SHOULD be an offense against academic honesty. These days candidates are just glad to be able to assemble a committee. Everyone is too busy writing their brilliant books and giving papers in Finland or Lake Como to have time for grad students. (Forget undergrads.)
I have stopped going to graduation at my school (I still attend those commencement events where I actually get to spend time with students and their families) because of the people we’ve been giving honorary degrees to. Used to be the likes of Rosa Parks. Lately, Thomas Friedman. What’s a mother to do?
Having said all that: there are plenty of faculty at Harvard (esp. in the humanities) who are fed up with all this shit.

Strange, where this whole discussion has gone. Kind of makes TBogg’s point, I think.

I guess I’d like gay parades to be about bodies and sex and pride and the kinky and inventive and, most of all, the sheer fun of it all. That’s their appeal to straight little old female me.

You nailed it.
I’d like to see the national Dem party imbibe your wisdom by setting some clear (if loose) set of priorities and sticking with them, in their “messaging” and their legislative agenda. Their failure to do so since almost forever (see: Will Rogers) is a main reason our government’s policies lag so terribly behind the policies most people want..

Why is Mitt’s head so big? (I mean, the head on top of his neck.)

The trouble started when the supremes decided to ignore the absolute construction that opens the Second Amendment — the bit about a WELL-REGULATED militia….

Before reading the ecphrasis, I looked at this picture and wondered, why are the guys so bright-eyed and looking pleased as punch? Ah, they’ve just eaten, but the bowels haven’t started moving yet, prompting looks of anxious desperation.

As someone who feels more than a little sad on Easter because I no longer go to church even on Easter, I was sort of pleased when I first caught the Google story headline. Good on them. Happy Easter! Over at TPM I also read a translation of the new papa’s Easter message and I wondered (along with the foot-washing and modest papal vestments and Muslim-and-women-courting), could it be? Could the cardinals have misjudged? Could we (never been a Catholic, but that “we” is sincere) conceivably have, against all odds, a successor to John 23?

Well, I won’t hold my breath there. But we can hope. Hey, we gotta hope. Happy Easter!

and you been with.

Love the one you’re with.

Why do the droolers have the best sense of smell? A serious question here (if its premise is even correct). I mean, I get the connection between long droopy ears and short legs, and picking up a scent. But drooling? (Is it because everything smells so good, and there’s so much more you smell, so of course you drool more than other dogs?)

Gee, I was at St. Anne’s Warehouse (though a new venue, so was I really?) just last weekend. The Wild Bride was great. I hope L&T Casey is doing well and enjoying NYC. Encourage her to get to Brooklyn before it becomes Bloombergized, the way Manhattan has been.
Lou Reed rules. Still.

I love L&T”s stance here, with those solid legs and back. She hasn’t lost her soccer form! While she is in awe, it would seem, of the snow, the city. Stay with her, Mrs. T, the boys, your brother, your friends, your work, yourself. We’re here, eager for you ( “for” as to and from, both), when you have energy and time. Grateful for whatever excess you can expend our way.

Remove E from enthusiastic NOTE.

Curiously, weirdly, I was just teaching today, kind of incidentally to the main things we were discussing, some 5th century Athenian ways that children were socialized/constructed into thinking “marriage!” as a key telos in life. (Little little boys getting their first taste of wine in a festival to Dionysus, in which boys also stepped in the procession of marriage of Dionysus to the wife of one of the archon’s — a picture is worth a thousand words…..) Anyway, I guess I might have sounded like K-Lo. But not, and I didn’t have to worry that my students thought I might have sounded like her.

Yeah, we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. Societies work hard to replicate themselves, that is, continue the people and institutions that will make life go on. But societies that succeed have some imagination, ya know? “Replicate” is a nice word if you really examine it. Like mimesis. Same, but not the same. NOTE THE SAME. Life continues, we are here, because of same, and just as important, not the same.

I just found two seconds to check your blog, Mr. T. What’s up with the world? Those of us actually employed have no time for anything but workworkwork? While others (if they’re fortunate enough to have a computer, electricity, and intertube connections) are taking a break from looking for work to gaze at the boys?

Well, I had to eat out at a good local eatery tonight (professional obligation), but I did get back in time to see that the Ravens were way ahead and that something weird was going on — why game delay? But before learning why the delay I had to go to Downton Abbey. No less junky than the SB, but more compelling (though tonight’s installment felt like a total transition/setter-upper/filler — inevitable, I guess, after the Sybil-death episode). Glad the Ravens won, I guess — makes the Pats look better, maybe. (Though, heart of hearts, I am still Giants.)
All this while preparing a class in a course on drama, spectacle, bread and circuses stuff. And while playing ball in the living room (talk about a game that gets very boring through routinization) with my English Springer, who’d been deprived of her normal after-dinner games by said eating out.
Civilization in a ditch.

Just crap. That’s what real illness is.

Think of it as a rehearsal for dying (we don’t do enough of that, those of us who enjoy basic good health, who are many in this day and age of public health, good hygiene, toothbrushes and ob-gyns), and then enjoy life all the more as you get well. You will get well, and before you know it, the sound of waves and the importuning of bassets will be good again, instead of some attempt at a reminder about something you can’t remember or care much about anyway. (And then you’ll forget that you remembered to appreciate….)

I recognize that look! Though here the temp is trying to stay above zero. And today, in the teens, endless games of ball were still expected, in the crevices between snow and hard ground. But I know that look!

Almost enough to make me start rooting for Tiger (to the extent I pay any attention to professional golfers or golf).

I worked at a golf course pool’s snack bar one summer, when I was about 18. Learned to slap hamburgers, clean hot grills without getting burned (harder than you might think) and deal with children temporarily orphaned by their golpher parents (poor little rich kids are a real phenomenon, I learned). I also got groped by the middle-aged golf pro one day — awkward, but another learning experience. Sometimes, though, I’d get assigned to the “watering hole,” between the 9th and 10th, where I spent most of my time reading Jane Austen. (It was an intense Jane Austen summer.) I’d look up from my book now and then and watch the play around me, and I did come to admire the game, could appreciate how it could become addictive (to play). For some strange reason, I never came to admire the players or the country-club world around the game.

I’ve never seen Wembley look so, well, happy. Must be because L&TC is home. Enjoy.