It’s taken more than half a month, but I’ve finally found time to sit down and write a brief note here to celebrate the fact that my blog is now 11 years old. Perseverance in the blogosphere is easy, especially if you only bother to update your blog once a year! I think in fact [...]
Just a quick note for the occasional visitor to this site. I’m going to try to prune comment spam by using the (Tim) Burke solution: comments are still enabled but I’ve required you to register if you want to say something here on the blog. Hopefully this will encourage community and keep me from having [...]
(delivered at Sof this week) I’ve organized my drosh for today around two song lyrics. I’ll tell you about the second one later. The first is from one of my favorite musicians, Tom Waits, who says in one of his songs: “The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.” Reading this parshah, right at [...]
With broadband adoption surging across the country, my wife and I are switching our netflix subscription to unlimited streaming + four CDs at home at a time. It’s the opposite of adoption patterns but makes good sense. Think about it: after two years with a Roku box we are simply running out of things to [...]
My scientist mother, reading “My Big Animal Book” with her children: “Yes, that’s a guinea pig…sometimes they live in labs… they’re good models for the third trimester…”
Years ago I stopped writing reviews on sites like amazon.com because their terms of service basically gave them my work. Sure, I wrote reviews for works by friends that I thought deserved some publicity, and for particularly superb things I’d throw a review out there as a way to say thanks for people’s work. But [...]
Not the title of a derivative mystery novel or an article aping Marshall Sahlins. Rather, the list of people who wished me happy birthday when Teh Internetz told them it had occurred. There is some secret mission at which only this unique combination of skills can succeed but I’m not sure what it is. 10 [...]
This weekend I moderated a panel at a conference. One of the speakers there was one of the guys who is responsible for helping to measure Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness (that’s what it’s called). There are a lot of Hawaii-Bhutan connections, and it occurred to me that Bhutan has a lot in common with another [...]
Me: It sounds corny but I think living in Hawai’i really has taught me to have more aloha for people. Reasonably Famous Anthropologist: Yes, I wasn’t sure if it was having children or something else but you seem much less… agitated…
It’s a sign of how neglected this blog has become that I failed to blog its tenth anniversary on 1 Jan 2011. The neglect is a sign of success — tweeting, blogging for Savage Minds, writing for Inside Higher Ed, and of course working on actual academic publications. Still, it’s a bit sad that I [...]
As a new father, I am facing a dilemma that men before me have faced for generations: what songs should go into the first set that I learn to play on the ukulele to my adorable children? After some serious thought I’ve settled on: I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning (Bright Eyes) It’s You I like [...]
Me: I think it’s high time we watched Secret Silent Baby Hunter Episode. [pause] Scarily Erudite Beloved: You mean that “World’s Happiest Baby” DVD? Me: Isn’t that what I said?
One of the websites on chabad.org dealing with pidyon haben starts with the subheading “special care must be taken with new entities”. The idea is a well known one in Torah: first fruits and all that. But if there’s one thing that having a baby — and by that I mean ‘watching my wife have [...]
I’m a father. Mom and kids are healthy and happy. More info behind passwords in All The Usual Locations. At some point I will end up blogging something about my life as a father but finding the line between public and private in re: die kinder is tricky. So for now everyone who is need [...]
My laptop temporarily melted. I blame the third party power source. Let this be a lesson to you, ebay shoppers. Back with O tomorrow.
Holy Week means many things to many different people. I am old enough that, to me, it means the start of the second record in the double album original cast recording of Jesus Christ Superstar.
More details since Tom asked: I use Things as a GTDish type device — to capture everything I need to do so I don’t worry about it and can focus on work. I also use it to schedule all events and deadlines. I can’t be bothered with ‘projects’ since I do a better job keeping [...]
Maybe it is the new apartment or (more likely) awareness of how little free time I will have once I’m a father, but I have spent a lot of time massaging out the kinks in my intellectual muscles. First, I’ve rejiggered, reevaluated, and rethought the set up of my outboard brain. After testing a bunch [...]
Oh yes, I am tweeting. Come find me at http://twitter.com/r3x0r
The school newspaper asked me to answer some questions about Valentine’s Day. Please find the transcript attached: Aloha Dr. Golub, Thank you for taking time to answer these brief questions, as well as providing any additional insight you think might be of interest to our readers. My questions are: Is there an anthropological basis for [...]
I spent New Year’s Eve December 31, 1999, in the house of the pastor of the Lutheran Church in Waiwanda waiting for what many believed was the end of the world. On New Year’s Eve December 31, 2009, I spent the evening on the lanai with my wife watching fireworks and smoke — mostly smoke, [...]
Last night before falling asleep I read How To Write And Use Educational Objectives, Fifth Edition by Norman Gronlund. That evening, I dreamed that I was enrolled in one of my colleague’s classes and had showed up to the midterm completely unprepared — a humiliating and embarrassing thing to do. But then as the test [...]
Last night my wife watched Mary Poppins while I watched the second season of Dexter. I think this says something about our relationship — namely, that there is a lot more Mary Poppins in my future and a lot less Dexter. I told her who knows the kids might like Dexter more than Mary Poppins, [...]
This blog will become more active in the near future as I have more than 144 characters worth of things to say and I get the back-end cleaned up and easier to use. However a few big public updates for people who might not have heard already, and listed in reverse order of importance: 1. [...]
What might it mean to undergo violation, to insist upon _not_ resolving grief and staunching vulberability too quickly through a turn to violence, and to practice, as an experiment in living otherwise, nonviolence in an emphatically nonreciprocal response? What might it mean to make an ethic from the region of the uwilled? It might mean [...]
I am coming up on my first full week in Port Moresby — the weather is (relatively) cold and (relatively) wet. I’m staying with a host family in Port Moresby who are welcoming, accommodating, and fun to be around. (I’ve been typing the word ‘accommodate’ repeatedly the last couple of days for some reason and [...]
This is the way I go through life: This morning I woke up in Cairns, where I landed last night in the first leg of my flight from Honolulu to Papua New Guinea. I woke up and got on the Internet to check my email. My wife was on IM and we were talking back [...]
I am leaving tomorrow to fly to Papua New Guinea. I have known this for quite some time — I didn’t just pick up the traveller’s checks from the bank the other day on a lark — but it really hit me this morning, for some reason. Yowch. Time to get packing.
I think that is what I study: the performativity of collectivity. What does it mean? I’m still working that part out.
Here are some more random ‘kindle for professors’ thoughts: 1) PDF/DOC display and conversion…: A major plus. I’ve tried fooling around just a bit with reading PDFs and .doc files on the kindle and it works really well, so far — which means that the kindle can be used to read journal articles and long [...]