A Broeverbial No-No

 

 

Yesterday the 2011 session of Carnegie Mellon U's Pre-College session opened. Apart from the fact that I really enjoy teaching Pre-College, and the fact that my nephew Seth is attending this year, this gave me a chance to speak to Boevers face-to-face about the pic he sent me (Fig. 1), and provide his commentary.

Fig 1. "You'd look like a carrot." -DB

Broeverbs; the proverbial sayings of David Boevers, edition 3: On Sucking

My favorite Broeverb so far is this one, referring to the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama:

"We're the best in the world at what we do, and we still suck."

I have waited a long time to put that one up because I thought it might reflect negatively on the School, but since the Professor went ahead and did it anyway, what the hell. On his blog, David points out that it is actually fairly celebratory, but reminds one to stay humble. True, but actually what I really like about this Broeverb is that it also does the opposite. Now, we have really terrific students in our program, and generally they work their butts off and excel brilliantly. And we, as faculty, work our butts off for them. Every day I solve problems in the program, negotiate with other faculty to help my students, assist other faculty on projects for their students, recruit them to help me with mine, help build the program generally, look for new experiences and resources to improve the student's experiences, and on and on. That's my job, and I like it. But students being students, they sure do seem, perhaps from the exhausted perspective of the faculty, to be able to point out every feature of every facet of the work we do that could be better. I'm not saying they complain constantly. No, actually I am saying they complain constantly, but that comes as much from a place of wanting to have a genuine, profound, and challenging experience as it does from a sense of privilege or entitlement. What the students don't see all the time, I feel, is what they are getting for their investment compared to other programs they might have chosen. The School really is quite remarkable in many ways. As much as I think of myself more as a Tigger than an Eeyore, I guess I tend to concentrate on the things that need improvement, which is fine, but sometimes I forget to think about how much we are getting right, every day, and how proud I am of the work that we do collaboratively with our students, because we still suck and I guess I wouldn't have it any other way.

Broeverbs; the proverbial sayings of David Boevers, edition 2: On Fashion

I mentioned to my colleague and friend David Boevers that I needed some fashion tips - I really don't know anything about men's style, clothes, hair, all that stuff that makes it pleasant to be around a person. I guess I was just in the library the whole time I was supposed to be learning that. So David kindly gave me his three high-fashion secrets:

1. Don't wear anything with a visible food stain on it.
2. Don't wear anything your wife hates [Fig. 1].
3. Never mix green and orange.

As it happens, I don't own a single article of green nor orange clothing, so I'm already 30% assured of success!

Fig. 1. The Boeverses. I don't know what Marisa sees in David's ear that she finds so funny, but I know at least he's not wearing green pants.

Robot Plays

It's well-known that RUR, a play by Karel Capek, featured the first modern conception of a "robot," and indeed coined the term. But for my little friend Data, Heather Knight's Comedybot, there are going to have to be some new titles. Here is a selected list from an old blog I used to maintain, called Lapsus Linguae (www.lapsusl.blogspot.com), before it was overrun, coincidentally, by robot spammers. Many of my pals at the CMU School of Drama contributed to these. Here's the best of:

A Doll's Mouse
'night, Motherboard
The Merchant of Virus
Riders from the C Drive
Curse of the Silicon Class
Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I Want to Get Off
'Tis Pity She's a Mac
Spam, a lot
iMACbeth(pro)
The Iceman.cometh
Fool for RAM
Uncle Tom's Inbox
Mourning Becomes Electrons
Long Day's Journey into Byte
Suicide in BASIC
Charlotte's Website
Playboy.com of the Western World
Cat on a Bot Tin Roof
Ibsen's Ghosts (In The Machine)
Waiting for Geardot
Downloading at Lughnasa
The King and IBM
Suite In Press Any Three Keys to Continue
LINUXtrata
C//:gul
The Stronger (by Strindborg)

110 Characters in Search of an Author
Blog of Anne Frank
House of 000FF Leaves
Servant of Two Applications
Curse of the Dialup Class
Autocadia

Scanner Drum Song
The Secret Password
Sunday in the Park with a Laptop
Merrily we Surf Along
A Funny thing Happened on the Way to the FAQ

Broeverbs; the proverbial sayings of David Boevers

David Boevers, my respected colleague, is a fountainhead of wise sayings, which behind his back we call Broeverbs. Actually only I call them that. His most profound (which is acceptable for public discourse) is probably this one:

"Carnegie Mellon University is the place of 'oh-my-god-you-shoulda-been-there-last-night.'"

What this means is that this campus is absolutely chock-full of astonishing people doing astonishing things and nobody seems to know anything about it. Part of this is because everyone is very, very busy, part is because it just seems to be hard to get the word out. I'm going to contribute to this malaise by talking about the mondo coolio-bizarro stuff I experience here under that heading. Stay tuned.