Hurricane Katrina and the Influence of Blogs

The devastation of Hurricane Katrina is unbelievable. It's so awful I can't even watch the news.

I was surprised to see a link to Miles O'Brien's hurricane blog on CNN.com. I knew blogs could be influential, but I didn't realize news services now had them.

Speaking of the Blogosphere influence, it appears that today bloggers shamed Amazon and Yahoo! into hosting links to Red Cross Hurricane Relief Fund. How? By encouraging blog readers to bombard these sites (and Google, which still does not have a Hurricane Relief Fund link on its main page) with phone calls and e-mail. The argument was that these sites supported Tsunami relief after the Dec. 26, 2004 disaster, but were not doing the same thing to aid their own country now.

Apparently it worked.

Why My Students Make Me Feel Old

Every year Beloit College publishes a mindset list to familiarize professors with what their freshman know and "to slow the rapid onset of 'hardening of the references,' in the classroom." All I know is that it makes me feel really old. Heck, I don't even understand some of the references on the list!

Here are few of the items, seen from the point of view of the typical college freshman this year:

• Ricky Nelson, Richard Burton, Samantha Smith, Laura Ashley, Orson Welles, Karen Ann Quinlin, Benigno Aquino, and the U.S. Football League have always been dead.
• Paul Newman has always made salad dressing.
• Computers have always fit in their backpacks.
• Stores have always had scanners at the checkout.
• There have never been dress codes in restaurants.
• They have always been able to make photocopies at home.
• They have always been able to make phone calls from planes.
• Yuppies are almost as old as hippies.
• There has always been Lean Cuisine.
• Bert and Ernie are old enough to be their parents.

Scary, eh? Not only do I have nothing in common with my students, most of them don't read for pleasure, or out of curiosity. I learned this when, while trying to get to know my students better, I asked them to name their favorite book or series, and most couldn't. The did have favorite movies; unfortunately they were crap like Dumb and Dumber. Thank God for Jo Rowling. Some of them now read more, thanks to Harry Potter.

No wonder they have a hard time relating to their college instructors, even the younger ones. Ah well, at least my friends and colleagues are old, too, so we can understand each other. :)

Web Stats

Now that I'm getting vistors to my blog, I've added a hit counter at the very bottom.

Darn! I noticed that every time I post or edit, the hit counter thinks that is a visit. I wonder if there's a way to make it count visitors, but not me?

Hooray for Ray!

Today Ray Bradbury is 85 years young. Ray is one of my all-time favorite authors and probably the first sci fi/fantasy author I ever read. (Blame my brother for giving me a copy of The Illustrated Man when I was about 12.) His stories are creative, insightful, and deceptively simple; when you re-read them you'll find a meaning you didn't see the first time.

I associate his stories with autumn (probably because of The October Country, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and The Halloween Tree) so I like re-reading them at the height of Michigan's hot, humid summer as reminder that cool, crisp weather will come again. When it does, of course, I can't resist visiting my old friend by re-reading his books. The magic and the wonder are still there for me, even after all these years in The Martian Chronicles, R is for Rocket, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and others too numerous to name.

Ray, thank you, thank you, thank you for your magic and inspiration. May you have many more happy birthdays and write many more books. In the meantime, I'll see you in The October Country!

How to Pill a Cat

Our Siamese mix is on her second round of antibiotics for a bladder infection. For the first batch of pills we wrestled her twice a day for two weeks and she became adept at 1) knowing when we were going to try and hiding, and 2) projectile spitting the pill across the room. Even bribing her with a reward of canned food each time she swallowed a pill didn't help much.

There are all kinds of web sites about how to medicate a cat; they range from serious, like About.com, to hysterically funny parodies, to special treats to hold pills, but none of these were much help.

We tried to put the pill in a treat (not the expensive treats I linked to above; treats we had that I know picky Miss Sophie likes!). She ate the treat and spit out the pill, of course. We finally resorted to sneaking up on her when she was asleep and pilling her before she knew what was coming. Even so, the tendonitis in my left arm is back, thanks to two weeks of cat wrangling. Thankfully for us all, the two-week treatment came to an end.

Unfortunately, the infection returned. This time the vet armed me with three weeks of antibiotics and a pill-popper gadget to get the pill in the back of her throat with (theoretically) much less wrestling. So far, however, we haven't needed it.

Why? Because it finally dawned on me that whole pills can be hidden in treats and spit out, but crushed up pills mixed into canned food (yummy, smelly, fish-based canned food) can not. So far it's worked every time.

Now the only problem is making sure I give the bowl with the medicine to the right cat -- but that's much easier on us all than cat wrestling.

The Martians are Coming!

According to Sky and Telescope "Mars will be closest to Earth on October 30th," just in time for Halloween, and we all know what that means. Remember H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds? Get the chicken pox bioweapons ready!

In the meantime, my telescope and I will be looking for Percival Lowell's canals on Mars.

To Blog or Not to Blog

I've always wondered who the heck reads blogs. For that matter, who writes them? I guess I thought they were just an outlet for unpublished writers but now that I've started looking around, they look like fun!

I don't have any specific plans for this blog yet, just musing on whatever strikes my fancy. As you can see from my profile, that's likely to cover a range of things. Ad Astra!

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