152<\/a> (the &#8220;Request for Clearance or Cancellation of a Standard or Optional Form&#8221;)? <i>One form to rule them all,\/ one to authorize them.\/ One to make us fill them out\/ and in the night despise them<\/i>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Have a good weekend, all! I&#8217;ll be attending a recital tomorrow, but the rest is all work or chore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Friday-at-the-end-of-finals-week edition&#8230; Did President Obama&#8217;s Nobel Peace Prize speech as a wartime president demonstrate that irony is not dead, or what?&nbsp; Is the last question rhetorical, or what? Is Hannukah a holiday that celebrates energy efficiency, oil wars, or insurgencies? Why do no schools have a food as a mascot (e.g., the Souffles)? (My [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[19,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-out-of-left-field-friday","category-the-academic-life"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-sz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}