Tonight’s episode was…huh.

First act sets up the ball-busting, unsatisfiable, irrational and outraged strawfeminist, resulting in Principal Skinner’s demotion and replacement by…well, Mme. Strawfeminist herself, a character who serves as Ice Queen, Shrill Harpy, or Mushy Feel-gooder as plot requires.

Then there’s the second act, in which boyness is reduced to a grab-bag of banal, trite stereotypes and cliches about inter-masculine behavior are treated unironically as archetypes. Quelle heteronormative.

Then the third act caps it all off with Lisa realizing–wait for it–that while a girl’s lot in life may be hard, boys have it, oh! so much harder.

Does Matt Groening have script approval over such bushwa? Feh.
Does Matt

Boop!

I’m rickety, man. Rickety!

Nothing too peculiar, just the usual end-of-semester angst multiplied by the novel “last semester of grad school” factor. Oh, and there’s the “no job on the immediate horizon” thing, and the “last remnants of Will necessary to lose weight dwindling even though I’m far from acceptable” bit (which itself is complicated further by the “tension between putting myself out on the market again v/ dealing with the crush of perpetual rejection” situation).

Eep. Two more weeks, two more weeks.

The Good News: I this evening got a non-form response to my recent application for a position at UC-Irvine!

The Bad News: The response was to inform me that I had attached two copies of my resume and no copies of my references list to the e-mailed application.

The Cautiously Optimistic News: The response requested that I respond with a copy of my references attached.

I’d intended just to treat myself to an early dinner in recognition of my having gotten off four complete application packets this morning. At the restaurant, though, my (much younger, cute, but thoroughly straight) neigbor Nate drops by my table and asks if I could help him finish off his pitcher of beer. Turns out that during Happy Hours (5-9PM) domestic draft pitchers cost only like 25 cents more than single glasses.

So we drink, and order another pitcher, and then a third, and now it’s the end of the (early) evening. So much for productivity, but damn! was it fun.

We gave a quiz in Dr. Dalton’s 507 DE class last night. As TA, it was my responsibility to design the quiz.

There arose a problem in that several of the questions, worth the bulk of the quiz’s points, required reference to supplementary material. When the quiz is given locally this is no problem, as the supplements can be appended to the quiz packet as appendices. In the electronic environment in which we work, however, such is not an option.

For the previous quiz I’d tried embedding a link within the quiz text to an external document containing the supplementary material. This proved disastrous, though, when it turned out that WebCT insisted on opening the supplement inside the quiz window, which window had no nav bar and so left most students unable to figure out how to get back to the test.

(Bad, bad TA for not testing that in advance. Bad!)

I figured I would lick the problem this time by sending out the supplements in Word format to everyone’s WebCT mailbox before the quiz. I made up four docs, named the files with the same phrase used to refer to those files within the text of the quiz, and shortly after class began did the mass mailing.

What I did not do was include the unique identifier for each document within the documents themselves. So use to thinking of filename as identifier for contents, it did not even occur to me to include the identifier inside the text. Bad, bad TA.

So it turns out that, at least for many of the students’ set-ups, WebCT email truncates every downloaded filename at the first non-breaking space. Instead of downloading files named “Sample Search A” and “Sample Search B” to their desktops, then, many (most? all?) of the students ended up with files named Sample(1).doc and Sample(2).doc. With no internal signifiers of content, and as they’d downloaded all the files at once instead of opening them from their email as needed, at least half the class ended up having no idea which appendices were to be consulted in responding to each question.

It ended up being, frankly, a clusterfuck.

It wasn’t bad planning that caused disaster, I think, but bad assumptions. (Which, I guess, could actually be considered a special case of “bad planning.” Huh.) I had assumed WebCT would work like, y’know, everything else and download the files with the original names intact. I had also assumed students would open files as needed instead of all at once. I had also assumed it would be safe to rely on file names as unique identifiers.

These were all bad assumptions, and they resulted in a nightmare.

So, again: Bad, bad TA!

So let’s say I tell a patron to “log in to the Professional Development Collection database from https://library.troy.edu/databases.html .” Should I consider that sufficient, or should I instead have known I would need to say “Go to https://library.troy.edu/databases.html, scroll down to find the link that says Professional Development Collection, click on that link and provide your username and password on the page that comes up.”?

I mean, the second seems awfully patronizing to me, but could it be reasonable to assume such (what appears to me to be) a woeful lack of computer-use knowledge among typical undergraduates?

I’m sitting here at Bad Ass, having a “Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” moment. But it’s not water, water everywhere but porn monkeys, and it’s not unquenchable thirst that’s the problem but…well, you can fill in the rest.

“Nor yet a drop to drink” indeed.

At the corner store just now I found myself behind a queue of unpleasantly scruffy middle-aged redneck stereotypes. They seemed to be together and to be out of their element, this shop generally serving very pleasantly scruffy college-aged redneck and hipster-wannabe[1] stereotypes. I didn’t think much of it, just idly wondered where they were headed (or coming from–several of them were visibly intoxicated already).

On the way home I saw the last couple of them navigating their way into the Jupiter. I realized I could satisfy my idle curiosity by looking up at the club’s marquee, which I did. And I was ever so slightly sickened.

It turns out that tonight the Jupiter is hosting a sorority’s date auction. These 30- and 40-year-old bubbas are going in to bid on a night out with nubile 20-year-olds, and with their earning advantage over the appropriately aged students they’ll almost certainly have their pick.

Ick. I mean, it’s bad enough that something like a date auction exists in the first place, but…ick.

[1] I simply must write about the quality of Tuscaloosa’s hipsters one of these days. For now, let it suffice to say that most of them still think trucker caps are the height of anti-(but-not-really-)-fashion. Now, I’m not sure what genuine hipsters’ headwear of choice is these days, but I’m fairly certain it’s not the same thing it was three or four years ago.

I’m listening to this This American Life program from back before the presidential election, right, and they lead off with a discussion with this lifelong-Republican doctor who loathed everything about Bush but couldn’t bring himself to vote for Kerry. The doctor went through all the positions on which he personally disagreed with Bush, which was a buncha buncha buncha stuff, but then he said he couldn’t vote for Kerry ‘cuz Kerry was too liberal.

But! But! But! Comparing the doctor’s list of positions (which were pretty much orthogonal to the GOP platform for, say, the last 30 years) with those of Kerry, we found that the doctor was actually more liberal than the candidate he refused to vote for.

I hate people.