More than ever, this was truly a week that happened. I’m very tired, I’m going back to bed after this. Sometimes after a hard morning of a few hours’ blogging, I like to sleep until dinner. I highly recommend this.
This week saw the return of accurate lesbian porn haiku:
Petite Red Head and Caliente Latina Roommates Surprise the Pizza Delivery Man
With a lecture on
how his employer should
compost pizza boxes.
Women in art history still long for nothing more than solitude:
babe can we please go home and go to bed
after this solo
you said that before the last solo
that was the same solo
did you really think they were two different songs?
i’ll play it again
oh god please don’t
Don’t miss anything, ever, about forgotten, difficult women. They’re the best kind.
IT FELT SO GOOD TO CONFESS ALL THE BOOKS WE’VE PRETENDED TO READ, LET’S DO IT EVERY WEEK
On being butch. On being handsome.
Are you trapped in an essay about adulthood right now?
“You dream that the founding fathers are boys like you. Exactly like you. You find them playing in a tree house, and they yell: “Come! We’ve built a whole country in your image!” When you look, their country is a fort, or a raft, or an abandoned mine…or a railroad track and a sandwich.”
I will never stop talking about Galaxy Quest.
Tags: meta, toast points
Hey Toasties! All those threads about books made me think of a fun game I like to play: which words do you see so much in your chosen field of work or study that you kind of want to punch them in their letters? Mine is “bivouacked.” Which I always mispronounce in my head as “bivo-wacked.”
That sounds like a great game, but I kind of want to hear you use bivouacked in a sentence because I cannot imagine one that makes sense.
For awhile, mine was triage. Please note that I do not work in a hospital, but at a small press. The objects of triage were books.
The armies bivouacked for weeks although they were only fifty miles from town because they encountered far more guerilla resistance than they expected in their journey inland.
Sorry, did my best. The most egregious offender last year for me was Napoleon’s Egypt: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25379
“Committee.” But through not fault of its own. Just the things that make it up.
“Functionality.” Goddamn engineers.
Pretty generic, but “confirm/confirmation,” and “folks.” God, I hate “folks.” And the expression “out of pocket” to mean unavailable/incommunicado. I will never lose any opportunity to complain about “out of pocket,” blech.
Don’t know if this counts but I have a coworker who asks if I have the “bandwidth” to do something instead of just asking if I have the time. It drives me crazy.
Not teaching right now, but when I am, I really hate the world ‘outcomes’. Hate, hate.
But the one I like best is ‘cohort’ because it makes me think of ‘cahoots’, and that’s a far better description of what students are in.
“Eligible” or “eligibility.” I hate them and I always mis-type them.
“Assessment.” One of my jobs is coordinating and overseeing assessment of student learning in the college where I work, which means that I send a lot of emails to professors asking whether we can schedule an assessment in their class and telling them what we need from them, and there is no other word to substitute so these emails use the word “assessment” about 18 times in 4 sentences and I worry that the professors think I am actually some kind of assessment-bot.
that was such a good nap
Paula Poundstone had a funny bit about napping, how kids never want to and we always do. Napping equals genius, in my book. It can’t be coincidence that so many interesting people are pro-nap.
But Zeus. Zeus was the best.
Seriously!
Glad I got here early! I need help tracking down a book I read as a kid – Googling is proving fruitless. This is what I remember:
So, it’s some sort of crummy teen horror/thriller – the main character is a high school girl who was booted from her select choral group (called the Madrigals, I think?) – and the girl who replaced her maybe also started dating the main character’s boyfriend, and she’s miserable because it was her entire life, etc. She gets involved with the mysterious new boy – I think he has a motorcycle, is a bit backwoodsy, and possible has a name like Jethro? Judson? But he’s some sort of tree monster?
I don’t even know, this is where things get weird and Googling “root monster ya novel” got me nothing. I seem to recall him wanting to, like, drag her into the earth with him, but she didn’t go, and is left lonely as he…disappears? Possible dies? I have a vague recollection of the cover being the root monster. Anyone also read this supremely strange book?
any idea of the pub date?
I found this:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/308858.The_St…
Here’s the Amazon link, the synopsis there makes me think this is really it because it mentions The Madrigals there.
http://www.amazon.com/Stranger-Caroline-B-Cooney-…
Caroline B Cooney “The Stranger”
PS The winning Google search term was: site:goodreads.com madrigals jethro
OH MY GLOB YESSSSSS. Rock monster, damn it – my memory of the cover threw me off. I actually thought earlier “It was some Caroline B. Cooney type shit” and then didn’t have time to go through all her books to check. Excellent work, A++++, would resource again.
Sidling in to rant about the use of the word “basically,” a fat, sloppy boor of a word. Taking it out always makes a sentence stonger and more interesting. Try it.
Worst phrase ever is “the reality is.” I hear it everywhere these days.
Not teaching right now, but when I am, I really hate the world 'outcomes'. Hate, hate.
But the one I like best is 'cohort' because it makes me think of 'cahoots', and that's a far better description of what students are in.
vdfvdffsdfsf
“Leverage.” Yeesh.
"Leverage." Yeesh.
“differentiation.” “scaffolding.” (I’m an ESL teacher)