blog assignment #2: explore the web…

and report your findings….

due: Tuesday, Sept. 12

Find one online news source and one blog (NOT a classmate’s blog) that interest you–create a brief (one to five sentences) description of the site and put a link to it in your blog. This will create a collection of sites for the class to explore. If you find something that you want to read (and respond to) regularly, subscribe to it–that is, add it to your news reader in Flock.

To create a link:

• Type the name of the site and highlight it
• Click on the icon at the top of your text box that shows a little chain link
• Enter the web address/URL of the site (For this you might want a second tab open with the site you are linking to; copy and paste the URL out of the address bar)
• Decide whether you want the link to open in the same window or a new one and click insert. Your highlighted text should now be a hyper-link.

Sites that might help you with this assignment:

technorati: tracks blogs on the web and what people are blogging about; check out “Top Blog Posts” for currently popular blogs; and see “What’s the Buzz” for what people are writing about and searching for. This should help you find an interesting blog.

salon : a news source that also includes links to blogs at the end of their articles.

in-class freewrite

We have our secrets and our needs to confess. We may remember how, in childhood, adults were able at first to look right through us, and into us, and what an accomplishment it was when we, in our fear and trembling, could tell our first lie, and make, for ourselves, the discovery that we are irredemably alone in certain respects, and know that within the territory of ourselves, there can be only our footprints.

–R.D. Laing The Divided Self

This quote is the epigraph of Mary Karr’s memoir The Liar’s Club, and it reminds me of the time I chose NOT to tell my first lie–the fear of hell is a powerful thing. 

It was Easter, and my brother and I must have been around the ages of four and seven or five and eight.  We were at my grandparent’s, as we were every Easter, and my brother had received, in his Easter basket, a flourescent pink watergun with a yellow trigger.  As young kids do, we went outside before church to play in our best Sunday duds–he with his water gun and me with…Lord only knows…a jump rope or something appropriate to my gender.  Anyhow, we both ended up intensely more fascinated with the gun, as my brother proceeded to drawn spiral designs in the fresh morning dew that coated the black of my grandparent’s Lincoln Towncar.  But of course, morning dew doesn’t protect fresh black paint. 

When we all left for church there was hell to pay.  My grandfather freaked over the circular scratches in his car.  But who had done that?  They attributed it to some hooligans in a local parking lot.  My brother hid behind that explanation, but the weight on my chest felt like the world (or the fear of hell). 

By the middle of mass I couldn’t control the tears that kept running down my face, and naturally the family wanted to know what was wrong.  I couldn’t keep the lie.  The adults COULD see right through me.  And I gave my brother up. 

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