Mayor Mike, we need to talk.

I wasn’t happy about the third term thing, I thought it was a little beneath you actually, but I understood.  There was the financial crisis and you always fought for gun control and Christine Quinn seemed really really into it so I thought, “what the hell” and shrugged it off.  I know, I know I’m a lazy citizen, but after 8 years of basically being hysterical all the time and marching at everything I just didn’t have the energy to fight on this one.

And then you messed with the fireworks.

I didn’t move to Greenpoint for the perogis.  I moved to Greenpoint so I could stand on my roof every 4th of July and have the best seat in the house.  I know that you have nothing to do with the fireworks committee.  You don’t sit around your desk in the days leading up to the 4th picking out flag pins for your lapel and making phone calls to make sure those stupid smiley face fireworks are actually going to perform their job and make a smile.  I understand that.  But if you’re going to flagrantly indulge in chop-shop democracy the very least you could do is take some time out of your billionaire schedule and put the fireworks between two actual boroughs of the city of New York and not between us and…it hurts to say it…New Jersey.  The coast of New Jersey is just bunch of NYC ex-pats who wanted cheaper rent anyways – they’re turncoats – that’s why we shame them.  You can’t just steal Brooklyn’s fireworks and give it to a bunch of people who have bigger, cheaper apartments in a whole other state.  Their reward is there on earth, ours is supposed to be in the heavens.

Not that my 4th was terrible, I spent it in a hammock at a bar-b-que in Fort Greene sipping whiskey, but I’m still mad.

Blooooooooooooogggggggsssssss!

I don’t know what happened this week but we managed to summon all of these long dormant blogs out of the ground. Joseph Ugoretz @jugoretz at Prestidigitation had a lovely post asking whether or not we’ve yet to understand the capacity of the recorded lecture.  For an excellent example of the potential of the medium Joseph linked to David Harvey’s latest:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOP2V_np2c0[/youtube]

The animation is certainly more compelling than the TED format, but I have mixed feelings about what it takes to make something like the Harvey lecture possible.  I’m glad that a lecture of all things put some animators to work, but to what extent can we expect professors with a long view of their lecture to also be production crews?  How do you slip something like animators across a department chair’s desks?

Pedagogy was also on Benjamin Miller’s @benmiller314 mind this week.  Majoring in Meta made an appearance on the blog roll with a slightly neurotic look at whether meta-lecturing was instructive or just driving students crazy.  I had to admire the candor of one of Ben’s students who basically told him to make a decision, but lolz aside, I think Ben’s on the mark.   You don’t exactly get a ‘how to teach’ course with every masters and PhD.   More to the point,  on a good day the classroom isn’t just a person who knows something telling others who don’t, it’s a bunch of people in a room learning something new together.  Teaching on the go facilitates that and can bring you to some unexpected places.  That’s the real secret knowledge of the professor.

Adam Wandt @awandt did some investigative live blogging for us and discovered that ‘death grip’ has plagued iPhones well before the newest one.  Not that it matters to the tech-mob I guess, I was at the Apple store on 5th Ave this weekend and the only death grip that counted was the one you could get on an employee.   I have to say though, Adam, I think you have bigger problems than reception…

How can you read everything backwards?

Aaron Kendall @Akendall checked back in this week from Iceland.  Still no sword…yet…but some nice pictures from over yonder.  This week on the island our hero and team went digging around some farm land.  Then John Locke flipped out and turned into smoke.  I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I still miss it.  Apparently the lake near where they were ate away the midden and dashed any chances for some interesting finds.  I feel like if I was an archeologist I would be constantly stressed out because apparently this sort thing is a persistent problem.  I can barely cope when I can’t find the other sock so digging holes all day and then finding nothing usable would break my heart.  Not to nag but you promised us some video!

Michael Smith  @MSmith said he’d make a post a week and the guy is serious!  This week we got Physical Chemistry, a tract about relationships, or atoms, or science yoga.   I suck at physics.  It’s ok, I know that.  I can talk your ear off about gender construction or mid century shifts in theology but come at me with wave/particle stuff and you can almost see the cartoon birds orbiting my head.  That being said, if someone had just taught me physics through art there’s no telling.  I think you’re an attic’s worth of old art projects away from a syllabus.

To wrap things up Tony Picciano @Apicciano caught Maureen Dowd getting all sentimental on the 4th and encouraging us to let our “freakin’ flag fly”  I’m not real sure what Maureen had in mind, but I’m gonna head to the park and read some more David Harvey.