Imagine an institution that meets the ideals of public higher education: call it Public Good U. What does this institution look like, who does it serve, how is it funded and governed, and what service does it return to the community?
SAVE THE DATE!
Public Good U: Strengthening the Case for Public Higher Education
February 7-9, 2025
Albany, New York
Join us for a groundbreaking national conference exploring the vital role of public higher education as a public good in the 21st century. This timely event will bring together educators, academic administrators, policy makers, and business leaders to address the challenges and opportunities facing public higher education institutions, students, faculty, and staff.
Conference Highlights:
- Welcome Remarks: SUNY Chancellor John B. King and CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez
- Keynote Conversation: Davarian Baldwin (Author, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower) and Sara Goldrick-Rab (Author, Paying the Price and Reinventing Financial Aid), facilitated by Cathy Davidson (Author, The New Education and co-author, The New College Classroom)
- Panel Discussion: state university system heads from across the nation on current issues in public higher education, facilitated by Chancellors King and Matos Rodríguez
- Closing Address: the view from the New York State capitol on the value of public higher education
Conference Tracks:
1. Democracy in America: Educating Citizens Equitably
2. The New College-Educated Workforce
3. Research for the Public Good: Creativity, Innovation, and Impact for the 21st Century
4. Reimagining Town/Gown Relations: Community Building, Civic Engagement, and Economic Development
5. Perennial Issues in Urban Public Higher Education: Lessons From the Past, Tools for the Future
6. What Should the State Provide? New Public Good U Foundations and Funding Models
Organized by:
SUNY University Faculty Senate, SUNY Faculty Council of Community Colleges, SUNY System Administration, and CUNY University Faculty Senate
I know it's Masters week, but what better time to let the world know that I'm going to be teaching a summer course on Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson from May 28 through June 28 at SUNY Fredonia?
Here's how I've been pitching it on campus.
Summer Session I
Bring on the "Ne(a/i)ls":
Bruce Neal Simon Will Be Teaching Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson
ENGL 427 Major Writers: Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson
During Summer Session I, we will examine a sample of works from the major fantasy fiction writer and the major science fiction writer of their generation: Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson. We will start by pairing some shorter works that made the writers' early reputations (for instance, Gaiman's Sandman: Season of Mists and Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" from Some Remarks). We will then pair Gaiman's (and Terry Pratchett's) Good Omens with Stephenson's Snow Crash as hugely popular and influential experiments in narrative, humor, and apocalypse. Finally, we will pair Gaiman's American Gods with Stephenson's Anathem as mature and major novels. If we have the time (and are completely insane), we will also try to pack in their most recent novels, Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Stephenson's Reamde--you know, for fun (these novels will be optional purchases)!
We will consider such questions as what makes a writer "major"? how do these very different writers speak to each other, to their own times, and to us? what connections and contrasts can we find between their characters and settings, characteristic themes and figures, central beliefs and values, writing styles and narrative strategies, and literary and political projects?
This course fulfills the "major author course" requirement for undergraduates majoring in English or English Adolescence Education.
[Note to my regular readers who come here for women's golf coverage: I'm airing Mel Brooks's 1974 film Blazing Saddles tonight as part of SUNY Fredonia's American Studies film series "Myths of the American West," so decided to share a draft of my opening comments here at Mostly Harmless (which is, after all, "for fun"). I'm aware of the 5-car collision that has lead to my favorite golfer Ai Miyazato withdrawing from this week's LPGA event (and onechan's favorite Paula Creamer being a likely WD candidate) and obviously wish them and everyone else involved in it a full and speedy recovery.]
[Note to my non-regular readers who are coming here after watching Blazing Saddles (or missing it): Hope you enjoy this post and are curious enough after reading it to browse around for other posts here that you may find interesting!]
I was four years old when Blazing Saddles was first released in American theaters and until Shannon McRae--the director of American Studies at SUNY Fredonia and organizer of the program's film series "Myths of the American West"--took seriously my half-joking suggestion to include it in the series and invited me to introduce it, I had never seen it in its entirety until this month. In a semester when I'm teaching American Identities, Introduction to African American Literature and Culture, and Critical Reading, I'm particularly pleased to take Shannon up on her kind offer, and offer a few comments as a new viewer of a movie that's been well-known (even to me) for decades, comments that will hopefully be as useful to students in my classes this semester as everyone else who braved the rains to make it out here tonight.
Growing up, I put Blazing Saddles in the mental category of comedies too raw for me to watch, a remarkably capacious category that in the '70s and too far into the '80s included everything from Monty Python to Mad magazine to Saturday Night Live to just about every famous stand-up comedian of the time. If this reference helps people place where I was at, probably Benny Hill was the rawest thing I got access to before graduate school. Yes, I grew up in a small town in central NY and failed to take advantage of 2nd grade in Palo Alto and 7th grade in Chapel Hill. Nevertheless, I was obsessed with everything comical and comics-al. In high school I started a cartoon series called The Gray Area that, despite its being far too derivative of The Far Side, was seen, nay loved, by regular readers of the Pennysaver and other fine local publications for far too many weeks. Me, I loved everything from Gilligan's Island to Scooby Doo, from Diff'rent Strokes to The Facts of Life, from Benson to Newhart, from Doctor Who to The Greatest American Hero, from Airplane! to Ghostbusters, from The Muppet Show to The Tracey Ullman Show, from Tom and Jerry to Rocky and Bullwinkle (in reruns, duh) to Calvin and Hobbes to Mork and Mindy, from any DC comic Ambush Bug appeared in (even though I was almost exclusively a Marvel fan) to the animated version of The Tick. Sure, I hated the Smurfs and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but otherwise I was pretty easy to please. And I was a fan of The Simpsons before The Simpsons was The Simpsons, man! (It goes without saying from the title of this blog what my favorite was, though!)
All of which is to say that when I go to grad school in the early 1990s I was perfectly primed to understand and appreciate what many still misunderstand and denigrate even today as a French theoretical import: postmodernism. As someone who saw The Simpsons parody of the end of The Graduate long before I ever saw The Graduate, who loved it when Beavis and Butt-head were watching a Johnny Cash video and decided it was gangsta rap, and who came of age in a hip hop culture rife with allusion and remixing and pastiche, I didn't have to think twice about Jean-Francois Lyotard's notion of "incredulity toward metanarratives" as a core characteristic of postmodernism.
So it's all too easy and obvious now for me to look back at Blazing Saddles and see it as yet another exemplar of American postmodernism. It's certainly not an original point to make, as a quick google search will show you (I recommend posts by Mark Bourne and Mike Sutton on this aspect of the movie). But what is originality, anyway? Just another stinkin' metanarrative--right, JFL? Perhaps it's slightly more original to claim that Mel Brooks and Monty Python were engaged in a transatlantic comedic one-ups-man-ship that was perfectly postmodern. In the same way that Brooks and his co-writers, including Richard Pryor, were playing with myths of the American west and poking fun at founding narratives of the modern United States, Monty Python was taking on English legends of the Holy Grail and western icons of Christianity--and at roughly the same time. Check me on this. And, as you watch Blazing Saddles tonight, consider some of the debates over postmodernism that occupied so many western intellectuals in the last third of the 20th century: is postmodernism all sound and fury, signifying nothing? is it, in the final analysis, the laugh track of late capitalism? are its politics of race and gender and sexuality and [fill in the blank] reactionary, liberatory, laughable, nostalgic, or what? is postmodernism a thing of the past, and if so, how do we react to it today (and what comes after that post-?) if not, if we are still living in and with postmodernism, what does Blazing Saddles compare to in contemporary and recent culture?
There's so much more to be said--about what light Blazing Saddles may shed on black-Jewish relations in the late civil rights era, for instance--but I think it ought to wait until after the movie. Don't you?
I got to Locust Hill yesterday a little before 4 pm and after checking out the driving range and practice putting green and checking in at the media center, it wasn't until about 4:45 that I was able to catch up with Mika Miyazato's pro-am group as they closed out the front 9. As I was making my way to the 6th fairway, where I figured Mikan's fivesome woyld be, I got to see just how much more comfortable Mi Hyun Kim looked on the golf course than last year (in a word: very!), just how funny Laura Diaz is (see previous parenthetical comment), just how intimidating the new look of the 18th hole is (ditto), just how much of a star Patty Sheehan is in Rochester (ditto), just how great Natalie Gulbis looks in person (ditto), just how long Brittany Lincicome and A.J. Eathorne are off the tee as lefties (ditto), just how tough even simple little run-shots and lag putts are on the very firm and fast greens (ditto), and just how laid-back Ya Ni Tseng is during pro-ams (ditto). I'll do separate posts on what I noticed about Mikan and the 6th through 9th holes (which I had never actually walked in their entirety), what I heard from Ya Ni Tseng and Suzann Pettersen about how they're preparing for competition this week, and what I'm wondering about heading into the start of the tournament tomorrow--not to mention my usual tournament preview/predictions/pairing post--but I want to close out this one with a few observations and anecdotes.
Access, Access, Access
I know everyone who attends a professional golf tournament comes away impressed by how in the thick of things the spectators are. A brief sampling of idle thoughts as I was wandering the grounds yesterday should show I'm no different: "Oh, that was Michelle Wie." "Is that Lexi Thompson finishing up there on 18? Yep." "There's Amy Yang again." Today I hung out on the driving range until the rain drove me to the media tent and I saw Morgan Pressel, Juli Inkster, Pat Hurst, and Belen Mozo, among others. The only comparable experience to attending an LPGA event I've ever really had is attending academic conferences as a grad student and realizing the scholars whose work I'd been admiring and wrestling with for years were actual people.
Kids, Kids, Kids
The cuteness factor at LPGA events is not to be dismissed. Maybe it was because I was a little anxious about leaving onechan and imoto with my mom and dad (I know, I know, for all of 24 hours!), but I couldn't help but notice every little girl's autograph-hunting tactics and every baby or toddler I passed. I'm not saying it was a large number, as it was late in the afternoon on Tuesday, but they certainly made up a decent proportion of the spectators. It was fun trotting out my rusty Japanese for the befuddlement and amusement of a 3-year-old boy (who 1st held up 5 fingers, then 4, as he replied "san sai" to my "nan sai desuka?"--yeah, he's 3) and his older sisters (the eldest of whom must have been about 10 and at times was busting out an impressive downswing with a stick on a tree trunk to the right of the par-3 7th hole's green).
But the funniest thing I saw came after Mikan had finished her round, while she was being interviewed behind the 9th green by a contingent from the Japanese media. All of a sudden, I heard a toddler softly calling out, "Mami, mami!" and quickly saw that he was being wheeled toward us in a stroller from about 50 yards away. It was pretty clear the reporters knew whose kid he was, as they easily communicated to his caregiver that Mikan wasn't the woman he was looking for, who was likely finishing up the back pretty soon. It wasn't until about an hour later that I figured out who the toddler was when I saw him reunited with his mom: Mi Hyun Kim's son Ye Sung! When I first heard and saw him, I had in passing thought, "wouldn't it be cool if he was..." but quickly dismissed the possibility. Turns out my guess had been right! I'm hoping I get a chance this morning to follow up on last year's interview with her about returning to the tour as a new mom. But I can report her son is looking very healthy. And much bigger than the year-and-ahalf-plus he is!
Practice, Practice, Practice
I hung out at the putting green for more than an hour after Mikan had finished her round, just observing how she and the other players there approached preparing for greens that to me looked like they were significantly quicker than last year (approaching scary fast). I caught the tail end of Ya Ni Tseng and Kyeong Bae's practice sessions, witnessed how veterans like Leta Lindley and Pat Hurst shot the breeze and tuned their strokes (including a lesson for Hurst from none other than Rosie Jones!), and got a sense of how much Cristie Kerr is juggling (she left a couple bottles of wine for Ya Ni, practiced uphill 3-foot sliders and delicate downhill 10-footers, talked to a club rep, and left for a wine tasting she would be hosting, all in the space of less than a half-hour) these days. I was ready to call it quits around 7:30 pm when Mikan finally took off (after being on the course for what must have been 8 to 10 hours!), but as I was passing the driving range on the way to the media lot, I noticed the only player still there was Suzann Pettersen. She was working on 3/4 wedges with a coach and her caddie, discussing something very technical about her grip (super-strong, with her right palm practically underneath the club face, so to speak) and wrist-hinging at the top of her backswing and through her downswing that I was too far away to overhear the details of. My impression at a distance as she grinded away at these barely visible changes was that I was witnessing a true virtuoso honing her craft. The bugs were out in force by the time she had had enough and it was after 8 pm, but she was gracious enough to walk and talk with me as we took the tunnel underneath Jefferson road and headed uphill towards the player parking lot by the clubhouse. More on that conversation later, but what I took away from watching these pros work on their 80 yards and in games for hours is how much focused work it takes to shave thousandths or even hundredths of a stroke off your putts per green in regulation rate and putting average or inches or even feet off your average distance from the pin on approach shots.
Speaking of which, the rain is slowing down, so I'm going to lug the laptop around the back 9 to see how the overnight storm's downpour has been absorbed by the course. Be back soon!
[Update 1 (8:48 am): Well, that was quick. I took one look at the weather map and decided that discretion is the better form of valor, at least for the next hour.]
Back in the day, Mostly Harmless had an expansive definition of "fun" (as its perpetual tag line, "for fun," and long links list over there on the left remind me every time I visit the site), which included science fiction, fantasy, anime, music, tv, films, theory, and politics, as well as golf. Fortunately, I've got a couple of academic/pop culture blogs, sf@SF and American Identities, that allow me to sound off on most of those topics when inspiration hits me and I don't feel like cross-posting it here. More important, though, they allow me to showcase some of the work my students have been doing in my courses.
Well, the time has come for my Fantasy Fiction students to start sharing their response essays with the world (or that portion of it that makes it to sf@SF!). And that's where my Mostly Harmless regulars come in: I'm asking you all to point your own intertubey (and other) networks at the most interesting essays from my students this semester. I think you'll see from the 1st post that their topics, views, and writing will be worth your time!
Consider for a moment the following thought experiment: what if Michelle Wie had been the player to kick off the LPGA season with back-to-back wins for the 1st time in 44 years, instead of Ai Miyazato? Wouldn't we have been treated to breathless speculation on Golf Channel (including on-line streaming video from Golf Central) on her odds of doing it, expanded tv coverage of the HSBC two weekends ago, endless arguments over the significance of her feat, and top billing for her on every sports highlight show, sports page, and sports site for a couple of days, at least, all as a prelude to the media rush to Okinawa to follow her every move in this past week's attempt to make the JLPGA opener her 3rd worldwide win in a row?
So why not for Miyazato? She's at least as big a global star in women's golf as Wie, plus she already has 18 wins on major tours to her credit. After her HSBC win, she moved up to #3 in the world, only .01 points behind Ji-Yai Shin and within striking range of Lorena Ochoa. Plus, she was competing against Shin, Momoko Ueda, Sakura Yokomine, and other top 50 players in the JLPGA's debut this week, so even though she had trouble getting the ball in the hole and finished T7, behind Sun Ju Ahn, Shinobu Moromizato, and Chie Arimura, she's likely to make up even more ground on Ochoa when the new Rolex Rankings are released today. I'm certainly not the only one to have predicted this level of success. Of those participating in the 2010 LPGA Prognostication Derby, Ron Sirak anticipated the worst finish for her (10th), I of course foresaw the best (1st), while there was a 4th, 2 5ths, a 7th, and a 9th from everyone in between. While two wins in a row from her is a hotter start than even I expected, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that Miyazato has joined the LPGA's elite. So why is she being concern-trolled for being unable to win in North America thus far in her career? Why are Hound Dog and Jason Sobel the only golf writers or bloggers I know of to really take her devote a paragraph or more in the last week or two to her 3 LPGA wins in the last 8 months? seriously? [Update (3/9/10, 5:12 am): Little rewrite there to acknowledge that of course the usual suspects are taking her accomplishments seriously! Bill Jempty wrote, "Miyazato has come out blazing. Can she challenge for #1? I think so." Tim Maitland, who predicted her 2009 breakthrough, has been following her closely ever since. But why so few outside the usual suspects? And why so many mistakes in what they produced?] And how in the world did Hunter Mahan getting his 2nd career win get pitched as a bigger story anywhere in the world than what Miyazato accomplished two Sundays ago in Singapore?
Yes, I said "anywhere"--even in the U.S. Of course in Japan Miyazato is neck-and-neck with Ryo Ishikawa, Daisuke Takahashi, and Mao Asada, among others, for most popular athlete in the country. Where does she stand in the U.S.? Let's see: every major golf site relied on wire reports of her HSBC victory and in the week after it there was a grand total of three hastily-put-together career overviews (by Sal Johnson of Golf Observer and Beth Ann Baldry of Golfweek--scroll down in my Ai-sama victory post to updates 34 and 35 for my assessment of them--as well as a halfway decent one by Larry Bohannan). Even an online golf magazine you might expect better of, Global Golf Post, had Miyazato sharing a page with Laura Davies (good company, but Davies was playing in the minor leagues that week, even if she did get worldwide win #73), in the back half of this week's issue--behind a nice full-page profile of Shin by Lewine Mair. Seems like there's a "no woman allowed in the 1st 10 pages" rule at Global Golf Post.
This despite the fact that the LPGA's tournament previews, notes, and interviews have gotten sharper in the Mike Whan era, that there's been a concerted effort to take advantage of opportunities in Asia and to promote Asian stars, and that even the golf industry seems to be waking up, as evidenced by Titleist's new LPGA ad that was getting serious air time during the HSBC (but has not yet made it onto teh youtubes). So why is the U.S. golfy media so far behind the curve, particularly when it comes to coverage of the new generations on tour? Why do we see more profiles of and promotion of the LPGA's Asian-American stars like Michelle Wie, Christina Kim, Vicky Hurst, and Jane Park--and even of Futures Tour prospects like Tiffany Joh and Hannah Yun--than of Asian stars like Miyazato, Shin, Ya Ni Tseng, In-Kyung Kim, Na Yeon Choi, Eun-Hee Ji, and Momoko Ueda? Consider the golfy media's relatively equal embrace of both Asian-Americans like Anthony Kim, Tadd Fujikawa, and Rickie Fowler and of Asians like Ryo Ishikawa and Danny Lee. As I asked over at Citizen of Somewhere Else yesterday on a very different topic last week, "what's going on?" Is it that hard to talk to English-speaking caddies or agents? To hire translators for interviews with players or to get background from Asian reporters? To read reporting from Asia in translation?
I don't think this is an individual failing, a breakdown in journalistic integrity, or the natural outcome of nationalism or impersonal market forces. It's not often that I get to cite books by academics here, but Colleen Lye's 2005 study America's Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893-1945 is remarkably relevant to any analysis of what responses to the LPGA reveal about race, ethnicity, gender, and class in America today. Even though Lye focuses on a very different time period than our own, she shows how relevant anxieties from even progressive and liberal leaders and writers from then are to us now. Consider the following passage:
Through observations of shifts in naturalism's representation of Asiatic figures to exemplify the promise and the peril of free market expansion, my study seeks to reveal one systematic way in which the critical potential for revealing the damages wrought by globalization in the American context has been short-circuited....
The remedy and exacerbation posed by America's Asia to the crisis of the closing of the frontier entwined the emergence of Asiatic racial form with the intensification of commodity relations and capital's global expansion. The legal designation of Asian immigrants as "aliens ineligible to citizenship" reflected the freighting of Asiatic racial form with an abiding tension between U.S. national interests and capital's transnational movement, between the exceptionalist dream of the identity of nation and capital logic and the nightmare of their nonidentity. (8, 9)
Lye's focus on the "initial textual presence of Asiatic racial form as an economic trope" (11) and argument that late-19th- and early-20th-century Americans displaced their anxieties over capitalism and globalization onto Asians of their own imagining is entirely relevant to our own time, when the LPGA has been featured more in the business section than the sports section, when Americans and Europeans on tour are individualized and "the Koreans" are generally treated en masse and as a mass, and when the presence of Asians on the LPGA is sensationalized either as nightmare or dream. Lye again:
To the extent that American universality depends upon the possibility of assimilation, there is always the danger of finding aliens in our midst, or the wholesale possibility of American takeover by aliens....
In a fifty-year period, a vision of California as a post-frontier about to be engulfed by coolie hordes and Oriental despotism is succeeded by visions of a Pacific Rim utopia, where the local and the global could be made happily coextensive. (8, 11)
The Bivens regime spent too much time worrying about the former, while the Whan regime is working to make the latter a reality. Here's a suggestion: helping American media and fans get to know Asian players as individuals is only part of the solution. (A big part, to be sure, as the closest the lazy American media has come up with anything interesting thus for for Miyazato is that she's a "rock star" in Japan who at first "lost her confidence" on coming to America.) Encouraging American fans and media to embrace globalization is also only part of the solution. (Although highlighting more cross-continent friendships among the players as well as the economic benefits to the tour and its sponsors of exposure in Asia, as well as in Europe and America, wouldn't be a bad idea.) The task is much larger than that: defusing American anxieties that capitalism may be passing them by and that Americans can no longer succeed against global competition and trying to interrupt the historical short-circuit that makes American images of Asia and Asians a symbol for economic transformation. They already realize this can't be done simply by massively promoting American stars (and thus adding to the media and fan pressure on them).
One small start might be pairing Americans of Asian descent with their lesser-known counterparts who were born in Asia--and this could extend more generally between Asian and non-Asian players. The Lorena Ochoa-Ai Miyazato connection has already been established; Suzann Pettersen and Ya Ni Tseng could become a regular pairing, as could Cristie Kerr and Song-Hee Kim, Angela Stanford and Sun Young Yoo, Michelle Wie and Ji-Yai Shin, Paula Creamer (when she's healthy) and In-Kyung Kim, Karrie Webb and Amy Yang, Vicky Hurst and Momoko Ueda, Christina Kim and Jee Young Lee, Jane Park and Na Yeon Choi, Morgan Pressel and Eun-Hee Ji, Mina Harigae and Mika Miyazato, and so on. The point is to put players who combine in interesting ways together on a fairly regular basis, either by game, level of accomplishment or promise, or personality/style. Having tv commentators, golf journalists, and everyday fans on the course and in front of their tv sets getting used to seeing Asians and non-Asians showcasing their games and interacting without the world coming to an end could add up to one giant leap for America.
[Update 1 (3/9/10, 5:21 am): The new Titleist commercial is up on LPGA.com--oh, wait, wrong one....]
[Update 2 (5:33 am): This is not the one I saw during the HSBC--a lot more Asians on that one!
Anyone know where I can find the one aired during the Asian swing?]
[Update 3 (3/10/10, 3:00 am): Here's Stephanie Wei on Momoko Ueda--it's the latest installment in her Know Your Asians feature.]
Just a little public service announcement for those who come to Mostly Harmless looking for stuff on sf, anime, and other aspects of American and transnational popular culture: I've got students in both my undergraduate classes this semester signing up as co-authors on the sf@SF blog, which is now on "science fiction--and more--at SUNY Fredonia." I've just posted a brief observation on the odd choice of commercials that run during Onegai My Melody on veoh.com and Ouran High School Host Club on youtube.com. We should have several posts per week up from a variety of writers this semester. Check it out when you get a chance!
With this semester looking to be the most intense in my career and onechan going back today to her full Saturday schedule of Japanese school in the morning and violin lessons in the early afternoon--plus being less than 2 weeks away from starting kindergarten--it's looking like I won't be able to give women's golf the kind of close attention I was able to do pretty consistently over the summer. So for the Safeway Classic, I'm trying a littleexperiment in micro-not-quite-live-blogging--but via blogger rather than twitter. This way, you can get a sense of my reactions to things that stand out to me during the round and I can focus in my recap posts on what I missed and the larger patterns of each day. I know it involves a little more clicking for those who just want to start with my recap posts, so please do let me know what you think of the scrolling vs. clicking issue.
In any case, the day 1 leaderboard is something worth waking up early for. How awesome is it to see Seon Hwa Lee (34-31) and Moira Dunn (35-32) joining Ai-sama (33-34) in the thick of things? Pretty awesome for someone like me, I'll tell you what! (Even the 70 by Momoko Ueda was exciting--she finished her round on the front with a birdie-birdie-eagle run to do it. Plus, In-Kyung Kim's 74 could have been much worse--she couldn't completely erase the double she made on each side, but 2 birdies in her 1st 3 holes on the back and 2 in her last 4 on the front to close out her day give me some hope for her.) And how about that 66 from Stacy Prammanasudh and 68 from Jeong Jang? This leaderboard was like a flashback to the middle of the decade--in a good way. I'd love to see JJ and Stacy P rejoin the game's elite, Moira be a top 40 player again, Lee finally to mount a serious challenge this season to Ya Ni Tseng's career lead among the Young Guns (Tseng, by the way, had a nice comeback of her own--3 birdies in her last 4 holes on the front--for her 68), and Ai-sama to rack up more wins this season and finish as Player of the Year.
Oh, and how cool would it be for the LPGA if Jennifer Rosales, Natalie Gulbis, and Christina Kim kept shooting 68s? It's nice to welcome them back to the land o' goin' low. And that kid Michelle Wie? Watch for her! You heard it here 1st.
Speaking of Solheim Cuppers, I was pleasantly surprised to see so many of them adjusting back to the rigors of individual competition so quickly. Sure, Suzann Pettersen needed to come back from a slow start to shoot her own 68, Cristie Kerr had to settle for a 69 after a walkoff bogey on 18, Helen Alfredsson had to take a 70 after a walkoff bogey of her own on the 9th, Maria Hjorth had to accept a 70 of her own after her typical mix of birdies and bogeys, and Laura Davies (walkoff eagle), Sophie Gustafson (late birdie), and Kristy McPherson (ditto) needed comebacks for their 71s, but I expected more of a letdown from them and their peers I've already micro-not-quite-live-blogged about who shot exceptional numbers on a new course to them.
Speaking of Ghost Creek, it certainly haunted a lot of talented players. Kyeong Bae played great in Korea and Shiho Oyama played well in Japan, but they both ballooned to 78s on day 1. Brittany Lincicome, Catriona Matthew, Katherine Hull, and Hee-Won Han only did 1 better. Inbee Park had shot a 64 in Korea last week, but she opened with a 76 yesterday. Karrie Webb, Ji-Yai Shin, Morgan Pressel, and Vicky Hurst joined Inky at 74. Brittany Lang, Na Yeon Choi, Song-Hee Kim, and Amy Yang will have to fight to stay on the right side of the cut line after their opening 73s. So who knows what scoring will be like later today?
Looking forward to seeing what moving day looks like when we get back from Buffalo this afternoon. I wonder if Ai-sama's experience winning so many 54-hole events in Japan will serve her well this weekend!
[Update 1 (5:36 am): It's fun to see JamieRS and Hack stepping up to the plate. Gotta disagree with T-Joh's Emo Friday proclamation. Heck, her melody is even upbeat.]
[Update 2 (5:46 am): For those who don't mind the real micro-blogging experience that is Twitter, be sure to follow GolferWriterGuy and NiceBallz--Ghost Creek is their home turf.]
[Update 3 (6:01 am): New technology is great and all, but gotta love how the Seoul Sisters.com crew rocks the bulletin board format. Check out Go-Kimmie-Go's detailed notes on various groups, including Jee Young Lee-Inbee Park-Mika Miyazato and In-Kyung Kim-Christina Kim-Catriona Matthew. Verdant Garden followed several groups, too, and has interesting notes on Haeji Kang, Eun-Hee Ji, Soo-Yun Kang, Vicky Hurst, and others. Thanks, y'all!]
[Update 4 (6:10 am): Oh, and Alan Shipnuck's Solheim Cup piece was well worth the wait. Whereas Ron Sirak clearly mailed his in, Shipnuck found the best details to convey the drama and energy of the competition--and his writing was pitch-perfect.]
Ji-Yai Shin leads Michelle Wie by almost a 2-1 ratio in the LPGA's Rookie of the Year race. But Wie is making more birdies (4.08 per round to 3.84) and averaging more top 10s (.385 to .313) than Shin. What she really needs to do is cut into that 2-0 deficit in wins. Can she do it? Can she make the ROY race interesting?
[Update 1 (8/26/09, 3:31 am): Oh, yeah. Classes start at Stanford September 21st. Wonder if Wie can sign up for a special independent study/travel abroad course of study so she can make the Asian swing!]
I have to register a complaint with the good people who run the Futures Tour. Why, oh why, did they wait till Richmond to put my 2 favorite players on tour, Tiffany Joh and Hannah Yun, in the same pairing? And with an amateur from Russia! They go off the back at 1 pm. If I left now I could probably catch them. Too bad the start of the fall semester is right around the corner here. Oh well, at least I'll get my last round of the year in today. Might even have time to follow the real-time scoring afterwards....
[Update 1 (8/15/09, 12:28 am): Here are the 1st-round scores, results, and story (by Lisa Mickey). I was definitely better off getting in 27 holes on The Easiest Course in the World than suffering with T-Joh in person (see the comments for my results!). Yun seems to have turned a corner of late; a 72 is nothing to write home about, but she birdied her last hole to recover from some late-round hiccups. Same for Virada Nirapathpongporn; she made 3 birdies in a row early on the back to start her day and birdied 2 of her last 3 for her 70. Pernilla Lindberg (65) and Briana Vega (66) are going to be tough to catch, but if you're not in the running for the top 10, the key is to build some positive momentum toward Q-School.]
Iggy Pop is selling car insurance. Is he selling out?
While BBC puts the debate over selling out in context and MichaelBerube puts his sound bites in context, I'd just like to point out that his swinging a golf club at the end of this piece
is probably his ironic commentary on the whole debate. "You want cognitive dissonance? You can't handle cognitive dissonance!"
Speaking of wonder girls, the good people at Seoul Sisters.com have made a Futures Tour press release by Lisa Mickey introducing Jeehae Lee widely available. She's a Yale graduate who's fluent in Korean, Chinese, and English. And speaking of the Futures Tour, its members did pretty darn well at the LPGA's Q-School. Lee is only the 2nd-biggest surprise from last week, however. France's own Jeanne Cho-Hunicke, who came in next-to-last on the LPGA money list in '08 and did horribly at the FT Q-School, came out of nowhere to get Category 11 status. Lee and Cho-Hunicke will get their pick of events in '09. Good luck to them!
[Update 1 (2:41 pm): Dave Andrews has more on Lee.]
[Update 2 (5:00 pm): If Lee has a good '09, look for the Yale alumni office to come knocking on her door!]
To help out some NYU researchers by filling out their survey? And post the link (with comments closed) on your blog? Please don't do anything to bias the survey results...thanks!
Well, hang onto your hats, true believers. Berube's back!
For those who might be tempted to dig through the Mostly Harmless archives and figure out when this pop culture blog became a golf blog, I'll save you some time. You see, the seeds of MH's golfaramamania were, uh, seeded in comments over at Berube's old place. Whenever he'd take a break from his hockey blogging and golf blog, I'd always ask him, "what about the LPGA?" Eventually I figured I'd better fill that void myself. Might have been that time my prediction turned out to be right--and his? Well, not so much.
So, yeah, Michael Berube is to blame for the golf blogging I inflict on less than a hundred people a day. Putting aside the fact that that's a bigger and more regular readership than I ever got for obscure in-jokes and political satires, the only fitting punishment for him is for you to become a regular at his blog and leave him many many comments.
[Update 1 (10/3/08, 12:12 am): Yeesh, not only am I way late with this "news," now I find out I'm not even original with my title.]
[Update 2 (4:24 am): Aaargh, and I forgot to mention that Berube's bloggy return means that Annika Sorenstam will be back on the LPGA in 2011.]
I can't remember when I first heard of Hannah Yun, but she certainly got my attention with her announcement after the NCAA Championships that she was leaving the University of Florida...after her 1st year...at age 16. Normally I don't think such decisions are good ones, but I just discovered one reason she's put off the decision to turn pro for at least another year: according to a Futures Tour press release,
Yun has enrolled at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where she will be pursuing a career in illustration and animation with her first class beginning next month.
How sweet is that?! The only thing that could possibly be sweeter is if Yun knows about Mostly Harmless--and is interested in becoming a co-blogger here!
(Don't worry, Moira, Ai-chan, Seon Hwa, Momo-chan, and the gang--there's room enough for another favorite golfer here.)
It's official! Award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer NaloHopkinson will be giving a reading/lecture at SUNY Fredonia on Monday, April 21st. And she'll be making a special appearance in our Science Fiction class the following day, which we're moving to a new room to accommodate Saundra Liggins's African American literature class and any other Fredonians who want to attend.
Many thanks to the Dean of Arts and Humanities John Kijinski, the Pride Alliance, the Science Fiction Fantasy Gamers Guild, and the Mary Louise White Fund--not to mention the amazing Ms. Hopkinson herself--for making this visit possible. And to Jeffrey McMinn, Textbook Manager at SUNY Fredonia, who will have about 25 copies of her newest novel, The New Moon's Arms (which, by the way, was recently shortlisted for the Nebula and Aurora awards) and her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring (which won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1997 and recently was one of the 5 finalists among the books selected for the Canada Reads program).
Here are the details:
Monday, April 21, 4:30 pm, Thompson W101: Reading/Lecture on race in science fiction; free and open to the public
Tuesday, April 22, 2 pm, McEwen G26: Class Visit; free and open to SUNY Fredonia students, faculty, and staff
And a bit of a bio:
Born in Jamaica, and raised in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, and the U.S., Nalo Hopkinson has lived in Canada since her family moved there in 1977 when she was 16 years old. The author of four novels and two short story collections, she has branched out into essays, editing, and art in recent years.
As in a real, live, location. A building, if you will.
What is this about? Click here and ask yourself which god(s) of stupidity made me forget to cross-post that CitizenSE post here. But hey, everything happens for a reason, etc. etc. Instead of a cross-post, I have something much, much better.
Video from the Virtual Goods Summit 2007 at Stanford University. Watch it all. I haven't--yet--but Sloucho has.
Sloucho, you'll recall, is the guy too busy to blog here about some of the material we never quite got around to doing together as a ground-breaking video games studies book back in the early aughts--mostly due to mutual slackerdom. Well, since then he's straightened up and appears to be flying right. His Fantasy Football writing gig has been supplemented by a third job toiling away in Everquest 2's platinum mines. His first job? Oh, he was just named Professor of the Year there. I'm totally serious. Things are going his way. And coming. Watch the video and try to figure out how he's making more per month on his third job than I am on my first.
So my point in mentioning all this is that we don't just have a site but also potential sponsors and a stellar line-up for the video game studies summer camp idea you all were too lazy to click and read about up there in my first link. Go do it now, so you'll appreciate what I'm about to do next.
Site: Cameron University's Center for Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurial Studies.
Sponsors: Click on the link, for starters. Feel free to suggest more (or self-nominate) in comments.
OK, so they haven't officially confirmed. Heck, some of them don't even know yet that they're being recruited, or are doing a damn good impression of it. Only others we let in are close personal friends or those whose friend(s) already in can wangle a majority vote among those already in for them.
Seriously, this is going to be big. I can't believe no one has done this already. How do you patent this? Or is that trademark? Yeesh, maybe we can bring somebody in who knows something about intellectual property. Between the 2 of us, we ought to know someone.
Yeah, I said Lawton, OK, in summer 2009. You got a problem with that? Sloucho has to take advantage of his summers to do most of the heavy lifting directing an Honors Program there, so no travelling road show until we finish beta testing it on his home turf.
OK, anyone else who wants in can leave a comment or drop me a line at my super-secret bloggy email address (or any of my others--impress me with your fab research skills)....
Please excuse my tone. When I was talking about all this with the Full Metal Archivist yesterday evening, onechan came over, listened in for awhile, and interjected, "why are you laughing like a monster from Pretty Cure, daddy?" No, my laugh had nothing to do with the Powerpuff Girls CD playing rather loudly in the background. It's the possibility of never having to teach a summer course again and still being able to send both my girls to any college they want.
Curious?
[Update 3/26/08: Bill Benzon shares an article on the social networking pros of video game play. Thanks, Bill!]
