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There seems to be a mysterious bug infiltrating my WordPress installation. Please accept my apologies for light posting while I deal with this annoyance.

It’s almost time to go and fetch youngest from her respite outing at the local science centre. I hope she’s had a good time hanging out with the staffer and getting to enjoy some time exploring the centre on her own terms and at her own speed.

We’ve signed the paperwork on a new car, replacing our aging and gas-guzzling minivan with a smaller, sleeker Jetta sedan.

Now I have to clean out all our CDs and stuff from the old car in preparation for switching over to the new on Tuesday.

Because the weather forecast for tomorrow predicts 20 cm of snowfall and for Thursday another 5-10 cm.

Bleargh!

Yeah, sure, it’s technically Reading Week for the next seven days. In reality, though, I have a paperwork week with a stack of marking to power through, a distance ed course from Classics to review, more encyclopedia contributors to check in with and lots of other administrivia which seems to pile up and wait for just such an occasion.

My senior students don’t have it much easier, I know. Their progress reports on their research projects are due the Wednesday that we get back.

Indulgences are Back crows the NYT.

My students from last term’s “Reformation and Counter-Reformation” class will have some more historical context to add to the story than the simple fact that Luther condemned these. Hopefully they’ll remember why, for starters!

The contents of a spiritual treasury of merit being distributed by those in power within the church still makes me feel a bit skeevy, personally. But at least I can take heart in the words of Reverend Tom Reese, quoted in the article: ““The good news is we’re not selling them anymore.” Nuts to you, Johann Tetzel!

Sadly, that wasn’t for anything publishable, but rather a complete overhaul of my classroom material on the history of punishment as I wind up my majors’ course module on the history of crime in England, 1750-1900.

At least I’m really happy with how this turned out. The next time I teach on the subject (in three or four years, maybe), I’ll benefit from the polished preparation full of relevant material from Foucault, Hay, Howard and Blackstone that’s complete with many useful notes on themes I want to ensure the students pick out and ponder.

However, another part of me says “You fool! You should have been writing something real!”

That’s the gist of this piece from the National Post, “Bob Rae: Goodbye ‘Rae Days,’ Hello ‘Harper Holidays’”:

Dear Prime Minister,

I am writing you in my former role as Deficit Poster Boy and Punching Bag. This title was bequeathed to me by Pierre Trudeau and Brian Mulroney when I became premier of Ontario, and I have been carrying it around on my back since 1990.

I have tried to wear the title as lightly as possible, but have to admit that its “baggage” has hindered my progress on occasion.

It is hard to describe the pleasure I take in bequeathing it to you and Jim Flaherty. Harper Holidays and Flaherty Fridays will join Rae Days in the lexicon. You will learn, as I did, that the estimates of Finance officials are never quite on, that as the layoffs and bankruptcies pile up government revenues collapse and expenditures grow. (Read the rest)

It’s the time of year when my university mailbox is stuffed with mailers, each bearing an unsolicited textbook for some subject or another. Today’s haul included the newest edition of my favourite textbook for Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture as well as a less-useful Western Civ survey from Absolutism to the Present (I won’t be teaching this time period again any time soon).

I passed the second book on to my colleague who’s teaching the modern material, but sometimes what to do with the book is not so clear. There’s the Social Work text that showed up in my mailbox last year (I gifted it to a student who’s majoring in that field and only taking my course as an elective), the persistent stream of American Studies microhistories (I think that my Americanist colleague is getting tired of these being passed his way) and the occasional book that’s of interest to me as a general field but could never in a million years relate to any course I might teach here.

If you’re an academic, what books surprise you when they arrive in your mailbox? If not, what books would you like to see showing up unexpectedly?