The View From Kalamazoo

Have popped in to the KIA to putz with my mosaics from last term and check in with the instructor of the class I’ve been jonesin’ over. Much to my dismay, Monster Pots will require more wheel experience than I have, as throwing large forms for a short, squat, and non-Ahnald-arm-strength-having spud like me is teh sUxx0r.

Looks like more wheel frustration for me this fall. I already have some outside-class handbuilding projects in my head to attempt to balance my screaming wheel angst.

(brought to you by the letters b, i, t, c, h, and y)

Bit on The Scholar.
“theyÂ’ve got the collective personality of a medieval history conference”
Yeah, whatever.

Cambridge digs Canadian’s ‘Canterbury Tales’ rap

And found at Mirabilis.ca:

Bulgaria unearths Thracian riches

Catacomb Find Boosts Early Christian-Jewish Ties, Study Says

Societas Magica is sponsoring a session on Picatrix. Indelicately put, it’s time for me to shit or get off the pot. I had better get my act together and submit an abstract.

I’ve been considering another Masters. Am I nuts? tell me the truth…

I should sign up for another ceramics class (fall term) soon. I could take The Potter’s Wheel again, or I was thinking of taking a class called Monster Pots, instead – the description: “Using the instructorÂ’s technique of handbuilding, students will be able to accomplish that GIGANTIC pot theyÂ’ve always wanted to make. Instruction will be given in other areas as well, like any other studio class. Take advantage of this rare opportunity to tackle scale in a big way.”

DUDE. I like handbuilding. I really need more wheel practice and time, but I really like handbuilding. Oooohh, big pots. YAY!

Note: Anyone who will be in the Kalamazoo area this fall needs to see this exhibit – Chihuly is amazing.

(and I know I’ll get an email from you-know-who-you-are complaining that I haven’t put any pictures up from last winter, much less spring. winter pics taken, just need to be posted – spring projects still under way, they weren’t of the fire-it-and-be-done-with-it type)

Ancient remains found at Louth archaeological dig

Extreme Academia

To dye for..

800-year-old mystical ring unearthed in Warwickshire – a coded token of affection between two lovers? a medieval spell?

found at mirabilis.ca: Four papal seals dating back 600 years have been uncovered from a medieval toilet shaft

A $1.4 million grant awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in June will fund a collaborative project in which Stanford University Libraries, the University of Cambridge and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, will make hundreds of medieval manuscripts accessible on the Internet. The Parker on the Web project will create electronic research tools and digitize library materials, including more than 500 manuscripts at the Parker Library dating from the 6th through the 16th centuries, as well as editions, translations and secondary works.

I just ran accross an announcement for a new publication. and thought many of you would be interested:

A Catalogue of Books Printed in the Fifteenth Century now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford.
Alan Coates, Kristian Jensen, Cristina Dondi, Bettina Wagner and Helen Dixon.
6 vols.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Alan Coates, Assistant Librarian, Rare Books, Dept of Special Collections & Western MSS, & Head of Incunable Cataloguing Project, Bodleian Library, Oxford,
Kristian Jensen, Head of British & Early Printed Collections, The British Library, London,
Cristina Dondi, J. P. R. Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early Modern Printed Book, University of Oxford,
Bettina Wagner, Head of Incunable Cataloguing, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich, Germany,
Helen Dixon, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, The Warburg Institute, University of London

I’ve seen this in far too many blogs to list them all, so here goes:

“If, as you live your life, you find yourself mentally composing blog entries about it, post this exact same sentence in your weblog.”

Is Google, and not blogging, the real issue at the heart of the Tribble Drivel? (found at Coffee Grounds)

Yes, and no.

If you Google me you’ll run into my blog, sure, and opinion columns I wrote for the school paper lo those many years ago. And papers I had put up, again, a decade ago that have since taken on a life of their own (including my undergraduate thesis. my graduate thesis you’ll have to find at the university library, sorry. not that you really want to..). And references to me in my capacity as the Great Herder of Cats. And archived listserv emails, and who the heck knows what else – I’m all over the place and there would be no eradicating my electronic presence whether or not I blogged under my own name (which I do on principle, if that means anything), whether or not I blogged at all. I would not put my URL on official, application data (I’m still not sure who would put a road map to a personal blog on their materials, frankly), but that didn’t stop a ‘whole department’ from, en masse, becoming readers.

My question is this, for all of you on various and sundry committees who have the habit or practice of Googling applicants: Did you, say 5 years ago, regularly Google your applicants? Regularly run a LexisNexis search on applicants to check for any letters to the editor, perhaps?? Did you, instead, look at the contents of their dossier, the materials submitted expressly for you to consider??!?

At what point did it seem appropriate to cross lines, muddy boundaries, scootch personal ethics to the side? If it wasn’t a practice then, why is it so fashionable now??