I’m happy to announce today that I’ve released my first book. It’s called The _____ of _____ By Means of Natural _____ or the _____ of Favoured _____ In the Struggle For Life: King James Version.
Basically, I wrote a PHP script that took Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and I had the script redact every word from Darwin which does not appear in the King James bible.
The resulting work is an amusing objet ‘d art. I think it says something about fundamentalism and language. Â I also hope it says something about the absurdity of creationism, and the importance of science in how we understand the world.
After J-school, I’m more convinced than ever that newspapers (ink on dead tree) are pretty much doomed, with the exception of some niches — free papers, alternative papers, hyperlocal neighborhood papers.
Even among my journalist friends, I can’t think of anyone that has an actual subscription to a dead-tree daily newspaper.
Here in the midwest, there’s a local custom of playing a beanbag-tossing game known as “Cornhole”. Â If you ever find yourself in a tailgating situation around here, you’ll see lots of people playing it. Â In fact, it’s so popular, there’s even a group called the American Cornhole Association that’ll tell you the official rules, and hosts tournaments. Â They even have a website at playcornhole.org.
So I thought of a game that could be played as a supplement to cornhole. Â I’m calling it “Kick My Balls”.
The principle is pretty simple:
You use a standard basketball and basketball hoop attached to a plywood backboard. Â The net is tied at the bottom to hold the ball. Â The ball starts out cradled in the net. Â The player kicks the ball through the bottom of the net, and tries to get it to land back in the net. Â If the player is successful, they are assigned points based on the height the ball reached. Â If the ball lands outside the net, no points are awarded, and the player has to run after and retrieve the ball.
The diagram is self-explanatory. I suggest painting the background with caricatures of unpopular political figures
P.S., since this is the second invention I’ve posted, I’m going to make a new category for them.
So the Medill project came to a successful conclusion.
I’m now a Master of Science in Journalism.
I’m still looking for some full time work, but I’ve managed to get a couple of freelance projects that will keep me fed and housed for a couple of months. Â I’ll post more about them as they get closer to completion.
So, additional freelance projects seem like a good idea at this point. Â It seems wise to split my job-search time between full time positions and additional freelance gigs, at least for the time being.
And it’s almost X-mas. Â Hope you’re having a good one!
As many of you are probably aware, I’ve spent the last couple of months working on the Interactive Innovation Project for Fall 2009. Â This is the capstone project of my year at Medill.
The project has been about obituaries in print and online, and about how obituaries drive readership to local media outlets.
One of the two major pieces of the project was to produce a report on the state of obituaries in America these days. Â I had a pretty large hand in this aspect of the project, as I was one of the primary authors of the report. Â I’m happy to say that today, that report has been released.
“To better understand the nature of our project and the role of Legacy.com in today’s obituary publishing industry, the Fall 2009 Interactive Innovation Project team at the Medill School of Journalism has been diligently researching the history and trends of American obituary writing. We have summarized our findings in a report that we have released this morning. In this report, we examine the nature of the contemporary American obituary, a phenomenon that constitutes an important content category for modern newspapers – and, increasingly, for publishers in other media.”
