They say history repeats itself, you know.

"People seem to think they are citizens of the Republican Party and that that is patriotism and sufficiently good patriotism. I prefer to be a citizen of the United States." (Mark Twain, 1884)

I don't hate the French.

I just hate French intellectuals.

In particular, the following French intellectuals:

Michel Foucault
Jacques Derrida

and currently

Pierre Bourdieu.

Dispatch from Pittsburgh

Most people go somewhere warm when Spring Break rolls around. Rich and I are in Pittsburgh. It snowed today.

At least this year we went somewhere somewhat south from Madison. Last year we went to Minneapolis. Of course, it didn't snow up there.

Anyway. Yesterday and the day before we were in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Home to the University of Michigan, of course. Something which allowed the following exchange to occur:

Rich: "You know we could do something really nerdy today."

Carly: "What's that?"

Rich: "We could go to this brownbag talk at the Institute of Humanities."

Carly: "What's the topic?"

Rich: " 'Citizenship, Statelessness and Social Exclusion' "

At this point, Carly's eyes light up.

Carly: "Very, very tempting"

Rich: "We're not going to a brownbag in the midst of our roadtrip."

Carly: "Bastard."



I know. I'm such a nerd.

SPAM Titles

I just deleted my Junkmail box by hand. Among the usual "hot stock" and "Try Viagra!" emails were a two interesting titles:

1.

"new scrapple!"

I suppose it's better than old scrapple. Although, really, no scrapple is good scrapple. Although, it is "arguably the first pork food invented in America"

2.

"Try Kafka!"

Well. I've tried Kafka. And I liked it. I really did.

I'm totally into that whole man-wakes-up-and-is-bug thing.

Carly goes it alone

Rich is off in Tennessee. Actually, I think he's probably sitting in the Detroit airport at this moment, on his way to Nashville. He'll be there for the week, at which point he'll come back to Madison and then the two of us are roadtripping it to Pittsburgh-via-Ann Arbor, returning via Indianapolis. When we get home from that trip, Rich is off to Nashville pretty much immediately. So he'll be pretty much out of Madison for the rest of the month.

This all means I've got to carry this blog all on my on for a while. As astute readers may have noticed, we've been kind of short on entries lately. This can be explained partially by my having my own blog to express myself on, and partially on the fact that we're very busy people who never actually do or think anything interesting.

OK, occasionally we do interesting things, I suppose. But I'd say a scarily high percentage of our waking hours are spent working in coffeeshops. So much so that I'm guessing our new housemate probably thinks we're freaks, as we're almost never home.

In fact, I'm in a coffeeshop right this very second. Ostensibly reading How Policies Make Citizens but mostly I've been fooling around. I need to stop taking my computer with me when I go to read because it's such a distraction.

In any case, hopefully I'll manage to bear the weight of two blogs at once without boring the heck out of y'all.