You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
This makes me sad (and feel exceptionally square).
What troubles me most is…how smug Dante is. He “see[s] where [he’s] vulnerable to ethical scrutiny” but it took forty. eight.¹ paragraphs to get there.
It might be too easy to cherry-pick the rejected independent study as the straw that broke this writer-to-be’s back, giving license to embark on a “oh yeah? Well, watch this, motherfuckers” career, but that undeserved swagger must have started there, no?
“Say what you want about me, but I am not the reason your students cheat.” Well, no, but hey, way to be part of the solution!
And now I’m going to go wait for the UPS guy to bring my copy of “The Copyeditor’s Handbook”.
¹ Dude, I counted.
(Source: givemesomethingtoread)
Sledgehammer and Whore (via DF)
COP: You need to go to your office and see if anything’s been taken. See if a crime has been committed. Then call us and we’ll come out there.
ME: People are fucking in my office. In the middle of the night. For money. Without my permission. Certainly there’s a crime there. And it’s a brand new Ikea leather couch. I would say the couch’s innocence has been taken if nothing else.
COP: You need to go up there and see.
ME: I’m scared.
COP: It’s Larchmont, sir. It’s safe.
ME: I’m gonna beg to differ.
Cracking me up: “it’s Larchmont, sir” might be my new verbal eye roll.
Can JK Rowling write more non-fiction, please? It’s not that I don’t love the HP series, duh, it’s that “The single mother’s manifesto” (via Jezebel and Kim) is quite good and I should like to read more things written in her way. Would you look into that? Merci.
Read the whole article, but herein lies my favorite bit:
I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. The main one was that I wanted my children to grow up where I grew up, to have proper roots in a culture as old and magnificent as Britain’s; to be citizens, with everything that implies, of a real country, not free-floating ex-pats, living in the limbo of some tax haven and associating only with the children of similarly greedy tax exiles.
A second reason, however, was that I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. On the available evidence, I suspect that it is Lord Ashcroft’s idea of being a mug.
Fantastic. Not only for teaching me 2 new words (scarper! also mug as eye-rolling slang) but also for putting her money where her mouth is. I love that.
…it can be hard to accept that what our hero actually needs is to have everything taken away, be it by fire, flood, divorce or zombie uprising.
Burn it down, John August (via)
“A new view: is this the real Shaksepeare?”
What annoys me about the article accompanying the portrait is this:
Also, the story of the painting - known as the Cobbe portrait - once again raises questions about Shakespeare’s sexuality. Was he more than just good friends with the man who commissioned the painting, his patron the Earl of Southampton?
Does it really once again raise questions? What is the story of the Cobbe portrait? You can’t link to another Guardian article about it? Or even a Wikipedia article? Sure, I can do the grunt work, but you’re the one writing the story and waving this flag around, not me.
A one-sentence summary that gets the Cobbe story wrong would be better than bringing it up out of context, in the middle of the article, and leaving the gun unfired by Act 3.
Bah.
