The Salt-Box

When you spend three minutes staring out of your office window wondering how to figure out whether it’s stopped raining, the better to return books to the library . . . you may be an absent-minded prof.

Not good.

(One sign you’re a hopeless Apple dork: Your first thought, when thought finally comes, is, “Oh, I’ll check my iPhone.”)

This month’s issue of Macworld imagines a typical student’s writing process, and it isn’t pretty:

If you’re using Safari to do so some heavy-duty browsing, you’ve probably got multiple windows and multiple tabs open at once.  For instance, when doing research for a paper, you may open Wikipedia in one window and Google in another, and then [apple]-click to open multiple tabs within each window.

Sounds like a C paper  to me,  magic Safari tricks or no.

If the student center changes their fries (to “steak-cut”), shouldn’t they have to run that by the faculty senate?

Steak-cut’s gross.

(It may well be, of course, that they’re just out of regular fries.  But isn’t it convenient that they’d make this change in the summer, when the senate doesn’t meet?)

Yesterday, the following message went out to departments located in a campus building:

Toilet partitions will be replaced in the second and third floor bathrooms of . . .  Hall.  The third floor restrooms will be closed tomorrow and the second floor restrooms will be closed on Friday.  Signage will be placed on the impacted restrooms.

“Impacted” in this context is a stroke of genius.

(Yes, yes, I’m basically 4 years old.  It comes naturally, from being on childcare detail so much this month.)

These three things are all related to Victorian literature and culture, and are very, very strange.

• “Experiments in Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver.” When it’s installed at a gallery, museum patrons or internet users can make a dead frog jerk its legs. (Via BoingBoing.)
• A flash-based video game in which anime women in Victorian dress smack each other.
• “Charles Dickens and Cleavage by Super Amanda.” From the description: “can a chick in a black corset be taken as seriously as some of those tweedy university fuddy duddys we usually listen to”? (Via an anonymous colleague.)

• (Update 7/26:) A nanochip based on Charles Babbage’s difference engine. (Via Engadget.)

Finally, this has nothing to do with Victorian literature, but: I forgot to post a link to last week’s post at Bookslut.

. . . if only it had been around when I was an undergrad:

Christopher A. Faraone, Ancient Greek Love Magic (Harvard UP, 1999)

If, at 19, I’d known the classics were so awesome . . . I’d probably be annoying my students with Aristophanes rather than with Dickens.