The View From Kalamazoo

OOoh my. There are a good many researchers pissssed about this one…will everyone working on prehistory in the last 30 years have to correct a whole career’s worth of work?

I can’t help but chuckle over this one. Three cheers for the arts!

“The words and the letters are all havin’ a party and dancin’ in my head. Like, craaazy…” -Emma

Fear and Loathing on his way to Hell to visit Tricky Dicky.

Yo – Leeds needs papers

I’m just about out of Vicodin. (I’m not happy with that. WIth my previous surgeries I never used all of the ‘scrips, but the pain with this one has been much, much worse)

My incision area is still touchy, although not as bad as the first couple of days, and my entire abdomen feels like I was in some kind of bar fight with people much bigger than I (and lost. miserably). I have some odd bruising to complement the achy soreness there, and my IV hand is still sporting a big purple number that’s yet really tender to the touch.

I have a nice new burn on my arm. Lesson: take particular care when baking whist under the influence of Vicodin. (dinner was, however, not only edible but darn tasty, FWIW)

And to add insult to injury I must have picked up some virus at the hospital, because a couple of days home and I have a cough (and I already described the joy of that), I lost hearing in my left ear, aaand I’m all stuffed in the head and expelling technicolor yuck. Nothing like misery on top of misery, no sir.

At least I’ve just been watching the days of constant snowing through the window instead of having to drive in it. Hey, if we’re lucky enough to get a snow day that’s a day I won’t have to take leave! (Yay, if that happens, because I have precious little leave left at this point!)

Even the Vicodin isn’t getting near handling the pain, tho. A good 6-inch, stapled gash across my abdomen – you know, everything makes abs move – laughing (hurts), sneezing (hurts), coughing (hurts), and any little movement (hurts). I won’t even try to describe the screaming evil of trying to blow my nose. Ouch.

I’m behind reading everything and everyone, of course. And I have a bunch of-interest-to-medievalists links to throw on that left side column, but they’ll take a while, too. I’m going back to the couch. Erg.

University launches satanism course for priests : Worried about the lure of the devil, a Vatican-linked university launched its latest course yesterday: a class on satanism, black magic and exorcism.
Man, I just don’t want so see the homework for that one…

On Romulus and Remus [found at mirabilis.ca]

Carly Fiorina, recently-ejected CEO of HP (the 11th largest corporation in the US and manufacturer of the majority of the Medieval Institute printers, FWIW) did a B.A. in medieval history and philosophy as an undergrad at Stanford. She had been pulled away from Lucent Technologies by HP in 1999.

Even ousted is lucrative – her severance package is 21.1 mil.

(I’ll take a mere tenth of that severance, myself, if anyone’s offering)

Taking the final ok’d blue line over for UPS to whisk away to the printer…whee!

Leprosy’s decline caused by rise of TB

Proofs (2nd time through) should be in tomorrow. Same-day turnaround, and I can only hope we can still take delivery by the end of next week…

Not that I’ll be around to see it. Slice and dice still scheduled for Tuesday.

Finland Receives First Ph.D. in Trolls:
Finland has received what appears to be the first doctoral dissertation on traditional forest trolls.

Master of Philosophy Camilla Asplund Ingemark, 30, has researched the subject for six years. She will defend her doctoral dissertation, which is classified as a work on folklore, at the Ã…bo Akademi University in Turku on Friday.

The study describes the world of trolls according to the beliefs in the folklore of Swedish-speaking Finns.

Both Christian and pagan stories described the relationship between man and supernatural forces. Folklore and Christian tales and sermons influenced each other.

“I chose trolls as the subject of my research because I suspected that troll tales could reveal something about the relation between folk beliefs and Christianity. I am interested in that relationship.”