THIS is a CLOSE-UP?

Over the past fifteen years (both here at NCMC and at Kirtland Community College, where I taught as an adjunct for two years prior to my North Central gig), I've compiled some of my favorite comments from students. While it seems that traffic on sites like Rate My Professors has slowed (I haven't had a comment there in over a year), I still get the end-of-semester materials from my college, and they're always a source of light entertainment. Usually, it boils down to a bipolarity: If the student did well, I get praised, and if the student crashed and burned, well...we know who to blame, right? Every now and again, I get something substantive and thoughtful, but otherwise, it's a lot like the following. (Errors of spelling and punctuation left intact, of course, so as not to obscure the student voice.) • He is either really smart or so stupid he seems smart • Makes little squeak noises sometimes and talks to himself at times • I would never recommend this class to my wo...

If my name were Justin, this would be a typical exchange between me and the short humans that run this world. Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

I have a personal pet peeve about hearing the phrase "hard-wired" to describe the brain and/or behavior, and this article from Smithsonian.com is a nice concise debunking of that myth as well as a few others, such as that trite old incorrect notion of only using 10% of your brain. (Ugh. Always hated that one, too.) [And as a personal aside, I must admit something horrible: I have been making jokes about tongue mapping in Intro Psych for many years now as if there was some validity to the basic concept. I now know that to be false, so to the many years of Intro Psych students that I've led astray, I apologize.]

So 2006 eventually came a'callin', the first year since 1991 that I didn't have some sort of record store affiliation. Amazing to think that working at record stores was some part of my life for fifteen years, even before I started to attend concerts on the regular. Plenty of good shows in '06, such as: The National / The Cloud Room [Intersection, Grand Rapids 3.23] Electric Six [Magic Stick 4.1] Editors / Stellastarr* [Magic Stick 4.13] Coachella Music & Arts Festival [Empire Polo Field, Indio, CA 4.29/4.30] Secret Machines [Magic Bag, Ferndale 5.14] Movement: 06 [Hart Plaza, Detroit 5.29] Intonation Music Festival [Union Park, Chicago 6.24/6.25] Gnarls Barkley / Peeping Tom [State Theater, Detroit 8.7] Steely Dan / Michael McDonald [DET Energy Music Theater 9.2] Lindsey Buckingham [Emerald Theater, Mt. Clemens 10.22] Mobius Band / Baby Dayliner [Intersection, Grand Rapids 10.23] Electric Six [St. Andrew’s Hall 11.4] As I exa...

Lots of fun take-aways from this infographic , but the biggest travesty is that the U.S. is 31st out of 33 countries w/r/t income inequity. In other words, the gap between those at the top of the top of the dollar heap and those at the bottom of the foundation of the pyramid is a vast expanse of soul-killing differentials and deficiencies. Do I think it will get better? I hope so, but when the long green buys enough power and influence to dupe those at the bottom into believing that there's hope to be found around the corner...well, it's hard to stay positive. Won't corporations realize that broke consumers can't buy their products? That no one wants to live in a town where schools are decimated and fire & police services are kneecapped? And on a local level, can you find me ten people who believe that cutting corporate taxes in Michigan while simultaneously cutting funding for education and low/middle SES social programs is a winning strategy to revive Michigan...