BenCrowder.net

I ran across Orson Scott Card's two-part essay on homework this morning. A quote: Homework is usually so mind-numbingly dull, so endless, so hopeless, so relentless, so useless that lots of motivated, bright kids whose parents are involved turn savagely against the whole idea of school. They hate reading, they ...

A day goes by without blogging and I feel like the world has come to a halt. Methinks I need to unplug from cyberspace a bit. (And while I don't really need to say this, the Middle English nerd / English Language major in me wants to point ...

Since I'm not a big fan of Halloween (both on the condoning-the-occult front and on the candy front), I've spent the evening reading instead of trick-or-treating. A few chapters of Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings (one of my favorite books, by the way) got me in a language mood, so ...

With Instant Handbrake I'm able to convert my DVDs to iPod (.mp4), so now I have To This End Was I Born, Mountain of the Lord, and Fan Chan (แฟนฉัน, a Thai movie) on my iPod. In addition, the Internet Archive has 710 public domain feature films ...

You'd think I would have been all over podcasting as soon as I heard about it, and I'll admit my interest was piqued at the beginning, but it wasn't until yesterday that I really caught the vision. Language learning. It's brilliant, and perfect for podcasting. You can get bite-size ...

I’m getting back into the groove of school, thankfully. And I’d forgotten just how much I enjoy doing homework. :) (I say that without any sarcasm, honest.) For example, I just finished translating the first three chapters of Cicero’s First Catilinarian Oration and reading an 80-page historical ...

I was originally going to take the Latin Vulgate class this fall, but things have changed. This may be a petty reason to drop a class, but I'm pretty sure that I won't like the professor very much -- he's reportedly full of himself to a large degree, he ...

My copy of Novum Testamentum: Graece et Latine came in the mail today. :) Mmm. I read the first chapter or so of Matthew over dinner, with a peek here and there at the Greek (I took Greek 101 two years ago but have forgotten most of ...

While studying Latin and reading Grimm this morning, I had so much fun that I couldn't just stop there. So I picked up my copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in Spanish and started reading, not worrying too much about the dictionary but just trying to ...

So, I've added a "Blogs I read" page. Keep in mind that anything computer-related will end up on Outside the Box (when I add a blogroll there), and anything art or design-related is on BenjaminCrowder.com, and anything genealogy-related will be on Footprints from the Past ...