28 February 2006
PBS needs a new slogan. I'm thinking... "PBS got me syphilis in less than
24 hours!" Since I had no luck finding a library that would ILL me a copy
of The Syphilis Enigma, I decided to order it from the PBS website on
Monday at 3:30pm in the hopes that, if I chose overnight shipping, I'd get
the video by Wednesday evening to show my Thursday afternoon class. But
they somehow managed to ship the video around 1am, which got to Raleigh
around 5am, and was out for delivery in Durham by 7:15. It was dropped on
my doorstep at 11:30am. So 20 hours. PBS gave me syphilis within 20
hours. Sweet.
Posted at 1158.
17 February 2006
For some odd reason, Patrick and I were discussing
Bob Barker this morning,
and I decided to look up how old he is, since I figured he has to be at
least 80 (he's 83). Surprisingly, Bob has had quite an interesting life.
Highlights include:
- Father died when he was 6 by falling off a pole.
- Was raised by his mother on the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South
Dakota.
- Attended Drury College on a basketball scholarship.
- Got drafted into WWII and became a Navy fighter pilot.
- Went back to school and graduated summa cum laude with a degree in
economics.
- Became a vegetarian 25 years ago because of his love of animals.
- Is a Civil War buff.
- Has a black belt in karate.
- Earned a red belt in tang soo do karate under Chuck Norris.
So it all comes back to
Chuck
Norris.
Posted at 1311.
16 February 2006
Patrick and I went to a lecture by
Jared Diamond at
Duke this evening.
If I hadn't already known what a total whackbag he is, I would have
learned tonight. He is an appalingly bad public speaker -
I
lecture better than that, and I'm a terrible lecturer. The talk was
poorly presented, poorly thought-out, and patronizing. And it wasn't
about anything really. It was an extended meditation on something that
Dick Cheney said like, "The American way of life is non-negotiable."
Now, he could have done something cool and anthropological with that, but
no. He had to be a giant whackbag. His points were fine, but they were
just so elementary and reductionist. The Q&A session was absurd - so many
fawning sycophants asking if he'd gotten thanked by Third World people for
changing the world.
The best part for me was the introduction of Diamond by the head of the
school of public policy. He was talking about how sciences and social
sciences always tend to have their camps of lumpers and splitters, no
matter what discipline. And, he said, "Jared Diamond is truly a member of
the lumper proletariat." See, it's clever because of the pun on
lumpenproletariat.
And, well, because I agree that Jared Diamond is the "refuse of all
classes, unproductive, and regressive." Thank you,
18th
Brumaire. I knew
there was a reason they make us read Marx in anthropological theory
courses. Now I can get sophisticated jokes. Or maybe it wasn't a joke,
and I'm just too damned smart for my own good. Which is entirely
possible.
Posted at 2344.
15 February 2006
I gave the bioarch students an assignment to calculate the minimum number
of individuals present in a "skeletal" sample that was approximated by
popsicle sticks (long bones), wooden circles and hearts (crania and
pelves), and googly eyes (orbits). I asked them to come up with a
mortality chart for their "population" based on the MNI. One student
IM'ed me to say, "I'm really glad I don't live in Googly Eye Land. It's
at least a 30% mortality rate at every age." I told him that should be
the first sentence of his report.
Posted at 2226.
11 February 2006
Erika sent me a link to a BBC online test that is supposed to tell you
the sex of your
brain.
So far, the following people have taken it:
Sara = -50 (average woman)
Erika = -25 (not as womanly as the average
woman)
Laura = 0 (gender neutral)
Kristina = 0 (gender neutral)
Erik = 0 (also gender neutral, but no surprise there)
Jeannie = +25 (as manly as Andy)
Andy = +25 (not as manly as the average man)
Bryan = +50 (average man)
Patrick = +50 (average man)
Paul = +50 (average man)
Carl = +50 (average man)
Jeff = +50 (average man)
What was your score?
Posted at 2050.
9 February 2006
Yeah, I know my life is pretty boring, but I just got e-mail from the OSR
that they submitted my grant proposal! Woo hoo! I can FINALLY get back
to my real life! Or what passes for it anyway. Time to go drinking.
Posted at 1519.
8 February 2006
Like a corpse in a bad horror movie that keeps popping back up, this NSF
application is now officially the Proposal That Wouldn't Die. Turns out,
I had to make changes to it Tuesday night. Then more changes this
morning. And more changes tonight. Eventually, perhaps I'll get this
right and it will be submitted. Granted, the deadline is tomorrow. So I
suppose that at some point this whole mess will be over. Like when the
male lead whacks the last zombie in the head with a garden shovel.
Posted at 1708.
6 February 2006
Hot damn. I submitted my NSF proposal, like, 5 seconds ago. Scary. I
think I still have to give the OSR some form, but hopefully I can do that
tomorrow morning. I don't feel like driving into school, as I have to
finish writing my lecture for Bioarch tomorrow. Well, as long as OSR
doesn't kick it back because of the budget section (which I have no clue
how to fill out), I am done with this thing until they summarily reject
me. Woo hoo!
Posted at 1316.
1 February 2006
After months of trying, I finally got information about the skeletal
populations I will likely be using for my dissertation. The Italian
bioarchaeologist is very interested in my attempts to answer questions
about migration in the Empire using strontium analysis, so that's good. I
did spend the last 2 hours making
this
spifficacious map of my sites
showing how far they were outside the Aurelian Wall. I stole it from a
webpage that stole it from Italian Microsoft Streets and Trips, but I
really cleaned it up and made it nice. I guess I'm obligated to leave the
copyright info on there, but I changed more than I kept. And Piki helped
too!
Posted at 2104.
