A few days ago I made a random joke about Sabrina Carpenter on Facebook. I was talking about how stupid it is that some parents are apparently superman that they took their kids to her concert and it ended up being all about sex, when literally that’s the one thing I know about her. Anyway,…
I’m teaching a class called “Written Professional Communication” at the University of Pittsburgh. Amongst other things it’s about… well, communicating professionally in writing. Currently we’re working on “responding to complaints”. In order to generate some complaint s to respond to I instructed my students to write a complaint letter as though they lived in the fictional universe of their choosing:
Not that this will be an accurate sampling group, but based on comments with Stephanie and Jameel… Steph and I are wondering something that we’ve put together a little poll for. What was your undergrad major.Did you call your professors (or most professors) by their first name or last name?Was it different for grad school…
So, in a discussion with my cohosts on the Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow Podcast, and some of our fans, we came to the theory that most of us can’t conclusively gender cartoon characters UNLESS they have specific gender markers (skirts, boobs, etc). OR if we know from context (because we know the show…
I’ve been batting around an idea in my head for an academic paper/conference presentation (probably for next year’s PCA/ACA) and I’d like to do something that I’ve done before that has worked out pretty well for me. I want to outsource some of my thinking and brainstorming to the internet. What I’m looking for here…
I have a weird question for people who know children… that is either you have your own or you just hang out with anyone… I dunno… age five through fifteen or so… often enough to notice the way they speak (nieces, siblings, just random friends, whatever). I was just talking with some friends about the…
You know how you love nothing more than hearing me academically talk about comics and sex and gender and cultural theory and stuff? Shut up! You do! Anyway, I was asked to speak at Barnes and Noble’s Grand Reopening and Harry Potter event this Saturday at the Waterfront Barnes and Noble in Pittsburgh. They’re celebrating…
So weird question came up when I was having a discussion with a friend earlier. We were talking about giving HPV vaccinations to children and the concept of whether or not some parents are against because they think of it as giving their kids permission to have sex (similar reasoning to some parents being against…
So if you follow me on Facebook or Twitter you might know that I started a podcast a couple months ago, primarily with Wayne Wise and Katya Gorecki (but also a rotating cast of other people) devoted to pop culture. VoxPopcast (or Vox Populorum… we gave it two names, but everyone seems to be focusing…
Ok, so through a completely unforeseen, unexpected and frankly rather chaotic set of circumstances, I am apparently now suddenly teaching my Sex, Violence and Comics class again this fall. Yay! This is non one hand awesome, because I love that class and teaching it was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done. On…
(I’m about to get fairly geeky here and do some semiotics work.. I’m going to try to not be too academic, because I’m really interested in opinions from everyone) I’ve been pondering a weird thought experiment the last ten minutes or so. We tend to prefer single name signifiers for our political figures as a…
Last week I saw an image for a cover to a Popeye comic. This version, drawn by Steve Mannion featured Popeye and Bluto with exaggerated vein popping musculatures and Olive Oyl reimagined as a sexy femme fatale in the style that, at least to me, is most close evocative of Salma Hayek’s character from Deserpado. At…
I kind of wonder if anyone notices when I don’t update my blog. Most of my readers see it through the Facebook feed version, but I’ve been so busy that I haven’t even had a chance to go see a movie to review in the last couple weeks. If you follow me on twitter (@chrismaverick)…
In the name of continuing to pimp out my media whore appearances (I like that phrasing, I wonder if I can just add “media whore” to my CV), I figured I should mention that I did another podcast appearance this week which went up this morning. This time I’m a guest on Danny Anderson’s The Sectarian…
So even though I was super busy for the last month and didn’t blog as many movie reviews as I usually do, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about it. My friend Joe Darowski invited me to be on his podcast, The Protagonist Podcast, to discuss the movie Cool Runnings with him and his co-hosts Todd…