Miscellany

Noodling is now legal in Georgia! If you don't know what it is, there is an entertaining documentary about it here. Basically, it involves catching catfish with your bare hands by sticking your hands into underwater alcoves where catfish hangout. Unfortunately, many other things hang out there as well (snapping turtles, beavers, water moccasins). Quite a few noodlers are sans digits. My wife's grandfather once told me about he used to do it when he was young (though he called it something else). I didn't quite believe him until I saw the documentary.

My son is still working on his conception of the past. So far, everything in the past is referred to as "yesterday". It doesn't matter if it was yesterday or a year ago, to him, it was "yesterday". He recently took a step forward in his understanding. He said about something that we did last summer, "We did that two yesterdays?"

Our local paper had an article about the 25th anniversary of Pac-Man on Wednesday. It quoted Ian Bogost. Ian is a teacher of Video Game Rhetoric and Criticism at Georgia Tech. I can't decide if having a teacher of Video Game Rhetoric and Criticism is incredibly cool or simply disturbing. One of the things he said about Pac-Man, "it has the dramatic tension of you being the hunter and the hunted." Personally, the game appealed to the obsessive compulsive in each of us. I just had to clear that screen, each and every dot.

It looks like I will be a full-time English teacher next year. I don't know how I feel about that. I have loved teaching history and have become pretty good at it. I also come off two years as the interim dean of men (I have some good stories to share about that). It shall be a very different year.

Peace