I’ve set up a webcam again to help with research­ing my Thesis topic. The cam will only be live while I’m at the library and only avail­able through Yahoo! Messenger.

The goal is not to use these expe­ri­ences as a direct part of my thesis. Instead I’m trying the webcam to assist me in form­ing inter­view ques­tions and explo­ration paths.

So if you’re inter­est in chat­ting with a hot, fully dressed, grad stu­dent at the library feel free to look me up: rockOn_Matt. I promise I won’t ever appear as a popup in your browser.

This may be old news. I came across a cool little web ap that has a Gojira (that Godzilla for all you round eyes) style mon­ster do battle with tanks and planes with your web page as a backdrop.

For exam­ple

• Oh No! They trash my page

• Then head over to LJC

Give it a shot, append you’re favorite web address (includ­ing the “http://”) to this url:

http://​bun​ny​hero​labs.​com/​d​h​t​m​l​/​m​o​n​s​t​e​r​.​p​h​p?ref=

In other news, I’m fight­ing a cold. Stu­dent Health has informed me that it’s a virus and I just have to wait it out. The prob­lem is that it’s reek­ing havoc with both my sleep­ing pat­terns and con­cen­tra­tion. Nei­ther I can afford to screw with. On the plus side, if noth­ing else, it’s allowed me to catch up on some read­ing for plea­sure. Since text books typ­i­cally require too much focus, they’re not the best solu­tion for sleep­less nights. Instead I’ve been work­ing on my back­log of other books. I just fin­ished Neil Gaiman’s Cora­line. My goal is to start a book log here when I have a moment so I can keep track of what I’ve read.

To begin to tell this sordid story of things that shouldn’t be seen, I need to first set the tone:

It’s cold here. Not nec­es­sar­ily super cold, like sub zero, but cold none the less.

Good, now that’s estab­lished, on to the story. I left the Reg a little before five today in hopes of catch­ing a $1 latte at the Divin­ity School Coffee Shop. It’s a Friday tra­di­tion here at the U of C and one I take full advan­tage of when­ever I can. On my walk through the first quad I notice some­thing strange:

Lots of people lined up on either side of the quad, form­ing a cor­ri­dor of sorts. I get a little fur­ther and notice this:

I can’t say whether it was NBC or Tele­mu­ndo who had sent a camera crew to the U of C. Curi­ous as to what might be going on I asked one of the people what was up. They said it was The Polar Bear Run.

“Polar Bear Run… What’s that?” I replied.

“Part of the Winterfest”

“Winter what?”

“Oh… You must be a grad student… HERE THEY COME”

And then they came:

Fifty or more stu­dents. Mainly male with a spat­ter­ing of females in there. All run­ning. All miss­ing clothes. Some all of them… burr…

And the first thing that ran through my mind is: I need to blog about this… Cell Phone Camera, AWAY!

quick aside on ethics: the only reason I pho­tographed this was because I knew that the camera wouldn’t have enough res­o­lu­tion to cap­ture faces. Beyond that, this was clearly a public event and there­fore the people waived a lot of their rights by par­tic­i­pat­ing. And besides, they’ll all be shown on Tele­mu­ndo anyway.

So appar­ently, there’s a Win­ter­fest going on. It’s the type of thing they don’t tell the grad stu­dents about )we’re too busy study­ing). And this Polar Bear thing has been going on since 1983.

Anyway… What can I say. I’m scarred. Espe­cially after watch­ing some of the people do som­er­saults. Let’s just put it this way… Cold weather is not a friend to the naked.

On the road­trip from Chicago to Rochester I hap­pened upon the NPR pro­gram Speak­ing of Faith and heard an inter­view with Martin Marty, a Lutheran the­olo­gian and an instruc­tor here at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago. As part of the inter­view he quoted Rein­hold Niebuhr, a famed the­olo­gian and the writer of The Seren­ity Prayer. It’s been stuck in my head for a while and I thought I’d share. Thoughts? Reflections?

Noth­ing that is worth doing can be achieved in our life­time; there­fore, we must be saved by hope.

Noth­ing which is true, or beau­ti­ful, or good, makes com­plete sense in any imme­di­ate con­text of his­tory; there­fore, we must be saved by faith.

Noth­ing we do, how­ever vir­tu­ous, could be accom­plished alone; there­fore, we must be saved by love.

No vir­tu­ous act is quite as vir­tu­ous from the stand­point of our friend or foe as it is from our own stand­point; there­fore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

- Rein­hold Niebuhr

One of the aspects of my pro­gram is that I’m only allowed to offi­cially take three classes a quar­ter. In the pre­ced­ing post I ref­er­enced the fact that I’m actu­ally sit­ting in on five classes, three taken for grades and two audited. Which ever classes I audit will not make it on to my tran­script, as I don’t receive a grade in them. So part of what I have to do is decide which classes will look the best on my tran­script (in the event I decide to go for a PhD).

Which leads me to a switch that I’m making a little late in the process. Orig­i­nally my three were going to be:

• Lan­guage in Cul­ture II (aka Metaprag­mat­ics: the revenge)

• Crowds and Publics
• Rewrit­ing the Past: Memory, remem­brance and Memorial

How­ever, I’m going to be switch­ing the third slot to Social Psy­chol­ogy. In part I think it’s because I’m net­ting out some­where in the space between Anthro­pol­ogy and Social Psy­chol­ogy. If that’s the case, then it’s more impor­tant for me to have the Social Psych on my tran­script. Also Rewrit­ing the Past, while useful for my inter­est in memory cre­ation (which ties back to an inter­est in the gen­er­a­tion of per­sonal his­to­ries, which in turn ties back to Kodak), has thus far been a bit of a clunker. It’s focus­ing heav­ily on psy­cho­analy­sis. I have a lot of issues with the appli­ca­tion of psy­cho­analy­sis to social (read as group) phe­nom­e­non as it really seems a tool geared for indi­vid­ual analy­sis. And so, right now, that class seems to be built on some dubi­ous assumptions.

Things are a little hectic here in the windy city. Grr.

The temp has dropped from “cold” to “damn.” It’s our hope that it won’t go down to “fuck.” Need­less to say, I’ve gotten soft. You would think after years of doing the quar­ter mile at RIT I’d be ready for the walk to campus. No such luck. How­ever, word is that Rochester is get­ting buried with snow as I type this… so I will com­plain no further.

Classes are good. Here’s the offi­cial break­down of my winter quarter:

Monday & Fri­days – Read­ing and Thesis Work

Tues­days & Thursdays:

Social Psy­chol­ogy

9.00am – 10.20am

This course exam­ines social psy­cho­log­i­cal theory and research based on both clas­sic and con­tem­po­rary con­tri­bu­tions. Among the major topics exam­ined are con­for­mity and deviance, the attitude-​change process, social role and per­son­al­ity, social cog­ni­tion, and polit­i­cal psy­chol­ogy. J. Cacioppo, Winter.

Lan­guage in Cul­ture II

11.30am – 1.20pm

This two-​quarter course presents the major issues in lin­guis­tics of anthro­po­log­i­cal inter­est. Among topics dis­cussed in the first half of the sequence are the formal struc­ture of semi­otic sys­tems, the ethno­graph­i­cally cru­cial incor­po­ra­tion of lin­guis­tic forms into cul­tural sys­tems, and the meth­ods for empir­i­cal inves­ti­ga­tion of “functional” semi­otic struc­ture and his­tory. The second half of the sequence takes up basic con­cepts in soci­olin­guis­tics and their cri­tique, lin­guis­tic analy­sis of publics, per­for­mance and ritual, and lan­guage ide­olo­gies, among other topics. M. Sil­ver­stein, Autumn; S. Gal, Winter.

Rewrit­ing the Past: Nar­ra­tive, Ritual, and Mon­u­ment.

1.30pm – 3.00pm

This course focuses on the manner in which we make use of the past, the per­sonal past, and the col­lec­tive past, as well as the place of social and his­tor­i­cal change in retelling and rewrit­ing life-​history and his­tory. We begin with a dis­cus­sion of memory, con­cep­tions of the per­sonal and his­toric past, and such related issues as nos­tal­gia, mourn­ing, and the sig­nif­i­cance of com­mem­o­ra­tion in mon­u­ment and ritual. We explore these issues in topics that include twentieth-​century war memo­ri­als, the Viet­nam Vet­er­ans Memo­r­ial, high school and col­lege reunions, the Holocaust’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion in con­tem­po­rary Euro­pean soci­ety, the con­struc­tion of the Israeli national tra­di­tion, and the con­struc­tion of Abra­ham Lin­coln as an Amer­i­can story of loss and renewal. B. Cohler, P. Homans. Winter, 2005. (B)

The Little Red School­house (Aca­d­e­mic and Pro­fes­sional Writ­ing).

3.00pm – 5.00pm Thursdays

This course teaches the skills needed to write clear and coher­ent expos­i­tory prose and to edit the writ­ing of others. The course con­sists of weekly lec­tures on Thurs­days, imme­di­ately fol­lowed by tuto­ri­als address­ing the issues in the lec­ture. On Tues­days, stu­dents dis­cuss short weekly papers in two-​hour tuto­ri­als con­sist­ing of seven stu­dents and a tutor. Stu­dents may replace the last three papers with a longer paper and, with the con­sent of rel­e­vant fac­ulty, write it in con­junc­tion with another class or as part of the senior project. Mate­ri­als fee $20. L. McEner­ney, K. Cochran, T. Weiner. Winter, Spring.

Wednes­days:

Crowds and Publics

9.30am – 12.30pm

There isn’t cur­rently a write up for this…

So thats about it for the moment. I’ll have more stuff tomorrow.

In the five years I was involved with kodak.com’s bird­cam, I never once saw one of the Pere­grines actu­ally catch prey. It’s some­thing I’ve always wanted to see, but always seemed to miss by a few moments.

This after­noon I watched as a large bird flew into a tree here on campus. I stared at it for a few moments think­ing “Wow… that’s a big pigeon.” Then my brain kicked in and I real­ized I was star­ing at a hawk. Not able to iden­tify by myself, I called Drea, who is an expert at these things. Slowly I edged to the bottom of the tree it was in as I described it’s fea­tures to her.

Sud­denly it took off, flew into the ivy cov­ered wall of a build­ing no more than ten feet away, and light­ing fast, emerged with a small bird in its talons!

With total dis­re­gard to snow and fellow pedes­tri­ans, I chase the hawk to a nearby fire escape and watch as it tears into it’s dinner, feath­ers flying every­where. All the while I’m relay­ing a descrip­tion to Drea. She suc­cess­fully ID’d it as a Cooper’s Hawk.

So I’ve finally seen a raptor take prey in the wild. While it wasn’t a pere­grine, its still a cool start. My great regret… no dig­i­tal camera to take a pic­ture. I need to get one. I keep look­ing at the Kodak DX7590… I’m a com­pany man, what can I say. Hey guys (you know who you are), any chance of a price drop in the near future?