Last week's hailstorm

Last Wednesday night around midnight an impressive hailstorm blew through Austin from the west. It also had lightning, thunder, and high winds. I'm lucky not to have west windows, but the sideways hail did a lot of damage elsewhere. I found several hailstones that measured 2 inches across.

According to the newspaper, trees were down all over town; some landed on houses. The state Capitol grounds lost eight big old trees. I saw some of that damage from the bus today; if I get over there with my camera before it's all cleaned up I'll post a pic or two.

My neighborhood seems to have escaped the worst of it. A lot of branches came down, and one landed on the car in the picture at right. Nearly every west-facing window lost some glass. Two-inch hail does a lot of damage when it's being driven by tree-felling winds.

The impressive fallen tree below blocked a busy street for hours Thursday before the city crews could get the offending branches cut away and cleared. Removing the rest of it will be quite a chore for whoever owns that house.

I got in!

My paper, "Toward a Taxonomy of Frames", was accepted to the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. I will be making a presentation of some sort at some point in the convention, which is Aug. 6-9, 2008, in Chicago. I haven't received the details yet.

Mainly because the airlines and the government are working hard to make air travel more and more difficult and oppressive, and partly because I can, I'll be going there on Amtrak. The main down side is that the terrain doesn't change -- it's prairie pretty much the whole way from Austin to Chicago. But, hey, the train!

UPDATED: Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

UPDATE: Utah Phillips died Friday night, May 23, at his home. He was a genuine folk hero, and like so many others, he left before his work was all done. Now it's up to the rest of us.

Obit and some remembrances here and here. Amy Goodman pays tribute at DemocracyNow. Labor Beat has a video tribute. (Thanks to Majikthise for the last set of links.)

Original post:

I just got back from a benefit concert for Utah Phillips, a folk singer, organizer, historian, humorist, raconteur and agitator who's been a personal hero of mine for a number of years now. Utah has had congestive heart failure for some time, but it took a turn for the worse in February, and he can no longer leave his home in Nevada City, California, to perform and earn a living.

A lot of folks have organized similar benefits across the country. If there's one in your area, go. You'll likely hear some good music and meet some fine folks.

The one here in Austin was organized by Veterans for Peace and my ability to , which appears to be a good group of people. Utah, himself, is a veteran of the Korean War, and his experience there was enough to turn him off of violence forever. Quoth he: "I will never again, in my life, abdicate my right and my ability to decide who the enemy is."

Utah recently said, via the Utah Phillips blog maintained by his son: "My body is weak but my will is strong, and I keep my disposition as sunny and humorous as I’m able. It’s hard enough being disabled without being cranky as well."

Donations can also be sent directly to Utah at P.O. Box 1235, Nevada City, CA 95959.

The photo above was taken from Utah's Web site, linked above. Photographer not named. The site itself is © 2000-2008 by Christopher Dunn.

Done!

I finished my final term paper and graded the last stories. All done as of Tuesday night. Got decent grades, too.

I've been taking it sort of easy since then. With luck and determination I'll catch up on this blog. I have pictures.

Oh boy

Now I have concrete evidence I've been at the computer too long.

I was sitting at my desk grading a student story on paper, and as I read to the bottom of a page, I ... pushed the Down arrow on the keyboard.

As soon as I'm done with this semester (10 more papers to grade, 1 term paper still not finished) I'm gonna do NOTHING for as long as I can manage it.

Um ... wha?

Can someone explain Jean Baudrillard to me?

I'm trying to follow the bouncing ideas (or simulacra of ideas) in Simulacra and Simulation and it's just all higgledy-piggledy.

The best I can come up with is:

Kiri-kin-tha's First Law of Metaphysics: Nothing unreal exists.

Baudrillard's response: Nothing real exists.

My brain is tired.

A bit of an update

I haven't been posting much because school has gotten real tough. So if you don't see updates, that's what that means.

My big looming deadline at the moment is a research paper that I will submit to an academic conference by April 1. But first the paper is due in class tomorrow, Monday. So I'm charging hard to get it turned in on time and reasonably complete.

It's about framing -- the way news media select and arrange facts and images to create a coherent story. That may sound sinister, but it's generally not; reporters can't tell you every fact they find out because it would be too much and would be a senseless jumble. So they and their editors figure out "what's going on here" and produce a story explaining it. If they've done their jobs well, then you, the reader, will be better able to make sense of things.

Where it gets interesting, from a researcher's standpoint (or a media critic's), is when you consider how the reporters and editors decide what to put in, what to leave out, and how to frame the story. A lot of factors enter into these decisions: the reporter's personal experience, the routines of news gathering, the news organization's corporate culture and priorities, outside influences such as PR reps and spinmeisters, and the wider culture itself. Some of these influences are so familiar that we take them for granted and don't question them.

I'm interested in questioning these influences. I did it some when I worked at a newspaper, and now I hope to do research that sheds more light on the frame-building process, in a way that reporters and editors can use. My main interest is cultural influences.

But that's a big project, and my research paper at hand is a bit smaller: A review of other researchers' framing studies. There are few broad themes in framing research, and I'm looking for some, in hopes of helping focus future scholarship.

That's if I manage to finish this paper in the first place. So back to work I go.