Did not make it out to St. Louis tonight...

This morning, I found myself dozing in my office between classes, which is a bad sign if you plan to drive 9 hours. So I put it off until tomorrow morning. It's frustrating--I wanted to get out of town, but not that badly. So it was a nap for Bing in the afternoon, and I will be hitting the hay early tonight, in no more than an hour. Hopefully, I will arrive in St. Louis tomorrow before dinner.

In preparation for my trip, last night I purchased an audio version of The Men Who Stare at Goats for my mp3 player, and if one quarter of the things in there actually happened, I endorse sending the Salvation Army into combat. (If you know how I feel about Christmas bell ringers, you would realize that I would deploy them as suicide bombers. Against each other.)

The only way to get through a long drive is to put your head down (metaphorically) and plow through it. Get an adult diaper--you know, like they do at NASA--and drive like a motherfucker.

My students have recently turned in podcasts that they will be adding to their websites at the end of the semester. I have downloaded all of them to my headphones (you know what I mean) and I will listen to them on the way down. I was pleased. Some of the highlights:

• One pair recorded a phone conversation with a practicing witch.
• Another staged a mock debate between moon landing deniers and not idiots.
• One group analyzed about a dozen EVPs from a ghost hunting web site.
• One group interviewed a psychologist about the relationship between confirmation bias and cults.
• One group interviewed a very knowledgeable literary critic about the depiction of aliens in pop culture.
• One group interviewed an astronomer in town about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
  
• One group did a person-on-the-street style interview (inspired by the Young Australian Skeptics format) with people about their beliefs in Roswell and the government hiding UFO technology.
• One group staged an interview with an "Asian ghost" (which was very funny, because this poor fellow's spoken English is touch-and-go, and they played off of that in a clever way).
• One group looked at beliefs in ghosts across religions.
• One group tried to decipher a Scientology recruiting video. Good luck with that.

Can you tell me that my class does not put together some pretty nifty stuff? Of course not. I rule. At the same time, students have started bringing in examples of all sorts of crazy stuff to share in class, which is remarkable given the fact that we spent today discussing fonts.

HJ