Category Archives: humour

humour

Banned books, yes, but banned fonts …?

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Banned books we know about, but what’s the deal with censored fonts?

Jan Tschichold was born in 1902 and later was known for his support of the “new typography”, a design style inspired by the Bauhaus school and Russian Constructivists. Now, we’re talking about font here – letters on a page. Can you believe that this man, due to his passionate advocacy of this new typography, was actually arrested in 1933, and he and his wife were imprisoned by the Nazis for creating “un-German” typography. They later emigrated to Switzerland, and Tschichold couldn’t stand the new typography any more because of its Nazi associations, so he switched to classical design. Tschichold became design director for Penguin Books.

This story appealed to my love of the absurd.

Here’s a Short biography of Tschichold (requires Flash)

Jason Santa Maria blogs about Tschichold.
Here’s a facetious summary of Tschichold in Twenty Faces.

If you’re interested, you can read more about Tschichold’s life here

humour

Charlie bit me

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OBlgSz8sSM&hl=en&fs=1]

This is so cute. I love 4-year old’s lack of resentment towards his little brother; watch his face after the pain dies down. And Charlie chuckling.

Here’s an interview with the boys and their parents some time later, showing copycat videos.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kV8PbItDFS4&hl=en&fs=1]

humour, Web 2.0

I blog, you blog …

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What’s the linguistic deal with new words, such as ‘blog’, ‘wiki’, ‘twitter’?
Do they get conjugated? I blog, you blog, he/she/it blogs, we blog, you (formal/plural) blog, they blog
Future tense: I will twitter
Subjunctive: If I were wikid, I’d ….
Conditional tense: If I twitter hard, I will …
Imperative: Twitter more!
Are they declined? Do they have a gender?
Can we use them as a past participle? I have blogged; she has twittered
as a negative? unblogged; misblog
as an adjective? blogging; twittery
as an adverb? wikilly; twittly
profanity? blognation!
derivatives? blogophobe; wikimania; twitteration
And are they translated into other languages or just ‘borrowed’?

Please add your own Web 2.0 grammar suggestions and we may end up with a dictionary.

Education, humour, Web 2.0

What is learning?

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[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqGhIftKrno&hl=en&fs=1]

Further to my last point, I’d like to ask anyone out there what their definition of learning is. Without thinking for too long, in my opinion it should be a transparent process, one that could be mapped. It might read like this: wondering, confusion, asking questions, organising the answers into categories, processing this data, asking more questions, sharing that information and receiving responses, debating these, synthesizing and evaluating results, and so on. Learning from mistakes is a big one. Fear of making a mistake or obsession with the right answer impedes learning. Poor Wile. E Coyote never did learn from his mistakes.

I would love to hear other people’s definitions of learning.

Education, humour, Teacher librarians

Harold Pinter

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“In a career attended by a great deal of dramatic criticism one of the most interesting – and indeed acute – critical questions I’ve ever heard was when I was introduced to a young woman and her six-year-old son. The woman looked down to her son and said: ‘This man is a very good writer.’ The little boy looked at me and then at his mother and said: ‘Can he do a W?'”

I could say that this is an allegorical anecdote which illustrates the perception of a ‘good teacher librarian’ in the eyes of the school community, but that would be silly, because it’s actually a quote by the playwright, Harold Pinter.

Children's books, Education, humour, Teacher librarians

Censorship

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Banned Books Week Banner

Originally uploaded by DML East Branch

If you click on the photo of the banned books banner, you’ll be directed to its Flickr home, and you’ll be able to hover over each book to discover what it is. An interesting theme – banned books.

Censorship. It takes me back to when, as an Australian of Russian descent, I attended a Saturday Russian language school (RS, we used to call it), during the time when our parents’ fear of Russian communism was raw. My own grandfather witnessed his father being shot at the age of six. The censorship that ensued at Russian School (RS), through the eyes of young people, took on a comical aspect. The more paranoid members of our community (am I being unkind?) decided to protect us from ‘evil’ by eliminating our exposure to all things Soviet (which means ‘council’, by the way). We spent our Saturdays drawn like moths to the flame, peering through thick black texta-covered chunks of text through the light, or trying to unstick glued pages. In most cases, our discoveries left us disappointed or confused when the forbidden words revealed themselves as ‘pioneers’ (soviet scouts) or the date of a celebration we weren’t supposed to know about. Continue reading Censorship →

humour, Web 2.0

Getting dressed in 1805

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[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/eO_4PnO8KDM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

When muttering profanities under my breath whilst trying to remember usernames and passwords for various Web 2.0 applications, I like to remind myself that, while many things have become complicated by technology of our times, there are some things that have been simplified - thankfully.