1984: Murder in F-flat at the Daily Nebraskan

1984 was an interesting time to be alive, because you felt, every day, as if you were living in the George Orwell novel of the same name. Reagan was president, and the world seemed to be collapsing around you — likely just as many of us feel today with another, repressive, Republican president. 1984 also happened to be the year I started writing for the Daily Nebraskan — the school newspaper for the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I was a Sophomore in 1984, and I was writing a weekly, serialized, novel called “Murder in F-Flat” — in the wake of Mark Twain, and others like him — and the effort was curious, odd, joyful, frustrating, and purely delightful.

1984 was the dawn of the Personal Computer Age, and while we could save electronic copies of our writing, the work was stored on a fragile 5 1/4″ floppy disk that was kept in a sleeve because its magnetic surface was exposed to the elements. You wrote on the computer, printed out your articles, handed in the paper, and an editor retyped what you wrote into their computer. Yes, you saved what you wrote, but retrieving it later, was an issue then, as it is now; so when I discovered yesterday that the Daily Nebraskan archives for 1984-1987 were now online, I pounded my memory to try to remember when, and what, I wrote in 1984; and the key to the memory trick was my 1984 September 28 pay stub from the Daily Nebraskan. I remembered a check was cut for us every 30 days and each article paid $10.

My search began, and ended, in money — and now I present to you what I was able to find — four FIVE installments of “Murder in F-flat” by Dave Boles! I think a couple of episodes are missing from the online archive; I will keep an eye on that Daily Neb portal, and if the other stories flash into the now from the past, I will dutifully update this article! If you prefer a larger version to read, please head over to my Boles.com Periodicals Archive.

August 22, 1984
(UPDATE: 5-31-10 — I found the first installment!)

August 31, 1984
Too bad you can’t see the whole graphic logo for the column — and today, you’d never want a graphic byline, because your name would never index online as text — “Murder in F-flat” is stylized, and hand-drawn, and I wish I could remember the artist’s name. I just realized now, the pen doing the writing, is being held the wrong way, and is actually stabbing me, the author, in the chest. Murder, indeed! The opening reference to “last week” tells me at least one previous episode installment is missing, so we’re leaping into the story mid-stream.

Continue reading → 1984: Murder in F-flat at the Daily Nebraskan

Coloring History: Should Facts Remain Black and White?

Every so often, we get someone who steps forward to decide our shared, national, record of events isn’t good enough in standard black and white — and so they take the task upon themselves to “convert” the established, memed, facts of black and white history into their color-coded version of hues — to reset, in their mind, what really happened.

This modernizing filter of alleged aesthetic and absolutely craven creativity is just as disturbing to me today as it was 30 years ago when I was an undergraduate Freshman at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln taking a film class with the great Dr. June Perry Levine.

At the time of Dr. Levine’s course, Ted Turner was in full-burst mode in his effort to “colorize” old black and white movies and television shows by adding color to give them new life on his cable channel.

Turner’s effect was horrible and gross as skin colors were orange and backgrounds were dark blue and clothing was all a shade of a mossy green: Time travel at its complete worst.

Adding new color to old black and white images is like repainting a fresco of Christ.  The ultimate effect of each effort is the shared shameful same.

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Red Power and Taking AIM: Russell Means and the Reemergence of the American Indian Movement

Russell Means was a wounded warrior in the inequal fight for freedom and civil rights between the American Indian and the Federal government.  He was a hero to his people and an inspiration to the rest of us.  Russell Means died on October 22, 2012 on his beloved Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.  He was 72.

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NYU Razes Greenwich Village

NYU is a big bully of a university with over 45,000 students and no real campus.  Well, it has a sort-of campus as in “The Entire New York City Bohunk Neighborhood Called Greenwich Village” — and it isn’t folly to argue NYU not only wants to own all of Greenwich Village, it wants to be Greenwich Village… and probably re-brand the area, “The NYU Green.”

As you can imagine, the non-NYU students who currently reside in Greenwich Village despise the school’s ongoing and aggressive attempts over the last couple of decades to undermine the status of their lives by buying up and tearing down the real estate that makes up their little corner of the world:

New York University says it needs more dormitories, classrooms, athletic and performance spaces and a hotel to accommodate its burgeoning student body and compete with national universities, and it wants to erect four buildings amid two sprawling apartment complexes north of Houston Street.

The square footage of the four buildings, the tallest of which would be 25 floors, would nearly equal that of the Empire State Building.

The local community board recommended unanimously last month that the Council reject the university’s plan — known as NYU 2031 — and the zoning changes it would require. The board said that the proposed buildings were too dense and tall and that the addition of thousands of students and workers would erode the character of a still quaint and offbeat city quarter.

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Huskers.UNL.edu and Alumni Email

One of the newer chits college and university alumni associations offer to former students is “email for life” even if the former students attended the school in the Dark Age Before There Was Email.  The University of Nebraska-Lincoln — clearly because of their new email deal with the Microsoft devil — now finally offers a university email address that is both worthwhile and valuable.

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WiFi Speeds at the NYU Bobst Library

I had a couple of hours to kill last night in Greenwich Village in New York City, and I enjoyed walking everywhere — including Cornelia Street and the temporary Apple SoHo store at 72 Greene Street — to relive some beloved, old, memories of living in that neighborhood years ago.  Another regular, old, haunt of mine was NYU’s beautiful Bobst library.  It had been awhile since I’d been in Bobst with a WiFi device and so last night I decided to do some testing with my new iPhone 4S and iPad 2 — and the results were amazing!

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When the Plagiarist Punishes the Professor

Panagiotis Ipeirotis teaches computer science at NYU in the Stern School of Business.  After winning tenure, he decided to use TurnItIn‘s Blackboard integration to see how many of his students were plagiarists.

Continue reading → When the Plagiarist Punishes the Professor