FUN STUFF--HERMES STYLE!

Here, you will find fun riddles, puzzles, secret codes, embedded messages, jokes--and much more--that Joe has injected into his work in places you would least expect them. The god, Hermes, was important to his work, and was even included in his very definition of bricolage.

Just as Joe took very seriously his mission to alleviate suffering in the world he also took his humor very seriously--and hilariously--perhaps as a means for alleviating some of our suffering--ours and his own.

I hope you enjoy his humor as much as I do. It's yet another dimension of his work that makes it such a joy to read. You just never know what he's going to say--or when!

And sometimes this requires reading between the lines and even deep analysis using the Hermeneutic circle and observing what emerges. See his discussion, "The Creative Nature of Interpretation" in Rigour and Complexity in Educational Research: Conceptualizing the Bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004, pp. 95-102).

The Big Friendly Giant

Which book did Joe dedicate to the Big Friendly Giant? And for you scholars out there: What is the full significance of his having done so? You will need to do a lot of research and use multiple perspectives, along with Joe's multidimensional critical complex bricolage to answer this adequately and pass this test.

FIDUROD

Playing With the Queen of Hearts: The Joker Ain’t the Only Fool in FIDUROD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

And here is the song: Playing with the Queen of Hearts

Of course, FIDUROD is the acronym Joe invented to move away from the virulent arguments over "positivism." Its letters stand for Formal, Intractable, Decontextualized, Universalistic, Reductionistic, and One Dimensional, the form of debilitating learning and knowledge production used in schools today, which he argues against. You can read more here and in his book Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction.

And now for the puzzle:

What is the encoded message in the acronym, FIDUROD, and who is the message for?

Good luck! I never did figure it out and was finally told the answer from "Hermes" himself. (You can always ask, if you get stuck.)

The Other "Fools" in FIDUROD

Joe writes, "Playing With the Queen of Hearts : The Joker Ain't the Only Fool in FIDUROD" (p. 21). Who do you think is the Joker? Who are the other fools in FIDUROD?

Who was the Queen of Hearts? (This is a "private joke" from the cosmos: Joe used to tell me "Right on target" in response to my comments on his forum so many times he would laugh--he was Cupid, not me! Watch the video for a clue.)

Fill In the Blank

This is one that he devised, I am sure, to encourage us to ask "What's missing, and why is it missing?"

He states: "Fiske maintains that power 'is a systematic set of operations upon people that works to ensure the maintenance of the social order . . . and ensure its smooth running' (p. 11)" (cited from page 97 of Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction).

So . . . what do you think is missing and what may be some reasons he left it out? I know: this is hard because to know for certain, you need John Fiske's book, Power Plays, Power Works. (Hint: You could always try searching in the book on Amazon.com).

Joe's Best Friends

Joe had three dogs and he loved them very much! What were their names? He has actually included this information in several of his books so it shouldn't be that hard to find [Some people hate this joke, but what can I say?; Reality is strange sometimes].

Three Licks

What are the "Three Licks"? (This comes from his book Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction)

Cool Beans!

In The Sign of the Burger, Joe accounts many funny stories about his bean-eating days growing up as a "hillbilly" in the Appalachian mountains. This is just one of them:

"My friends and I would count the minutes until the lunch bell rang. I was teased throughout the school for my feat of eating five or six large bowls of soup beans: the number was restricted only by the short time allotted for lunch. The enthusiasm for bean day was shared by the entire student body and was a significant aspect of our school and community culture, matched only by the flatulence that filled the air of Wednesday afternoon classes" (p. 23).

This particular quote is also a test of your interpretive abilities (and I just now, as I am creating this page for the site, found this). For this puzzle, interpret it using the Signs of Twin Flames as I discussed in my dissertation and his recommendation to offset thanatos with Eros. Semiotics and polysemy come in handy for this interpretation as well. There are many "signs" in this quotation, so apropos for a book about "signs" in which he references the song, "Signs, signs, everywhere a sign" by the Five Man Electric Band (see p. 3).

Dimensions and Universes

In his book, Getting Beyond the Facts, Teaching Social Studies/Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century (2001), he has used the word “universe” on page 665. He has used the magic of hermeneutics and linguistic techniques to hide a special message of hope inside this sentence that relates to dimensions/universes. Can you discover the hidden message? Here is the sentence:

“Despite all appearances to the contrary, neoclassicists operate in a simple universe: a fantasyland that exists only at Disney World.” (p. 665)

Einstein's Theory of Unity

In his book about Einstein, The Stigma of Genius: Einstein, Conscsionness, and Education, Joe left a clue about Einstein's search for unity. Did Einstein solve the theory?

Hermes

What is Joe's hidden message in this statement he made in Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction on page 175:

No matter how much such uncritical scholars might wish it were so, the phenomenal world does not give up its meaning(s) so clearly. The Greeks who created the mythology of Hermes made this point many millennia ago.

LOTS MORE TO COME! . . .

“As a child I wanted so desperately for magic to be real. I would work for hours collecting what I hoped were just the right combination of ingredients to make some type of magic potion that would provide me with special powers….I found such magic in words viewed in a postformal matrix and I observe and practice that magic everyday.” (Kincheloe, 2006, Reading, Writing, Thinking, p. 13)

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