Song du jour: Bob Seger’s “Beautiful Loser”
I’m going to occasionally post (maybe a couple of times a week) links and videos to work my former students are doing. It’ll tend to be creative, funny, or odd, mostly, because my students were English majors. First installment: a demo video for Jaime Rhodes’s Bowling Green, OH based band Steel Wynd. Since graduating from Tiffin University she has earned her M.A. from the University of Toledo and is looking at doctoral programs in composition and digital rhetoric. While at TU she successfully completed a study abroad term at Oxford University. I’m proud to say that she kept up with the reading and writing, though she returned with a poor little fried brain.
Note: if you’re a former student of mine from any institution and you’re doing stuff that you want to tell the world about, email me at jamesrovira at gmail dot com.
Yes, you can play rock and roll on a cello. 2Cellos playing AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” There’s a bit of cinematic cheating on the strict eighteenth-century setting as they add looper about halfway through and some distortion a bit after that — and no, they’re not plugged in — but who cares? Musically, it rocks. A Facebook friend of mine watched this on my wall and then posted, “Okay, now I’m going to go make out with my husband.”
My friend Steven Wexler posted this clip to Facebook and I have to share it here: Bumblefoot live in 2005. Great guitar work, and the lead guitarist is playing a giant foot. Yes. He is. Musically, it’s a bit Red Hot Chili Peppers meets jazz.
Important attention to an important book…
I’m halfway through Thomas Piketty’s
Capital in the 21st Century
. It was some major implications for the future, including the future of education.
In this post I’d like to share some impressions of the book upon reaching its halfway point. I don’t want to summarize it (Doug Henwood does the best job I’ve seen), but address some key elements of content and style.
Piketty’s style is fascinating, and helps enliven what could otherwise be a dry study of statistics. He writes with humor, mocking his own profession:
[E]conomists like simple stories, even when they are only approximately correct (218)
[T]he discipline of economics has yet to get over its childish passion for mathematics and for purely theoretical and often highly ideological speculation (32)
…particularly when one belongs to the upper centiles of the [wealth] distribution and tends to forget it, as is often the case with economists (267)
The…
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James Rovira 