The End of an Era: a favorite blog goes dark

I found the Rate Your Students blog through an old Internet friend of mine, known online as Hedwig the Owl. She is a scientist and teacher and had it linked to her own page, her science blog over at Seed. Hedwig and I fell out of touch after a while, but I continued checking the blog pretty much every day.

I'm not a professor or a teacher. After reading this, I honestly don't know how the fuck people do it, or why they do it. The blog was alternately entertaining and alarming. I enjoyed hearing the tales of awful students, but there were a lot of positives on the page too.

Now the blog has gone dark. It was a very old-fashioned sort of blog. There were no comments. They were not on Facebook or Twitter. If you had something you wanted to say, you emailed them and a group of people sorted through and found things to post.

And those people were constantly burning out. They saw the worst of it. The people who did nothing but whine about the site. The tales of young people with PhDs and $100K in student loans who were forced to become "highway fliers," adjuncting at the three or four different colleges within a 50-mile radius of their parents' home, teaching seven or eight classes a semester at $2000 a pop and using their Christmas breaks to attend conferences for networking and job interviews rather than spending them with their families.

Now the final moderator has burned out. I guess the staff was down to one, and that final person could find no one to help, nad no viable option to keep the site going. So the blog has gone dark. And my own personal internet experience will be a bit poorer for it. The only site I have left that really requires a lot of brainpower, and updates regularly, is Free Range Kids.

Other than that, I mostly like semi-mindless humor sites. Lamebook, Regretsy, and the ones linked on the sidebar are favorites. But I need a replacement for RYS. Suggestions, anyone?

A unique tribute to Anthony Minghella

I'm sure that by now, I'm not delivering the news of director Anthony Minghella's death to anyone. Like everyone else, I was pretty surprised to hear he'd passed, him being relatively young and not associated with any particular health problems or addictions. However, none of the tributes to him that I've read so far mention my favorite work of his: the writing on Jim Henson's "The Storyteller" series.

I haven't met many people who remember this show from their childhood. If I didn't own both a DVD of the entire show (it only lasted 1 season) and the book by Anthony Minghella (a great library booksale find!) I would've doubted its existence. For some reason, this series didn't catch on. But it was absolutely beautiful. It starred John Hurt in the title role, as The Storyteller who would bring you a different folk tale each week. The Jim Henson Studio could create a dog puppet that was more realistic than an actual dog, so they may have been showing off a bit when they gave John Hurt his sarcastic sidekick dog.

I recommend the DVD of it to anyone, for any purpose. Whether you're a parent with young children, or you yourself just like some good escapist fantasy. Each episode has some humor, virtually no realistic violence, and beautiful puppetry. (The thought-lion from "The True Bride" appeared in several of Henson's publicity photos). But although the puppetry was the star, the writing hovered, perfectly unseen, in the background. Minghella was able to hit just the right note: understandable to children, yet not patronizing at all. The companion book was an excellent way to appeal to families who wanted to start their own storytelling tradition. How sad, to watch this DVD now and realize that both of the driving forces behind it are gone from us forever.