The topic today is a "shadow scholar" who is paid to write essays for college-level courses. Completely fascinating throughout; I think I missed my calling. He got started when some frat boy friends wanted him to write papers for them, and today he makes more than $60,000 a year. Key quotables:

"I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph."

As an online-course-taking, weekly-paper-writing-machine, I can definitely sympathize with that one. He goes on:

I've read enough academic material to know that I'm not the only bullshit artist out there. I think about how Dickens got paid per word and how, as a result, Bleak House is ... well, let's be diplomatic and say exhaustive. Dickens is a role model for me.

People sometimes ask me (when they found out I did graduate school online) how I can write papers each week about different topics without going to the library. Given that I didn't go to the library in college except to print, my answer approximately mirrors this explanation with the caveat that I did use the e-library to assemble and read legit sources:

I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples...Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article...there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way.

The Shadow Scholar is quite explicit about the variety of "students" he has helped, and includes a pretty funny list of the different types of papers and assignments he has written over the years. He takes on nurses, social scientists, architects, and plenty of others. But he saves a particular vitriol for one branch of higher education:

I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents. (Future educators of America, I know who you are.)

In my earnest effort to begin posting here more frequently (since the completion of my Master's courses, still waiting on the review of my work), I decided to focus, if ever so some-what, on language and writing. I have composed two "On Language"-type columns in my head that I shall type up forthwith after moderate efforts at research (Footnote 1).

I'm also consistently reporting events, published takes, turns of phrase, and sentences to my Miss Bee, who both judiciously ignores me and comments, occasionally, in a vague fashion, while in turn concentrating on her own affairs. To her betterment. In that light, I'm moving towards a MR-esque "Best __ I Read Today" format, which I can decorate in the finest possible manner. Working within the confines of such strictures, I am parsing my reading material most delicately, and in Day One of my efforts, I am delighted to present this gem, verbatim from kottke.org:

Four 50-packs for around $115. "Whoa!" I exclaimed to my wife, "Someone out there really likes whipped cream!"

Readers, I could almost hear the eyeroll as my wife explained to this naive bumpkin that people use these canisters of compressed nitrous oxide to get high. So whoever you are, thank you for the novel experience of learning a new Urban Dictionary term from my wife.

In a most remarkable turn of events, Miss Bee came home today and mentioned the need to go to Costco, this evening, no procrastinating, It's-For-Student-Council. Standing in line with our one item, which happened to be three canisters of whipped cream....


1 According to the Magic Tree House author Mary Pope Osbourne, in her Opus #9 entitled Dolphins at Daybreak, research is roughly defined as working to find the answer to hard questions. Noted to self: drill that into students.

This is funny.

Sarah Palin on the press in this country:

"I suppose I could play their immature, unprofessional, waste-of-time game, too, by claiming these reporters and politicos are homophobe, child molesting, tax evading, anti-dentite, puppy-kicking, chain smoking porn producers … really, they are. … I've seen it myself … but I'll only give you the information off-the-record, on deep, deep background; attribute these 'facts' to an 'anonymous source' and I'll give you more."

Anti-dentite. Hmm.

A quick google search reveals that in fact the only thing that anti-dentite refers to is a Seinfeld episode (the Yada Yada, for those scoring at home). To wit:





Tip of the hat to Slate for that little gem. I miss Bushisms, but Bidenisms + Palinisms is pretty, pretty, pretty good.

I've been teaching myself rudimentary audio manipulation recently, both for school purposes as well as entertainment. I've always enjoyed making mixtapes and such, but perhaps due to the talent and prodigious output of my roommate DJ Jewels, I never did get around to learning the ropes in college.

Well, I got super-obsessed with Audacity and made a genre-bending mix that was really fun, subsequently lost all my data in an program crash, and painstakingly re-mixed it for the beginning of the school year. I felt like I learned so much, but after listening to those songs a million times each, I needed to start something else pretty quickly. Right about the time we went to Sedona, I started pulling together this epic, three-suite mix that was to start with a sample from David Axelrod's The Human Abstract, that would reappear throughout the mix as segues. Suite II was to be called A Change of Heart, and would feature female vocalists in a variety of genres, but primarily uptempo. The third movement was to be a hip hop mix based around DJ Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World, which samples the lonesome piano chords from Axelrod.

Basically, they all blew way out of proportion.

Suite I is languishing. At 36 minutes, it has run out of creative steam and I don't know what to do with it.

Suite III is still being worked on, but it's pretty well done. Clocking in at 79:20, this is a CD-R away from a good road trip. But it's not as carefully put together as...

Suite II has been re-named to Femmes fatale and teased out to feature length. Again, around 79 minutes of music, for those who still quaintly like to burn their music to CD. Perhaps more of a creative constraint than anything.

Listen up:
Femmes fatale by Bret Sikkink

The lynchpin of the mix is a track called "A Change of Heart" by El Perro del Mar, and a Rakamonie remix that appears halfway through. We detour through the off-key warbling of Nite Jewel, the droning sludge of Fever Ray, and back through the looped sampling of Star Slinger before a quick trip to the dubstep of Bristol, England. The mix finishes with a series of modern rock favorites.

The mix is hosted by Soundcloud, a really cool music sharing website which allows for timed comments. The tracklisting is posted via timed comment, with the song's artist and title at approximately the point that it starts within the mix. Enjoy.

Supplemental materials:

David Axelrod's The Human Abstract


DJ Shadow's Midnight in a Perfect World

Miss Bee is taking a photography class with a colleague, and they had a field trip last night. Wednesdays are free at the Fair with a donation, so off we went to the Fairgrounds on the west side of downtown. First thing I noticed was the vintage Coliseum, which our friend informed us was the former home of the Suns. Built in 1965 and known as the Mad House on McDowell, the Coliseum holds a whopping 14,000 people. With moderate effort, I could determine how it compares in size to other defunct NBA arenas, but the effort is beyond me just now. It seems tiny, all I'm saying.

Miss Bee's class invited me to come down to their room and watch something "they had practiced". Sometimes I go down to watch a song or poem, but this time it was all the kinders saying congratulations and giving me a card!


Miss Bee gave me a big blue heart, and everyone in the class wrote me a letter. They had no idea exactly what was going on, but the enthusiasm was terrific! I hung them up on a bulletin board in the empty room next door.

"Julie and Julia" clip:


Promo for Julia Child as the French Chef:


I enjoyed the greater bulk of "Julie and Julia", particularly the black and white clips of Meryl Streep acting out famous French Chef scenes.

Also, "no paella for you" on finding the Seinfeld clip. You can read the script if you google Seinfeld Paella, but why bother? In lieu, here's a somewhat stupid, I mean frenetic, mashup of Seinfeld one-liners. Just in case you don't have the 9-disc set. Sucker.