by krisis
Archives for May 2004
Yeah, I Could Have Told You That
Also skimmed from CNN’s headlines, a fairly lightweight article about male eating disorders. It’s nice to see this topic getting covered somewhere other than daytime talkshows, but the lightness of this coverage only serves to emphasize the virtually nonexistant support system for men with eating disorders.
Even years after the period where i was most destructively anorexic i am still incredibly suseptible to falling into unhealthy eating habits, and generally only avoid major problems by making a point to make light of my condition here and to my close friends, allowing my humor to let them know they should keep an eye on me.
US Violates Geneva Conventions… Again!
Because i am such a major nerd and am in love with my single journalism class, i have subscribed to all manner of news services, including ABC’s daily Nightline email, which just passed along this article. I’m sure the story is all over by now, but i’m too busy working on my project to know. I simply find it ironic because the United States Army is so completely oblivious to the Geneva Conventions that we are so quick to invoke whenever any of our soldiers are captured.
Lawmakers Say New Abuse Photos Even Worse – The abuse of Iraqi prisoners by U.S. troops went beyond the photos seen by most Americans, shaken lawmakers said Wednesday after viewing fresh pictures and video that they said depicted forced sex, brutality and dogs snarling at cowed prisoners….
Even in such a grim article, there is one amusing passage…
House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, said he thought “some people are overreacting. The people who are against the war are using this to their political ends,” he said.
Further GOP reaction via CNN. Personally, I can’t think of a way to use this to criticize Bush or the war effort … it’s more about a problem with the way we recruit, screen, and train our soldiers. More importantly, i don’t think there’s a way to overreact to violating the Geneva Conventions. If our armed forces wantonly do what they’re doing, then we are in no position to complain when one of our citizens is captured and brutally slaughtered.
Senior Project First draft is nearing completion. Ironically, i loaded Blogger.com to see if they were featuring any current articles i could cite in my project only to discover their first complete redesign in Blogger history.
It is terrible. The new Blogger.com interface is completely AOL-ized in its rounded-corner graphics and utter uselessness to the established user. What amuses me the most about this is that, in writing the academic portion of my project, it became increasingly apparent that Blogger’s ubiquity was the main reason it could compete with the simpler and more communal Live Journal and the the more complex high-end Moveable Type. This new template capitalizes on moving towards the LJ model of compartmentalized simplicity rather than the MT one of specified power, and i think it signals the death-knell of serious bloggers using the Blogger service to do anything.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see a mass-exodus of big names in coming weeks. It seems as though Alison agrees.
Look, my snake is eating its own tail!
I am still working towards my weekend 10,000-coherent-word goal, but i have made some progress into my Senior Year death march of assignments. Again, if you live in China or have friends from Brazil, allowing me to interview you could save my ass in a dramatic fashion.
The current snag that i am working through is that, because my narrative voice and style tends to be consistently distinctive, i find that i am unwittingly quoting content that i wrote for the Blogathon site last year in pieces of my Senior Project. If you unintentionally quote your own uncredited writing, do you have to make a citation to avoid accusations of plagiarism? Or, alternately, to prove that you aren’t surreptitiously mining your own previous work in order to avoid writing new content? Furthermore, do i have to cite the sources of statistics that i compiled myself last summer for the Blogathon? What if the sources don’t exist anymore? Do i just get to say “cause i said so?” If were to wrap myself in a white sheet as if i were preparing to be mummified and then subsequently roll off my back roof, would i be distinguishable from the creepy thing that looks like a dead body in my neighbor’s yard that Lindsay and i were always too afraid to investigate from a distance closer than her back window?
So many questions, such a small attention span.