We Have Moved

The Elder and Younger Professors W.O. Wiseguy are pleased to announce that they have moved the Professor Plum's Plums to new digs under a new name.

http://www.professorwiseguy.com/

Mental Detox

I was too busy watching TV to know about this, so I'm a day late reporting that Mental Detox Week is here and we're in the middle of it. So blow up your TV and detoxify your mind!

Technoslave

It's too late for me, but save yourselves! Throw your cellphone out a bus window! Smash your laptop! (Better yet, send it to me, especially if it's really new and really nice, and I'll smash it.) But do not become a Technoslave.

All-Boy and All-Girl Schools

I have a confession: I attended an all-male school from eighth grade through high school. (Explains a few things, eh?) In the centuries since I graduated, my alma mater has gone co-ed, merging with a nearby all-female school. A recent article suggests that perhaps this merger was misguided from an educational standpoint, as single-sex education shows its value in England.

Line up for the Library

I know that some of you aren't entirely sure where the library is on your campus. Apparently some British students have a similar problem, opting instead to visit one of the world's great non-university libraries, The British Library. As we read in this article, Frustration for authors as students hog British Library reading rooms. Wouldn't you just feel awful if you kept the next Karl Marx from working in relative comfort?

Vintage Wii

Turns out that the Wii isn't as new as it seems to be. I found this ad in an old magazine, proving that the "ultimate joy machine" has been on the scene for--well, for a long time.
This is just one of several vintage ads created by somebody with a great deal too much time on their hands.

Set Your Sights Low

Here's a news story that proves that having high expectations just isn't worth it. Apparently, selective schools rejected more students than ever before. What this should teach us is that having lowered expectations is a good thing. While all these suckers are getting the thin envelope from Harvard (93% rejected) and Princeton (91% rejected), you can be sitting back, comfortably assured of admission to Northwestern Oklahoma Wesleyan Polytechnic A&M from the moment you drop the application in the mail. Why deal with the serial rejection you're going to get from the Ivy League and their ilk? Set your sights low, and you won't be disappointed.

Threats to Education

A friend of mine has a painting in her office. Two of the corners of the painting are labeled "Rock" and "A Hard Place," while the other two, diagonally positioned across the canvas, read, "Devil" and "The Deep Blue Sea." In the middle of the painting is a big "X" labeled "You are here." To some degree that's how campus security types must be feeling these days. With horrific shootings in Virginia and Illinois over the past twelve months, they can't afford to take lightly any sort of threat. That's why semesters have been interrupted recently at two schools: "Threatening Graffiti Leads College to Cancel Classes."
What are you going to do, if you're the decision maker at a school where threatening messages show up above the urinals? Probably the writing is the ranting of somebody with a dreaded exam on the date in question, but you can't take that chance, can you? Time was when campus security only had to contend with rowdy partiers and sloppy drunks. Today they have to worry about gun-toting psychos and harmless but frightening cranks. I don't envy them their job.

No Dancing on my Donation!

Reading a recent article on gifts to colleges, "When Strings Are Attached, Quirky Gifts Can Limit Universities," I found myself taken back to the good old days at my alma mater, William Jewell College. A school with Baptist roots, Jewell, for decades, never had a dance on campus. (Baptists, you see, have traditionally disapproved of sex, believing that it may lead to dancing.) Instead of a Homecoming Dance, we had a Homecoming Concert. This was in the days before moshing, but I am fairly certain, despite never attending one of these events, that there were curmudgeonly overseers strolling the aisles to ensure that the movement did not wax rhythmic.
Was there a point to this post? Oh yeah! William Jewell used to play its indoor sports in the lovely and ancient Brown Gymnasium. After the construction of a fine new fieldhouse, which opened in time to mark my arrival on campus, the Brown Gym became a bit of a redundancy. The Browns, I am told, gave the money to build the gym with the stipulation that if a dance were ever held on campus, the gym would be burned down. Although I rather doubt such a restriction actually existed, it makes for a fun story. When the college raised buckets-full of dough to convert the gym into a performing arts center and classrooms, they apparently decided that whatever stipulation was in force had fallen away with the conversion of the building from gym to catch-all.
Sometimes, an alumnus' generosity winds up putting more burden on the school than their gift is actually worth. I'm contemplating some sort of poison-pill donation to one of my several former schools. Perhaps I could donate a new theater with the understanding that plays by Edward Albee must be performed in Norwegian at least once every leap year. That sounds like fun.

Find Books at Bookfinder

You probably won't be surprised that I, as an English professor, am a book junkie. More than likely I will buy more books this year than you'll buy in your entire college career. If not, then welcome to the wonderful world of book hoarding. Regardless, you probably don't want to spend more money on the books you buy--whether they be Harry Potter hardcovers or textbooks--than you have to. That's where a site like Bookfinder comes in handy. This resource searches a host of sites in search of the best buy, new or used, on a book you specify. It's similar to Best Book Buys, but Bookfinder has the advantage of searching new AND used offerings. On the other hand, Bookfinder does not organize by ISBN, so you might need to sift through a number of listings, all with slightly different titles, in order to find the bargain you're seeking.
And I still haven't found the site that will search both Amazon's used books and eBay in one move. That would be something worth creating for a programmer, although there's no money in sending people to eBay listings.

How Not to Make a Fortune in IT

It seems that the days of infinite competition for tech jobs perished with the dot-com bubble a decade ago, but computer-related jobs still promise good pay and solid security if you're halfway dependable. Take my nephew, who didn't go to college at all and now works for Google, attempting to take over the world. They keep moving him around the world. I fully expect him to live on the moon within five years.
If you're wondering what will not help you earn the big bucks in the computer field, you might find this lovely article from Infoworld interesting.

Professorial Plagiarism?

Here's a dirty little secret coming out into the light of day. Any sneaky thing that you've thought of as a student, professors thought of years ago, and we do it more smoothly than you do. Take the case of--how shall we describe it?--"creative acquisition of scholarly materials." With the publish-or-perish gun pointed at the career's heads, many professors have succumbed to the temptation of what would, in any other situation, be called plagiarism. (It's called plagiarism in this situation as well.) Now, it seems, in order to avoid embarrassment over such materials, journals are taking the battle to their writers. In "Journals May Soon Use Antiplagiarism Software on Their Authors" you can read about how the professorial version of Turnitin is being turned on the tenure-track types whose work might be suspect. Maybe I'll have to think twice about submitting that article to College English!

High-Fallutin Ivy Leaguers

Those hoity-toity Ivy Leaguers are at it again. Now it's the president of Harvard criticizing the game of football in this aptly named article: Harvard's President Denounces Football. That's as unAmerican as denouncing pizza or voting or enormous SUVs! You're not surprised at this denunciation, are you? Those smarty-pants East Coast types think they know everything. I wonder what Harvard's record was last year. Probably if they'd gone to a bowl game, the Prez would be whistling a different tune. But here's the rub. The Harvard President is Charles Norton Eliot, and he made his comments in 1908.

Fear of Facebook

How many Facebook friends do you have? In a current Time article,Suffering from Facebook fatigue?, you can read about the perils of Facebook overload. At the risk of sounding like a complete Old Fogey, I have to say that I don't get it. I don't get why people invite zillions of people--like me--to join some group like "Let's all fall down the stairs" or why I get vampire bites or why I get asked about my preferences in movies or whatever? The same students who complain about not having enough time apparently change their profile picture every thirty seconds and engage in twenty-eight Facebook applications. Might this be an experience that sucks up just a bit too much of our time?

Money = Happiness?

All my life I've been taught that money can't make you happy. On the other hand, I've come to the conclusion that the absence of money can certainly lead to unhappiness. All that being said, someone far more methodical and thorough than I did an intriguing study of the correlation between money and happiness, published in the New York Times.

M.H. Abrams and Academic Majors

What's your major? If you haven't decided, or even if you have, you could do worse than to listen to the thoughts of the great literary critic M.H. Abrams from an article by Jeffrey Williams. He went into English because, he says, "there weren't jobs in any other profession, so I thought I might as well enjoy starving, instead of starving while doing something I didn't enjoy."There's a lot to be said for going into what you enjoy.

Voodoo Baseball

I awoke this morning to a radio report of the story of the Boston Red Sox jersey buried in the construction of the new Yankee Stadium. It seems that Gino Castignoli, a New York-dwelling, Red Sox-cheering construction worker, placed a David Ortiz jersey beneath five feet of concrete in the new stadium several months ago. After bragging about it to friends, he allowed the story to get out. The Yankees then, figuring out where Castignoli might have had access, took a jack hammer to the suspect floor and found the shirt last week.
So who is dumber? Is it Castignoli who spent good money on the Ortiz jersey and buried it, only to face possible legal action for his troubles? Or is it the Yankees who took this nonsense seriously and spent time, money, and mess jack-hammering their new ballpark searching for a jersey that might never have existed?
Does somebody in the Yankee organization really believe that a buried piece of cloth will somehow put a hex on the Bronx Bombers? If that's so, perhaps they ought to sift through the rubble of the House that Ruth Built when they demolish it next year looking for an explanation of the jillion-dollar team's woes in recent years.

Read Novels for Success!

The lovely world of Lifehack brings us a great notion: Reading novels (books in general) fuels your idea machine. I'm not sure that's the best reason why physicists and accountants and nurses and IT types ought to read non-job-related stuff, but it's a good reason. So head on down to Borders and start reading!

Citation Site

I guess it took Kiwis to get it done, but somebody at the University of Auckland has created a very nicely presented guide to documentation in the various styles, including MLA and APA. Now you'll have no excuse for not knowing how to site a book by three authors published under a full moon and sold on street corners.

The Unavailable Mr. Hughes

Some ten years ago, I sat in a teachers' workshop and shared my memories of Hill Hughes, a high school English teacher, and why he meant so much to me. I can well imagine Mr. Hughes wiping his brow when I walked out of his classroom for the last time. Surely, I had not proven his most promising or successful student. Wise enough to recognize ability, he probably knew that I profoundly underachieved in his class, but I'm fairly certain he didn't foresee me teaching English as a profession, earning a doctorate, and publishing on some of the very literary works that I so studiously avoided studying seriously when they appeared on his syllabus.
After I told of this man, I remember Helen Burnstad, our staff development director at the time, asking, "Have you told him how much he meant to you?" Obviously, I had to write this man a letter. I called the school the next day to retrieve his address, but I never got that letter written.
Today, for some odd reason, I thought of that undone task. Again I contacted the school, but this time I received word that Hill Hughes passed away in October 2004.
I'm not self-absorbed enough to believe that I somehow ruined the last six years of Mr. Hughes' life by not telling him about how life turned out for me. He did not, I'm certain, die wondering "What about Browning?" with his last breath. Still, I might have added a sliver to his day had I taken the time to write that letter and get it in the mail. And today, the opportunity is gone.
This is not some thinly veiled attempt to be praised for my teaching. Instead, it's a bit of a carpe diem plea. When we get opportunities, we simply have to act upon them. Far too many of those chances go away, never to return.

Magic Pen Game

Would you like something free and just as capable of sucking your soul out of you through addictive game play as Desktop Tower Defense? Try Magic Pen. In this game--did I mention it was free--you draw geometric shapes in order to push a little red ball through a course. Sound goofy? Yes, but it's . . . well, did I mention it's addictive?

The Prophets of Sports Illustrated

With my beloved Kansas Jayhawks in the Final Four for the first time since 2003, I'm paying a bit more attention to sports news over the past couple of weeks. On Friday, I found the Sports Illustrated college basketball experts' predictions for the weekend's three games. SI has five such experts, each of whom picked his winner for the Kansas-North Carolina and the UCLA-Memphis semifinals followed by their expert opinion on the winner of Monday's championship.
These geniuses, people who get paid good money for their college basketball acumen, made the following guesses. Four out of five of them picked North Carolina over Kansas. A different four out of the five picked UCLA over Memphis. All the picks for the final champion went to either UCLA or North Carolina. How rich.
On Saturday evening, Memphis thumped UCLA and Kansas spanked the Tarheels. Neither game was within single digits. Therefore, out of the possible ten right answers the SI experts posited, they got exactly two correct. To add to the beauty of this, they have no chance of adding right answers in the finals, since they all picked teams who have already lost! Thus, out of fifteen chances, they have gotten two right, considerably worse than coin toss guesses would have likely produced.
These sports-page prophets are just the latest and most trivial of the various prognosticators who you'll find showing up in magazines and other media. Do you remember the people who predicted with apparent certainty that the Bush administration would be reinstituting the draft or invading Iran over the last couple of years. You probably don't recall Richard Clarke's breathless 2005 article in which he predicted a nation wracked by continued terrorist attacks over the coming years. So far, Clarke's bleak vision appears quite fanciful. The same magazine featured a 1999 cover predicting "Dow 36,000." That came shortly before the dot-com bubble popped.
Of course all those brilliant financial minds at Bear Stearns and other lenders, who have gotten us into the whole subprime mortgage greed fest, were predicting the future as well. "It'll be okay," they assumed, glancing at their Harvard MBAs for reassurance.
What all of these stories should tell us is that hubris is alive and well in America. The best predictions today, as always, appear after the fact.
Without Harvard MBA's, government jobs, or SI press credentials, we're best off speaking of what is known and leaving the hard work of prophecy to the stronger minds.

In Memoriam: Semicolons

I used to share a communal office two mornings each week with a guy who had spent several years as a journalist. "I resigned," this former reporter explained, "because they wouldn't let me use a semicolon in a story. In all the stories I ever turned in, some copy editor always took out the semicolons. Eventually, I started to try to sneak one in, but it never worked. No semicolons would appear, so I quit!"
Why do I mention this? It seems that the apparently endangered future of the semicolon is quite the cause celebre in France, as this story from The Guardian explains.

Intentional Misrenunciation

In the category of "Things that may only interest me" is "Saying it Wrong on Purpose," an article from The Lexicographer's Rules, dealing with people's intentional mispronunciations of words. Personally, I've been known to pronounce the "w" in sword, but most of my on-purpose mispronunciations derive from things my kids say or have said. In time, I think, we develop an entire, warped vocabulary if we talk sufficiently with our offspring.
Therefore, if you want to sound like an educated person, avoid procreation!

Texting Ourselves Silly

According to this article from The Times of London, constant texting and emailing makes us lose as much as 10 IQ points temporarily. To my mind, this is yet another of the recent evidences that multitasking really isn't working out so well for us. How effectively, then, do you think you do at studying, writing, and so forth if you're responding to constant texts, calls, and messages?

DiMaggio, Hitting Streaks, and "At This Rate"

A recent op-ed contributor to the New York Times uses computer modeling to demonstrate that a hitting streak like the fifty-six-game job Joe DiMaggio put together is really not that extraordinary. Indeed, the computers suggest, we shouldn't be surprised at Joltin' Joe's performance at all.
With all due respect to this writer, I have to observe that computers do not play baseball. I did a similar study, albeit without aid of complicated computer modeling. What I discovered was that perfect games, that rarest of pitching accomplishments, should actually happen more often than they do. If the odds of getting a single hitter out are about 3/4 for a good pitcher, then the odds of getting 27 hitters out in a row are 3/4 to the 27th. That comes out to a .000432 chance of a perfect game. That's 4 in 10,000. Given that there are 2,592 games per year with two sides pitching or 5,184 possibilities, there ought to be something like two perfect games each year. Even crummy pitchers, the sort that allow runners to reach base 30% of the time, ought to get a perfect game every six years or so.
This goes along with my irritation at comments like "at this rate" when it comes to sports or anything else. For example, at the rate they are hitting home runs this year (after one game) the Kansas City Royals will hit 162 homers this year. I'd be fairly certain that the Royals will not hit 162 home runs this year. At the rate they're winning games, the Royals will go 162-0. "At this rate" is an absolutely meaningless comment, since rates rarely stay the same.
If housing values continue to decline at the present rate for the next ten years, houses will be worth nothing. I'm pretty sure that isn't going to happen. At the rate my son is playing Wii, he'll have put 5,000 hours on the machine by the end of the month. That isn't going to happen either.
Let's just be clear. Computers don't play baseball and the future cannot be boiled down to a mathematical formula. To write and think intelligently about such things, we have to go beyond such functions.