Day: August 5, 2015

Life is too short to be content with commonplace ideas and philosophies society bombards us with. What use is being called Homo sapiens, “the thinking man,” if we refrain from using every bit of time we have left to enhance our meditating faculties? So in the interest of the purely rational mind and for the sake of posterity, we have compiled a list of intellectual tasks and mental exercises you can perform to expand your mind:

1. Start reading serious books. — Stephen Hawking didn’t become Stephen Hawking by reading Spider-Man, and Ayn Rand didn’t come up with Objectivism by immersing herself in sleazy romance novels! Chuck out every non-serious, fun, and emotional book or reading material you have in your shelves and start collecting those leather-bound tome-like ones without any pictures. If the font is smaller than size 8, that’s a good sign you’re in the right direction. Burn…

The photos in this post are mine, from my visit to Poland in late May and early June. The full set, annotated and viewable as a slideshow, is available here. I have provided English-language links where I could, but much of the information I used is only available in Polish. I marked those links with an asterisk, to save you a click if you do not speak the language.

The Polish-Soviet Friendship (officially, Brothership-in-Arms) Monument in Legnica was built in 1951*. It stands in the Słowiański Square, right in the city center. Two soldiers, one Polish and one Soviet, shake hands while a little girl held by the Pole embraces both of them. Poland, invaded by Germany and the Soviet Union acting in agreement, then devastated in the conflict between them, occupied and plundered by both even as its soldiers fought on every front they could find, finally…

I visited M&Ms World in Leicester Square this Tuesday, for the first time in rather a long time, but to be honest with you I’m not sure why they bother calling it M&Ms World at all anymore. The whole thing is just Minions.

As many of you will know, I’ve thought and written quite extensively about the M&Ms store in the past. From the moment I first saw the M&Ms store, in October 2011, I was completely fascinated with it. Posing as an amusingly left-field attempt to market a hard-shelled chocolate candy, the M&Ms store in fact represented the attempt to replicate the entire world, in M&Ms form. Aside from the sweet itself, you could buy anything at all in the M&Ms store, filtered and distorted through the prism of the five M&Ms character-candies: not just food but clothing; domestic appliances; farming equipment; all of the most terrible engines…

This is not a typical blog piece, though nothing about me is typical, so it fits appropriately.

I have been hesitant to write anything about my life that is deeply personal, because that requires an incredible willingness on behalf of the writer to be vulnerable and honest. However, I am always up for a challenge.

I’m 9 or 10 years old. I’ve snuck into my parents’ bedroom and am quietly walking across their carpet, praying that I don’t make a sound. I open their closet and find the brown metal box. My heart is pounding, hands shaking. I crouch down, balancing on the balls of my feet, ready to jump up and escape at the potential first creak of the stairs. Silence. So far so good. I lift the top up slowly. It doesn’t betray me by squeaking. I’m grateful. My little fingers search through the vanilla colored tabs labeled…

About once a month, I get asked by a colleague or friend for the syllabus I used to teach my seminar on the Graphic Novel at Amherst. Included below is a list of the texts that I used to teach students. In that seminar I allowed optional creative exercises and finals, and that led to me teaching tutorials in the making of comics, which led to me advising two graphic novel theses to summa honors. I’m very proud of those students, who were both also awarded the English Department’s prize for best thesis. Amherst’s English department was very generous and supportive in the teaching I did there throughout, and I’m incredibly grateful for the hard work of all of my students.

I taught the class as an experiment, even an expedition of a kind, and so it was never the same every time. I began teaching it because more graphic novels…

Watching social media more or less incessantly as I have been over the last few days – instead of working or feeding my children or acknowledging brief but important everyday moments of physical affection from my partner – I’ve seen, as you surely have, that everyone is furious about a thing.  This thing really has got goats and stuck in craws in every corner of the globe. It’s been trending for days and hardly anyone’s feed is free of comment on the subject.  Politicians and celebrities have weighed in with their opinions, and seventy-four badly-realised parody accounts based on this thing were registered by midnight Pacific Time last night.

But ask yourself this: why? Why are they furious about this thing when there is another thing that I believe they should be much more furious about?  The thing that I believe they should be furious about is so much more…

My 3 Day Quote Challenge – Day 2

1. To be or not to be? That is the question.” ~ William Shakespeare
2. “I live here now, and my responsibility is in this world now. I deal with natural laws. This is my work here on earth.” ~ Albert Einstein
3. “Perhaps those impulses must come from scientists in the tradition of Galileo, Kepler and Newton. In spite of failures and persecutions, these men devoted their lives to proving that the universe is a single entity, in which, I believe, a humanized God has no place.” ~ Albert Einstein

With gratitude and thankfulness to my Lord Jesus Christ and to https:https://kavitakhanvilkar.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/3-day-quote-challenge-day-1///kavitakhanvilkar.wordpress.com/2015/06/15/3-day-quote-challenge-day-1/ to nominate me for this challenge. It is an experimentation with words to inspire me.

The rules are:

1. Post your favorite quotes or your own quotes for 3 days in a row.
2. Thank the person who nominated you.
3. Pass it…