Degree paper

I'm finally done. I finished by attempt at a second degree paper yesterday and collapsed into a semi-coma for the rest to the evening. I turned it in to my first reader this morning. If all goes well, I'll start working on getting it past a second reader next semester (along with my first degree paper).

Oh yeah, and I need to take comps.

Saturday Shakespeare

[...] Direct they feet
Where thou and I, henceforth, may never meet.
Twelfth Night 5.1.162-163

You can't lick Elbow

People always come up to writing teachers to vent their sense of scandal at the latest grammatical mistake they've seen a student commit - as though mistakes in grammar come from teachers and workbooks not teaching grammar.
-- Peter Elbow. What is English?

Friday frivolity

http://www.sillywalksgenerator.com/

You can waste a lot of time on this thing.

Water boarding

Vanity Fair has just published an article by Christopher Hitchens on water boarding as an interrogation technique. Unlike most of the practice's defenders and detractors, Hitchens volunteered to undergo water boarding himself.

Then he wrote about it.

You could, at least, read it.

Whelmed but not overwhelmed

Here I am, working on a second degree paper, finishing the first one and getting ready for the beginning of the next school year. Yesterday, I also found out that my father has been in the hospital getting two more stents put in after persistent chest pains while he was in Chicago last week. My brother and I, along with our families, are going to visit him this weekend. I suppose that I'll be making irregular and fragmentary posts, as usual.

Saturday Shakespeare

You break jests as braggarts do their blades, which, God be thanked, hurt not.

Much Ado About Nothing 5.1.177-178

Monday numbers

Miles driven today: 120
Hours of sleep: 2.5 (not while driving)
Tractors in the road: 2
Wagons in the road: 5 (4 Amish)
Moody teens in my house: 1
Days until a presentation in graduate school: 1

Saturday Shakespeare

Oh, there has been much throwing about of brains.
Hamlet 2.2.347

An interesting revelation

I just finished reading an article in The New York Times about a tablet from before the birth of Christ that may prove that the idea of a suffering messiah who rises from the dead after three days was already part of Jewish thought at the time.

As is often the case with archeology (especially religious archeology) what the tablet really proves or does not prove remains to be seen. Still, I am encouraged that the manic hucksterism displayed over the Gospel of Judas seems to be absent. Read the article here.

Saturday Shakespeare

If she lives till doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole world.

The Comedy of Errors 3.2.93-94

I need a thesis

I'm doing a project on Lois Lowry's The Giver, and I really need to finish it this weekend. Work is not going well. My professor is one of the leading scholars on Lowry, and I'm terrified of getting something wrong - something basic and embarrassing.

I also need a thesis.

Nothing's coming.