on ismism - part i

[post divided retroactively]

in prepping for my paper on literary theory, i'm studying modernism. it's taking me a long time to wrap my head around all the different isms, and here are some wonderful little bits i've uncovered. a diligent reader may notice that some of my references are to wikipedia. "hey! that's not a good source!" one might very well exclaim. maybe not, but it's an excellent source of sources. and it has some useful summaries.

compare:
• baudelaire's politics with bon jovi's self image
• the fourth freedom with high school carnage
• and freud's state of mind while coming up with those theories

oh, and lenin on anti-semitism (another popular ism, may have had some impact on behaviour during the second world war) made up for reading a version of jewish / egyptian history that denied us hebrews had *ever* been slaves in egypt. this man isn't entirely wrong; but he seems to forget that herodotus wasn't the most reliable of sources, and that the israelites wandered about in the desert for forty years. deserts have a habit of not holding evidence as well as other types of terrain.

and in almost related news: why the suggestion that drug use in arts departments shouldn't be met with antagonism (there were wild accusations made about freud, then about freud's students), and whether or not i'm allowed to express my personal theories in a course being set up for the next semester.

---wednesday:

after posting, i crept over to pg's and slept like the dead. getting out of bed was tough, and i lumbered home to get my gear and head off to campus. i wore my new trapper beanie (something like this), and when an idiot taxi driver honked right next to me i automatically made tapping motions to where my ear would be visible had i not been wearing it. my attempt to make it clearer scored me a look that informed me that i'd made the same impression as obelix tapping his head saying "these romans are crazy".

i made those well-known last-minute on-campus pre-print corrections, and then my paper was served. what a great sensation! i handed in with one of the other in potentia master's students, and our chat on the way out was interesting. i paid wr a visit, still stuck in a freudian (huh, my phone auto-corrects to "fraud") loop...

i ran into sorter on my way into the office, and we walked and talked to pick up seeds and lunch. while waiting for my delicious schnitzel sandwich, some guy in the street held his hand on the hooter for twenty second intervals for at least ten minutes. it was driving everyone crazy, but as my manager said: not the area where you really want to say something. i considered calling the police, but they'd probably just laugh at me :(

---having learned a very serious lesson about code reviews, i sat with -someone and had a really productive session. i have learned to articulate the use for comments: they're not just for making the code easily readable. they do that too. but they more importantly provide the only convenient way - for both programmer and reviewer - to know if the code does what it's supposed to do.

"i didn't comment this because it's so obvious what it does"
"why does it do that?"
"ummm... lemme see now..."

no. none of that. by the time we were done his code was readable and we knew exactly what he had to fix and why. there were a couple of i-can-hear-angels-singing moments when he launched into a commenting frenzy pre-emptively, and i *think* that means he got the message. i taught him a few other tricks along the way, but that was the one that counts.

[continued...]