The MSG Golem

It was easy to decide on my favorite thing this week. I am still smiling over PodCastle's  The MSG Golem by Ken Liu.

I love PodCastle anyway. This podcast is all short Fantasy Fiction stories, and they are almost always wonderful. (Rarely there is something I just don't get, and even rarer something I just don't like.) But The MSG Golem from the July 2nd podcast is definitely a favorite.

I think one of the reasons I love it so much is the scene when Rebecca argues theology and religious ritual with God. It's so much my Rebecca. Especially since she seems to be winning.

I also love that God keeps whining about the way He gets blamed for everything when, having given man free will, He has no control. There are a few lines in the story that have me thinking about the God that I believe in and what obligations exist on both sides because of that belief.

If you've never listened to PodCastle before, this is a great first cast to start with. It's got God, a Golem, a sassy teen, space travel, and rats.

I lost my Focus

By now, you've probably noticed that I've changed the name of the blog. The title has been bothering me for a while. I started this blog in 2005 as a place where I could play creatively. Originally, I was going to take and post a photo each day, with minimal written description since the picture would be worth a thousand words. That didn't last long.

In the past eight years, this blog has undergone quite a number of changes as my interest have evolved and my life has changed. Instead of Staying Focused, I have created a gallimaufry of my interests, thoughts, ideas, pictures, and life in general. (A gallimaufry is a random collection, or hodge podge, of items.) The new title is a better representation of what I'm doing with this blog. In other words, I'm giving in and just accepting that my interests and discussions are far from focused.

I still think that my original idea for the blog was a good one. Luckily, thanks to modern technology, and my children's insistence that I would love an iphone, I now have the Instagram app. So I can summarize the day with a photo over there. You can follow me, if you would like; I'm agallimaufrygal.

All because of a fistumba

Michelle, an Atlanta middle school teacher, has come up with one of the best off-the-cuff lesson plans that I've heard of in a long time. I would love to meet this lady.

One of her students had answered a question correctly in class, and his buddy gave him a fist bump (apparently also known as a fist pump or a dap, depending on what part of the country you're from) and they must have been a little too enthusiastic because there was an injury as a result. Instead of getting stern and forbidding such dangerous actions in the classroom, Michelle turned the situation into a learning opportunity. She questioned the students on what the fist bump injury would be called. The children's imaginations were engaged and they began to research, looking for the answer. After looking it up in the dictionary (how do you find a word when you don't even know what word you're looking for?), using the library's resources, and googling it online, they turned to the experts at A Way with Words.

A Way with Words has become one of my favorite podcasts. It's total geekdom, tracing the etymology of various terms and words for callers and amusing the listener with riddles, puns, and other word play.

When the experts, Martha and Grant, were unable to come up with an answer, the kids made up their own word: fistumba. Martha and Grant made suggestions on how a word becomes popularized, and the kids made their plan. Their teacher, Michelle, has them writing letters, posting comments, and holding formal and informal conversations in an effort to bring their word into the general language. I love that instead of sticking to the cookie cutter, standardized test-driven plan, Michelle was able to go with the flow and give her students something that they will think about and remember.

And it all started with a minor fistumba in the classroom.

Dots!

I don't normally play video games, and there are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, I'm really awful at them and it's just no fun to play a game you know you're going to lose. Secondly, I'm afraid that with my tendency to become obsessive if I did find a game I could play, I would become glued to the computer screen and never get anything else done.

But one of my friends convinced me to give Dots a try.  The game is very simple. There is grid of 36 colored dots. You connect the dots, using your finger to trace the path up, down, or sideways. My first attempt at playing the game was a disaster. Trying to figure out the rules, I wasted all of my special bonus moves. It turns out you don't get those back. (At least, I haven't figured out how to get them back yet.) But the game reminds me of a paper-and-pencil game that I played as a child (also called Dots), and I find myself going back to play it "just one more time."

To date, my highest score is 292. There are people ranked online with scores as high as 799, but they are either cheating or - more likely - have figured out how to use those bonus moves I wasted early on.