Marines in the Muck
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on February 8th, 2010
Living here at El Cid one sees odd things now and then. Among my favorites are the Marine exercises in the marsh behind the house. For some reason I really enjoy looking out the window and seeing very muddy cadets struggling through the muck. It’d be one thing if they were miserable, but if they aren’t happy they sure do a great job of masking it.
Last week’s exercises were on a lovely day, so I walked out with the camera and took some shots of the action. Here’s the “course” that the young lads and lasses follow through the marsh. This is tidal marsh, and at the moment the tide is out. Perhaps it doesn’t look so bad to you:
The Marsh "Course"
I didn’t need to wait long for a group of Redbadgers to come along. Here’s a group of three fellows coming through the same stretch pictured above. I think the guy in the middle was looking for his M16:
Marines in the Mud
The gentleman on the right side of the picture, about two seconds later, took a swandive into the goo for the benefit of my picture-taking. Alas, I didn’t have the camera ready, a fact I didn’t have the heart to share when he finally crawled up out of the mud. Good man, though. Good man indeed.
Muddy Pavement
Here’s a shot of the road they ran down right after crawling free of the marsh. I think that cadet in the distance is passing my trash bin. That’s not really water on the road, by the way. It’s the sloughed-off marsh mud that they call “pluff” ’round these parts. Stinks to high heaven.
Project XK: Dealer Sticker Removal
Posted by Michael Livingston in Project XK (Jeep) on February 7th, 2010
I’ve been meaning to remove the dealer advertisement from my Commander since the day I bought it. Somehow, though, I consistently forgot about the matter unless it was pouring rain outside. It’s not that I didn’t have a great experience at Auction Direct, or that I don’t wish them well as a company. I just don’t like the look of the sticker. Here’s a file photo of my vehicle featuring the offending blue monstrosity of a sticker on the tailgate:
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Life This Week: Brunanburh, Broken Bones, Bubbling Butts
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics, Homelife, Teaching on February 6th, 2010
What’s my life like these days? Well, here’s a selection of snapshots from my life this past week:
Saturday, 2:54 pm. Idly thinking about what Wednesday’s Tolkien lecture will focus on, I begin to ponder the possibility of a new philological reading for a line in The Hobbit. The idea is scribbled on a slip of paper upon my desk, where it will languish among the dozens of other article topics I don’t have time to write up.
Sunday, 4:02 pm. Our 9-month-old daughter is a guided missile for the staircase. Set her down on one side of the house and — zoom! — she’s fast-crawling like a Marine, headed for the foot of the stairs. Up and up to the top, giggling to herself. Catch her, set her down in a new place, and she’ll head back to it. Spin her around, try to confuse her, and like a carrier pigeon it won’t matter. My iPhone and my baby are both GPS-enabled.
Monday, 7:08 am. I wake up feeling the twinges of an illness coming on. The subsequent week will find me fighting off some plague caught from my cadets and/or my son; as a result, my voice teeters on the edge of breaking and I’m far more tired than I’d like. The need to project across the 30+ kids of my Tolkien class does not help, but I love them (and the class) anyway.
Tuesday, 9:15 am. My daughter sets a new personal record by standing unaided for over a minute. You go, girl.
Wednesday, 11:38 pm. I’m poring over manuscript readings for the Old English Battle of Brunanburh poem, trying to determine which rune I should use on a given line of the casebook’s edition. For the record, I decide on an eth.
Thurdsay, 9:04 am. The little girl decides to try walking. Two steps, boom! Stands up. Three steps, boom! Stands up. Four steps, boom! Crawls for the next few minutes.
Thursday, 6:10 pm. Sitting down at the dinner table, I reach across to tussle my son’s hair. He smiles through a face splattered with burrito stuffings. “Can I have your hair?” I ask.
The boy stops chewing, and his innocent eyes look up at my shaved head. Then one of his hands rises to pull upward on a fistful of his own thick locks. “No, Daddy,” he says. “It’s really stuck.”
Thursday, 7:18 pm. Burrito + hair = boy in bathtub. Baby sister joins him for a bit of clean-up (her problem is smushed graham crackers) and the fun lasts a few minutes before the elder child is booted from the bathroom for refusing to share bathtoys. Much screaming ensues.
Friday, 5:11 pm. After a long afternoon of working on some stressful Brunanburh matters, I arrive home to two rambunctious kids. The boy wants me to swing him around. The girl wants me to watch her latest attempt to climb the stairs while carrying a rubber duck. I tell everyone to hold off while I go change out of my uniform. Within five minutes I will have broken two toes on my right foot.
Friday, 11:01 pm. The pain of my toes sends me to bed early. I spend some time thinking through a novel idea (literally an idea for a novel). I decide the idea is sound but still in need of revision. It is subsequently pushed to burner #5 in my mind.
Saturday, 8:46 am. I notice some very fascinating patterns of color on my toes. The next ten minutes are passed in a close examination and a series of flexing exercises to determine how much I can live with the pain. Wife advises urgent care. I decide in favor of some mole skin and an old roll of athletic tape. In hindsight, I’ll wonder if duct-tape would have been more appropriate for the mood.
Saturday, 7:32 pm. I’m putting my son to bed, just getting him tucked in, when he (shall we say) passes wind rather loudly. He giggles a bit, but I try to ignore it (the time for high-fives will come later). But then he suddenly sits bolt upright in bed. “I saw something,” he says.
“Oh? What did you see?” I ask, expecting him to say shadows.
“I saw something bubbling,” he says.
“Bubbling?”
“Don’t worry,” he says, “it was only my butt.” And he laughs and laughs and laughs.
Robbie Williams as the White Rabbit
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on February 4th, 2010
I just bought Robbie Williams‘ new album. It’s been out for a few months, but somehow I missed it.
It’s Brit-pop silliness, I know, but it’s honest Brit-pop silliness. And I really do enjoy his particular brand of it. I’m continually amazed that ol’ Rob has never hit it big on this side of the pond. Pretty sad what with all the stink on the airwaves these days.
Anyway, I thought I’d share an amusing video from the new album, in which Mr. Williams prances about as the White Rabbit. ‘Tis sweet.
Lode Runner
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on February 3rd, 2010
I thought about Lode Runner this morning.
Lode Runner Screenshot
One of the first great video games for a home computer, Lode Runner was a game I positively loved as a kid in the mid-80s. It was fast-paced but easy to learn, and the levels could be deceptively complex; I don’t know that I was aware of it at the time, but I think now that it was this brain-flexing quality that I liked best. And, as an added bonus, the game came with a level editor — for a long time the only such game editor I knew about.
Anyway, I’m not sure what I’ve been doing lately to make me think about the game this morning, but visions of burying robots “alive” by digging holes in the ground with a laser were nevertheless in my mind when I sat down for office hours today.
So I did a Google search.
To my joy (and slight surprise), Lode Runner actually has an article on Wikipedia. Even better, there are at least two sites where you can download copies of the old games: here and here.
I’m not saying I’ve downloaded them, and I’m not saying you should, but … it’s Lode Runner!
Another Student Publication
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on February 2nd, 2010
Another of my freshmen students has had his essay accepted for publication in the Lesser Squawk.
Congratulations, Michael Nicholas!
Updated C.V.
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on January 29th, 2010
I realized today that my online C.V. was distressingly out of date. So I’ve uploaded a new copy that includes forthcoming papers and work in progress (like Brunanburh).
It’s not exciting reading.
Google Presentations and Tolkien Lectures
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on January 28th, 2010
I spent a good couple of hours this afternoon building the next couple of lectures for my Tolkien class. It’s been interesting. Partly because it’s Tolkien, of course, but also because I’m doing the slides using Google Presentations instead of PowerPoint. I’d frankly grown tired of being forced to remember my thumbdrive every day; better to just have the slides sitting in my GMe cloud (I should trademark that).
Anyway, I have to admit that I’m pretty impressed with Presentations overall. Not as fancy as PowerPoint, but for my needs it’s almost entirely adequate.
Except, well, there’s a couple of things I don’t like. Foremost among them are the sharing options. I can’t seem to figure out a way to save a presentation such that folks can’t just open the thing up and copy my notes out of it.
Here’s the situation. A number of my students would like to have access to the slides at home, mostly for personal studying, though a few want to pass them along to family and friends who are trying to follow along with my class from a distance. (By the way, that doesn’t ever seem to happen much when I teach Chaucer.) I have no problem with such a thing on principle, but at the same time I don’t want people to take what are essentially my lecture notes and then redistribute them as if they were their own.
What I need is a “locked down” slide presentation, and Google Presentations just doesn’t seem to have it.
So sorry, students and back-home-followers. No distributing of slides unless someone can show me a solution.
