COMM 337: Before we ride off into the sunset ...

Odds and ends for the last day of class ...

1. Your final exam is posted below. If you have questions about it, or anything else, please don't hesitate to contact me by email. My Yahoo! account is best, peterellertsen - at - yahoo.com (please note spelling of last name or copy and paste it from here).
   
2. I've posted some information to the blog about COMM 353, an advanced seminar I'll be offering in the spring. I believe it's required for Writing and Publishing program students and an elective for Comm Arts. It's also about magazines, geared more to editing and production.
   
3. Links at the end of this post to a couple of articles about the European economic crisis we've been reading about this semester. As usual, you're encouraged to take them with a grain of salt. But the crisis isn't going away now the semester's over.
   
4. My favorite political blog, Capitol Fax at target="_blank">http://capitolfax.com/, often closes out the week by posting a music video on Fridays. Since we're closing out the semester, I'll do the same.

So here's some Christmas cheer by one of my favorite bands, an Irish traditional group with punk rock overtones called the Pogues. The song is "Fairytale of New York". It was recorded in 1987 by Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan and guest vocalist Kristy McColl. It regularly tops the charts in Ireland and the U.K. at Christmastime, and it's getting to be kind of a tradition in my fall semester classes.

"Fairytale of New York," the Pogues & Kirsty McColl



The other one has more to do with COMM 337. If there's one major point I've wanted to make this semester that isn't on the syllabus, it's that I think the world belongs to people who have the drive and talent to be entreprenueral.

And the people who put this 2010 video together were nothing if not entrepreneurial.

Something to think about as you graduate and begin your careers.

"Hallelujah Chorus," Christmas Food Court Flash Mob

This flash mob was superbly organized, choreographed and recorded by http://www.AlphabetPhotography.com of Niagra Falls, Ontario. To read more about the agency, link here to their About Us page. Cooperating were Robert Cooper and Chorus Niagara, The Welland Seaway Mall and Fagan Media Group. Vickie Fagan describes the group as a "one-stop portal for all media services including, broadcast, corporate, website, social media and software design." Some of you may consider the song appropriate to the end of the semester, as well.



Footnote on European (and U.S.) sovereign debt crisis. Niall Ferguson, controversial and usually quite conservative economic historian, has a discouraging take on the sovereign debt crisis we've been reading about this semester. It's titled "The Fed's Critics Are Wrong: We Need to Avert Depression" and it's in this week's issue of Newsweek. Ferguson has plenty of critics, but most of them are on the left, and it will be interesting (at least to those of us who care about economic history) to see what the reaction is to this article. At any rate, in Newsweek Ferguson says:

What was the root cause of the financial crisis? Greed? Deregulation? No. It was ignorance of financial history.

Last week the world’s central banks—including the American Federal Reserve—acted in concert to try to prevent history from repeating itself. Their critics on both sides of the Atlantic showed a dangerous ignorance, and not for the first time.

Author of "The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000" and several histories of the Rothschild banking house over the centuries, Ferguson says "In normal times it would be legitimate to worry about the consequences of money printing and outsize debts. But history tells us these are anything but normal times." Instead, he fears a repeat of 1931 when tight money policies made the Great Depression inevitable:

We are indeed fortunate that at least the world’s leading central bankers have studied this history: not only [U.S. Federal Reserve chairman] Ben Bernanke but also the heads of the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, and the European Central Bank.

The bad news is that so few politicians and voters understand what they are trying to do, or why. The even worse news is that central bankers by themselves may not be able to stop our depression from turning great.

Time will tell. I'm convinced by the parallels to the Great Depression, but I've been worried about things like that before and they haven't come to pass. In the meantime, scary headlines do sell magazines.

There's another story in Newsweek I plan to read. It's by Simon Schama, another British historian who teaches in America, and it's titled "Why America Should Care About the Collapse of European Unity" ... not exactly cheerful holiday reading, either, but I think these things are important.