I'm back...

I haven't posted in a while, partly because it's almost the end of the marking period and I have been grading an endless supply of student drafts, and partly because we have been suffering some fairly serious computer problems. I've been trying to keep up with email on my classroom computer but Blogger is so slow on that connection and I don't have lots of time when I'm at work, for obvious reasons. Finally things seem to be working again, though I hesitate to say that too loudly.

In any case, I'm trying to catch up on the blogs and other sites I read regularly, and as I do so I'll post some things that catch my attention.

Below is a great excerpt from an interview with Lemony Snicket. You can read the full text here.

Begin Quote:

AC: Obviously you have a sarcastic nature. The children who are reading your books are at an age bracket at which they're beginning to understand and grapple with irony, the fact that you can say something that's different from what you actually mean. Do you find that when children are talking to you that they really respond to that?

LS: I think that the demarcation of whether or not you're going to be able to understand irony -- the beginning of irony -- happens for people at different ages, for sure, and sometimes never happens, so in some ways, if you want to see whether your child has a healthy sense of irony, give them my book (laughing).

Irony is just one part of it, but I think that as you grow up you begin to look critically at the world and you note the disparity between what people are saying and how it goes. The way the books run is contrary to what everyone says all the time. In many children's books good people are rewarded and bad people are punished, and you see when you are very young that the world just doesn't go that way. I think that's something akin to irony, though it's not a textbook definition of irony. The idea that bad behavior is always punished will begin to ring false if you're actually in a schoolyard.

End Quote.

Ooh, look, there are lots of beautiful new doors over at Doorways Around the World since the last time I checked!

Jenny in Sharon, CT has been posting some fall pictures, ideal for me here in the steamy tropics, with no cool weather in sight.

Hooray for Kigali, Rwanda, which recently got its first public trash cans (or poubelles - sounds so much more appealing in French). We have lovely ones in the city where I live, helpfully installed by a foreign body, but sadly they are not emptied frequently, which somewhat limits their usefulness. Don't you love the caption on the photo of the rubbish heap? "Kigali is reported to be cleaner than other African cities." (There's nothing like being able to compare yourself to others who are doing much worse than you are.)

And finally, to end my gushing post, aren't you thrilled by the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize? I think it's terrific that the committee has chosen to honor someone who has helped make life better in a tangible way for so many people around the world. The "microcredit movement," as the article calls it, is truly a wonderful thing.