I have to note this brouhaha from across the Atlantic: along with Pippa Middleton, Gabrielle Giffords and others...
John Prescott took to his Twitter account and said: "So the BBC couldn't find a woman for Sports Personality of the Year but they could find a panda for a female face of 2011 #pandagate."
Labour MP Stella Creasy said: "No offence to sweetie – sure a lovely panda and best in class etc- but clue is in title 'women' not 'female of the species' of the year ..."
Lovely.
Marshall Sahlins writing in the pamphlet, Waiting for Foucault, p. 18:
Relevance
I don't know about Britain, but in America many graduate students are totally uninterested in other times and places. They say we should study our own current problems, all other ethnography being impossible anyhow, as it is just our "construction of the other."
So if they get their way, and this becomes the principle of anthropological research, fifty years hence no-one will pay the slightest attention to the work they're doing now. Maybe they're onto something.
Another Geico commercial tonight during college football bowl season: Geico Caveman is playing Scrabble with some famous NFL player. Caveman plays "CAT" and is proud of himself. Football jock plays "NEANDERTHAL".
The usual huffy indignation ensues.
I suppose it's not really defamatory...but I've come to expect a certain level of entertainment from the Geico Cavemen, and this just fell far short of my standard.
G: Guess what Daddy and I learned last night? I'm more Neandertal than he is!
S: How did you find that out?
G: Our genes.
S: That's creepy.
G: What do you mean, creepy? We think it's awesome!
S: Awesome... in a creepy way.
John Scalzi: "Lord of the Tweets".
Everyone in Middle Earth writes in the same font. THAT’S JUST NOT REALISTIC.
I was genome browsing this morning and noticed something strange going on at UCSC.
Whoa, I thought! What's Denisova doing there listed with the yeasts? Just an accident of how they have categorized, of course -- it's a catch-all category because they have really few human-specific datasets. Err...
Hey! Perfectly innocent, I'm sure...
The New York Times Magazine tries for a new record in academic killjoy columns: "Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?"
Professors of Shakespeare — and I was one once upon a time — are blissfully unaware of the impending disaster that this film means for their professional lives. Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. “Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.
Oh, criminy. Just like undergraduates have been confidently asserting for the last decade that the boy actors in Shakespeare's time were actually women who look a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow and really wanted to get it on with the bard?
Our Lady of Eternal Osteology:
In S. Francesco a Ripa, Rome.
The Guardian writes about the amazing comeback of Zahi Hawass ("Egypt's man from the past who insists he has a future"). Whether it's a comeback or just an unusually slow slide into prison is not yet clear (Hawass was sentenced to "a year hard labor" last month, but the sentence is not being carried out, yet). Whichever, the story is certainly interesting.
These quotes from the story contradicted each other in a revealingly humorous way:
"This is one of the most significant episodes in Egypt's history," says Hawass, who resigned his cabinet position three weeks after Mubarak's downfall, only to be reappointed a month later. "For the past 5,000 years we have been ruled by pharaohs, and on January 25 [the day the revolution erupted] we finally broke that chain."
...later...
"We have always needed a strongman; without one you have chaos. Look at what's happening at the moment. Times are troubled but I'm optimistic that the unpleasantness will end and success is around the corner." Whether he is referring to Egypt or himself is not clear.
From an article about exploring Saturn's moon, Titan, I have never in my life seen a scientist quote that sounds more like something Professor Frink would say:
"Waves on Titan's seas will be far larger, but much slower, than on earthly oceans, according to our calculations," said Professor John Zarnecki, of the Open University. "That suggests Titan is the best spot in the solar system for surfing. The only trouble is that the temperature there is -180C (-290F). Either way you look at it, it is clear the place is pretty cool."
HOYVIN-GLAVIN!
