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Friday is supposed to be my short day; I have only one class, from 9:30 to 11:00 in the morning. But today there were also two committee meetings. At 11:30 the Policy Committee met; one of our graduate students is in a tricky academic situation, and asked for relief. (It's a nasty one, all right, and - though I myself will be doing what I can to extricate him - it may not be possible.) That meeting took about an hour; then I went for lunch. The other meeting wasn't until 3:00, and only lasted fifteen minutes. The bus I take leaves campus at about five before the hour, so I didn't leave for home until nearly 4:00. Sigh. (Snicker. I know, I'm complaining about having to put in an eight-hour day at the office. What can I say? Expectation is everything, sometimes.)
Today is (or, at least, stands a good chance of being) Shakespeare's 440th birthday, so I'd like to offer one of my favorite WS quotes, from Measure for Measure:
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
One could choose a worse motto.
I finished John Adams this afternoon. It does make me think better of Adams, but I think McCullough lets him off a little too lightly for some of his ill deeds - most notably, for the Alien and Sedition Acts. I should probably look for good biographies of Jefferson and Hamilton as a corrective. I have the first volume of Malone's biography of TJ as well as Jefferson's autobiography, but nothing on Hamilton. Not now, though; I should read something less historical next.
And another for the cloudy-crystal files: in Anderson's The People of the Wind, in the midst of a political argument, one character says, "I've heard that till I'm taped for it. I prefer to program myself, thank you." The ostensible date is many centuries from now; the publication date was 1973. (I remember programming with paper tape, and it was about that time, too. This isn't as bad as the giant, vacuum tube-based computers from Blish's Cities in Flight - published quite a few years after the invention of the transistor - but it's still somewhat amusing.)
Today is (or, at least, stands a good chance of being) Shakespeare's 440th birthday, so I'd like to offer one of my favorite WS quotes, from Measure for Measure:
O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.
One could choose a worse motto.
I finished John Adams this afternoon. It does make me think better of Adams, but I think McCullough lets him off a little too lightly for some of his ill deeds - most notably, for the Alien and Sedition Acts. I should probably look for good biographies of Jefferson and Hamilton as a corrective. I have the first volume of Malone's biography of TJ as well as Jefferson's autobiography, but nothing on Hamilton. Not now, though; I should read something less historical next.
And another for the cloudy-crystal files: in Anderson's The People of the Wind, in the midst of a political argument, one character says, "I've heard that till I'm taped for it. I prefer to program myself, thank you." The ostensible date is many centuries from now; the publication date was 1973. (I remember programming with paper tape, and it was about that time, too. This isn't as bad as the giant, vacuum tube-based computers from Blish's Cities in Flight - published quite a few years after the invention of the transistor - but it's still somewhat amusing.)
