Even Bigger than bin Laden

The most significant thing to come out of the raid in Pakistan that led to the killing of Osama bin laden is not the man’s death, but the wealth of intelligence the Navy SEALs brought with them out of Abbottabad.

According to an article in Politico, the SEALs grabbed “personal computers, thumb, drives and electronic equipment” during the raid. The article goes on to say:

"They cleaned it out,” one official said. “Can you imagine what’s on Osama bin Laden’s hard drive?”

U.S. officials are about to find out. The material is being examined at a secret location in Afghanistan.

“Hundreds of people are going through it now,” an official said, adding that intelligence operatives back in Washington are very excited to find out what they have.

“It’s going to be great even if only 10 percent of it is actionable,” the official said.

Part of me hopes they find that bin Laden was a fan of “Angry Birds.”

Officially in at Columbia

Well, we're officially in at the CSPA. Here's what Alan says about our repeated invitation:

Here is the link to the workshop I will be teaching. The Columbia University people told me that the reasons they are having me come teach this summer are because I come well prepared and get really good reviews with class numbers increasing. The words they used to describe the sessions were things like innovative and attention-grabbing. They also like that we cross train and deal with small staffs. This invitation would not be possible if it were not for the team effort that goes into helping me prepare for these events. Each of you have played a key role in this and I appreciate it. When I go to these things and am successful it is only because of this team. You should all take credit for this. Thanks.

That makes us feel pretty good. Here's the link he mentions.

National Cartoonists Day

It's to surprise to my readers that I like my comic strips. And while it's true that my tastes have evolved over the years, two things have remained constant: I've always liked Peanuts, and I've always disliked Alley Oop. Not that I didn't try awfully hard as a kid to like Alley Oop. It just never caught my fancy.

It's the same with Pearls Before Swine. Really trying to like it. I come close several times, but most of the time, no, it's just Alley Oop all over again. And I can't really put my finger to why I don't much care for either of those two strips, either, though Swine's awful puns and plays on words are a big turnoff for me. Never much liked puns as a kid. Except for those that appeared in Wiley's Dictionary. Something about that disembodied, authoritative voice just made the awfulness come to life for me.

Absurdity, like this, I do like:

[He tries in vain to find a comic to fit the absurdity bill here. No luck. Almost all of my comic books are in storage because there's not enough room on the shelves for them. Next house will have lots of bookshelves. And a garage.]

There are better ones than this. Just don't have the time to find one tonight.

Two things started my love affair with comic strips: First, the Forbidden Books -- BC and Wizard of Id collections -- my brother Jeff had hidden on his bookshelf, but not well enough that his younger brothers couldn't find them. Second, "Barnaby," which my sixth grade teacher Mr. Loertscher read to us using what I recognize now as the voice of W.C. Fields as Mr. O'Malley. (It doesn't matter what any of my other elementary school teachers did or any of the stuff they tried to make us learn. My most lasting memories of school will always be of "Barnaby.") My dream one of these days is to find some "Barnaby" comic books in a thrift store. I love to dream that dream. I know they've been reprinted. But to find an original . . .

So who are my favorites today?

Well, Cul de Sac, for one. And Dilbert, for another. And the Dogs of C Kennel I rather enjoy. Overboard. Baby Blues. Yes, I'm a traditional newspaper comic strip fan. None of this magna or DC Comics or anything like that. No. They all appeal to the desire I have to feed the absurdist within.

A Washed-Up Journalist Heads, in Spirit, to CSPA

Back in April 2005, I washed my hands of newspaper journalism.

Sick to death of it I was. And even with the prospect of underemployement as a hod carrier (to be followed up by stints at call centers and Target) I was glad to be out of the profession.

I’ve grown up a bit since then. Well, a lot.

I now realize I frittered away opportunities in the field. Still, I’m happy I left. I’m enjoying my career as a technical writer and have turned my desire to write into a handful of blogs, a strong presence at Uncharted and, at last count, a 114,000-word fantasy novel that I’m in the midst of editing. Also during that time I earned a Masters degree and, through Uncharted, have become associated with people who want my input on all sorts of things, writing being only one of many. I’m also teaching an online English class at Brigham Young University-Idaho, hopefully shaping students’ minds to become better writers, or at least not to regard writing with fear and loathing. I’ve also grown closer to my wife, with whom I collaborate at Uncharted, and who is going through the same masters program I finished in 2009.

And thanks to Uncharted – more specifically, to Alan Murray, our illustrious CEO and Sith Lord – I’m kinda in a back-doorsy way getting back into journalism.

For the past two years, Alan has traveled to Columbia University’s Columbia Scholastic Press Association’s spring and fall workshops, to teach high school students there everything he knows about writing for the web, collaborating with people dispersed across the globe, and other such stuff. Now this summer they’ve asked him to come back for a full week to teach a workshop on newspaper writing for the web.

He wants me to help.

All I can say is yikes. Two rubes like us working together to present something at Columbia. He’s feeling overwhelmed. I’m feeling overwhelmed. Yet excited and challenged at the same time.

I’m sure some of my compatriots in my former field of employment would raise their eyebrows at my participation in this. No matter. I’m not the same person I was back then. I’ve changed for the better, and don’t mind saying that, though I know I’ve still got a long way to go.

So here’s a rough draft of what we’re thinking:

Tonight's Nonsequitur: Bunny in A Bunny Suit

This I Believe

NOTE: Another bit for my Foundations English class.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

I sat in the back of Mrs. Barrett’s third grade classroom, next to the bookshelf.

When I got my school work done – and sometimes even before it was finished – I’d pull a book off the shelf to read. There I found the magical worlds of Robert C. O’Brien, Marie McSwigan, Beverly Cleary, Alexander Key.

As I wondered at a new world alongside Jon O’Connor, as I tagged along in the background as Henry Huggins romped with Ribsy, as I sat beside Mrs. Frisby in the rats’ library, rapt at the story of the rats of NIMH, I decided I wanted to be a writer.

Then I promptly did nothing about it.

Oh, I did little things. A poem here, a short story there. But through several fits and starts, I never did what I set out to do, there in the back corner of Mrs. Barrett’s classroom at Lincoln Elementary.

Until 2010.

By then, I had a third-grader of my own, plus two other children. I was writing – but as a technical writer at a Department of Energy laboratory. During a lunch break in late January, however, I sat at my computer mulling the madelines of memory. I pecked out a few hundred words: two boys, bored at living in their primitive village, longing instead to climb the cliffs that ringed them in and climb toward the stars, then over and out the green pass that led to the world beyond.

Maybe, I thought, I have something.

So the next day, at lunch, I wrote some more.

Each day, it became an obsession. Write a few more hundred words about these curious boys, now departed from the only home they’ve known into a mysterious school training them to become –

I didn’t know. I kept writing, on the bus rides home, late into the night on weekends. And at lunches. Many lunches. I posted snippets of this growing story on my blog. If anyone ever read them, I didn’t know it. I knew a third-grader who was reading them. And he kept insisting, staring at those words in the ethers, that the story continue.

It did.

By January 2011, those first few hundred words turned into 114,000 words.

I’d written a novel.

It’s unpublished. It’s unedited. It’s raw. But there, in that little folder on my desktop, in that binder at home, on the thumb drives were I’ve stored it, my first novel awaits the finishing touch that may some day lead it to sit on a bookshelf in the back corner of some dusty classroom where another kid will pull it off the shelf and fall into the world I created because that third-grader who still loves the rats of NIMH told me I had to do it.

I believe, with the proper tools and motivation, one person can indeed move a mountain. Or feed the inner muse-child, staring longingly at the shelf of books not yet written.

I'm Learnding

Used under the fair use doctrine for educational purposes.

So, I have a lot to learn.

That’s no surprise. That I knew about the Ophelia Syndrome before I signed up to teach this course doesn’t necessarily mean I don’t occasionally stumble into its pitfalls. But as Lucy said to Charlie Brown in the Peanuts Christmas special, “that I recognize I have a problem means I am not too far gone.” That’s good, right?

I’ve already confessed to Tyler that I’m having a hard time adjusting to teaching this course because, from 2006 to 2009, I was taking online courses with a group of highly-motivated grad students. Now I’m on the other side of the looking-glass and see that the students I’m dealing with don’t quite have that level of motivation. Some do – don’t get me wrong there – but there are some who don’t. And it hurts to see. Not that it’s hurting me, but I hate to see them hurting themselves perhaps without recognizing it.

So what to do? Tyler’s suggestion that we study the language we use as we interact with our students is an apt one, because I’ve seen in all sorts of interactive situations – from the online courses in which I was a student, to email exchanges I have with various SMEs at work and through the sometimes contentious exchanges I have with fellow co-workers at Uncharted, a social media group I’m involved with – that it’s communication and the words we use that sometimes inflame and sometimes calm contentious situations.

This is the part where I start to sound like Uncle Rico from “Napoleon Dynamite,” as if I’m completely legit, like I’ve got all the answers. I don’t. This is just what I’m seeing as important and what I’m seeing I need to work on.

Firstly, Elder Bednar says in his presentation “Seek Learning by Faith” (I’m trying to model good citation format for my students here; gotta keep in practice), “[A]nything you or I do as an instructor that knowingly and intentionally draws attention to self – in the messages we present, in the methods we use, or in our personal demeanor – is a form of priestcraft that inhibits the teaching effectiveness of the Holy Ghost.”

Ouch. Priestcraft. You know, that’s just like, as Steve Martin says, the word ‘hemorrhoid.’ Neither is a word you want to become associated with. But as I read that portion of the article, I recognized myself in it a little. On paper like this, I’m loquacious. Logorrheic, in fact. And I’ve probably stepped on a few toes strutting about in the cockpit of language, making myself sound bigger than I am. So then I read what Elder Bednar says and I’m humbled. I’m also reminded of what one of my writing heroes said:

The intellectual life is not the only road to God, nor the safest, but we find it to be a road, and it may be the appointed road for us. Of course, it will be so only so long as we keep the impulse pure and disinterested. That is the great difficulty. As the author of the Theologia Germanicai says, we may come to love knowledge – our knowing – more than the thing known: to delight not in the exercise of our talents but in the fact that they are ours, or even in the reputation they bring us. Every success in the scholar’s life increases this danger. If it becomes irresistible, he must give up his scholarly work. The time for plucking out the right eye has arrived.

That’s what CS Lewis says in “Learning in War-Time,” a sermon he delivered in Oxford in 1939.

So between CS Lewis and Elder Bednar, I can see I’ve got some humility to learn.

So what am I doing to learn it?

Well, I’m here, virtual hat in hand, hoping to learn from the rest of you. This is my first semester teaching anything outside of Primary or Elders Quorum, so I’m green as bamboo. I’m ready to be taught.

I’m also doing a little self-exploration, thus following one of Elder Bednar’s admonitions: “Learning by faith cannot be transferred from an instructor to a student through a lecture, a demonstration, or an experiential exercise; rather, a student must exercise faith and act in order to obtain the knowledge for himself or herself.”

Here’s what I’ve found out:

Mark Canada, in “Students as Seekers in Online Courses,” offers good advice, as Tyler has already pointed out: “To help students adjust to working effectively as independent learners, professors should emphasize the pursuit of knowledge – perhaps even using words such as “seek” and “explore: -- when communicating with their online students.” I’m trying to do that – my word of the semester is “challenge.” I know each of the students I have in this section are capable of doing the work that’s being asked of them. Over the past two weeks, we’ve spent time together learning, and I’ve learned which students are the eager beavers and which ones need a bit of cajolery. Thus the challenges – dig deeper into the articles, find what you like, what you don’t agree with, and share it with the class. These challenges are calls to action – something Alan Murray, Uncharted’s president, urges us to do all the time as we try to take our creation at www.uncharted.net and turn it into a successful social media platform. We can unfurl the flags and put out the welcome mat and pay jugglers to stand at the doors, he says, but until we ask our visitors to do something – to submit a story, upload some photos, etc. – they won’t feel obliged or encouraged to do so, even if they’ve come to us of their own free will.

Note I use the word cajolery here. That’s for shorthand purposes, not meant to bear the baggage the word brings with it. One of the things I hope to emphasize with my students throughout this semester and, BYU-Idaho willing, further semesters, is that no matter their chosen major, they’ll need to be effective communicators. I plan on pointing them to a paper called “Do Scientists Understand the Public,” written by Chris Mooney for the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Mooney’s thesis is that scientists in general either need to do a better job of communicating with the public in order to convey the import of their scientific research or to solicit the help of professional communicators to do so in a way that leads the public to positive calls for action, rather than leading them to preconceived notions or knee-jerk political opinions of science because the principles haven’t been clearly communicated.

Mooney, in his paper, commends the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission as an example of a scientific agency that has “undertaken new measures to strengthen public support of its activities.” Part of that includes a careful watch that cajolery or condescension doesn’t enter into the picture. Mooney writes: “According to Janet Kotra, head of the NRC’s High-Level Waste Public Outreach Team, these steps include improving the ability of government scientists to engage with citizens in well-designed, effective public meetings. As Kotra put it at the American Academy meeting: ‘I will never forget a former colleague who said, ‘You mean, I have to dumb down my presentation for Ma and Pa Kettle?’ And of course, the answer to that is, yes, if you see it that way. But if you see it that way, I don’t want you talking to them.’”

So as I issue my challenges and calls to action, I’m trying to do it in a manner that encourages my students to act, rather than to be acted upon. “Learning by faith and from experience are two of the central features of the Father’s plan of happiness,” Elder Bednar writes. “The Savior preserved moral agency through the Atonement and made it possible for us to act and to learn by faith. Lucifer’s rebellion against the plan sought to destroy the agency of man, and his intent was that we as learners would only be acted upon.” I hope my choices – and the Spirit – help me avoid such situations.

Time's Almost Up for the Treasury of Laughter

Come the third week of May, the era of the Treasury of Laughter blog will close.

I have officially finished reading the book, written my last post and put the book back on the shelf. It’s about time – the poor book, 65 years old, isn’t in the best of shape, though my wife ran it through her book press.

And like the Cokesbury Party Blog, it kind of goes out with a whimper rather than a bang, due in part to weak end material in the book itself, and also to my desire to finish blogging this book and take a rest for a bit.

Will I find another book to blog about?

I don’t know. I’ve got a few possibilities sitting on the bookshelf. But in the meantime, I’ve started two other blogs which are a little on the neglected side, and I’ve also started teaching part-time as an English instructor at a local university. Whether or not I start another blog depends on time and desire, and both are at a low ebb at the moment. Plus, I’ve got a fantasy novel to edit and farm out to agents before the year is out. I’m swamped. And I can’t even blame Guilder for it.

Used under the fair use doctrine for commentary purposes.

Venus Flytrap Helps Me Write A Thesis Statement

NOTE: Again, something from the basic English course I'm teaching.

I have a video for you to watch – all of about 4 minutes long – that perfectly encapsulates what we’re learning this week.

This video contains a brief, snappy thesis statement that embodies everything in the “Writing a Thesis” presentation (thinking small but covering that small bit thoroughly) and expressing the idea with attitude – clearly answering the question “What do you want your readers to know?”

Here’s the thesis statement:

I can give you the basics of the atom in two minutes.

And here’s the video. It’s a clip from the television show “WKRP in Cincinnati,” which I watched a lot as a kid. Yes, I am old.

Used under the fair use doctrine for educational purposes.

As you’re watching, consider these questions (taken from the “Showing vs. Telling” presentation):

• How does Venus Flytrap make his details do useful work?
• What description does he include?
• How does he let dialogue do the showing, rather than him doing the telling?
• How does he use lists, repetition, and spatial relationships to support his telling?
• And finally – How in the end does his showing help him support his thesis?

As CS Lewis advises: “Let me taste for myself and you’ll have no need to tell me how I should react to the flavor.” Venus Flytrap, in describing the basics of the atom, shows his reluctant pupil everything he needs to know about the structure of the atom in a way that let his pupil taste for himself, rather than being told to react to the flavor.

As you listen to and read the “This I Believe” segments assigned this week and prepare to write your own thesis statement, please keep these questions in mind. As you read and listen, draw out how the authors rely on detail, description, dialogue, repetition, lists, and other elements to show, rather than tell, why they believe what they believe.

Ding-Dong, bin Laden's Dead

So Osama bin Laden is dead.

Buried at sea, with the body handled “per Islamic tradition,” according to the news. Don’t quite sure what that means, but the government has made pains to ensure that was communicated clearly. (Apparently, it has to do with the Muslim belief that a body must be buried within a day of death. The burial at sea, I assume, has to do with US desires that his body not be exhumed and venerated among radicals.)

His death, of course, will be denied by those who supported him, and by others. Per CNN:

One resident in the city of Lahore said Monday she was stunned to hear bin Laden was in the country.

"But was it really him?" the woman said.

A senior national security official told CNN that officials had multiple confirmations that the body was bin Laden's, saying they had the "ability to run images of the body and the face."

That’s a refrain, I’m sure, we’ll hear more and more often as time passes. Some so-called photo experts are already claiming bin Laden's "death" photo is a fake. UPDATE: The deniers have their first A-lister: Cindy Sheehan. And there are things like this, with Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood -- a major force behind that country's revolution earlier this spring -- condemning the bin Laden "assassination." So the circle keeps a-comin' as we all knew it would.

Nonetheless, a victory for the United States after ten years and two wars and a lot of death, not the least of which are the 3,000 or so souls who died in New York City, Alexandria, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on Sept. 11, 2001.

President Obama, of course, was jubilant.

And this time, it’s our turn to cheer in the streets.

Per Time magazine, former President George W. Bush had this to say of the news:

"The fight against terror goes on, but tonight America has sent an unmistakable message: No matter how long it takes, justice will be done."

And maybe Richard Thompson has an explanation as to how he was able to elude capture for so long.

Then there's this guy, Abbottabad resident and IT wonk Sohaib Athar, who live-tweeted the raid on bin Laden's compound without knowing what was going on. Instant celebrity for him, the poor sap.