A plague on our house

Sam came home from school today with a temperature of 102.8 so I guess we now have a case of the flu in our house. No cough which seems to indicate it isn't swine flu.

Conference Vignettes

1) Undercover cop arrives bright and bushy tailed on day one and leaves defeated after one and a half papers. Admittedly the first was in Macedonian and the second so 'linguistic' it might well have been in another language. He judged that the Greek patriots might also not be lured out to hear about vowel contraction and the like in Macedonian.

2) Cut to the afternoon when a very bright and very young grad student is reading his paper on something intensely linguistic; one of those language phenomena that people use but deny using. He utters the following sentence just as two burly local Greeks (in workmen's caps, no less) enter the room -- "their very existence is questioned..." which is of course the raison d'etre for these two chaps' presence: the questionable existence of Slavic Macedonians.  A bit of a back and forth ensues during the Q and A as we insist that they have to ask a question relevant to the paper (impossible of course) and they content themselves with leaving some "literature" and making their exit.

3) Day two contained the most contentious papers. Anything with "Alexander the Great" in the title is like a red flag to a bull. This particular Alexander the Great talk was fascinating. By an anthropologist who showed how both the Greeks and the Macedonians who are fanatical about the name question have found themselves a Pakistani tribe who purport to be descended from soldiers in Alexander's army. Who knew? Each country now offers scholarships to their respective 'tribespeople' to come and study in the homeland. 

4) I took my charge to provide food for the conferencees seriously. The day before it started Craig said to me "Honey, why are there 36 eggs in the fridge." Because Macedonians don't like the steady diet of muffins and other relentlessly sweet carbs that form the usual American breakfast buffet. So I boiled lots of eggs and we had sliced meat and cheese and fruit and I received many compliments on my egg boiling skills...

5) All of this could have only been accomplished with the help of our stellar project coordinator, Addie, who has more poise at her tender age than I do now. OK, she did lose it at one point on Friday when the lunch cart she was wheeling over to our building got caught on a pebble and the vat of soup went everywhere. 

This is where I live part 3

This was in my inbox today:

I just wanted to make you aware that there is an issue in my class. I am currently enrolled in Professor ________'s class, ___________. For this class the book Helden wie wir  is supposed to be read. I find it very offensive and have voiced my opinion to Professor ____________. I suggested that she give me a different book to read and I would be happy to do similar assignments. She told me to read it with a different perspective. This book has nothing to do with my German skills. It is a perverted book that talks about inappropriate topics such as sex, worded very offensively, and masturbation. I am to meet with her tomorrow morning and we are supposed to talk about it, but I wanted to let you know that I refuse to read this book and it has to be fair to all of us. I don' t want to be a victim to this book or this class.

updates

Apologies dear reader(s) for the long drought in posts. Life has been a roller coaster mainly because I am hosting the conference from hell this coming week. Way back in about 2002 I agreed to host the Macedonian-North American Macedonian Studies conference in 2009 which at that point seemed so distant that saying yes was easy. Putting on a conference is hard work under the best of circumstances - well off departments probably use conference services, but in the poor humanities we go it alone. So I had to book hotel space, set up a payment website, organize food, contract out for a scenic excursion, find a place to host a party for which I managed to get live Balkan music and dancers. This was stressful enough but then the Greeks found out and all hell broke loose. For those of you not in the know, the Greeks object to the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia calling itself Macedonia because that is a Greek word and no one else should use it. One of my colleagues in Classics noted that it is kind of nice that people can be so passionate about a word, and I would agree if I wasn't dealing with volumes of what can only be described as hate mail. Some listserv out there encouraged its members to write to the university president and demand the cancellation of my conference. So, I got summoned to the president's office to bring him up to speed on this particular area of Balkan conflict. The positive thing was a very clear statement of support from his office that is on the home page for the university and the VP for communications took over replying to all the crazies so the stuff stopped being forwarded to me.

Oh, and I get a uniformed security guard for the conference and an undercover guy who came by the department on Friday wanting to know how he should dress to blend in. Which of course for all you academics out there raises difficult sartorial questions.

So, Wednesday the people start arriving and through Saturday night my life is not my own.

Halloween 09

I'd lost my star trek beam me up badge by this point.

Scot with guitar
Sam and his friends

Ellen's little one
Catherine

homework

Correcting assignments today based on the students' viewing of a Deborah Tannen video lecture about her work on the different ways men and women talk. One of the students wanted to reference her point that neither men nor women talk more, but that who does so varies according to whether the space is public or private. I quote:

"Men do pubic. Women do private."

If only he had added an 's' to 'private'...

this is where I live part 2

So today in my class where we were talking about language and gender we hit the topic of different ways that English refers to men and women. Of course we talked about titles: mr. mrs. miss. ms. and, guess what, a huge number of the students had no idea what ms was. One guy said that he knew the term and that it meant "a widow, um, like she had a husband, but she lost him."