This from Ph.D. Comics, by the inimitable Jorge Cham.Eerily accurate. I used to say this: "I will change the world with Old English!" Then it was "Changing the world one dead language at a time!" Then it was "Changing the academy, one Kalamazoo at a time!"Occasionally, it has been "Not saying something dumb in class, one day at a time!" Although lately it has more often felt like "Writing a page th...

I'm only doing this -- linking to my Technorati Profile"> because Technorati told me to. Yup, gullible....

by Mary Kate Hurley (image: unexpected Medieval Italian Greyhound, from the Cloisters museum, that looks surprisingly like my own dog, Allegra)Today was a beautiful day for working on my dissertation. This was especially true because I got to have tea with my undergraduate adviser, Gillian Overing, and there are very few meetings that I look forward to more. So of course, on this particular Monday,...

This is not very Old English or Medieval-ist oriented. However, I've recently found THIS supervillain musical from Joss Whedon. Now given all our utopian inclinations over at ITM, I thought this was a particularly interesting part of his "Master Plan":Once upon a time, all the writers in the forest got very mad with the Forest Kings and declared a work-stoppage. The forest creatures were all sad; t...

[photo of sunset on Lake Erie]One of the things I did this summer -- which I have not done on previous trips -- is organize a small reading group over at my alma mater, Wake Forest. Tonight was our first meeting, and may I just say it was amazing. We're reading The Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida, and tonight's session ended up being a slow reading-aloud of the majority of the second chap...