Category — General

Higher Learning in France Clings to Its Old Ways – New York Times:

In a speech at the Sorbonne in late April after the labor law was rescinded, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin pledged “a new pact between the university and the French people.”

Mr. de Villepin, a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, the grandest of the grandes écoles, promised more money and more flexibility, saying that as in the United States, a student with a master’s degree in philosophy should be able to become a financial analyst.

When a student asked him to explain how he proposed to do that, Mr. de Villepin had no concrete answer. Instead he talked about the “happiness of the dog that leaves its kennel.”

But flexibility is not at all the tradition in France, where students are put on fixed career tracks at an early age.

“We are caught in a world of limits where there’s no such thing as the self-made man,” said Claire de la Vigne, a graduate of Nanterre who is now doing graduate work at the much more prestigious Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. “We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible. Our guide is fear.”

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old learning to reproduce the old social system. much like in the u.s.

You Go, Girl:
Now there are hundreds of grown women in the hotel ballroom, eating salmon to celebrate her and her GirlSource sisters. GirlSource hires 150 poor girls a year, aged 14 to 18, mostly from the Mission, Bayview, Hunters’ Point. They’re trained—and paid—to run a chatty health information website, by girls, for girls. They design, research, write, and code the whole thing, picking up skills they can sell. “We’re not from the kind of communities where we all got the internet at home,” one explains. As part of the program, they also get tutoring, help with college applications and scholarship research, and a safe place to hang out with other girls….
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this seems like a great program.

Forget the footnotes » Blog Archive » how to run an academic department:
This is of course exactly as it should be. Academics must be cats, independent-minded and uncontrollable. They should all go off in their own respective directions looking for adventure or trouble. This is why they are academics rather than, say, accountants. Or differently put, the ones who are too easily controlled are rarely proper academics. They’ll never have an original thought in their lives and they’ll contribute nothing but boredom to what they take to be ‘the profession.’ ‘Thou shalt not do as the Dean pleases …’

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perhaps cats… but i think falling snow is more appropriate, ever try go direct 10000 snowflakes that are still in the air?

Apple – Get a Mac – Watch The TV Ads:

FrederickLane.com — 2006-04-26 Lost in MySpace:
The 2006 Hawley Foundation Lecture

Lost in MySpace:Social Networking, Student Privacy,and Self-Protection

Frederick Lane
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this looks like an interesting talk.

BOYHOOD STUDIES – Encyclopaideia:
A Working Index of Male Initiation/Passage Rituals

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and you thought boys had it simple…..

marcus vick – Google News :
Marcus Vick, younger brother of Michael Vick who ran afoul of the law while getting kicked out of Virginia Tech, was not drafted at all

so i went to get some groceries today and they had the flowers out front for sale. i am not one to really pursue the confinement of flowers, but clearly others are. so i thought…. what must the world be like to be a person who really desires to own flowers, to grow them…. is that world experience different than mine, where i prefer to find flowers and witness them as part of the landscape. i realize that for me to take my pleasure, i need others to take their pleasure… that i find reassuring. it is a fact about the world that i take pleasure.

supposedly, you need to have watched these movies to be movie literate. got it from phantomcity, screw kottke
102 Movies:
* 2001: A Space Odyssey
*The 400 Blows
* 8 1/2
* Aguirre, the Wrath of God
* Alien
# All About Eve
* Annie Hall
* Apocalypse Now
* Bambi
* The Battleship Potemkin
* The Best Years of Our Lives
* The Big Red One
* The Bicycle Thief
The Big Sleep
* Blade Runner
* Blowup
* Blue Velvet
* Bonnie and Clyde
Breathless
Bringing Up Baby
* Carrie
* Casablanca
* Un Chien Andalou
Children of Paradise / Les Enfants du Paradis
* Chinatown
* Citizen Kane
* A Clockwork Orange
* The Crying Game
* The Day the Earth Stood Still
Days of Heaven
* Dirty Harry
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
* Do the Right Thing
* La Dolce Vita
* Double Indemnity
* Dr. Strangelove
Duck Soup
* E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial
* Easy Rider
* The Empire Strikes Back
* The Exorcist
* Fargo
* Fight Club
* Frankenstein
The General
The Godfather, The Godfather, Part II
* Gone With the Wind
GoodFellas
* The Graduate
* Halloween
A Hard Day’s Night
Intolerance
It’s a Gift
* It’s a Wonderful Life
* Jaws
The Lady Eve
* Lawrence of Arabia
M
* Mad Max 2 / The Road Warrior
* The Maltese Falcon
* The Manchurian Candidate
* Metropolis
Modern Times
* Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Nashville
* The Night of the Hunter
* Night of the Living Dead
* North by Northwest
* Nosferatu
* On the Waterfront
* Once Upon a Time in the West
Out of the Past
Persona
* Pink Flamingos
* Psycho
* Pulp Fiction
* Rashomon
* Rear Window
* Rebel Without a Cause
Red River
Repulsion
* The Rules of the Game
* Scarface
The Scarlet Empress
* Schindler’s List
* The Searchers
* The Seven Samurai
* Singin’ in the Rain
* Some Like It Hot
A Star Is Born
A Streetcar Named Desire
* Sunset Boulevard
* Taxi Driver
* The Third Man
* Tokyo Story
* Touch of Evil
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Trouble in Paradise
* Vertigo
* West Side Story
* The Wild Bunch
* The Wizard of Oz

well, i am a little bit literate in this sense…. i note that there is no wim wenders.. i do not think anyone can be movie literate with out watching early wim wenders.

The Seattle Times: Nation & World: Lightning hits cross, kills five children:
Five Mexican children were killed when a large metal cross they were praying at was struck by lightning in central Mexico, local media reported Monday.
Five children between 9 and 16 years old died and several others suffered burns when lightning struck a white-painted metal cross set on a hill in the town of Santa Maria del Rio early on Sunday, according to two newspaper reports.
Several families had been participating in a midnight ceremony as part of a local religious festival that centers around the cross.

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makes you wonder…. zeus does not like it when you worship false idols i’d guess.