HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: spp@zabriskie.berkeley.edu (Steve Pope)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Homeschooling (was Re: Education and the Environment by Gregory A. Smith)
Date: 1 Jan 1993 03:30:57 GMT
Organization: U.C. Berkeley -- ERL
NNTP-Posting-Host: zion.berkeley.edu

In article <1993Jan1.004152.14085@panix.com> jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb) writes:
>In <1hvedcINNdg4@agate.berkeley.edu> spp@zabriskie.berkeley.edu (Steve Pope) writes:
>>And what really bugs me is that the people who are killing
>>public education by pulling their kids out of public
>>schools have the audacity to blame the problem on 
>>"liberal educators with their social agendas" and
>>other imagined demons.
>
>Your view that it is the parents who are pulling their children out of
>public school who are causing problems with public education is
>surprising.  

Surprising??

Not really.  The less of a constituency public schools have,
particularly among the educated and those of comfortable finances,
the worse off the schools become.  

>The problem with public schools is not too little financial support --

I never claimed this..
>So it appears to be the way the
>resources are being used that is at fault.  

Absolutely!


>If that's right, the view
>that professional educators may be among the ones creating the
>problems may be less of a fantasy than you seem to think.

No, it is *not* a fantasy and I didn't say it was.

There is a LOT of waste in public schools, and that
is at the heart of the problem.

What I claim is that the *prevalent* fantasy -- about
"liberals with social agendas" being the ones at fault --
is blinding the public to the actual nature of the
waste of resources, thus preventing solutions from occurring.

Steve
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: hhenderson@vax.clarku.edu
Subject: Mangled song lyrics (was: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age)
Organization: Clark University
Date: 30 DEC 92 04:55:27 GMT

Keith Morgan writes, regarding the mishearing of song lyrics:

>The second one is prison, babe, and the sheriff's on my tail 
>And if he catches up with me I'll spend my life in jail 
> Or? 
>The first one's named sweet Ann Marie and she's my heart's delight 
>The second one is prison bait and the sheriff's on my tail 

Hey, that ain't nuthin'.  Try these on for size (yes, I actually know people
who have admitted to these):

   Bee Gees' "More Than A Woman" = "Bald Headed Woman"
      "Bald headed woman, bald headed woman to me..."

   [Some odious pop star's] "Feelings" = "Felix"
      "Felix, nothing more than Felix,
      Trying to forget my
      Felix of love..."

   Barry Manilow's "Looks Like We Made It" = "Looks Like Tomatoes"
      You might need to have a New Yawk accent for that one ("timmaydas").

But the best one comes from my friend Katie Mailer (daughter of Norman --
okay, so this post is *ever-so-slightly* book-related), a sweet, kind, very
intense and sincere person.  Way back in high school we were listening to the
radio, and a recently released Rolling Stones song came on.  Katie got all
agitated and exclaimed, "This song is so STUPID!  This is the dumbest song!" 
I asked her why, and she said, "Well, the lyrics are really idiotic!  I mean,
'I'll never be your pizza-burger'!  What is that supposed to MEAN?!?!"  After
a while I realized she wasn't kidding.  "Katie," I explained, "It's not
'pizza-burger'.  The song goes 'I'll never be your Beast of Burden'."  

I kind of like it as 'pizza-burger', though.

Heather
HHENDERSON@vax.clarku.edu 
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: sbrock@teal.csn.org (Steve Brock)
Subject: Re: john hopkins university press
Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 03:00:26 GMT

The last address I have for them is:

Johns Hopkins University Press
Baltimore, MD  21211

Good Luck.  -- Steve
From: francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Chaucer. Was non-Rabelaisian farts
Date: 28 Dec 1992 16:14:43 GMT
Organization: Stanford Exploration Project
NNTP-Posting-Host: oas.stanford.edu

Mike Godwin says to s1mbm:

	It is a source of pleasure to me that you know Chaucer, and 
	I want to thank you again for sharing that with us.

And to me a source of some pain that Godwin does not know Chaucer. The
fact of the matter is that while an understanding of American literature
might get by quite nicely without understanding Chaucer, that is not the
case with English literature which, even up to the present day, is
influenced more by Geoffrey Chaucer than any other writer not excluding
William Shakespeare.  The *The Miller's Tale* is much, much more than a
tale of a fart, and *The Miller's Tale* is but a small part of *The
Canterbury Tales*, which is astonishingly broad in its display of the
human experience. The traditional way to start reading Chaucer is with
*The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales*, and this is a fine way. I
recommend the Bantam Classic paperback edition of the CT. It has the work 
in Old and New English on facing pages, and a useful Introduction, Glossary 
and Bibliography, all by Kent & Constance Hieatt. I paid $2.95 in 1990 for
mine. Oh yes, and get the Caedmon recording I mentioned yesterday. Chaucer
is not all sound and no sense, but there is a music to this English that
MacLiammoir and Holloway bring out. After the Tales there is then for
your pleasure *The Romaunt of the Rose* and *The Parliament of Fowls*.

								RABworm
From: jahb@ns1.cc.lehigh.edu (JENNIFER A. HEISE)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: decline in SAT scores very little genetic
Date: 21 Dec 92 18:46:06 GMT
Organization: Lehigh University

In article <1992Dec17.125818.29756@ms.uky.edu>, fehr@ms.uky.edu (Jeff Davis) wri
tes:
>6) Don't track younger kids. Let the smart ones go off in
>   a corner to help the slower ones. Knowing a subject well
>   enough to teach it to a peer increases mastery waaaay
>   beyond the usual level needed to pass a test, so putting a
>   smart kid in with a slower one doesn't have to hold back the
>   smarter one.

I can only write for myself. Personally, I think peer tutoring is a good
idea-- but.  I still have a scar on one calf where the young man I was
supposed to "peer tutor" in math in second grade kicked me until I bled.
I was NOT tracked in elementary school, and was miserable.  (Non-tracking does
NOT mean anti-homogeneous grouping, but grouping however the cards fall.) It's
difficult to make friends if no child in your class understands more than one
word in three that you speak. I literally spent one entire year with my head
inside the flip-top of the desk, reading.  I tell all this not because I want
people to feel sorry, but to notice that non-tracking punishes the better
students: instead of being rewarded for knowing the subject, they are asked to
work harder to teach learners the teacher can't reach-- or simply ignored.
The ideal classroom wouldn't work this way, but the classrooms of this country
are far from ideal.

-- 
Jennifer Heise                           Net: jahb@lehigh.edu
Reference Dept.,                         Phone: (215) 758-3072
Fairchild-Martindale Libraries #8A,  Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA 18015
My opinions are my own. No one else would HAVE them anyway.

"The toad beneath the harrow knows
Exactly where each tooth-point goes;
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Subject: Re: *Any* kind of r.a.b split, or at least a *serious* discussion
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 22:54:39 GMT

tmaddox@netcom.com (Tom Maddox):
>A *joking* attitude, it's called, and is easily recognized as such
>by anyone with either a clue or a sense of humor.

Unfortunately, this is counter to fact.  Too many of the cues that
tell someone you're joking are missing.  Body language and tone, the
first lines of defense, are absent.  (I occasionally neglect to substitute
a smiley, when I'm being sufficiently obvious that nobody could *possibly*
mistake my intent.  It generally turns out to be a mistake.)  The second
line of defense is that in person, you're generally talking to people who
know you well enough to say "he couldn't possibly mean that seriously."
That's absent here too.  What replaces it is the reasonable benefit of
the doubt most readers will accord.  (Some readers, however, won't.  One
reason is that *some* posters *do* turn out to be serious about the most
outrageous pronouncements.  Only time and familiarity can enable people
to distinguish.)  The third defense, in person-to-person communication,
is immediate feedback:  You see that the listener is misinterpreting and
you modify your delivery or, in emergencies, go directly to "just kidding."

To all this, add the sheer *number* of people who read each posting.  
*Most* will understand.  Perhaps it's true that most of those who don't
are humorless or clueless:  Does that justify offending them?  Finally,
aside from these two groups, there will be a few hundred readers who
take what you said seriously through no deficiency of character or
native intelligence.  

It's a commonplace that behavior that is acceptable in one culture
may be rude in another, that language that's appropriate in one medium
may be inappropriate in another (eg, written English should *not*
generally be identical to spoken English), that communications with
strangers should be more cautious and formal than communications with
friends and acquaintances.  It's easy, sitting alone at one's own
terminal, to forget that those commonplaces apply here as well.  Posting
to tens of thousands of newsgroup readers in the same terms you'd use
to speak to one of them is...provincial.

-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst
 Are full of passionate intensity." -- W.B. Yeats

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: msmorris@watsci.UWaterloo.ca (Mike Morris)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Morally good hypertext
Date: 22 Dec 92 22:19:48 GMT
Organization: University of Waterloo


                                      Tuesday, the 22nd of December, 1992

Jack, I wasn't quite sure how I should be reading you, but you
said:
                                                     the ruling elite can
  lie in their teeth for years on end and if it's politically inconvenient
  will *never* be called on it (some may recall a certain retired actor at
  this point).

See, I think the problem is every Joe on the planet *could* catch
Reagan out on most of what the man said. I think the facts and figures
were there, were instantly available to most of us most of the time (if
we didn't happen already to know them) to contradict nearly all of Reagan's
many, many howlers. And often the contradictory facts were available
right from those transnational communications corporations who supposedly
had an interest in making the man look good. The problem is not that
anyone was keeping facts from anybody---the problem is that *facts
simply didn't matter*. He looked good, kind of grandfatherly, and that's
all that anyone really cared about. That is what's so scary. I don't
think those corporations have the slightest interest in keeping good
information retrieval out of the hands of anyone. That's because the
information retrieval doesn't really matter.

                Mike Morris
         (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)
From: zeleny@husc10.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Is the discussion over?  (Was Re: *Any* kind of r.a.b split...)
Date: 29 Dec 92 19:22:40 GMT
Organization: The Phallogocentric Cabal:

In article <1992Dec29.153326.14511@clpd.kodak.com> 
staffan@ca.serum.kodak.com (Kenneth Staffan (x37507)) writes:

A Defender of the Realm:

>>>I don't understand where these people come off. They enter a room and 
>>>decide that because they don't like it there, so the rest of us just have
>>>to stop whatever we were doing and pick up what they want to do.

A Pretender:

>>EXCUSE ME? 
>>	 'these people'?  'guests'?  Who died and made you king?

KS:
>This argument misses the point.  Nobody is saying that anybody has to
>stop what they are doing (or at least, not everyone is saying that :-).
>The gist of the original posts (before it deteriorated into yet another
>spat) was to suggest possible ways to improve the organization of the
>r.a.b so that all could benefit.  It's a high-volume newsgroup, and
>people are just looking for ways to filter out what they do and don't
>want to follow.  Not everybody has hours to weed through tons of messages.
>Kill files are only of marginal use - subject lines continually change,
>and the kill parsing itself takes time, which is one of the problems in
>the first place.

Have you considered taking your business elsewhere?

KS:
>Don't pay any attention to these tangential arguments.  Does anyone
>else have constructive suggestions for organizing the group?

How about an immediate moratorium on organizational metadiscussions?

>Ken
>---
>staffan@serum.kodak.com

cordially,
mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
"Le cul des femmes est monotone comme l'esprit des hommes."
Xref: sparky rec.arts.books:22933 news.groups:24765
From: mtaranto@panix.com (Mark Taranto)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books,news.groups
Subject: RE: *Any* kind of r.a.b split, or at least a *serious* discussion
Date: 21 Dec 92 15:50:16 GMT
Organization: The Inner Clique <tm>


hhenderson@vax.clarku.edu (Heather) writes:

> Tom Maddox and Mark Taranto banter:

>>>You should have come to the NYC r.a.b.fest at the White Horse.  Mike Godwin
>>>showed us the R.A.B. Inner Clique Secret Handshake.  
>>       Only the ICSH?  
>>       I guess he didn't really trust you, or he'd have shown you the 
>>Get Down with the Inner Clique Secret Handshake and Hiphop Motto. 
>>       Of course if he'd been *really* taken with you . . . 

> Paul Callahan comments: 

>>Yes.  That's exactly the attitude I was trying to describe to Mark Taranto
>>in e-mail yesterday (did he read it?--all I got was a note from his
>>answering machine).  At the time, I said it was not so much a *callous
>>disregard* for newcomers as a *whimsical disbelief* in their existence.  

>I think that's a pretty accurate description, although at times the attitude
>toward "newbies" turns downright rude.  This is connected, I believe, to that
>"whimsical disbelief" that you mention: the behavior is not so much due to
>the desire to make the "newbie" uncomfortable, but to appear clever to one's
>buddies.  The disbelief comes in when someone else has the temerity to find
>the humor unamusing.  What!?!  Doesn't he/she realize how fantastically
>*witty* we are?  Must not have been around the group long enough for this
>fact to sink in.  Well!   This is our turf!  Fuck off and die!!

*I* was not bantering with *anyone*.  I was responding to a self-proclaimed
newbie.  In my response, I answered his question, did my best to make him
feel welcomed.  Noticing that he is a New Yorker, I even extended this
welcome to tell him that he should have joined us at the White Horse 
r.a.b.fest.  My comment about Mike and the secret handshake was an obvious
joke.  The fact that I said we would have shown it to him was an obvious
sign that we are not hiding anything here, and do welcome newbies.

Aaron replied to my article indicating that he appreciated it, and all of the
other replies that he received on this topic.

I'm doing what you asked:  I'm friendly to a newcomer, I wrote about books,
I went so far as to invite him out for a beer.  And what happens?  You and
Paul give me shit, both on the net and in e-mail.  What the hell is wrong 
with the two of you?

Stop it, stop it now!

Mark

PS

Due to the recent unpleasantness in this group, I am seriously considering 
whether it is worth continuing my participation here.
From: jzimm@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Joann Zimmerman)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: 92 in rabreview
Date: 30 Dec 92 22:14:45 GMT
Organization: UT Art History
X-UserAgent: Nuntius v1.1



In article <1992Dec30.201517.29883@cbnewsj.cb.att.com> Evelyn C. Leeper,
ecl@cbnewsj.cb.att.com writes:
>Inspired by someone's posting last year of his 1991 reading list, I kept
>a similar list for me for 1992, and so know that I read 136 books this
year.
>The breakdown would be:
[...]
>(I have the same excuse someone else had: it would have been more, but
>I was writing also, in my case, over 100,000 words of reviews,
>convention reports, and travelogues.)

I *know* I read at least 180 books; those are what I went through my
shelves and remembered either reading for the first time or re-reading
this year. Most of this is fiction of one sort or another. What I *don't*
know what to do about is the huge quantity of technical material (art
history, history, literary criticism, literary theory, classics) I went
through for five graduate seminars and thesis research. I skimmed an
incredible amount of material, including a stack approximately 2 feet
high of Xeroxed articles, and my database reveals at least 100 books that
I did something to/with, such as skim, browse, use in a footnote, or some
such. What to do with those? Count them each as one-half a book?

(When you also consider that I read the NYT every day, and r.a.b., plus
other papers and magazines, it's probably not immediately obvious when I
have time to do anything else. Well, cheer up. It's not obvious to me,
either.)
--

"They like sitting around reading all the books there are. And then they 
love arguing about them. Some of those arguments go on for millenium 
after millenium. It just seems to keep them young, for some reason, 
arguing about books." -- Julian Barnes          

Joann Zimmerman (jzimm@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu)
From: loosemore-sandra@cs.yale.edu (Sandra Loosemore)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Non-fiction (was Re: _Dog Soldiers_ by R. Stone, a wild ride!)
Date: 24 Dec 1992 13:46:12 -0500
Organization: staff hacker @ Yale Haskell project
	<1992Dec24.182709.5488@julian.uwo.ca>
NNTP-Posting-Host: functor.systemsz.cs.yale.edu
In-reply-to: jdnicoll@prism.ccs.uwo.ca's message of Thu, 24 Dec 1992 18:27:09 GMT

I used to reserve nonfiction for bedtime reading and fiction for
weekend or evening entertainment, so that I'd have (at least) one of
each in progress at any given time.  But a while back I noticed that I
was buying history books faster than I was reading them (I guess they
were too effective at putting me to sleep!), so the past couple of
months I've switched over to reading fiction and nonfiction
alternately and trying to finish each book before starting the next.

So many books, so little time!  :-(

-Sandra
From: francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: Re: Stark Naked
Date: 23 Dec 1992 20:18:30 GMT
Organization: Stanford Exploration Project
NNTP-Posting-Host: oas.stanford.edu

Mike Pingleton writes:

	I'm wondering if it mentions my favorite Shakespearian actress, 
	Nora Lenderby.

Click & Clack, the Tappet Bros., of Car Talk have a list of these names
which grows increasingly excruciating as the weeks go by. Their book,
*CAR TALK*, may include a list.

							RABworm
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: mtaranto@panix.com (Mark Taranto)
Subject: Re: A fishy tale (was for newbies (was Project B.F.D. (was an apology))
Date: Wed, 23 Dec 1992 15:38:05 GMT
Organization: The Inner Clique


A.Hunter@dunaad.co.uk (Alan Hunter) writes:

> OBbook, don't have one, let me off, it's Christmas

No problem -- besides, your article was Travel Literature at its best.

Mark

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: lew@cbnewsd.cb.att.com (lewis.h.mammel..jr)
Subject: Re: Non-rabelaisian farts 
Organization: AT&T
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 21:46:01 GMT
Summary: I pass some remarks

In article <1h7fj1INNb5v@morrow.stanford.edu>, francis@oas.stanford.edu (Francis Muir) writes:
> Leslie Troutman answers:
> 
> 	Mikw Godwin asks:
> 
> 		I'm trying to think of some non-Rabelaisian pieces 
> 		about farting. Are there any?

I remember a fart record, which in failing actually to be funny,
is not rabelaisian.

> 
> 	There is a Mark Twain short story, the name of which escapes 
> 	me at present.  It's *very* bawdy and hilarious.  I've been 
> 	told it's in the most recent Library of America edition of 
> 	Twain's work.  I've got a photocopy at home and can check the 
> 	title if there's interest.

The title is a date, I think. 1601 maybe. Someone actually posted
the whole thing once, some years ago. I have a hardcopy of it somewhere.

> It probably won't do. Its Rabelaisian. Actually, we have a problem. It
> is difficult to imagine anything about farting that is not either
> Rabelaisian (by Godwin's definition this included the Miller's Tale)
> or medical. In what civilization has farting not been a joke?

I agree, but how much actual farting is there in Rabelais ?
I only remember the "fart from a dead donkey" line, and the
"Salvo of Farts" in the list of Gargantua's games, both in
the first book.

Rabelais is generally much more outre than mere fart jokes.
Are there any that are not merely incidental, as the above ?
I don't remember any great fart-winds, or anything like that.


Lew Mammel, Jr.
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
From: dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig)
Subject: Re: Cultural Appropriation and the New Age
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: Tue, 22 Dec 1992 07:46:08 GMT

irwinke@storm.CS.ORST.EDU (Mary Smith-Nolan):
>I'm new to this internet thing and thought I'd post a few questions for
>general discussion, just to test the water, so to speak.

You're more than welcome here, Mary.  As a rule, though, the best way
to launch a topic is to tell us what *you* think.  "What do you think
of X" or "Has anyone read Y" is less likely to garner a response.

>I'd like to know what people think about New Agers (ie, Europeans and
>Euroamericans) appropriating the spirituality of various indiginous and
>small scale cultures.

I question the assumptions behind that question.  I'm not sure where
"New Age" comes in, but the implication of the question is that these
cultures have a spirituality that ours lacks, and that we are in some
way harming them if we try to make good our lack by adopting elements
of theirs.  Why should either be credible?

It hasn't been long since we ended a protracted discussion, one
side of which criticized our culture for borrowing so little from
outside the mainstream.  It seems that a successful culture is
something to aplogize for, one way or the other.

-----
Dani Zweig
dani@netcom.com

"One of my favorite games when I was a kid was 'murder/suicide.'
 Dad would show us a photo and ask us, "Is it a murder or a suicide?"
	  --  Colleen Doran

Newsgroups: rec.arts.books