Archive for July, 2009
How to Handle a Down Economy:
Kevin takes on the fact that when you’re out of work, you have time to exercise more and get super fit, in a post called Funemployment … while Vee (follow her on Twitter at @vmlopez) goes to the 50 cent movies … Kristen writes of her final Tuesday deadline with the Northwest Times-Record weekly newspaper, which stopped publishing this week …
Restaurant and Food News and Reviews:
Alex of Zag, Inc. “a full-service, professionally managed student-led marketing agency based in Fort Worth,” gives us a visit, with lots of pictures, to The Love Shack hamburger place, which opened a new store this week … Lauren W. Smith has the same kind of story, but with a different writer, at her blog, Blue Eye Brown Eye. … Austin talks about a new restaurant and an old Horned Frog legend in “Old Rip” … Fort Worth Hole in the Wall is back with a review of Yogi’s bagels. I’d also like to draw attention to their cool map view of the places he’s reviewed on his site, which, unfortunately, shows he rarely eats in Southwest Fort Worth … oh well. The truth is, the Southwest area, where I live, is not actually known as a great place to find restaurants. More’s the pity. … finally, Rob has some thoughts on how to select single-cup coffee makers …
Arts and Letters
Log Cabin Village has a tale of the woes that come from trying to fix a broken hand water pump for which the parts need to be ordered from somewhere. Hand water pumps are not a high sales-volume item these days. … Kevin notes that registration for Fall Arts Goggle is now open at Fort worth South … Arts Goggle is a Fort Worth South festival offering an opportunity for musicians and artists to share their work and runs Saturday, October 3, 2009, 3:00pm-10:00pm …
Shopping
Lauren W. Smith profiles an Etsy vendor, @deargolden, who has some cool retro-70’s clothing … and Julie at Silversmyth has got sterling silver earings for unpierced ears.
Social Media and Networking
Lauren W. Smith wants to invite you to Fort Worth Co Working on August 7 in the 76107 area … they will have coffee, wi-fi, and at 5:00, drinks. The event begins at 10:30 a.m. … David has found out how you can nominate your favorite chartity for a $25,000 social media makeover …Richie says that he hates those people who fake having a twitter network, even worse than he hates twitter spammers, and then gives us advice for if you have to handle the accidental death of a VIP in your organization, as he had to last week. Streaming video of the funeral? Yes.
Strictly Personal Blogging:
You get a general meditation on the difficulty of exercise in Emily’s “Letter to Jillian Michaels,” one of those garden variety I-hate-you-I-love-you rants to your athletic trainer that can come whether the trainer meets you in RL on on a DVD … and finally, Kristen gives us a hilarious post on her first kiss; true love it was not. I can’t quite remember my first kiss. But my memory is pretty selective and I’ve probably forgotten it because I want to, and saying that alone may be enough.
Koi travel by net from their transit tank to the pond at the Fort Worth Japanese Garden
About 60 large Koi, or Japanese Ornamental Carp, were added to the Botanic Garden’s Japanese Garden’s pond system yesterday morning. The new additions, which came from Weatherford’s Clear Fork Koi, cost around $100-250 each and will hopefully live many years, somewhere between 40 and 150 depending on who you ask. The koi appeared in high-flopping good health. They came along with two catfish which were headed for the Botanic Garden’s reflecting pond.
These fish are to help replace those lost last winter, when about 100 Koi died during a water replacement procedure at the garden. Chlorinated water was poured into the ponds due to a miscommunication with the Municapal Water Department. The Water Department has pledged $23,000 to pay for the damages related to the fish die-off.
The new fish, which were each 18-20 inches long or more, travelled to the garden in a large bucket-like travel tank that nearly filled the bed of a pickup truck. After they arrived at the garden, no lack of care was shown about them getting just the water they needed. After some of the pond water was mixed with water in the ravel tank and time was allowed for them to acclimatize, the fish were transfered to the pond by workers using large nets. The fish objected but they were overruled.
Another addition of replacement Koi is planned to bring the total replaced over 100.
Review: SALVI’s Rusticatio Virginiana Conversational Latin Workshop
Charles Town, West Virginia, 2009
by Dean Cassella
Almost twenty years ago, I asked my first Latin teacher when I would be able to speak Latin. Laughing, he sardonically replied: “Not for a long time.” Year after year went by for me as an undergraduate, master’s student and finally a doctoral student in Classics. Despite having read several thousand pages of Latin literature, and having taught the language professionally for years, that magical moment that I had been waiting for, the Latin conversation, never reared its lovely head.
Well, that has now changed in a big way for me this summer, thanks to an opportunity to attend a week-long workshop designed specifically for beginning Latin speakers. Rusticatio Virginiana (that’s Latin for Virginia Country Life) is run by Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum (English: North American Institute for Living Latin Studies) SALVI an organization dedicated to the promulgation of conversational
Nancy Llewellyn is a Professor at Wyoming Catholic College and advocate of spoken Latin.
Latin in North America. The founder of SALVI, and director of the workshop was Nancy E. Llewellyn, an assistant professor of Latin at the newly formed Wyoming Catholic College. Dr. Llewellyn spent several years studying conversational Latin in Rome- ground zero, if you will- with the renowned Father Reginald Foster and Father Cleto Pavanetto, who teaches classical languages at the Pontificia Università degli Studi Salesiana. Father Pavanetto took part in the workshop, and he was one of the most charming and dedicated teachers I have ever had the privilege of meeting.
The program was held at the Claymont Mansion,an estate built by George Washington’s nephew, which currently houses workshops and conferences such as this one. The site’s isolation was ideal, because the 28 attendees were strictly enjoined not to speak anything but Latin from dawn of the second day.
Reginald Foster, of the recently formed Academia Romae Latinitatis in the Eternal City
The participants ranged from college instructors such as myself, to high school Latin teachers, graduate students, and even a few undergraduates. The common interests of all made the group quick to congeal, and I have no doubt that many lasting friendships have grown out of our week together.
Professor Llewellyn is an absolute master not only of oral Latin, but also of foreign language pedagogy. The various types of classroom exercises she had us do— my favorite was a Latin version of the game show $20,000 Pyramid — in case you’re curious, here’s a YouTube video of the original show.
were a virtual goldmine of material for teachers of Latin- or any other foreign language, for that matter. The informal after-dinner activities were among the highlights of the
David Morgan is Professor of French at Furman University, and a crack shot at spoken latin.
program. These ranged from the frivolous (e.g singing an ingeniously translated version of the Village People song YMCA- “Puer, desperare noli!”) to the high-brow. My favorite in the latter category was a discussion, led by Professor David Morgan from Furman University about the invention of the concept of the “genius” out of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. Professor Morgan, whose fluency in Latin can make one green with envy, also helps direct an oral Latin summer school for high school students at Christendom College.
Professor Llewellyn told us on the first day that large amounts of passive knowledge would rise up into our active memory as the workshop progressed. Not only can I vouch for this, but I received an instantaneous boost in my ability to write in Latin within days of beginning the workshop. I would even venture to say that my ability to read quickly has improved a bit.
All in all, the whole experience was transformational. In recent years, I have experimented with incorporating some oral work in my Latin teaching at UNT. I have met with some success in this. But since returning from the workshop, I have been able to apply my newfound skills in my own Latin workshop. The result is an astonishing 80-90% of my classes being conducted in Latin, to the great delight and benefit of my students, who are learning their verb forms and retaining vocabulary far more readily than most of my students in the past.
If you have a love of Latin and would really like to become part of the Western intellectual tradition, I urge you to enroll in one of SALVI’s (or any one of the growing number of similar workshops in the US and Europe). I promise that you will not regret it!
Review: SALVI’s Rusticatio Virginiana Conversational Latin Workshop
Charles Town, West Virginia, 2009
by Dean Cassella
Almost twenty years ago, I asked my first Latin teacher when I would be able to speak Latin. Laughing, he sardonically replied: “Not for a long time.” Year after year went by for me as an undergraduate, master’s student and finally a doctoral student in Classics. Despite having read several thousand pages of Latin literature, and having taught the language professionally for years, that magical moment that I had been waiting for, the Latin conversation, never reared its lovely head.
Well, that has now changed in a big way for me this summer, thanks to an opportunity to attend a week-long workshop designed specifically for beginning Latin speakers. Rusticatio Virginiana (that’s Latin for Virginia Country Life) is run by Septentrionale Americanum Latinitatis Vivae Institutum (English: North American Institute for Living Latin Studies) SALVI an organization dedicated to the promulgation of conversational
Nancy Llewellyn is a Professor at Wyoming Catholic College and advocate of spoken Latin.
Latin in North America. The founder of SALVI, and director of the workshop was Nancy E. Llewellyn, an assistant professor of Latin at the newly formed Wyoming Catholic College. Dr. Llewellyn spent several years studying conversational Latin in Rome- ground zero, if you will- with the renowned Father Reginald Foster and Father Cleto Pavanetto, who teaches classical languages at the Pontificia Università degli Studi Salesiana. Father Pavanetto took part in the workshop, and he was one of the most charming and dedicated teachers I have ever had the privilege of meeting.
The program was held at the Claymont Mansion,an estate built by George Washington’s nephew, which currently houses workshops and conferences such as this one. The site’s isolation was ideal, because the 28 attendees were strictly enjoined not to speak anything but Latin from dawn of the second day.
Reginald Foster, of the recently formed Academia Romae Latinitatis in the Eternal City
The participants ranged from college instructors such as myself, to high school Latin teachers, graduate students, and even a few undergraduates. The common interests of all made the group quick to congeal, and I have no doubt that many lasting friendships have grown out of our week together.
Professor Llewellyn is an absolute master not only of oral Latin, but also of foreign language pedagogy. The various types of classroom exercises she had us do— my favorite was a Latin version of the game show $20,000 Pyramid — in case you’re curious, here’s a YouTube video of the original show.
were a virtual goldmine of material for teachers of Latin- or any other foreign language, for that matter. The informal after-dinner activities were among the highlights of the
David Morgan is Professor of French at Furman University, and a crack shot at spoken latin.
program. These ranged from the frivolous (e.g singing an ingeniously translated version of the Village People song YMCA- “Puer, desperare noli!”) to the high-brow. My favorite in the latter category was a discussion, led by Professor David Morgan from Furman University about the invention of the concept of the “genius” out of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romanticism. Professor Morgan, whose fluency in Latin can make one green with envy, also helps direct an oral Latin summer school for high school students at Christendom College.
Professor Llewellyn told us on the first day that large amounts of passive knowledge would rise up into our active memory as the workshop progressed. Not only can I vouch for this, but I received an instantaneous boost in my ability to write in Latin within days of beginning the workshop. I would even venture to say that my ability to read quickly has improved a bit.
All in all, the whole experience was transformational. In recent years, I have experimented with incorporating some oral work in my Latin teaching at UNT. I have met with some success in this. But since returning from the workshop, I have been able to apply my newfound skills in my own Latin workshop. The result is an astonishing 80-90% of my classes being conducted in Latin, to the great delight and benefit of my students, who are learning their verb forms and retaining vocabulary far more readily than most of my students in the past.
If you have a love of Latin and would really like to become part of the Western intellectual tradition, I urge you to enroll in one of SALVI’s (or any one of the growing number of similar workshops in the US and Europe). I promise that you will not regret it!
My mother and I share many traits in common: we are both tall, have long hair, and watch Star Trek because the actors are attractive (with her, it’s the original Captain Kirk. For me, Trip from Enterprise. That lazy southern drawl gets me every time; the fact that he ends up with T’Pol and I secretly wish I was her is also no coincidence. It’s much easier to like a guy on screen if his female interest is someone you can stand).
We also value media with great replay value. Or, to rephrase that, both have a tendency to listen to the same music, watch the same movies, and read the same books – over and over, “ad infinitum,” as I’m sure it seems to those around us whose tastes doesn’t quite align. Some people have recently questioned my tendency to do this; they feel that a book, once read, has been exhausted of most of its value, and the same with a movie, and, though those in question will probably listen to the same music over and over, I doubt they stick a CD in the car and refrain from taking it out for six months (as my mother did with the Dixie Chick’s album Home. I can still sing along to every song on the album, half a decade later.)
Whether you can chalk this up to an intellectual tendency to dig deeper and deeper, or just sentimental attachment, it is what it is. There’s a reason I had Gone with the Wind quoted to me throughout my entire childhood – “Isn’t this generation soft and ladylike!” There’s also a reason I know the first line of Pride and Prejudice – “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a large fortune must be in want of a wife.” And, there’s a reason myself and my siblings can quote some movies nearly end to end – Toy Story, if you’re my sister and I, Billy Madison -among many others- if you’re the boys, Men in Black if you’re me about eight years ago. There is also a reason the Lake House Soundtrack by Rachel Portman has a play count of nearly a hundred on my iPod.
Why? Because we just really like the movie, book, or song. A lot.
What about you? Do you have this tendency? Maybe it’s a yes-or-no deal, but regardless, it runs in our family. From my mother and my devotion to Gone with the Wind to the kids getting a new movie and watching it three times in a row to Papa playing that Negramaro tape every time he makes pizza – it’s just our thing.
You may want to take your kids to one of these before the summer is out. So here are the places I was able to scare up that are in the basic Fort Worth area that have water slides and kids play areas with waterfalls, etc. Some are full-fledged waterparks where you pay a lot and stay all day — others are simply augmented municipal pools. There’s a park for every budget. So let’s get splashing.
NRH2O – Owned by the City of North Richland Hills (hence the name). This is a pretty spiffy waterpark, with 6 attraction-quality waterslides as well as a kid’s waterfall/pipes area, wave pool, and river. Free parking, free tubes, and concession stand. $22.99 over 48 inches, $18.99 others, and under 2 is free. Discounts for purchasing ahead on the web.
Hurricane Harbor: Run by Six Flags. This is a full size waterpark. You can buy a joint ticket for Hurricane Harbor along with Six Flags, but I wouldn’t advise it, since either of these places would take all day to see. How many slides? I couldn’t count them, but here’s a map to give you an idea. Online, get both kids and adult passes for $19.99; at the park, adults pay $24.99. Kids under two are free. Parking $10.
Water Works Park run by the City of Denton Four slides, children’s play area, river ride. $12-7 non-resident admission depending on age, with discounts available if you show up for the evening after 5.
Bedford Splash This is apparently a smaller waterpark with some kids-splash attractions and a couple of slides. But the price is definitely right: $5 adults and $4 kids.
Hawaian Falls Mansfield This looks like a pretty well developed waterpark, with lots of stuff to do. Also two people on Twitter mentioned that this was a good place to go. Here a link to the map. $19.99 adults/$13.99 kids online price.
Keller Point: Run by the City of Keller: A very advanced public pool or a very small waterpark, take your pick. There are two attraction quality slides (small, but fun) two lazy rivers and two little kids splash areas, as well as a “beach” of very shallow water for babies. Two pools, one inside and one out. Concessions. No tubes. Life jackets $2. $10 for adults, $9 for kids, non-resident.
From a Press Release by the City of Fort Worth:
Who/What:
The Charles Tandy sculpture, which was removed from downtown’s Paddock Park earlier this month, was reinstalled at its new permanent home on the TCU campus.
Where:
Grounds of Charles Tandy Hall at TCU, 2900 Lubbock St.
Why:
The relocation was endorsed by the Fort Worth Art Commission and approved by the Fort Worth City Council after Downtown Fort Worth Initiatives, Inc. recommended moving the city-owned sculpture to a smaller-scale, pedestrian-friendly site that offers historic context.
As part of a long-term agreement with TCU, the city will maintain ownership of the artwork and supervise ongoing maintenance through its public art program. The relocation of the sculpture is being funded with a grant from the Burnett Foundation.
The sculpture will be located at the entrance to Charles Tandy Hall, dedicated March 1989 as part of the Neeley School of Business at TCU. The late Charles D. Tandy (TCU ’40) was known as an entrepreneur with immense energy who laid the foundation for one of the country’s best-known electronics and computer manufacturers.
Life moves on, if slower than the metaphorical molasses in January. Biggle says she’s coming home in two weeks, which I maintain is too late to no avail. I have started a new project, a blanket, of many bright colors. I tried and failed to make headway on both the NYT and LAT crosswords. In a bit, I go to church. Becca might come out in a few weeks. I feel better most days. My stepbrothers make themselves more scarce every day it seems. The house is almost always silent, broken only a few times a day (or night) by the garage door opening and closing, feet running up and down the stairs in quick succession, the fridge opening, the shower at 8am. Then, back to silence.
I’ve been reading a great book called What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew, a sort of informal encyclopedia and dictionary about life in nineteenth century England, especially in the aristocracy and gentry, and especially as it relates to the authors of the time we read most – Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, and a handful of others. I also started The Kitchen God’s Wife, and upstairs Nicholas Nickelby, The Metamorphoses of Ovid, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and Agnes Gray wait for me to get my act together. My Biology book has been laying open on the dining room table for eons now, chastising me for not getting near.
I say my prayers on my knees, read a passage of the bible, write down my daily doings in a notebook, click off the light, finish my prayers, fall to sleep…and, after waking a few times in the night and seeing the darker hours glaring at me from my clock radio, it is morning, and the time is not so bright, having been dimmed by close proximity to the window, and I alight, and get dressed, and make the bed, and go downstairs, and pull out a bowl and spoon and carton of milk and box of cereal and, these days, carton of blueberries, and sit, and read the newspaper, and then get up, put the bowl in the sink, rinse it out…
And after finding things to do to make up the time for about thirteen hours, I’m back, and the lights are off, and my mind is wandering.
The other night at teacher training, our professor showed us a video of an anaconda eating a capybara and wanted us to learn how to give kids a chance to make non-traditional presentations using one of the “other” seven of the “eight ways of knowing.” The eight ways of knowing are:
Verbal/linguistic (the traditional one);
Logical/Mathematical;
Visual/Spatial;
Body/Kinesthetic;
Musical/Rhythmic;
Naturalistic;
Intrapersonal and
Interpersonal.
Toward this end, the instructor asked us to sign up to interpret the Anaconda material in various ways. We could create a fairly tale, do a cartoon or illustration, act the story out, create a dance based on the story, and a couple of other things. I chose, probably because of my experience teaching music, to write a song. Two classmates also joined me in doing the song approach. I had figured I could go home and get my guitar. But it turned out we were only going to use a few percussion instruments in a plastic box.
It quickly became clear that with only about 20 minutes to prepare the lesson we had to write fast. We wrote the song lyrics and chose the instruments. We polished the lyrics. Then, when there was only about 60 seconds to go, we realized our song had no melody.
“That’s okay, we’ll do it as a rap,” I said. Here, then, is the Anaconda Rap Song:
A capybara family was playing on the ground
An enemy was coming, it was big and it was round.
As they were sitting eating, just having family fun
Not one of them knew that the snake was gonna come.
Thirteen feet long and a good foot wide,
It swam underwater so they could not hide.
(now we used the “swizzling” instruments to create extra suspense)
The capybara tried to fight
But pretty soon, with one last bite
The capybara wasn’t breatin’
This was what the snake was needin’
The snake’s jaw came unwird
Afterward she was fat and tired
It was a very successful lesson, I have to say, after all. “I guess we really are elementary teachers at heart,” I thought to myself. “Only elementary teacher types could really ‘get into’ this exercise.”
There’s a little bit of kid in all adults, I suppose, and more in some of us. This morning I’m going back to class. We’re going to do a skit with stuffed animals. Yes, this is fun.
Yesterday I allowed myself (on FaceBook, of all places) to get sucked into a political discussion of the president’s healthcare efforts. Because this is a non-political site (honest) I’m not going to discuss the particulars, but basically I spent much of the morning in rather heated conversation, at the end of which I felt misunderstood, defeated, and angry. There’s no talking politics with someone who disagrees with you these days.
Why does this concern me? Because I believe we’ve become prey to a certain hardening of our belief systems and an unwillingness to question our own thinking. The country has polarized into “hard right” and “hard left” and there’s no middle ground. The worst part of the matter is the packaging of ideas — if you’re for the initiatives of one side or the other, you’re for ALL of their initiatives. You won’t need to think for yourself; all you need to do is follow the leadership and yell loudest.
I was first concerned about this type of rhetoric during the Bush administration, when I felt many of the president’s opponents were shrill and hysterical. I remember one evening when my husband told a member of the extended family “Bush is not the antichrist” and the response was to argue. I believed this type of partisan hard-lining was the province of only one party.
But I was so wrong. My son came home from a friend’s house the other day and told me, “Basically, they’re pretty sure Obama is the devil.”
At that point I had to accept: it wasn’t about a particular political party, this was the rhetoric we have come to use, and the hard-lining Americans have come to believe in. No, Bush is not the antichrist, Obama is not the devil, they are human beings. In the old days the POTUS used to get a certain measure of respect along with the office. No more.
How did this happen? I’m not sure but my husband and I just finished a book on tape by Neil Postman called Amusing ourselves to Death. In this work, back in the 80′s, the author argued that the television was effecting the way we thought and perhaps most troublingly the way we saw politics, inculcating a rhetoric where instead of discussing problems we simply called names and reviled. In the twenty-five intervening years since the book came out, political rhetoric has apparently continued going in the same direction. Our nation has slipped into being the kind of place where we can’t have a civil conversation about decisions that need to be made, instead we get angry.
Why is this a problem? Because while the man on the street shouts incoherent insults, big corporations are influencing, even controlling, the decisions in this country, such as bailouts and healthcare, in their own favor. They don’t want everyday people to be able to discuss and negotiate; they want their lobbyists to be the only people doing that.
What hope is there for this situation? Well, blogs for one thing, where we can talk more openly about problems that face us, perhaps first on a small scale (we need more and better public pools in Fort Worth, as you remember) and then growing to bigger issues. I’m hoping blogs are the antidote to the television-drenched view of reality that has polarized us into “us” and “them.” This may be an overly optimistic view, but I’ve always been an optimist.
I guess maybe FaceBook isn’t the place to talk politics. But do patronize your local blog and discus things civilly. And do consider, before you demonize the opposition, that when you do that they are going to fire right back with the same. Ultimately, I think we need negotiation, not confrontation.
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