I’m in Oregon! It’s fantastic, of course. While in Iowa, I didn’t nearly get enough work done on my syllabus for next term or revising a few pieces of writing, but hopefully I’ll get some work done here.
An interesting thing I just learned about: In January 1917, there was a molasses spill in Boston. A tank burst and flooded the streets of Boston with molasses. Gives new meaning to “slow as molasses running uphill in January,” a phrase my dad used when I was a kid to tell us how slow we were. From the Wikipedia article:
The collapse unleashed an immense wave of molasses between 8 and 15 ft (2.5 to 4.5 m) high, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h) and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft² (200 kPa). The molasses wave was of sufficient force to break the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway’s Atlantic Avenue structure and lift a train off the tracks. Nearby, buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet. […]
The Boston Globe reported that people “were picked up by a rush of air and hurled many feet.” Others had debris hurled at them from the rush of sweet-smelling air. A truck was picked up and hurled into Boston Harbor. Approximately 150 were injured; 21 people and several horses were killed — some were crushed and drowned by the molasses.
Fascinating!
And a friend of mine received a game for the holidays, a new version of the card game War called Nonviolent Politically Correct War. Of course, it’s ridiculous. But my favorite part of the game is that the suits have been renamed, and one of them is called “Diversity.” The face cards for “Diversity” include a king, queen, and jack that are amalgamations of people of various races. A quarter of the body is (stereotypical) Native American, a quarter of another race, and so on. I love it. So symbolic of what’s wrong with liberal multiculturalism!
Folks are writing New Year’s Eve resolutions. I haven’t been a big fan of these. I’ve probably written about it before. Why not just make resolutions whenever you want! But I guess I do have goals for the next year:
- Go to Europe if I can afford it (maybe Prague)
- Try to submit two, maybe even three, journal articles
- Get into a better writing routine
- Take better notes of what I read (at least a precis and quick response for each journal article)
- Create a committee for my comprehensive exams! (this one’s required)
So much is related to graduate school!
