'tis the season

Half the bluestocking bloggers are on the move, and that includes me. Not at home, praise be, but in the office: Several senior professors have left for one reason or another, so it's musical chairs in the English department -- and the music stopped playing when I was sitting in KF's lovely corner office. It's just a couple of doors down the hall, so this move shouldn't be that grueling, but lord knows my office is full of stuff. I'm hoping to be well settled in (and organized) by the end of the week, and sooner would be good, if unrealistic.

A couple of folks have mentioned the photos of Grendel in the last post. I should have noted that those photos were snatched off the web, from Playbill. If you're interested in more on the opera, A Fool in the Forest has an ongoing collection of Grendel links, and Frank's Wild Lunch has a great post on Grendel's violations of the Eight Eurotrash Trends That American Operas Must Not Emulate.

Linguistic peeve of the day: Normally I am all admiration for Hendrik Hertzberg, even when I just glance over his column in "Talk of the Town," but something in a recent one really chapped my hide: He refers to the power structure of oil-producing states as a "petrocracy." Dammit, that's the power structure of the stone-producing states. Without "-ol," it ain't oil. And "petroligarchy" carries more (and correct) meaning, anyway.

Random notes on children's literature: I knew that Stuart Little had been banned at various points, but I had always assumed it was something that the won't-somebody-please-think-of-the-chilllllldren nutcases had against talking animals. But no: Apparently it's usually banned because of the claim that Mrs. Little gave birth to Stuart herself. Presumably not C-section. That never got my attention when I was a kid, but when they filmed it, Stuart was quickly transformed into an adopted child. And I have it on reliable authority that there is a sizable constituency of library users who object strenuously to any reference to birth at all in children's books. They're probably the same folks who want to ban Everybody Poops.

The other day on one of the children's lit mailing lists, someone asked for titles of books for 8-10 year-olds on the subject of geocaching. This cracks me up... Should I follow up with a request for picture books on parallel distributed processing?

Comments

[Great Sco(t)t]

Linguistic peeve. A colleague sent out a message by e-mail which reference a particular "comity" of the University. I'm sure that everyone with a brunel.ac.uk address is entirely courteous and civil, but this "comity" has the usual bureaucratic things like membership, minutes and agenda. Any suggestion that our two top decision-making bodies should take "counsel" from (Mack) "Sennett" would be pure fantasy.

Random students. Our Design final-years have this year come up with (inter alia) a tent-peg which survives an onslaught at Glastonbury by a random-walking festival-goer, a noise-cancelling helmet for babies in air ambulances, and a smoothie-dispenser which works with your Tube-ticket Oystercard.

[Another Damned Medievalist]

Hmmmm ... maybe talking about birth is too didactic??? *ducks*

[Vance Maverick]

Do you prefer "petroldollar" or "petrolodollar"?