Siri: define literary fiction.

See, now I might be an Onion-brand Sicko, but when I hear/read "Owl-dom" I imagine something quite different...

announcing ILÚVATAR, my multi-billion dollar company which will specialize in the dismantling of all other idiotically tolkien-named entities, that they shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite

Add universities to this list.

Canadian doctors obeying a U.S. executive order that doesn’t even apply to Canada is deeply offensive to both trans people and to Canadian legal sovereignty.

15yo: people don’t care enough about the medieval period and it sucks!!
Me: they need to get Eleanor of Aquitaine-pilled
15yo: yeah, she was crusademaxxing

Book and Paper MPhil, Glasgow By Teagan Kimbro, Anna McNulty, Charlotte Pryke and Brittany Wallace Date: January 2026 Students, (from left) Brittany Wallace, Anna McNulty, Teagan Kimbro, and Charlotte Pryke posing with paper sa…

The new Book & Paper Conservation programme at @glasgow.ac.uk's Kelvin Centre has got off to a great start. As it's the first year there are just 4 students, numbers will increase in future years. Here's a blog from them about their first semester.
iconscotland.wordpress.com/2026/02/24/b...

I might have beat them over the head a bit about the second instance (copy of poem quasi-discovered in a MS; correction to Index of verse), but they got the point at least.

This is a great thread by Ellen and contributes to my fervent belief that academic NOTES need to be valued more in e.g. tenure & promotion. How many puffy articles could have been an exceptional 4-6000 word note?! We’ll never know!

Thankfully, my Promotion & Tenure committee recognised two Notes & Queries pieces as valid and important contributions.

If universities think AI can and should replace faculty and the basic skills students used to be taught, then why not replace all varsity athletes with robots?

Who needs humans to play varsity football when robots can do it for us?

Cool. My electric mixer stirs faster than my finger

Can you policy not be "Absolutely not"? Our programme is working over the summer on drafting just such a statement, not least so that we have it in place when new folks join (in temporary placements or permanently) and also have something with which to push back against our shitty colleagues.

Canada's gas tax debate is even dumber than it looks The federal government's decision to suspend the excise tax on gasoline combines is an obvious attempt to put politics ahead of policy. It also looks downright sophisticated compared to the populist s...

Mark Carney's decision to suspend the federal gas tax was dumb. The positions taken by Pierre Poilievre and Avi Lewis, on the other hand, were downright ludicrous.

We can do better than this, folks. We have to. #cdnpoli

www.nationalobserver.com/2026/04/15/o...

As the battery ages a little too much on this machine, and given that the latest update on W11 is causing all sorts of other unanticipated battery drains (the coloured battery thing is an indicator, I guess?), I am busting out my ext cd-r to load Office 2010 on this box tomorrow.

Is this a "despite" vs "in spite of" situation??

I'd trust my faculty union a bit more if there weren't glaring punctuation errors in the headlines of their email blasts.

Just to go back to basics:

I once worked on a (winning) presidential campaign.

Something too obvious for anyone to mention was: "Don't get into a fight with the Pope over who knows more about Jesus."

These people are morons.

Dear @alexusherhesa.bsky.social ,
When you get the contract for the MUN Strategic Enrolment plan, please do contact the profs on the ground, especially at Grenfell.

I thought it was Adam and Steve... 🤷‍♂️

Perhaps Milton was the real Slim Shady....

Perhaps Milton was the real Slim Shady

NYTimes alarmed to learn that cultural and intellectual cache is not actual fungible currency.

And the thing that pisses me off so much is that so many media outlets continue to report on higher ed as if everyone is operating like the Yales of the world —which is why we are all supposedly “elites”, even though the majority of faculty across the country are just struggling to get by.

For two years, I taught 4-4-3 at a small public university in order to make $50k CANADIAN with zero benefits (so I could support myself as a single person) and it almost broke me.
The people who wrote that report could never.

Can we put out a non-elite report on higher ed?

a frog holds itself upright while poking its upper body out of a manhole cover set in a pavement or road

truth coming out of her well to shame mankind

The College Affordability Crisis is Real, but the Media is Looking at the Wrong Schools Sturges Hall (Photo by Keith Walters ’11) Opinion By Costas Solomou, Vice President, Enrollment Management Published by the Office of Enrollment Management When Yale University released its Committee ...

"the colleges that dominate the headlines are not the colleges that most Americans attend

their core mission: to serve students from all backgrounds, at a price families can actually afford, prepare graduates for real careers and meaningful lives."

www.geneseo.edu/enrollment-m...

It's a gift, and if opposition parties can't do anything with it, and if the Ontario voter eats it, well, I dunno.

Screenshot from King of the Hill Season 9, Episode 5