Category: Uncategorized

What’s that bit about April being the cruelest month? Well, I have decided to make it even crueler decided it was time for a diet. Actually, it wasn’t literary masochism that drove me back to dieting, but the excesses of back-to-back work road-trips, my birthday week, beer making, traveling to Florida to see the in-laws, and general stress eating because of crazy school stuff.

I’ve been feelin’ mighty tubby.

And I’ve been feeling way out of shape, too. In the fall, I was able to go to the gym between four and five days a week. Since January, I’m not sure I’ve been to the gym four or five times.

So, as a result of my general tubbiness and out-of-shapeness, I’m back on “the program;” specifically, the South Beach Diet. As loyal readers may recall, I have attempted any number of “non-diet diets” recently where I just tried to “eat right,” etc. This has not worked. The South Beach Diet is the only thing that has even kind of worked for me in the past– I lost around 15 or 20 pounds before we went to Hawaii– so I’m giving it another whirl.

My goal is to lose as much as I can by August. I’d like to lose about 30 pounds, but that’s probably wishful thinking.

How’s it going after two days? Well, right now, I’m hungry….

Greetings from Chicago! A few pre-conference thoughts before I get back to grading:

• We’re staying at the Congress Plaza Hotel for this thing. I would have preferred to stay at the Palmer House, which is the conference hotel for the CCCCs and STC (which is where my roommates Bill H-D and Steve B are right now), but when that filled up, we ended up here. We were warned by many a WPA-L writer not to stay here.
• There are at least two problems with the Congress Plaza. First, the local hotel workers union has been on strike here for literally years. I don’t really know what the status of the strike is, but last night, I saw a picket sign propped up on a garbage can, and this morning I saw a few picketers. I don’t like crossing the line, but I also need a place to stay, so….
• What I do know is that the Congress is a kind of run-down, older, city hotel, but other than that, it seems fine. The service so far has been good, we have a large room/quasi-suite, etc.
• Internet access has been a problem, and it might continue to be so for the whole conference. The Congress Plaza charges $7.50 a day for wifi, and that’s only available in the lobby of the hotel. This morning, I did find a Panera’s just two blocks away, and but that’s kind of a mixed bag. I did get the wifi connection to work eventually, but it was a frustrating half-hour or so.
• I think I forgot my microphone for my iPod, which really sucks. I had hoped to record some podcast kinds of comments from the conference tomorrow, but unless I left the microphone in my car (which is completely possible), it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen. Oh well….

No time to write right now– I’m preparing for my pre-40 birthday party (details coming soon, I am sure)– but I just had to post something about the stupid Iowa Hawkeyes who are out of the NCAA tourney in the first round for the second time in as many years.

Stupid Hawkeyes.

Since they won the Big Ten championship and looked to be playing well, I figured, hey, what the hell, I’ll pick ’em to go all the way to the final four. Messes up my brackets good. Actually, the same kind of messing up appears to be the case with lots of brackets of big ten fans, what with MSU and Wisconsin losing, too. Still, I say:

Stupid Hawkeyes.

There’s rumors about that Alford is going to go to Indiana. That’d be okay with me. It might make the Hawkeyes less, uh, stupid.

A pretty funny rendition of Coldplay’s “The Scientist,” which is at an interesting flickr-like service called YouTube. It’s a fairly long video, but still worth it. Via Clancy’s blog.

Spring Winter Break is upon us at EMU, and, as you read this post (I actually wrote it earlier in the day), I am on an airplane to visit family in Florida for a few days. I decided not to take my laptop for both technical and, I don’t know, quasi-spiritual reasons. “Technical” because my ailing laptop which no longer will run on battery power has become a bit of a pain to haul around. “Quasi-spiritual” because I could probably use a few days where I don’t spend as much time at the keyboard.

This is not to say I won’t be spending any time on my short break doing computer work. My wife is bringing her laptop and I suspect I will be borrowing it from time to time. I just don’t know if I’ll be posting anything here or not.

In any event, see you next week. Possibly sooner.

It’s funny how, while actually looking at academic/professional blogs this morning, how easily one can stumble upon items about mastrabation. Take these two, for example:

• From the ASU Web Devil student paper: “An 18-year-old male ASU student was arrested Sunday night at Hayden Library and charged with indecent exposure and public sexual indecency. The suspect allegedly pulled his pants and underwear to his mid-thighs to masturbate while watching pornography on his laptop. When asked why he had gone to the library to view pornography and masturbate, the suspect allegedly told police, ‘To be honest, the Internet connection at my dorm isn’t good enough.'”
• From the Davezilla blog (and this is what linked to the academic blog and that started this whole thing) comes this memo about spooge clogging up the shower drains in the men’s dorms. It’s an image file on his blog, so you’ll have to go there to enjoy it in its full glory, but, according to the memo from the Durham University Estates and & Buildings department, semen has been clogging the drains and they will seek DNA testing if the problem persists. So please, says the memo, advise students who wish to mastrabate to do so in the comfort of their own rooms.

Ah, youth….

Well, time to take a, er, “shower”….

According to this page, this post is dated at the exact moment of the Winter Solstice in EST this year, even though I’m writing it after this time (by several hours). So hey, let the belated goat blood sacrafices and orgies begin!

Seriously though, it seems that people have gotten awfully worked up this year by the whole Christmas versus “Happy Holidays” thing. I guess it is more or less the sign of the times of an increasingly conservative and (supposedly) religious nation, and I guess it is also the right’s way of distracting folks from what’s going on. Or maybe it just makes for good newspaper fodder, I don’t know.

For my whole life, Christmas has largely been a secular holiday. Sure, I go to church when I go home to see my family (because they go to church), but that’s about it. For me, Christmas has never had the overt religious feel of, say, Easter. Christmas goes on WAY too long and is WAY too commercial to be a completely religious holiday, in my opinion. Personally, I’ve always thought about Christmas as a time to be with family, to see old friends, to exchange gifts, to eat and drink too much, and to huddle together in the cold and rejoice in the coming light.

Oh wait– that light bit is solstice. Because after all, as this page suggests, a lot of the things that we associate with Christmas are really more the result of the Celtic traditions of the Winter Solstice. And when the whole “Merry Christmas” versus “Happy Holidays” thing came up on the ABC Sunday morning show “This Week” this past Sunday, Cookie Roberts said that the solstice used to be celebrated on December 25 because that was the first day that people without basic astronomical and time telling tools could really tell the days were getting longer again. And if Cookie Roberts says it’s true it must be true.

In any event, it seems obvious to me that the early Christians saw the Winter Solstice as a nice and symbolically significant date to claim as the birth of Jesus– you know, “light” of the world, yadda-yadda-yadda. Anyway, good for them, and 2000 years later, we get a fat guy in a red suit, excessive shopping and credit card debt, the best Peanuts cartoon of all, and happiness and goodwill.

Which is all my way of saying hey, say Merry Christmas, say Happy Holidays, say Happy Hanukkah, say Happy Kwanzaa. Oh yeah– Festivus is the day after tomorrow, so get out that pole.