Progress!

Progress! At last! After working on the same essay since xmas, I finally finished the first full draft on Saturday night sometime between 12:30 and 1am. Yay! I've been working on this for about five months--which is five times longer than any single dissertation chapter took me last year! Whew!

I can finally use the code for strikethough on the list in the right margin, something I've been aching to do for ages, using the list as a dangling carrot, just for the pleasure of scratching it off. Or partly. The problem now is that the essay is 53 pages long, and the editor who is publishing it has given me a maximum page limit of 45, so now I've got 8 pages to cut. I'd already cut 3 a month ago and have no idea how to cut a text that I know is full of repetition. Some serious editing remains ahead of me...

So progress (yippie!) but there's still quite a way to go yet...

Update - Tuesday, May 30: Translation #2 (the short 5 page one, rather than the longer 20 page one) is now done. One more strikethrough--yay!

The chicken or the egg?

Also found on Cyberpresse this morning, the enigma of the chicken or the egg has been solved! It's the egg. Or so the scientists say. Talk about taking the fun out of an idiomatic expression! Thank goodness for the humanities. It's probably good though that someone out there is dissecting the paradoxes that we lit crits love, autrement on en serait débordés!

L'énigme «l'oeuf ou la poule» résolue
Le vendredi 26 mai 2006 - Londres
Un philosophe et scientifique britannique a résolu l'énigme qui hante l'humanité depuis toujours en affirmant que l'oeuf a précédé la poule, ont rapporté vendredi plusieurs quotidiens londoniens.
La clé de l'énigme millénaire se trouve dans le fait que le matériau génétique n'évolue pas durant la vie d'un organisme vivant, par conséquent le premier oiseau à devenir une poule a du d'abord exister en tant qu'embryon à l'intérieur d'un oeuf.
Pour le professeur John Brookfield, de l'Université de Nottingham, l'organisme vivant à l'intérieur de l'oeuf devait avoir le même ADN que la poule qu'il allait devenir.
M. Brookfield, spécialiste de la génétique évolutive a affirmé à plusieurs quotidiens «nous pouvons en conclure sans aucun doute que la première matière vivante membre de l'espèce doit être cet oeuf. L'oeuf était nécessairement avant la poule».
Les conclusions du professeur Brookfield ont reçu le soutien du professeur David Papineau du King's College de Londres, ainsi que du président de la Fédération britannique des éleveurs de poulets (Great British Chicken), Charles Bourns.
Selon M. Papineau, philosophe des sciences, le premier poulet a du sortir d'un oeuf pondu par une autre espèce, mais qu'il s'agissait bien d'un oeuf de poule parce qu'il contenait l'embryon d'un poulet. «La conclusion par conséquent est que l'oeuf était avant la poule», a-t-il soutenu également.
Pour M. Bourns, représentant la profession des aviculteurs, dont les propos sont rapportés par The Times, The Daily Mail et The Independent, «les oeufs ont du exister bien avant la naissance du premier poussin».

Coffee and sunshine

I was thinking the other day, as I continue to wrestle in the throes of procrastination, about what it takes for me to work well, and came to the conclusion that it's coffee and sunshine. I think the idiom is coffee and cigarettes, but, oh well, my lung capacity is shot as it is, and I think coffee and sunshine sounds just as good, if not more poetic. This thought occured, of course, on the first sunny, and my first productive, day after 10 straight days of rain. It was horrible, but when the sun finally returned, so did not only my spirits but also my ability to think coherently.

The coffee might have helped with that too. I have a bad habit. J'ai tendance à oublier à boire du café. Carrément oublier! Hé oui! I told myself at the beginning of grad schoool that I did not want to become one of those people who is completely addicted to coffee and who can't function in the morning without it, or worse who get grouchy without it, so I decided to limit myself to drinking it only when I actually needed it, on busy, work days, so that when in fact I did drink it, it would still have some of its effectiveness and I wouldn't need to keep upping the dose. It was not to become une habitude quotidienne, or worse, a crutch.

That was all well and good, in theory. Le problème, c'est qu'il m'arrive d'oublier à en boire, même quand je devrais ou même quand j'en ai besoin. It's so not part of my habit that weeks can go by in which I'm in such a daze in that regard that I forget to even consider the possiblity that it might wake me up and make me more productive. That's when having one hits me like a ton of bricks. And it's good because it gets me into a new pattern, which I suppose is exactly what I was intending, but is somewhat étrange nonetheless, in and of its unfamiliarity.

That's what happened the other day. I got a double-whammy of coffee and sunshine after having had neither for at least 10 days. Talk about a rush!

And then, speak of the devil, there was this article on Cyberpresse ce matin:

Le café est bon pour la santé, selon une étude norvégienne
Le vendredi 26 mai 2006 - Oslo
Une consommation raisonnable de café contribue à prévenir les maladies cardio-vasculaires ou encore les maladies de Parkinson et d'Alzheimer, suggère une étude de chercheurs norvégiens, parue vendredi sur le site scientifique www.forskning.no.
Les chercheurs ont appuyé leurs travaux sur des données récoltées aux États-Unis auprès de 27 000 femmes âgées: les sujets buvant entre une et trois tasses de café par jour avaient entre 20% et 25% de risques en moins d'être atteints de maladies cardio-vasculaires ou maladies inflammatoires.
Dans cette dernière catégorie, les chercheurs ont inclus le diabète, la maladie de Parkinson, la maladie d'Alzheimer, des maladies pulmonaires, du foie ou rénales.
«Les données suggèrent que les antioxydants peuvent être un facteur de protection contre de nombreuses maladies», a indiqué Lene Frost Andersen, une membre de l'équipe.
Mais les effets positifs du café disparaissent en cas de consommation excessive, à savoir au-delà de cinq tasses par jour.
«Il semblerait qu'il puisse y avoir quelque chose dans le café qui soit nocif, absorbé en grandes quantités», a commenté Rune Blomhoff, un autre chercheur, sans en déterminer l'origine.

So I guess I should be drinking more! It's interesting though that I wasn't totally off about the positive effects not working en cas de consommation excessive. Although I don't think they studied my particular avoidance pattern!

Of course, what's also funny about these things is that there will be a study next week that says the exact opposite. There always is. That's the way medical studies work. They get press for the particular research team that conducts them, thereby making their university happy, and the general public is always left utterly confused from one week to the next, which does though eventually have the positive effect of some people learning simply to live their lives as they see fit and ignoring these "news" releases altogether.

I think it's time to sauter sous la douche, pack up my laptop, and hit the coffee shop to get some work done...

Lament for a prom dress

A story posted by PlanetOut news. How utterly, and frustratingly, repressive! As if it isn't hard enough being a teenager--let alone learning to walk in heels!--they gotta make it even harder on the poor guy.

Male student in dress barred from prom
Wed May 24, 7:31 PM ET
SUMMARY: Kevin Logan has been going to his Gary, Ind., high school in female dress all year, and is considering legal action over his prom shutout.
GARY, Ind. -- A gay male student who has worn women's clothes to school all year was turned away from his high school prom because he was wearing a dress.
Kevin Logan, 18, went to the West Side High School prom Friday in a slinky fuchsia gown and heels. He believes officials discriminated against him by not allowing him inside.
"I have no formal pictures, no memories, nothing. You only have one prom," he said.
Logan received an $85 refund for his prom ticket Tuesday but was not satisfied. He said he is considering filing a complaint with the Indiana Civil Liberties Union.
Sylvester Rowan, assistant to Gary School Superintendent Mary Steele, said school policy bans males from wearing dresses. Excluding Logan from prom was based on "the dress code, not the student's homosexuality. That's his personal preference."
Tyrone Hanley, the youth program coordinator for the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition in Washington, D.C., said he often sees cases like this and called it gender-based discrimination.
"Prohibiting really short skirts for everyone is a fair dress code; prohibiting them for males is not," he said.
Logan said he had spent years defining and exploring his sexuality. This year, he took a major step by dressing as a female every day, wearing makeup, a hair weave, nails and girls' fitted jeans to school.
His mother, Donnetta Logan, said she was not surprised by what she called the ignorance of school administrators.
"I tell Kevin that in society there will be those who accept him and those who won't," she said.

I'm Will Riker

I just discovered Will Wheaton's blog, and his back-up blog. I've always liked Wheaton because he's such a geek, and I found out that he's got a book that's called Just a Geek. How appropriate! In surfing his site I discovered a link to the "Which Star Trek Character Are You?" Quiz. Apparently, I'm Will Riker. I think that it's actually quite a good fit! (Especially the part about many women, and finding the right one!) And I'm quite chuffed that Jean-Luc Picard ended up as my second-highest score: he's French, plus both character and actor are Shakespeareans!

Your results:

You are Will Riker -- At times you are self-centered but you have many friends. You love many women, but the right woman could get you to settle down.

Will Riker -- 90%
Jean-Luc Picard -- 65%
Spock -- 59%
James T. Kirk (Captain) -- 55%
Deanna Troi -- 55%
Mr. Scott -- 50%
Data -- 42%
Chekov -- 40%
Geordi LaForge -- 40%
An Expendable Character (Redshirt) -- 30%
Uhura -- 25%
Leonard McCoy (Bones) -- 25%
Worf -- 20%
Beverly Crusher -- 5%
Mr. Sulu -- 5%

Temptation Blocker

On my first day of blogging, I stumbled across the Temptation Blocker. After today, I'm going to need it! Where, oh where, have you been all my life, you delightfully sadistic little piece of software, you? Perhaps now that article will finally get finished...

La journée nationale des Patriotes

Le lundi 22 mai c'est la journée nationale des Patriotes (jadis la fête de Dollard-des-Ormeaux). Voici une activité trippante pour fêter ça!

"Les porteurs de l'indépendance"
21 mai 2006 à 21H00
Au Diable Vert, 4557, rue St-Denis (métro Mont-Royal)
10 $ par personne
Événement organisé par le Parti Québécois de Gouin, Laurier-Dorion et Mercier.
Allez voir la vidéo de présentation! (Attention, c'est un méchant gros ficher!)

NYU Striking Grad Students' Video

The grad student teaching and research assistants at NYU who have been on strike since the beginning of the year have a 5 minute long video on their website. It's worth checking out!

Dignity. Period!

I got an email a few days ago about this campaign in Southern Africa called "Dignity. Period!". It's really quite appalling that these women don't have tampons and that the cost is so disproportionate to their so-called salaries. I tried to donate money online, but they only accept donations from the UK. I wonder if they know about The Keeper over there. It's a heck of a lot cheaper than those toxic products the "sanitary" industry expects us to put inside ourselves and would solve their problems (assuming they have clean water, which is probably dubious too).

Goverment of Saskatchwan [double sic]

In honour of a good friend who has the misfortune of actually having to live there, a political post from Yahoo News that made me laugh. The only problem is that this takes the fun out of Rick Mercer's Talking to Americans when even we Canucks fuck it up too:

Missing "e" causes grief for Saskatchewan party
Thu May 18, 4:42 PM ET
A missing 'e' has put a Canadian provincial party firmly on the defensive after the opposition Saskatchewan Party spelled the name of its own province wrong.
The mistake showed up in a television commercial that listed complaints about the accomplishments of the present provincial government, but spelled Saskatchewan as Saskatchwan.
In a previous document, the party had missed the 'n' from the word government.
"Mr. Speaker, if you can't spell government and you can't spell Saskatchewan, but you want to be the government of Saskatchewan, you'd think you'd at least get one of them right," Premier Lorne Calvert said of the gaffes.
The party wants to oust Calvert's government in the next election, which is likely in the next year or so.
"The opposition is using this to question our credibility," said Ian Hanna, Saskatchewan Party's director of communications.
The word Saskatchewan comes from "Kisiskatchewani Sipi," the Cree name for the Saskatchewan River that means swiftly flowing river. It was altered to Keiskatchewan before the modern spelling was adopted in 1882, according to Natural Resources Canada.

Fun with the Census

Ok, so technically Census day was Tuesday, so I'm a bit late creating this blog if I want anybody to see this or actually care, but the fact that StatsCan spent Canadian tax dollars to pay US bomb-builder Lockheed Martin to create the online version of our Census and to read the paper forms is absolutely aberrant! This site provides some really fun and creative "minimum cooperation" methods to screw with the paper form so Lockheed Martin's computer system can't read it. I filled it out (twice--cuz I'm bilingual and it didn't say not to!) with some tricks of my own and was laughing my ass off for a good two or three hours after I dropped it in the mail. Nothing beats screwing the government, in my opinion; it's unfortunate it's only once every five years!

The Onion on Academia

Here are some of my other all-time favorite Onion posts. Why be bitter about academia when it's so damn funny?

• TA Spotted at Bar


• Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu


• Shakespeare Was, Like, The Ultimate Rapper


• Guy In Philosophy Class Needs to Shut the Fuck Up


• University Implicated in Checks-For-Degrees Scheme


• Band Teacher Gay in Retrospect


• Fellow Dormmates Warned About Christian in 462


• Hilarious Hamlet Essay Circulated In Teachers' Lounge


• I'm Pretty Sure I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings


• You Look Like You Could Use An Elizabethan Adventure On The Holodeck -- Shakespeare and Star Trek together put me in nerd heaven! Ah, but if you'd seen my old site, you'd already know that!

Hé ben, j'ai un blogue!

Et voilà, c'est fait, j'ai finalement un blogue à moi. Puisque tout le monde et son chien en a un, me semble que c'était le temps de le faire. Quoi que j'en avais un ben avant que "blog" ever even existed as a word! I wasn't going to post a link to it, but since anyone could Google it in two seconds flat anyway, I might as well show you the ancienne substantifique moëlle de Pantagruelle, back in the day, with the cavaet that Pantagruelle then n'est pas du tout Pantagruelle maintenant.

Who is this particular identitary manifestation of Pantagruelle anyway? Well, Chapter 2 of Rabelais' (first-written, but narratively-second) novel says:

Et par ce qu'en ce propre iour nasquit Pantagruel, son pere luy imposa tel nom: car Panta en Grec vault autant à dire comme tout: & Gruel en langue hagarene vault autant comme alteré, voulant inferer qu'à l'heure de sa nativité le monde estoit tout alteré.

So that would make Pantagruelle, celle (pas celui) qui espère alterer le monde by her passage through it... Really, otherwise, what would be the point? Who'd want to leave it in the rather repulsive state that it's in now?

And despite being named after that wonderfully carnivalesque and just plain fun Renaissance bard Rabelais, this Pantagruelle also has a particularly strong penchant for Shakespeare. Whether or not being a Shakespearean qualifies one to alter the world is highly debatable, but that shall be fodder for other (cynical?) posts on the state of the academic profession...

The profession can't be entirely bad though, since it provides us with such humour as this piece from yesterday's version of The Onion. This blog is still here, so let's hope that means my IBM doesn't think that it's entirely senseless rambling, at least not yet!