In the spirit of BlogDay 2006*, I thought I'd post some links to blogs I love to read regularly:

The Dilbert Blog: Scott Adams, creator of the Dilbert cartoon, posts on his blog daily and it never fails to make me laugh so hard that I almost pee my pants.

Celebritology: Courtesy of the Washington Post, this is my dirty little secret blog. At a glance, it gives me the day's top celebrity news. It also helps me decompress from a hard day at the office. <snork>

Bakingsheet: One of my favorite food blogs, this is where I go to read up on recipes and get ideas for new dishes. Because of this blog, I've now made pretzles, blueberry sauce from scratch, and really great oatmeal raisin cookies.

What's for Lunch, Honey?: This is another great food blog, hosted by Meeta from Weimar, Germany. She's an Indian transplant, living in Germany, who speaks English and I love to read her blog. :) She's got an amazing eye and is wicked good with a camera; consequently, her pictures are amazing and mine look like our dog took them. Maybe he did...

Achenblog: Also courtesy of the Washington Post. I've been reading Joel Achenbach's columns since I was an undergrad. They're funny, they're witty, and they're smart. You can't get much better than that. (I recommend his recent piece, titled "Then Why Am I Getting Poorer?".)

Honestly, this is just a small sample of the blogs that I read every now and again. (Okay, pretty regularly. Okay, okay: daily.) But this is a pretty good representation. And, for the record, I didn't include other personal blogs because I didn't want to put something out there that wasn't supposed to be out there. And I feel pretty good that I didn't include a gratuitous link to John's blog. Whoops!

*Truth be told, to capture the actual spirit of BlogDay, I would have had to have found 5 new blogs. But I wasn't that motivated. So you're getting five oldies-but-goodies.

About a week ago, I found out from another history graduate student that incoming history graduate assistants would be paid more than returning veteran history graduate assistants (myself and many of my cohorts). I didn't think much of it (other than the obvious unfairness of it all) until today, when I found out exactly how much more money we're talking about ($3,000 for those of you keeping score at home). At the risk of stating the obvious, it seems a shitty way to thank returning and experienced grad assistants who will now put in the same work and same hours for significantly less pay than our new colleagues. I understand the argument that we're all here to get good educations and that they money shouldn't matter. But it's hard not to feel slapped in the face. I'm proud to work with a group of wonderfully articulate and wicked smart people whose successes I celebrate and whose research I admire. And it's difficult not to be disappointed by the college's lack of good judgment in this situation. Unfortunately, it's made all the more frustrating by the sinking feeling that we (grad assistants and our department) aren't going to be able to bring about any real change.

So I was in the ill-fated library again today, looking for just five books. Part of my dissertation is going to be based on nineteenth-century genetic psychology research, so I was trying to track down some sources in the that section (BF, for those who are interested). The book I was looking for was BF701.G23, so I started in the BF701s: BF701.A..., BF701.B..., BF688.8... huh? It seems that a boatload of books had been completely and utterly misshelved in the exact section I was browsing. So naturally, while no one was looking, I took it upon myself to reshelve the section. I consider it just another small gift from me to this fine institution.

You'd never guess it: having strippers. No joke. In China, the government has decided to ban the practice of having strippers at funeral services. Why would you have a stripper at a funeral service in the first place? To boost your attendance. Again, no joke! Chinese funeral protocol says that the more people at a funeral, the more honored the deceased. And how do you get more people to attend a funeral? Have plenty of naked ladies on hand. If you don't believe me, read the article here, here, or here.

Here's a fun trick: go to Google, type in the word "failure" and look at the first listing that comes up. From whitehouse.gov, there it is: a biography of George W. Bush. It works for the phrase "miserable failure" as well.

I was emailing a friend the other day and, trying to describe someone we both know, I used the word "asshat." For this particular person, it was the most appropriate word I could come up with. I knew I'd seen it before, but I wasn't sure I was using it correctly. And since it was so colorful, I wanted to make sure that mine was the appropriate usage. Now, it doesn't have a listing in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster's doesn't seem to think it's a word, but once again, the internet's Urban Dictionary came through for me. I'll let you look it up yourselves.

Driving in Gainesville, you honestly take your life into your own hands. There are roughly two categories of drivers on your average Gainesville street: the meek ones and the homicidal ones. The meek ones will are dangerous because they're moving slowly and timidly enough that they actually become hazards on the road. I hate to make sweeping generalizations, but these are usually people in mini vans or Volvos. The homicidal ones seem to be doing everything in their power to run you off the road, slam into your back bumper, or cut you off so quickly that you nearly cause a wreck just trying to avoid them. Again, I hate to make generalizations, but these seem to be students or anyone in a luxury car (often it's students in luxury cars). I'm sure there's a Venn diagram that could help me explain all of this more thorougly.

John and I test drove a Saturn Vue yesterday afternoon and in the course of events, we realized that the salesman assisting us was drunk. I kid you not. He was slurring his words, he was sweating profusely, he was crimson red, and he was really disoriented. He made more references to drinking in a 30 minute period than I cared to count. And I think there was a reference to midgets somewhere in there. It was amazing! As we were leaving the building, he said, "Oooh! It's happy hour!"

Reading one of my favorite blogs this morning, I came across a recipe for what looked like breadsticks but were, according to the title, "Herbed Breasticks." Go back and read it carefully; there's a key letter missing. Honestly, it didn't clear anything up for me when the recipe touted them as being "smooth and easy to handle" and "firm to the touch."

Entering our recent receipts into Quicken this morning, I came across two things that struck me as funny:

1) The other day at Starbucks, John and I spent $5.42 at exactly 5:42 pm.

2) The "host" name on our Chipotle receipt from the previous day was "Lesbia." Which begs the question: are the people at Chipotle just having some fun, or twenty years ago did some woman's parents make an unfortunate choice in naming their daughter?

I've just learned that thirty of the books that I need to study for my quals are unavailable through the library. Let me rephrase that: although the library owns the books in question, and although the brand-new library has recently opened, and although I can see the shelves where the books are, I can't-- nor can any library staff member-- actually touch the books. Here's what the Assistant Chair of Access Services had to say:

"...the plastic sheets that the contractors have placed over the area prevent us from moving the shelving to access those materials; also, the power to that area is scheduled to be shut off this week. At this point, your best option is to request the materials through Interlibrary Loan."

While the library was under construction, books were inaccessible for browsing but you could still get a hold of them by requesting that they be pulled from storage. Now, it seems, even that option is gone. I can't help but wonder: why move all of those books into the new building, only to render them completely inaccessible? Why not keep them in storage until the f@#$ing Starbucks construction is completed? (Incidentally, why we need a Starbucks in the library is beyond me, considering that there's a Starbucks a mere half block from the library.) So now I'm off to compile a list of the books I need so that I can send off a pleading email to the other history grads to see if they have any of them.

Library West, UF's humanities library, reopened the other day after 2.5 years of renovations. John and I went over today to pick up a few books and I have to say, whoever had the job of deciding where the books would go has obviously never worked in a library, looked at a library, or used a library. It was terrible! The call numbers are organized in the most chaotic, bass-ackwards way possible. Case in point: the H's. Some of the H's are on the far right side of the basement, and some are on the far left. It is easier to get from HA to L than it is to get from HA to HB. Oh, and the moveable stacks aren't organized in call number order from left to right, the way our brains have been programmed to work. They're organized from right to left. So if you wanted to get from DA to to DT, you would have to proceed to your left, in a completely counter-intuitive way. What should have taken just ten minutes or so to find took at least half an hour, while John and I wandered around this new beautiful building (complete with bean bags, for shit's sake!). They've got chairs with cupholders built into them, but they can't be bothered to organize the library in a way that makes it easy to-- you know-- find books.

Oh, and the HQ's are completely inaccessible until Spring while they-- wait for it-- build the Starbucks that's going in on the ground floor. So if you want 30 books in the HQ's (as I do), you have to toddle home and fill out an online request form... thirty times.

When I was growing up, my parents had these old Mayflower moving boxes in the basement and in the attic that we stored things in. To be sure (as Dr. Tegeder says), it's not an unusual thing to store things in cardboard boxes. But because they said "Mayflower" on the side, I was convinced that we were descended from the Pilgrims who came to Plymouth on the Mayflower. I guess I had the thought that the Mayflower would have provided the Pilgrims with cardboard boxes with the Mayflower logo to store their crap in. And that said boxes would have survived more than 350 years to arrive in my parents' basement. Of course now, years later, I know that that's not true. The boxes that the Pilgrims on the Mayflower used to store their crap in had a totally different logo.

Last night I had a dream that I got a counterfeit dollar in change for something I'd bought. It was the only money I had in my purse, and it was counterfeit. How did I know it was counterfeit? Because where George Washington's face should be, Angelina Jolie's face appeared instead. The night before, I dreamt that John and I were battling an army of robots. I guess there's no connection there.