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The latest edition of Carnivalesque, stuffed chock-full of early modern wonders, is up at The Quack Doctor including a number of posts on topics related to early modern midwifery and the visual arts. Enjoy!

Let me direct you to The Little Professor’s wonderfully amusing tale of a grade challenge. Oh, it helps to be fluent in the Trek-verse, but you are, of course, aren’t you? It’s only logical!

Because she’s brave enough to post stories such as this one: Asperger’s at work: Why I’m difficult in meetings

Eighty percent of adults with Asperger Syndrome do not have full-time work. This not because they can’t do the work. It’s that they can’t manage to be socially acceptable while they get the work done.

Countless studies show people would rather have pleasant and personable co-workers than a co-worker who is always right. I try to keep this in mind each day, and consequently, I spend a lot of time planning my interactions.

But sometimes my plans fail. To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’m going to walk you through my most recent parent-teacher conference. Which was a disaster. And while it was a meeting in a second-grade classroom, it could have been a meeting with anyone, anywhere.

Read the rest.

Julie Meloni shared an inspired teaching tip at ProfHacker: Wordles, or the gateway drug to textual analysis.

I love this and am going to share it with my seniors in the seminar who’re doing lots of close readings of their various sources. Here’s an example from one of the texts we’ve used this term, Jane Anger’s Her Protection for Women:

I want one of these or these. Since I haven’t had a watch to wear since youngest accidentally slammed my wrist into a car door this summer, that’s totally justified coveting, isn’t it?

In the world of entertainment, I’m yearning for this unfairly cancelled SF TV series on DVD, this screwball mystery TV series on DVD and this lame superhero angst-fest season also available on DVD.

And there are so many books that I’d love to read. The Mislaid Magician is just one of many.

So don’t say that I don’t ever give you inspiration on something to covet for yourself or on my behalf!

Attention LU students: If you like history and/or classical studies, you should be enrolled in CLAS-3506EL-01 Roman Britain (Monday/Wednesday 10-11:30). Mark Sundaram, an medievalist who specializes in Old English, is going to be teaching this course so you know it’ll be a fabulous class. When I teach the early medieval survey in the winter term, we’ll only spend a very little bit of time on Roman Britain as we race through seven hundred years of history for an entire continent. To be able to devote an entire term to the study of this period is an opportunity you shouldn’t let go by!

Situation? Aging laptop’s battery gives up the ghost. Manufacturer wants almost $200 to replace the battery. Gah! A netbook might be a better choice at that price-point. Do a little research and come up with an alternative: Intelligent Batteries (CA) (they have an American sister site at Intelligent Batteries (US)).

Solution? Intelligent Batteries offers a replacement battery for our fading laptop at 1/3 the cost of the manufacturer’s option. High ratings on various sites suggest they’re a good company if you know exactly what battery you need (so know your computer model and battery details before ordering or you’re setting yourself up for disappointment!). This perception is borne out by a seamless experience. A slight delay in availability is noted immediately after ordering (with a convenient link to cancel the order if we can’t wait that extra week). The battery arrives via UPS earlier than promised, safely packaged and performs perfectly.

Thank you, Intelligent Batteries!

I’ll be flying United Airlines this month.

Thank goodness I don’t have a guitar!

or at least his exhibition maintains one.

I also recommend the interactive feature from the exhibition, Find Henry’s Marginal Notes which gives viewers a taste of what early Tudor documents looked like, along with a revelation of how Henry was wont to mark things up. (For all those people who think “well, these are English documents, how difficult could they be to read?” — hah! Double hah!)

Of course, I’ve already weighed in about my joy in the study of Henry VIII here in this blog on more than one occasion.

Via a school-days chum who blogs at Behind the Bit, I chanced upon news of an upcoming book The Horse in Human History with what seems to be a truly global coverage. Prior to release, Cambridge is blogging weekly pieces from the author who’s already shared some interesting tidbits on topics such as The Mobile Culture of the Steppe Nomad.

So, let’s just say I’m excited to see the book when it’s released — I can predict that it’ll be useful for a number of courses that I teach as well as the kind of synthetic, global history that I enjoy. And about horses — a subject I’ve weighed in about both personally and professionally!

It was an extra-fun bonus point to see the subject of the first book blog entry at Cambridge, dealing with a monumental equestrian sculpture that will dominate the landscape near the A2 in southern England: The Angel of the South. Pita Kelekna, the author, gave a variety of interesting suggestions about the meaning of the sculpture, touching on the symbolism of the white horse in a global perspective. (I suspect that she overlooked or the interviewers cut out the obvious link between this image and the famous Uffington White Horse.)

Intrigued by this story, I had to click through a couple of links to see what this “Angel of the South” would actually look like once complete. What fun! This has to be the world’s biggest Breyer horse model. Now I am desperately trying to come up with a way to get myself back to the UK to see “the Angel of the South” in all its towering glory once the statue is complete.