I am proud to announce that TheMikeDuBose the blog has increased our circulation. Two more sites have linked to us, bringing the total up to...two, I think. Meredith Guthrie's blog is one of them (it's been linked up on the right for a while), and my former colleague and Slobberbone fan-turned divinity student Brian Bork's blog Headful of Sermons (which I've just added to the list).
I hope one day to break into the double digits, reader-wise.
I just did a google search for myself out of idle curiousity...also to see if this blog would show up. Didn't get myself (I'm un-googleable!), but I got the football coach, a British oilman, a religious photographer, and a grant writer. The strangest one, however, was of an Austin TX musician; it says at the Austin Chronicle:
Singer-songwriter described as "the love child of Kurt Cobain and Lucinda Williams." Dark, introspective lyrics are perfect for post-breakup listening. So melodic that you can sob and sing along at the same time. Think Steve Earle, Elliott Smith, Bob Mould, Son Volt, and Neil Young.
It did have a link to his homepage, but that link went to (for some strange reason) Microsoft.com. Amazon didn't have any of his albums. Hmmmm...did I stumble across a tear in the space/time continuum that leads to another dimension? It does sound like it could be a version of me. Is this the non-academic alternate dimension me? Contact me if you see this, you other Mike DuBose...you brave man, you.
Amidst the oceans of papers I have to grade, I have had time to surface for a few bits o' entertainment. Some basic thoughts:
MUSIC:
Aimee Mann, The Forgotten Arm
At first, this did nothing for me, and that was mostly due to "In the Jailhouse Now." I love Aimee, but this song is a stinker. It's very "by the numbers" and sounds like Ms. Mann and company have fallen into formula. Luckily, however, I have given this album another chance. Pretty much everything else rocks! Aimee has rediscovered mid/uptempo songwriting! "Going through the Motions" couldn't be catchier, and "Little Bombs" is possibly one of the most devastating songs I've heard in ages. This album definitely has legs.
Son Volt, Okemah and the Melody of Riot
I wanted to like this, I really did. Son Volt returns and Jay Farrar remembers how to rock...it sounds like a brilliant combination. And there is a lot to love here: "Jet Pilot" is biting and crushing, "Atmosphere" is catchier than it should be, and "Bandages and Scars" gets the blood racing. Alas, there are also a lot of dogs here. "Ipacac" has a weak chorus and suffers from "let me throw in a big, vague word so I look smart" syndrome, and "Medication" is a low rent version of "Vitamins" from Jay's first solo album, sans a decent chorus. This album does give the impression that Jay has forgotten how to write choruses. Plus, the dual disk format is extremely annoying.
Ryan Adams & the Cardinals, Jacksonville City Nights
More solid and consistant than Cold Roses. This is a nice album. It is also very country, specifically the type of country where you should really be slightly pissed off and starting a whiskey drunk. The inclusion of new versions of old unreleased favorites "My Heart is Broken" and "Don't Fail Me Now" really makes this a keeper. The other songs are great, but as I only got this yesterday, I'll have to stop back for more details. It does seem like great companion piece to...
Caitlin Cary and Thad Cockrell, Begonias
The album of the year so far. Damn, this is good. It is also very country. I seem to be listening to more country stuff. Is there something wrong with me? Am I just getting older? Caitlin and Thad have tremendous chemistry. Too many highlights to list, but "Something Less than Something More" and "Waiting on June" are possibly perfect songs. If there was more country that was this good, I would go full-bore and forget rock ever existed.
Clutch, Robot Hive/Exodus
Awesome stoner metal. Who could ignore the catchy chorus of "10001110101?" Plus, the first song mentions both REO Speedwagon and Dokken! This is very hard, heavy and much less monotonous than I was expecting, especially since every song is in the same key and tempo. The best heavy thing I've gotten in ages.
More media later.
A fellow academic and blogger is doing a survey on academic blogging on her blog. Drop by and drop her a line.
I have a big head.
For those of you who know me, this probably comes as very little of a suprise. But, in the spirit of full disclosure, I feel the need to come public with the revelation. Besides, isn't admitting it the first step?
When my niece Clare was younger (you know, when they're at the age where they don't get the idea of editing themselves) and I would be riding with my sister, I would often hear her exclaim from the back seat "Uncle Mike, you got a big head"...which of course led to frequent chuckling on everyone's part...except mine...I instead cried gently.
Having a big head isn't all it's cracked up to be. Sure, it attracts the chicks...my wife was telling me the other day that the sheer size of my melon was what first set her heart all aflutter...but you face other difficulties. Guys, driven to sheer envy by the inadequacy of their own skulls, used to beat me up on an hourly basis, and my head provided a big target. And since my head is so large, I have chronic neck and shoulder pain.
It's also difficult finding hats. One size fits all? That phrase is a conspiracy set forth by those with smaller brainpans. Their sheer jealousy causes them to produce shoddy wares that cannot breach my head's circumference. My inability to wear a hat is the only thing that stops me from emulating those mightiest of heroes, the frat boys...the blackballing bastards who wouldn't let me join their club, only because of their jealously over my head size (although, looking back on it, going to a commuter campus might have also been a contributing factor).
I wonder what a phrenologist would say...
In a desperate attempt to at least look semi-normal, I thought about getting a fitted hat. I found a web site that told how to measure one's head. So, after gently closing my office door to avoid prying eyes, I broke out my Craftsman retractable tape measure and wrapped the crinkling metal band around my head. None of you will be shocked to learn I literally measured off the charts...I estimate an 8 1/2.
So I looked for a large (technically, an XXXL) hat online. There were none for my alma mater. There were none for my place of employment. There were none for my favorite football team.
What I need here is a reputable head diet.
And pray to whatever powers that be that I never get encephalitis...the resulting head would blot out the sun.
I don't care, this is a source of endless amusement for me. Again,
funny spam names from Gmail:
Emilio Hickey
Delmar Askew
Porfirio Turner
Lanny Painter
Della Wiggins
Weldon Wall
Genevieve Castillo
Drandi Dudley
Estella Marcum
Augustus Dow
Tessa Carillo
Wilbur Acevedo
Evangeline Kemp
Mitzi Mcgrath
Burt Avila
Elsa Sneed
Clarice Pratt
Amalia Erwin
Jolene Frank
So, you were wondering how the weekend was?
I got sunburnt at Black Swamp. The festival itself was great, and Lori and I bought our first festival artwork...a cool collage I call "Dinosaur Lady." We ate there twice. My fave festival food was the Thai stand...chicken on a stick! On the down side, the cajun place still has fried gator, but it's no longer on a stick...you have to buy a platter, and half the fun was eating it off a stick. Bastards.
I was a little underwhelmed by the music selection. Friday's acts just sucked, and we saw one person...who was with females and didn't want to hang with a couple. Saturday, in the afternoon (when we were volunteering), we saw two people we knew, but they just mumbled and went on their way. There was one good country act. We went back Saturday night for Chuck Prophet, who was a hell of a guitar player...unfortunately, his songs only really matched his playing 15% of the time. Again saw no one. Sunday, stayed in and went for TOTAL FOOTBALL IMMERSION.
It's Friday, and I'm in my office. I think that I might be the only one left at the University.
I walk the halls. Emptiness. Vast, labyrinthian unused spaces. Darkened offices. I think I might see the occasional office worker, but they might just be mirages...or perhaps ghosts.
I go to the Union office, yet there is no answer when I knock. Am I paranoid? Is there some significance with the Union office being deserted on a Friday afternoon?
I go down one floor. The third level of University Hall has the best echoes. It's like being in an ivy-covered Grand Canyon.
I go out to the green. Still deserted. Ghost campus. Save for the occasional tumbleweed and circling vulture, I am alone.
Did the railroad move, leaving the town's occupants to pull up stakes in the middle of the night? Space aliens kidnap everyone? Or was the life I thought I was leading only a dream? Am I the only one left? Has my world become a Twilight Zone episode?
Hello? Can you hear me? Knock once...
For all of my friends in BG, I will be at the Black Swamp Arts Festival quite a bit this weekend. As my wife volunteered me, I will be working somewhere in the beer area Saturday from noon to about two. I will of course be visiting both Friday and Saturday night...I gotta see The Derailers and Chuck Prophet. Please, come drink with me! Don't make me feel like I'm alone!
For those who have departed from BG...doesn't this make you miss the town just a little?
Sometimes the simplest of decisions can influence you in ways you never thought, and they often can stick with you longer than you would expect.
My first job was as a (ahem) "Asphault Pigmentation Application Specialist"...which essentially means I worked for a company which painted lines on parking lots. It was hard, hot work...Florida summers on freshly laid asphault do not make for a comfortable work day. The boss was one of those "speedeat so we can get back to the jobsite" types...a nice guy, but he didn't exactly need his morning coffee to get going. So it was long hours in miserable conditions.
The pay was mighty nice, though. Apparently the boss got tired of people goofing off, so he made the snappy decision to pay his workers by the job rather than by the hour. After that, everybody worked like dogs on amphetamines, and I would pull in $300 for a weekend's work. This cash went largely to cars and guitars...that is, the cash that didn't go toward partying.
When the summer was over, the work dried up. So, after a little while of no income, I started looking for a job. The only problem was that I was a young heavy metal kid with long hair (this was the eighties, after all) and very few places would hire me...and I couldn't see chopping the hair for minimum wage. A friend worked at Little Caesar's Pizza, and they didn't make you chop your hair...so I got him to pick me up an application.
I ended up working at Little Caesars on and off for nine and a half years...throughout my community college days, through parts of my "one semester break" (which turned into a few years), and right through getting a BA and an MA. By the time I left, I could do the job in my sleep...and often did.
There were controversies. I got fired from one company after the manager's cousin got promoted...which would have been more bearable, but the boss lied to me (told me the "powers that be" ordered my termination), and it all went down after I was in a bad car accident. So, injured and jobless, I tried other jobs including loading trucks and a disasterous stint doing temp work (remind me to tell you about the one where they wanted me to kill rats with a broom handle with a nail on the end). All the other work sucked so badly that I got a job at the other Little Caesars franchise in town and worked there, on and off, for a long time.
While management, I yelled at a lot of teens. I hired and fired. I drank with my superiors. After a while, I became a little bit of a "problem solver" for the company...they would send me somewhere when a store needed "cleaned up." I would yell, cajole, and generally train the little buggers to do things right. Somehow, I was able to get crews to move from hating my guts to really liking me yet still doing their job better than ever. One store in particular, no one would talk to me for about two weeks. When I left a few months later, they baked me cookies.
By the end of my pizza run, I was down to just working a couple of morning shifts a week. I could get into work at 9:30 and have all of the day's prep work (sauce, dough, cheese, all done fresh) finished by the time I unlocked the doors. I would then take care of customers for the lunch rush, fix myself a pizza, and read for school.
I only left because I needed to come to Ohio for my Ph.D....otherwise, I have the striking suspicion that I might still be doing a few days there. It was actually really sad when I found out the chain has pretty much left Jacksonville...both franchises folded.
Anyway, my time at Little Caesars influenced me in more ways than I care to think. When I taught Intro to Sociology for Terra Community College, most of my examples of group hierarchy and behavior came from Little Caesars. Those kids learned almost as much about pizza as they did about Sociology, and they would audibly groan when I would try to slip in another example.
More elementally, my teaching style is very close to my management style...a nice mixture of scary and quirky. It seems to work. I still get to my jobs 15 minutes early, just like I did at Little Caesars. I also learned how to deal with others from a leadership position by interacting with my pizza makers. So in many ways, Little Caesars made me the man that I am.
I think about the place more often than I probably should. I even dream about it. This morning, my alarm went off in the middle of a dream about a Little Caesars workers reunion, and I spent my time in the shower wondering which of the 13+ stores at which I worked was my favorite...and I still can't figure it out. Casset was good, but Beach Blvd. got to be really family...and then there's my first Orange Park store.
I also wonder what happened to all the fun people I worked with. Where's Willie, the monsterously tall and very sweet black man who joked about tearing down the Statue of Liberty and putting up a statue of Shaka Zulu? Terry, the very funny and cocky Lee High School tight end, who I once got to sing along to the Misfits, thus thoroughly confusing our manager? What about Paul and Paula from Orange Park...are they still together? Jim and all the rest from Beach, who made me feel like a friend...do they still repeat my mantra "a clean station is a happy station"? The dramatically short and funny Wendy from OP? Gina, the short Carribean girl with the heavy accent? The hundreds of others whose names I unfortunately cannot remember?
In many ways, Little Caesars did a whole bunch to shape me into the person that I am. I wonder what would have happened if I would've chopped the hair and went to McDonalds. Would I still be where I am today?
Of course, now I have to jet out of office hours early and get some Crazy Bread. Damn you, memories...
Society for Cinema and Media Studies
March 2-5, 2006
Vancouver, Canada
http://www.cmstudies.org
Call for Papers: "Signs of Intelligent Life in the Media"
Is it a good thing to appear intelligent? More to the point for our purposes, what does the media think of smarts? Academics have frequently seen anti-intellectualism in movies and television, but is the media’s view of smart people really as simple as the pompous, bumbling professor? Is there in fact any cultural capital to being smart?
This panel hopes to examine the nuances of depictions of intelligence in the mass media. Some possible areas of inquiry include: the connections between intelligence and social skills; intelligence and mental health; brains as an asset or liability in reality programming; intelligence in sport narratives; connections between race, class, gender, and images of intelligence; mental strategy depicted in non-intellectual competitions, such as wrestling or competitive eating.
Proposals covering any media are welcome. Please send a 150-word abstract plus a vita and bio statement to Dr. Mike S. DuBose at mike.dubose@utoledo.edu by September 3rd.
School is back in session, so I have been spending most of my time working on related issues. As you know, I am now a Lecturer at University of Toledo. I have been trying to deal with the usual array of student concerns (which I really don't want to get into here), but I have also been trying to get my office together. The plus side? I have an amazing computer...new Dell, fast as all git-out, big monitor, laser printer. Unfortunately, though, it does make my home machine seem ancient.
The only down sides to my new office are (1) the ugliness of this old place and (2) lack of shelving. Both will be corected eventually when building maintenance can get here, but who knows when that will be. I'm going with wall mount shelving, but I gotta store the shelves in my office lest another faculty lay claim...and some of these boards are long. I have to move chairs over stacks of boards when a student comes by. But, I suppose, there are worse tragedies.
Now that I have an actual office out of which to work, I find that (1) I feel much more professional, and (2) I seem to be more organized over my workload....to do lists and everything. I hope this means that I will get back to writing once I finish with the first stack of papers (which is, groan, already here). I should also have more time to blog while I'm at it.
This all leads me, however, to one scary thought: I think that I might be becoming an adult. My friend Jamie got me referring to my "adult salary," and I have been putting it to adult uses (paying off bills and restocking the liquor cabinet with good stuff...it is, by the way, really fun to buy five bottles at the liquor store). The responsibility at work also seems adult, as does the fact that the office staff now actually knows who I am. Hell, I'm even planning when I can afford to buy a new car, which is really weird...as my newest one was about ten years old when I got it.
Is dressing formally really that far behind? Will I quit drinking too much? How about getting mad at the young whippersnappers across the street who make noise to all hours of the night? Will I start complaining about how today's music doesn't have melody like it did in my age? Who can indeed understand these kids today?
Somebody give me a comic, quick!
For those of you who know me, the fact that I do in fact actually think about fashion might come as a suprise. But this is an area of my life that has been thrust to the forefront by two recent events.
First, some history. Back in high school, I was mister Heavy Metal, complete with the jeans, dark sunglasses, concert shirts, denim jacket, and long hair (briefly in a Bon Jovi-esque perm...not that I was trying to emulate the man...I still dislike his music...not that any of this is relevant). In this fashion, I was not very distinguishable from most of the other heavy metal fans.
Eventually, I got tired of being a conformist non-conformist, if you get my drift. So I was looking for the next Mike fashion when I decided to go tie-die.
Keep in mind that this was the late eighties. I did not choose tie-dies due to any love of the hippie movement, although I did listen to the Dead when hung over. Rather, I thought that if I wore such clothing, I would at least have a certain uniqueness. After all, who in the hell wore tie-dies in 1987?
But tie-dies, perhaps on the coattails of the suddenly radio-friendly Grateful Dead, came back. They started to show up everywhere. I realized the full extent of their incursion into the fashion realm when, sitting on the porch of a downtown restaurant listening to a friend sing and play, I saw a three year old in a (gasp) tie-die.
That was it. My choice of fashion had been coopted by kiddie clothiers. Something had to be done.
My next choice for what now was, I admitted, my pursuit of an anti-fashion was the humble Hawaiian shirt. So I got a few, had my dearest Mummy (a good seamstress) make me some very loud Hawaiians. I thought I looked good...or at least, reasonably bad. And hey, I thought in 1995, Hawaiian shirts wouldn't dare come back into fashion, would they? Surely, the public would continue to ignore them.
And you all know what happened. Personally, I started worrying when they started showing up at Old Navy. Then Red Lobster adopted them as work uniforms. Then there was the episode of The Simpsons, where Homer told Marge, "Only two types of guys wear Hawaiian shirts: gay guys and big, fat party animals." When they hit the local Meijer, I really freaked.
I tried valiently to be zen about the whole cooptation thing. I tried shaking it up by combining the Hawaiian shirt with tie-dies, but it was obviously an example of "trying too hard." Eventually, I came to the conclusion that as I was simply destined to be a fashion pioneer and whatever I moved to next would become the next "big thing," I might as well just bite the bullet and wait the trend out, until Hawaiian shirts became comfortably retro again.
Two things have made me really think about this, however. First off, the Chronicle of Higher Education published one of their first person pieces about clothing and teaching, which drew a connection between a professor's choice of attire and their teaching style. No problem. Contrary to what my parents think (they feel I should now start dressing professionally as I finally have a "real" job), my fashion choices have always been pedagogically thought-out. Hawaiian shirts work in front of a class. First, the students stay awake...the bright colors, you know. Second, I appear less intimidating...in a suit, a 6'5" large guy would scare the hell out of them.
What the article did do, though, was make me wonder how exactly the students see me. What is their image of their fearless leader? Especially as I express a few liberal ideas during the course of a (heh heh) course, such as homosexuals might well be real people, and women and minorities are not always treated nicely by society...do they, following the model of Homer Simpson, think I'm gay?
The second event was this past weekend. I've mentioned in this space before that my wife got us tickets to see Hall and Oates. Well, the post-tick reschedule was last week. There's a lot I can say about the show (solid band, very caucasian-heavy audience, Hall is still tired, why don't they let Oates sing?, $5 for a Bud?), but the main attraction was the crowd.
Immersed in that body of humanity, I did feel really good about my hairline...as a large percentage of males had bald spots that would put that of my friend Joe to shame. But it became quickly obvious that in this crowd, a Hawaiian shirt was more a uniform than an anti-fashion statement.
My God, I thought, I've been dressing up like a mid-fifties, thinking about retirement, lower-middle class WASP! Is that how my students see me? What can I do about it?
Lori thinks I'm thinking about fashion a bit too much, but I feel shaken. I don't know where else to go. I'd like to adopt a whole work uniform thing, but none of the thrift stores seem to sell any. I though briefly about going Izod, but I really can't see adopting the preppie look. I could return to the high school concert shirt image, but it doesn't go with my now short hair. I have realized belatedly in my life that I am a man without a fashion plan...and surprisingly, that frightens me.
Suggestions are welcome...hit the comment link below.
In lieu of an actual post (I'm writing, damnit), I present my collection of funny fake names that were attached to spam I've recieved.
First, while I don't want to turn this into a blog about bloggers (for those of you who love big words, that would be a metablog), I do want to throw one more at you. I got an e-mail from an ex-student today. It was nice. Apparently, he doesn't want to kill me, which is always a shock. Anyway, him and his girlfriend have a blog called Egg's Nestwhich has the best entry titles I've ever seen.
Second, on the above blog, there's a link to a great, funny site, Overheard in New York.
Thirdly, sci-fi/cyberpunk author William Gibson (of Neuromancer fame) has written a good article called "God's Little Toys: Confessions of a Cut and Paste Artist," which draws the comparison between William S. Burroughs, hip hop and sampling, intertextuality, and the interconnectivity and hyperlinking of computer work.
Enjoy.
For those of you interested in my Orion post, space and such things, check out Space Bombardment; by Norden, the commenter on this post, which is definitely worth thinking about.
My computer table is set up right over an AC vent...I have to wear slippers in the summer to keep from freezing my tootsies.
As an educator and academic, I am a reader of the Chronicle of Higher Education...it's a professionably viable thing to do, and they often have intriguing articles. Case in point: in the job section of this week's edition, they had an article written (anonymously) by a member of search committees called "Bloggers Need Not Apply."
The basic slant of this article was that whenever they've been able to dig up a blog of a job candidate, it has usually somehow worked against the potential hire. The article (as well as the author's searches) seems based on the assumption that the blog, in order to be anything other than a drawback, has to be an attempt to bring the author's scholarship to the masses. If it is not, the article argues, you should eliminate your blog from the ether.
There are a few really weird assumptions that result from this argument. First, one candidate's blog worked against him because it "revealed that the true passion of said blogger's life was not academe at all, but the minutiae of software systems, server hardware, and other tech exotica." The underlying assumption here is that in order to be an academic, your teaching and field of research have to pervade every mote of your being. To show that you have interests outside your work is to show that you are not a viable professional academic.
This of course means that academics is only for the totally obsessed among us...at least in this article's view of the world. I've got to wonder. My brother is an electrician, and a damn good one at that. Still, he has hobbies other than electricity, and he doesn't think of running wires every minute he's away from the job site. If he wrote a blog about his rabid love for music, would he be considered less of an elecrician? This example, incidentally, is not going to happen; not that he doesn't love music, but he's too much of a technophobe to have a blog.
Anyway, is being an academic really so far different from any other job that you cannot be good and it and have a life and outside interests? Personally, I've known a lot of academics who do nothing outside their research. They are not fun people. They can't hold a normal conversation, they're ill at ease with people, and they can't talk about research without (a) looking at the conversation as an excuse to dominate or argue with their position, (b) steal potential ideas from those with which they converse, or (c) use the talk as a tool to intellectually rank and compare their colleagues. Is this really the type of person that you want as a colleague?
When I was going after my MA, I was pretty much a school/work hermit, and I don't know if I did anything significant other than those two. When I started my PhD, I promised myself I would still have a life, I would converse, make friends. Guess what? I found that having some kind of existance outside of academics, rather than distracting from my work, actually allowed me a type of perspective and awareness that I could not get when thinking about scholarship was all I did. Knowing other parts of the real world allows academics to better relate their work to that real world...strange but true.
In many ways, many academics want to have their field dominate all existance...both within the university and without. I understand this...it's largely tied up with the struggle to stake out ground for your discipline in general and your research in particular. However, outside perspective, I would argue, is also something you might want.
Later in the article, another serious point came out, one that I feel the need to quote at length.
Part One: "it's best for job seekers to leave their personal lives mostly out of the interview process. It would never occur to the committee to ask what a candidate thinks about certain people's choice of fashion or body adornment, which countries we should invade, what should be done to drivers who refuse to get out of the passing lane, what constitutes a real man, or how the recovery process from one's childhood traumas is going. But since the applicant elaborated on many topics like those, we were all ears. And we were a little concerned. It's not our place to make the recommendation, but we agreed a little therapy (of the offline variety) might be in order."
Part Two: "More often that not, however, the blog was a negative, and job seekers need to eliminate as many negatives as possible. We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction."
If the people writing the blogs have nutso politics, then yes, maybe they might not want to advertise that fact. But the idea that you should squeltch your personality entirely to do a successful interview? That I have problems with.
Why, as an interviewer, would you not want to get to know any of your interviewees and in fact encourage them to hide this stuff? On what basis then are you hiring? A CV/resume? Some candidates have a great cv and look good on paper but would make awful candidates as they have no character or social skill. The very strength of other candidates is exactly in how they work with others, how they would work with your students, how they would work with your department, and if these things are not matters of character and personality...the very thing the article recommends squeltching...what are they? I've been reading Kitchen Confidential, and Chef Bourdain argues (I'm paraphrasing here) that when hiring, character is the very thing you want to look for, as everything else can be taught but character cannot. I've also hired in my past, and Bourdain hits it on the head.
The artice continues: "Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know "the real them" -- better than we wanted, enough to conclude we didn't want to know more." Should I mention that I find the whole idea that reading a blog and assuming you now "know" the person is just slightly presumtuous?
This isn't the first time I've seen someone questioning the logic behind doing a blog, and although I don't fancy myself a blog apologist, I have had to answer the question "why do/would you do the blog thing?" Lotsa possible answers. For me, the first reason is that I needed to have an outlet for non-academic writing. Writing scholarship requires an ultimate intensity...I'm glad I do it, and I do enjoy the process and the results, but it isn't always what one would call "fun." The writing style that I apply to the blog is much different in form; it can be fun, breezy, light, artistic, needlessly caustic, or any other mood that fits my whim. It is an artistic outlet more than anything else, and having it lets me be a more confident writer in all areas, including academics.
Of course, there are other reasons...I have lotsa friends all over, and it's nice to be available in some sense to them. I like the idea of having a body of work that I created, that other people enjoy, without having to go through the "submit/reject" cycle.
I also have serious ideas as to what goes here and what does not. This is not an academic blog, so I do not chronicle my research. I think of myself as a professional educator, so I do not go into specifics on individual students. My job search (except in broad, general strokes) is off-limit because the decorum of such a quest demands it.
To take the approach that a blog is inherently a bad thing for jobseekers seems shortsighted and assumes a relatively narrow view both about what a blog is supposed to do and about appropriate potential employee behavior. Of course, if someone was to read this blog specifically and directly tell me "you are a crazy person and will never get hired unless you hide your insanity from the world at large," then I might consider differently...
