me me me: blah blah blah

I'm working right now on a research statement for a summer institute that will allow me to travel for a week to a fun although not exotic place I've heard a lot about.

Writing about yourself and your ambitions and goals is SUCH a drag, yet self-promotion is the bread and butter of academe, especially on the research side. I think the idea is to create a coherent story about yourself and in this case, to be cutting edge enough so that the organizers want to hang out with you for a week. (All expenses paid, did I mention that?)

Over the last several weeks, I have begun to craft a story that shows that all my research work is organized around questions of economic restructuring. Let's see if I can get something logical out of THAT.

urban planning paradigms

While en route to an urban design studio review via public transit (which always makes me feel like an anthropologist!) , I sketched out an organizational scheme for planning approaches that really makes sense to me. This has been a thorn-in-the-side - I've been mulling over how to talk to my class about 3 very different readings for several days now. Hooray! finally light dawns.

In short: who is doing the planning; whether the method is process-oriented or outcomes-oriented; whom the plan is for; and what values are implicit in the method - these are my main data points. We will do a graphic organizer; and then we will apply these approaches. Yay. I love it when I am able to organize ideas from my readings into some sort of coherent pattern!

rhymes with cheepy's

B and I have been talking about buying a new bed for years, due to the interesting and ever-more-prominent topography of our not-so-old mattress. On New Year's Day, we went to the establishment mentioned in the title of this post, and the amount of cliches-made-reality was both astounding and sort of hilarious. (Well, it WOULD have been hilarious if B hadn't had to spend, like 20 hours on the phone getting back the ripoffs into our bank account.)

First off - the salesman. Not only was he wearing a wrinkled, stained white shirt and no tie, with a snowstorm of dandruff covering the shoulders of his cheap jacket, he proceeded with an amazing set of lies:

1.He used to work for the competitor (rhymes with Nob's) due to a family connection, and their comparable products (we purchased a memory-foam mattress with a 20-year guarantee) are complete shit and will barely last a year. Hm, wonder what he told customers at Nob's, when he worked there, about Cheepy's products? I surmised that he used to be married into the Nob family, and after the divorce, they fired his sorry ass.

2.After some dickering about the price, he agreed to match the Nob's price, but then, oh wait, the computer wouldn't "let" him enter that price, so he "had to" charge us $30 more, so he "threw in" a mattress pad, retail value $100, so we actually "saved" $100. When Brian pointed out that the "savings" was actually net $70, he seemed really confused. But wait, it gets even better: the next day we saw the Cheepy's ad for this mattress that promised a) FREE mattress pad; and b) beating any competitor's price by 20%.

3. He told us that Cheepy's charged $15 for taking away the old stuff. This turned out to be $15 PER PIECE and since we had a king bed with the split box springs, that was actually $45.

It took some time on the phone, as aforementioned, but the regional and corporate guys ultimately threw this guy under the bus ("oh, he's not one of our regular salesmen") and made good on the $30 and the mattress pad and the 20%. And then Brian finished off the poor SOB by calling back the online help dude at Cheepy's (who ALSO works on commission) and giving him the purchase info so that he could claim his 50%.

Moral of the story: don't take any shit from Cheepy's. You might as well walk out during the sale writeup if they are doing it wrong. It'll save considerable time post-sale, and you'll ultimately (I think) get all you're entitled to. (Or you can just go to Nob's.)

The bed is deeply, deeply comfortable. No more lower back pain (well, except after the shoveling. But that is a whine for a different day).

Curmudgeon Girl: memo to the Scott Brown campaign

Not that I would have voted for your candidate anyways (although I am not a huge fan of Martha Coakley due primarily what I perceive as the political expediency, bend-with-the-wind, nature of her positions this fall) but for the LOVE OF GOD, Scott, did you really believe your handlers were giving you sound advice when they pitched the call-unenrolled-voters-seventeen-times-a-day-with-recorded-messages idea? Wtf???

This strategy makes you sound either desperate or wack. And since we have WAY too many wackjobs in Congress already, I'm going with the Coakley option. Did you really think voters would vote for you if you harassed them with incessant calls? Really? REALLY?

Happy New Year!

Only two (emailing) disgruntled students from the fall, and neither one so disgruntled as to constitute a problem. Students don't really "get" how grades are weighed: see current thread on Chronicles of Higher Ed fora about math incompetence.

I think the most interesting thing I learned this semester was about ecological economics: the proposition that a resource value (say, a forest) is not automatically equal to its cash value, because once turned into cash, the transaction is not reversible. Hence the conceptual failure of neoclassical economics. Woot!

Otherwise, my classes were reasonably attentive and motivated. I really enjoyed the practice of teaching, which is something new for me. It felt much more relaxed and collegial this term.

I am not getting my hopes up. Spring semester is always a tougher slog - as the popular wisdom goes.