Jeu de main , jeu de ...

 For this week, no cake of indeterminate nationality or affiliation. After Thierry Henry handled a ball which cost Ireland its place in the world cup, and in the midst of an Internet storm of huge proportions,  this game arrived in my inbox, sent by some well-meaning friends. You can move Henry's arm and hand to score as many goals as you want, and help France to qualify...


Thierry Henry - Jeu de main - Le jeu !

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Of soccer and flags

Because of the impending doom match tomorrow, and the vexing problem of my double allegiance, this post on Cake Wrecks just seemed so perfect.

How (not to) write a thesis (part 9,742)

I have written. I am writing. I will write. I have to write. I must write. More. More often. Faster. Better.

I must not let my thinking turn into daydreaming.

(from todays PhD Comics: Brain Saver)

I all else fail, I can always follow Laurie's lead and use the Academic Sentence generator. It's an easy game - pick four words from the drop-down lists, and the generator creates your next sentence. Will you find those in my thesis?

The emergence of praxis may be parsed as the construction of agency.

The emergence of process carries with it the construction of power/knowledge.

 Back to work. And I must remember not use the word emergence.

Google monster

Here he is again, the Google monster in today's Google doodle - brought to you by Sesame Street's 40th birthday!

Me, I google

Sesame Street has a famous googler in Cookie Monster, and I'm not surprised. The word Google is very attractive to children; my youngest son had a little stuffed monkey which he called Google, and Google went everywhere with us. Google is now hidden behind books, Playstation games and Warhammer figures, but it is still there, watching my little one grow into a teenager...

A technological sense of humour

Some relents of Hal today in my RSS reader. DCU's president wrote a blog entry on celebrities'  "autobiographies", fame and popular culture. The entry was filed under "culture" and "society". It was tagged with "autobiography", "popular culture" and the names of two of the celebrities in question, Jordan and Britney Spears. Only a wicked sense of humour on the part of some blogging technology imp could explain the automatically generated links: nothing about culture, be it popular or not, nothing on autobiography or life writing. No, the blogging imp created links to Jordan's family photographs and "naughty hottie photos"! And then, as an afterthought, although a puzzling one, a link to Obama's back to school speech. Are the imp and the president(s) suggesting Jordan should go back to school?

Blogging teens

Tommy has created a secondary school blog directory, as a way of highlighting blogs written in Ireland by young people.  He has already listed a few of them.  From my research, it certainly seems to be true that blogging starts later, in university. However, there are also quite a number of young people blogging on platforms like LiveJournal, and who may prefer to stay outside the blogging mainstream, using their blogs or journals as a means of communicating with online or offline friends, either about the minutiae of their lives or about some special interests, like gaming or fan fiction.

Irish young people did not join in the big blogging craze which spread amongst their european counterparts, notably in France where the Skyblog platform became an oblogatory rite of passage for teenagers.  Its format however was very similar to that of social network sites to come, and young people eventually migrated to Facebook in France, MySpace or Bebo in the UK, and Bebo in Ireland. And interestingly, the blogging facility on social network sites like Bebo was rarely if ever used, or solely for quizzes and memes. At the same time however, a small yet consistant number of young people in Ireland started blogs initially on Diaryland, and then increasingly on LiveJournal, which has a dual role of blogging platform , but includes social network site facilities, like lists of friends and interests.  It is also home to some very active communities of interest, notably for fan fiction writers and readers.

Yet I must say that, like Tommy, I would love to see more young Irish people create blogs within the mainstream blogging community, and make their voices heard on issues which concern them, or simply tell their stories. I would also love to read more blogs from older people, and hear their stories as well. We need more voices, more stories which will create a patchwork of narratives, making for a more inclusive blogging community.

Love in time of social media

 

How Facebook and blogs are changing relations between boys and girls...

 From the always excellent xkcd