So a mathematician walks into a bar...

In a comment to the previous post, John Cowan told an engineer vs. mathematician joke. I am married to an engineer, co-teach a course with a mathematician, have published jointly with a biologist, and am in the midst of an enormous project with a computer scientist and another mathematician and a biologist. There is some truth in all the stereotypes. So here are my two favorite jokes that poke fun at the different disciplines.

First joke

An engineer, a chemist and a mathematician are all staying at a hotel after a conference. Three small fires simultaneously break out in the wastepaper baskets in their rooms.

The engineer wakes up, looks at the fire, makes a quick calculation, puts exactly the right amount of water into the ice bucket, and pours it on the fire. Fire is out and no water spills out of the basket.

The chemist wakes up, looks at the fire, fills up five different vessels and dumps them onto the fire and then, just for good measure, runs the shower on the wastepaper basket for an hour. There's a lot of water damage, but the fire is out.

The mathematician wakes up, looks at the fire, looks at the ice bucket, looks at the water tap, and says "There is a solution." Then he goes back to sleep.

Second joke

A physicist, a biologist and a mathematician are sitting in a cafe and chatting. They notice two people go into a house. A few minutes later, three people come out.

The physicist says "The initial measurement was in error."
The biologist says "They must have reproduced."
The mathematician says "If one person goes back into the house, it will then be empty."

Gratuitous completely nerdy math joke

Q: What do you get when you cross rabbit and elephant?
A: Rabbit elephant sine theta.

Gratuitous completely nerdy physics joke

2+2=5 for very large values of 2 or small values of 5.

I'm learning to think
more like a mathematician, and that's a good thing.

Last year I co-taught the "The Edge of Reason," the paired Math/Science Fiction courses that my friend and colleague, Professor Bill Goldbloom Bloch and I designed (Bill, by the way has an absolutely brilliant book on the mathematics of Borges' "Library of Babel" coming out any day now from Oxford). So every teaching day I was in a classroom with a mathematician, learning more of the very high-end math along with the students and really starting to understand how mathematicians think.

This year Bill and I are teaching an experimental course, Logic and Language, in which we will be taking students (mainly sophomores) through, among other things, Chomsky's Syntactic Structures, Computability and Logic by George Boolos, et. al., and Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea. Topics to be covered include transformational generative grammar, information theory, computability, Turing machines, and Gödell's incompleteness theorem.

This summer I have been collaborating with Prof. of Computer Science Mark LeBlanc and Prof. of Mathematics Mike Kahn (a specialist in statistics). We have been building some pretty cool software.

In prepping and teaching the courses, and doing the research, I've learned a lot of important reasoning skills, because mathematicians and computer scientists have different ways of thinking that are incredibly useful. Here's just one.

Let's say other people have proven a lot of things about Turing Machines. And let's say you're working on something else, like Wang Tiles. Well, a mathematician thinks, "hmmm... there's all this cool stuff about Turing Machines over here. If I can prove that a set of Wang Tiles can work like a Turing Machine then, boom!, I've just proved a whole ton of stuff about Wang Tiles without having to prove it specifically for Wang Tiles."

This sounds obvious in my summary, but it's the kind of obvious that I really only got after we'd done stuff like it a bunch of times. For example, number theory, long thought to be the most abstruse and useless part of math, turns out to be absolutely essential for doing secure credit card transactions on the internet. That's nice to know, but it's mind-blowing to work through all the underlying math and see how it all falls together.

And this brings me to just one quick opportunity to shill for a liberal arts education that includes a lot of math and science: The only way to make those kinds of connections, to say "Oh, this set of Wang Tiles is really just a Turing Machine," is to have, floating around in your head, a lot of information about different and disparate fields. That's why I read as much evolutionary biology (and now as much math) as I can get my hands on: the more I pack into my skull, I think, the more likely I am to be able to make those kinds of connections and to think like a mathematician.

Turtla (or, possibly, Turtle)


Today, after dropping off my daughter at camp, I was driving back along Route 1 here in Dedham. I noticed something on the side of the road. It was this guy (possibly girl; a female would be more likely at this time of year, but this turtle's plastron seems pretty concave to me, so I was thinking "turtla" rather than "turtle").

I was afraid that he was going to wander into traffic and get killed--and possibly hurt someone in the process, since he weighs at least 15 pounds and is about 30 inches long--so I pulled over and picked him up, thinking to take him back to the marshy woods behind TGI Fridays. But as I began to carry him through the parking lot, I noticed some workers looking at me funny as I brought the turtle closer and closer to where they were working. I rapidly came to the conclusion that they might not appreciate my letting a 15-pound snapping turtle loose near where they were working.

So I took the turtle back to my car and put it in my trunk, saying to him "You're a lucky turtle, buddy. I'm from New Jersey. Usually when we put somebody in a car trunk, they don't come back out."

I'm waiting until it gets dark tonight, and then I will release him safely.

This has been quite the year of the turtle. Last summer I rescued an endangered gopher tortoise from the road in Florida, and in June my daughter worked on a Diamondback Terrapin conservation project with my colleague Prof. Barbara Brennessel (you may know her as the co-author of the paper testing medieval medicine in Anglo-Saxon England).

At least none of these turtles peed all over me the way that the turtle I took out of the road on Cape Cod a few years back did. Who says nothing ever improves?

Department Chair Stuff

A few years ago I was the Chair of Wheaton's Educational Policy Committee (Ed Pol). I had been on Ed Pol for three years, including the years in which we did our massive curriculum overhaul, and I'd been recording secretary (so I can say, honestly, that I wrote the new curriculum -- It would be more accurate to say that I typed the new curriculum, but let's not split hairs). But because I had been on Ed Pol in a challenging environment, I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to be Chair.

Ed Pol is probably the most influential committee at Wheaton, where just about everything is run by the faculty committees (Ed Pol has the President and Provost on it, which helps a lot), so I had real hope that I could accomplish a few things. First, my particular hobby horse, I wanted to create tighter links between the sciences and the humanities. Second, I wanted to make some tweaks on our "Connections" curriculum. Third, I wanted to work with the President and Provost to clarify the relationships between Wheaton's various "centers" (Filene Center for Work and Learning, Global Center, Multicultural Center, etc.) and the curriculum (ok, I'll be honest: I wanted to lay down some markers that said "Only the faculty control the curriculum. Period." But I was happy to do this under a rubric of cooperation).

Instead, I found my time and my energy highjacked by one administrator who, I have to say, was a whiny pain in the ass. We spent hours and meeting after meeting on a stupid, useless proposal. I kept finding ways to reject it, and it kept coming back and wasting more of my time.

Of my many character flaws, one of the worst is my love of saying "I told you so." As a mentor pointed out, saying "I told you so" means that you didn't do a good enough job in arguing for a position and that failure of politics or rhetoric has had negative results. But I have not learned to overcome this flaw, and so I say now "I told you so." The useless program that this administrator wasted so much of my time on has not had one single student sign up for it. So much for the lie that "students are demanding this." It was, as I noted then, a complete waste of time, predicated entirely on ego and bureaucratic empire-building. But it did managed to prevent me from accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish as Chair of Ed Pol. Yes, I got the trains to run on time, and that's a good feeling, but the larger-scale things I thought we needed to address did not get addressed. I have a feeling I will be saying "I told you so" again not that long from now.

Last year, my first as as department Chair, similar things happened. I had a lot of plans for what I wanted to accomplish, but mostly found myself scrambling from one new crisis to another. Partly this occurred because my Chair responsibilities were dumped on me two weeks early with no transition at all. You'd think two weeks over the course of a year wouldn't matter, but it did. A lot. I am only now catching up on all the various stacked deadlines. But more than the dumping of responsibilities, the chaos of the departmental files, and a set of crises that started in June and continued pretty much uninterrupted through the year was my not knowing how to handle being department Chair. But over the year I think I learned some things, and so I pass on to you a few lessons that may be useful when you become Chair.

Not everything is crucial. This summer I decided that by June 20th, I had done enough department Chairing for that particular month. So for ten days I didn't answer emails, didn't go to meetings, etc. You know what? Nothing bad happened. When I picked up on stuff starting on July 1, everything was fine. Remarkable. This rule only applies to things without external deadlines. You may not as Chair or regular faculty member, make the staff's jobs more difficult by being late with things. That is totally unacceptable. But for reports that no one will read, make-work, and meetings that are about (*shudder*) feelings, things will wait.

It's your agenda. Within reason, of course, but if someone wants their proposal on the agenda, let them do all the other crappy department Chair work and set the agenda. I bent over backwards for people about stuff, and still they whined. Clearly, they're going to whine no matter what. So ignore the whining and set up the agenda that you think is important. (Note: anything that is below item 6 on the agenda is very unlikely to get done at that meeting. Don't put your stuff below item 6).

You don't need to take crap from people. Academics tend to be exceedingly obnoxious in their emails. I was joking about the "Friday afternoon nasty-grams" to a friend of mine who was temporarily doing administration, and he knew immediately what I was talking about. I kept track, and I got a Friday afternoon nasty-gram for seven consecutive Fridays at one point. From six different people. My solution: if any email is even the slightest bit obnoxious, it doesn't get answered, and I don't mention that I received it. Let the obnoxious person come up to you and ask "Did you get my obnoxious email?" (this has never happened).

Maintain boundaries. You were elected department Chair, not "Slave of the English Department." Don't answer email after certain hours (unless that helps you be more efficient), don't read or answer email on weekends. Protect your research time. Last year there were weeks when put in >20 hours on department Chair stuff while still maintaining my teaching and raising two young children. This was not wise. When I was Chair of Ed Pol I used to joke that we needed "Meeting Dosimeters" similar to those used for people who work with radioactive materials. When your dosimeter has gone above the safety level, you simply can't do any more work with radioactivity that month. It should be the same thing with meetings and other Chair stuff: decide how much you are going to do per week, and stick to that. To quote my friend Bryon Grigsby, who is now a Provost: "Nobody is going to die based on what happens in the English department."

I'm in an unusual situation this year with Department Chair: On midnight of July 1, 2009, I will be going on a one-year research leave. Then I will come back and be Chair for one more year. That means I'm not a lame duck this year, but there is also light at the end of the tunnel (even though The Cake is a Lie). I'm hoping that this dynamic makes for a productive and successful year. Maybe I'll even be able to follow my own rules.

A Five Word Summary on Being Department Chair


The cake is a lie.

Anglo-Saxon Aloudis back

Sorry about the lack of recordings on Anglo-Saxon Aloud. There are a variety of reasons, none of them interesting. But I am now back on track and intend to keep posting the Paris Psalter until it is done. These postings will be in spoken (rather than sung) form. I'll begin at Psalm 69 and continue to the end, and then go back to the beginning (Psalm 50) and record those in spoken form also. I estimate, then, that the entire ASPR will be on the web by approximately the end of September.

Then I guess we start in on the prose, beginning with the Sermo Lupi.

Change to Anglo-Saxon Aloud

I've become unhappy with how the recordings of my singing the Psalms have been coming out. The fact is, I don't have the right kind of voice for singing these, they don't sound good, and it takes an enormous amount of time to edit them into the form they are in, which still isn't that good.

So I am going to change course.

I will post the rest of the Paris Psalter (Psalms 68 through 150) as spoken rather than sung recordings. Then I will go back and re-post Psalms 50-67 as spoken recordings.

That will give us the entire ASPR recorded and available on the web (I will put together a "Complete ASPR on CD," but it will be expensive, unfortunately). I'll then probably add a few poems that aren't in the ASPR, such as "The Grave" and "Instructions for Christians."

Then, I will simultaneously work to record the Psalter with one of my students who is a good singer for this type of music, and add some prose (starting with the Sermo Lupi, and maybe doing a "Daily Reading from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" project).

At the same time, I have begun work on a CD, to sell, of poems in Old English, my own translations in Modern English, and a brief talk on each poem. I hope to have this done by the Long-Expected Party event in Kentucky in September (though that may be too ambitious). Right now this is a "greatest hits of Anglo-Saxon poetry plus other poems that Drout likes" project: Dream of the Rood, Wanderer, Seafarer, Wife's Lament, Husband's Message, Fortunes of Men, Gifts of Men, Maxims, some riddles, Maldon, Brunanburh, Cædmon's Hymn ... I'll see how it works out; I'd like this one to be just one disk.

Grammar the Drout Way

My latest course from Recorded Books' Modern Scholars Series is my grammar book, which I recorded back in the spring. I'm very happy with the way it came out: the people at Recorded Books did a pretty amazing job both with the audio and with designing a nice course book. If you want to improve your grammar and laugh while you're doing it, you might enjoy this book. And you'll get to hear the whole "That's no panda, that's a $%$#%-ing racoon!" joke as well as my railing about the transcendent stupidity of the split infinitive convention.

(Also, the red panda for the course mascot was chosen long before Kung Foo Panda came out, and my Red Panda is better--and a direct challenge to the black-and-white pandas of Lynne Truss and David Crystal).


Lecture 1 The Red Panda and the Drout Way: A Sensible Approach to Grammar

Lecture 2 What Is Grammar?

Lecture 3 Why It Is the Way It Is: The Short History of the English Language

Lecture 4 G-H-O-T-I Spells Fish

Lecture 5 Word Classes

Lecture 6 Pronouns and the Noun System

Lecture 7 The Verb System I

Lecture 8 The Verb System II: Infinitives, Participles, Gerunds

Lecture 9 The Verb System III: Truly Irregular Verbs

Lecture 10 Subjects and Predicates and Objects, Oh, My!

Lecture 11 Transformations

Lecture 12 Phrases and Clauses, Word Choices and Pauses

Lecture 13 Punctuation: Pause and Effect

Lecture 14 Fight! Fight! Fight! For English (for English?)

Finally out from under the avalanche--for now

I'm not sure if I've ever had to work at such an unrelenting pace for so long. It definitely goes back to January, and I think actually it's been a whole year, since the middle of last June when I became department Chair. I have at points had the subsequent twenty-five days planned out to about the hour so I knew how much work I would have to do, and when I would get it done (I mostly kept those hellish schedules). But on July 4 I sent in the course book for the Modern Scholar course on poetry, Monday I sent in my review of Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (very short version: read this book!), and today I sent in my SASLC entry on "Maxims, Aphorisms" (short version: there aren't any that aren't also, in more places, labeled something else, so we should delete the category and just stick with "proverbs"). Today my gratis copies of the previous Modern Scholar Course (A Way with Words III: Understanding Grammar for Powerful Communication," or, as the cartoon on the cover says "Grammar the Drout Way") arrived at my door, and copies of Tolkien Studies volume 5 should be there soon.

I still have stuff to do this summer: write the two papers that have come out of our computer analysis of Old English project; draft the first chapter of the new Tolkien book for my agent; get Anglo-Saxon Aloud finished; write and record the new Old English Poetry CD I'm doing (Modern English lectures to be interspersed with the poetry); design the Logic and Language course; organize the department files, which haven't been organized in years and years; get going on the Philology textbook and the column, with Scott Kleinman, on etymology. But, for the first time since last June, I am not behind in anything. Weird feeling.

So I am going fishing.

Metrical Apothegms in Cambridge University Library Ii.1.33, ff 224v-227v
(so no one else has to flibbert around like I just did...)

In Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, he mentions a "collection of metrical apothegms, moral and religious" (citing Kemble for this quote) in alliterative verse, arranged in about 20 paragraphs, in the manuscript Cambridge UL, Ii.1.33 (this is Ker's number 18 art. 44). These apothegms do not appear in volume V of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, as you might expect. They were edited, however, by James Rosier: 'Instructions for Christians,' Anglia 82 (1964): 4-22 ; 'Addenda to "Instructions for Christians",' Anglia 84 (1966): 74. The text is Dictionary of Old English Cameron number A44 (A44_Instr_T01950).

So now if you need this text, which begins "Syle ece god æhta †inra..." you can find it and won't waste forty-five flipping back and forth through the ASPR muttering "I just don't know how I missed this," before thinking to run the opening line in the DOE corpus.

At some point the summer will start...

Ah, the lazy academic summer, when professors loll in hammocks, reading and dozing... what is that coming, exactly?

It has been a very busy month of June, but, finally, a few things are managing to get finished.

On the technical side, I was able to revise and cut down "Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection," which will serve in part as the kernel of the paper I'm giving in Bergen, Norway, in November.

And, we've had pretty exciting results on our NEH startup grant project, "Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond.". Soon I will post a link to the project website. The exciting results I'll need to keep under my hat for a while, until abstracts are finished, etc. The best part about the project has been learning the system that the genomics group came up with. The way meetings and the exchange of ideas work has been really illuminating. I've set up and run research groups before, but they've never worked this well.

On the more popular side of things, I was in NY last week and recorded another college course on CD for Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series. This one is A Way with Words IV: Poetry. It was great fun to record, though also a bit of a challenge, since I haven't taught, say, Pope, or Wallace Stevens, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning since, well, never. I ended up mixing in formal aspects of the poetry with a historical approach (so I started meters with Chaucer, did heroic couplets with Pope, free verse with Whitman, etc.). Here's the historical part of the outline, in case you are interested:

1 What is poetry
2 The Roots in Oral Tradition
3 Anglo-Saxon (alliteration)
4 Middle English (meters)
5Renaissance (more meters)
6 Late Renaissance
7 Eighteenth Century
8 Early Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge)
9 Later Romantics (Byron, Shelley and Keats)
10 Victorians (Browning, Rosetti, Tennyson)
11 America – Whitman and Dickinson
12 Modernism (early and high modernism)
13 Later Modernism
14 Poetry Now

Of course I have to write the book part of the course by the end of the week (I have all the lecture notes, but it is still writing up a 100+ page book by Friday), and then the Elves review and the Maxims piece have to be done. Oh, and the abstracts for the first two papers coming out of the computer research. But there is finally a tiny chink of light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I'll get to go fishing once before the semester starts up again.

Completely Snowed Under

(Perhaps not the best metaphor on this amazing June day).

A few people have emailed me to find out if I'm alive and why I haven't posted since Kalamazoo. Anglo-Saxon Aloud has also gone on hiatus, and I haven't been too good about answering emails either. Sorry. Yes, I am alive, I think.

I've been learning what life is like for department chairs at the end of the year: it is like, not fun. The number of pages of evaluations is just stunning, as is all the other administrative work (i.e., spend down any leftover budget so that it doesn't get cut) and the number of meetings. Add to this a number of college-wide issues that need to be dealt with and are incredibly time-consuming. And we won't even mention that the stupid NBA has the Celtics playoff games running until midnight.

Simultaneously, I have been working frantically on our NEH grant for the Old English / Computer Science project. The scientists have really developed an excellent research dynamic (which I'll write about soon), and they like to work fast, so it has been a lot of reading, exchange of ideas, "journal club," etc. I hope to unveil some research tools by the end of the summer that will allow Anglo-Saxonists to do all kinds of pattern searching within the Old English corpus. You can never tell how things will finish up, of course, but right now it looks like the demo grant is on track and that we will have accomplished a bunch more than we set out to do. This is entirely due to my collaborators in Computer Science and Math and the amazing students who have been working like dogs to write software, build websites, etc.

Also, I had one major deadline on Friday, which I just barely met, for what I think is a pretty substantial essay on how to build a meme-based approach to aesthetics. Now I have to finish the last few end-of-year evaluations, write a book review, and finish my entry on Maxims, Aphorisms for SASLAC (it has been just about finished for months now).

But first, I have to write an entire college course on CD for Recorded Books in ten days. I did this over Spring Break for the grammar course, and it almost killed me, and now I'm doing it again for this poetry course.

By the first week in July I will either be finished or have dropped dead.

Kalamazoo 2008

Off to my 14th Kalamazoo (14 out of the last 15; my wife though going when we had a one-month-old baby in the house might have been a poor decision). Due to many thesis defenses (students did well) and just a honkin big pile of meetings, I am only coming out on Friday, flying to Midway, leaving Chicago around noon, and driving in to Kzoo, maybe in time to hear papers or even catch Wine Hour (look for me at Phil Kaveny's book display or in the Arizona display).

Video at Into The West: Fantasy Festival in Salt Lake City

Two weeks ago I was honored to be invited to give a keynote address and a talk on Beowulf at Fantasy Festival, an event organized by the non-profit charity Into the West. My talk was about finding ways to judge Tolkien's and Rowling's work, coming up with fair criteria by which we might rate them in comparison with each other and with other works of literature (I believe I snuck Joyce in a lot, as well as a fair bit of Hemingway and Toni Morrison). iSCIFI.tv was there and did a quick interview about the relationship between Science Fiction and Fantasy. It was fun, and now it's on YouTube: at this link (I will work on embedding it, but piles of papers call).

There is also some commentary on the event, and pictures, by writer Paul Genesse, the author of The Golden Cord, which I am bringing with me to read on the plane to Kalamazoo when I'm not grading papers. Paul has a good blog entry on the conference here, with pictures.

I am going to be at Kalamazoo, but doing only medieval things, not Tolkien things. Then there will be trips to NYC (Recording another Recorded Books course, this time on poetry) and, in November, to Bergen, Norway, to talk about my technical meme research, but only one other Tolkien-related event, the Long Expected Party at the Shaker Village in Kentucky, which has the most beautifully done website I've ever seen (designer, would you re-do my web sites? Pretty, pretty please?).

Just barely made it

I have always been the tiniest bit disappointed that, because it took me a while to realize what I wanted to do with my life, I didn't manage to get my Ph.D. by 25 (that was the age at which the Professor on Gilligan's Island got his). I know that's a silly thing, but it's true.

So, back when I realized I was going to miss the Ph.D.-by-25 cutoff by a couple of years, I set myself a new goal: Full Professor before 40.

Today the Faculty Promotions Committee voted to promote me to full Professor. So I made my goal with exactly 12 hours to spare. I turn 40 tomorrow.

I'm really grateful that my department so strongly supported my coming up a year early, and I want to thank the colleagues, external reviewers, and students who wrote letters supporting my case, and even more the senior colleagues who showed me how to be a good teacher and scholar (Bev, Paula, Sue, Sheila, Dick). Most of all I thank Sam Coale, who has been my mentor at Wheaton for ten years and was my advocate at the hearing today. I've been blessed with great mentors: Peggy Knapp in undergraduate, John Miles Foley and Martin Camargo for my second M.A., and Allen Frantzen for my Ph.D. Sam took over where Allen finished (though he and my earlier mentors really never left off), and I can't express how valuable all his teaching and support has been. Having a great mentor makes all the difference. I hope someday I will live up to Sam's example. I hope readers of this post realize how important mentoring is and continue to do the hard work of mentoring (the work is especially hard when you have to mentor a pain-in-the-butt like me).

And now let me tell a quick story about Sam. During my first semester at Wheaton, Sam was awarded his gold watch for 30 years of service (and they spelled his name wrong on it). Sam was showing me the watch, and said something like, "I can't believe it's been thirty years since I started here. 1968"
I looked at him and said, "1968 was the year I was born."
"F*** you, Mike," said Sam.
That was the moment when I really started to believe that I would be able to fit in at Wheaton.

Now I'm just waiting to be taught the secret handshake and given the keys to the special full-Professor's bathroom and the liquor cabinet...

Evaluation of Some of My Work

I have now reached the level of Alexander the Great*, except instead of boiling blood, it's work, with not much of an end in sight. 

But I wanted to point you to an incredibly generous evaluation of some of my work by Steve Tompkins at The Cimmerian.  It's on the piece that I wrote for Allan Turner's The Silmarillion: 30 Years On,

and which I thought at the time was far too personal for scholarship (it also includes my first published drawing, a linoleum block carving I made of Angband when I was nine years old).

As I said, Tompkins is incredibly generous about the work, so I thought I would give a pointer to it so other readers can see what they think.





*Dante reference. Alexander the Great is forced to stand in boiling blood so that only his eyebrows show. Next year's teaching includes the Tolkien class, Chaucer, and the medieval lit class that includes Dante and Egil's Saga. Should be a great year. Also a new extension to the Math/Science Fiction class, Logic and Language (done as an unpaid overload: what was I thinking? But it will be fun and my co-professor and I will probably get a book out of it).

Never a dull moment

So last night I look out the window and there is a wild-haired, older man walking around our street, seeming to search along the ground.  So far, no problem: we live on a small circle and people sometimes come up to ride bikes or walk dogs or just walk.  But then I notice that the man was carrying something that looked like a gun.  I looked again. 

He was carrying a crossbow.  

I got more nervous when I noticed him scratching his neck with it.  It didn't appear to be loaded, but weapon safety was obviously not a big deal.  I was going to go out to talk with him, but my wife vetoed that idea, saying that a man with a weapon should be spoken to by the police. 

Well, I guess we used a magic word when we told them that there was a man on our street with a crossbow.  Many police arrived (though by then the man was gone).  I guess he was found, admitted to having the crossbow, and explained that he was shooting squirrels and that the bolt went across our fence and into our yard or onto our street.  I still haven't found it.  The man, who is somewhat mentally disabled, was willing to give up the crossbow to the police. No hard feelings, no charges, etc.  I have no problem with anyone eliminating squirrels, either, though maybe a nice have-a-heart trap would be better than firing crossbow bolts through the fence. Never a dull moment around here. 

...a flippin' crossbow...

The Paris Psalter on Anglo-Saxon Aloud

But before the actual post, a couple of things.  First, my apologies for neglecting the blog. A never-ending series of minor illnesses have swept through the family.  As those of you with young children know, that's not surprising, but this year, for whatever reason, we have had the very weird situation where we've all been sick in series rather than parallel.  So just as one person gets well, the next gets sick, and by the time the stupid virus has worked its way through the whole family, we're all set for a new one to start in.  

But today, although I was home with a kid with a fever, my own voice finally cleared up enough to get back to Anglo-Saxon Aloud.  I recorded, edited and posted the Psalm 51 from the Paris Psalter.  I still haven't entirely achieved true chant style, but at least the psalm is actually sung (though those of you who listen to my singing might think it might have been better had it not been sung).  There are about 100 psalms in the Paris Psalter, so I will be trying very hard to post more than one per day so that I can actually finish this project, but the medium is absolutely unforgiving, so it takes a long time to get a psalm recorded properly. 

I wonder what my colleagues and students will be thinking when they walk down the hallway tomorrow morning and hear singing (and cursing, when I mess up) from behind my office door.  

Update on the 16 four-year-olds and the live goat

My son's fourth birthday party was this past Saturday.  We had used two rules of thumb for planning:  

1) we have had good weather every birthday of his life thus far.

2) when you invite the whole class to a party, less than half can come.  

We were wrong on both counts.  The weather was terrible, and every kid we invited came.  That meant that we had to have the party inside, and it was going to be crowded. 

Because the Barn Babies were coming.  

So, come 12 noon on Saturday we had sixteen children (actually more, because some people brought siblings without telling us that they would), a pig, ten rabbits, five chickens, two cats, two puppies, a rooster, and a diapered goat were in my basement. 

And it was great. 

The Barn Babies people put down tarps and then playpens to contain the pig, goat and puppies.  The goat was wearing a diaper (really).  The kids could take turns climbing into the pens with the larger animals or holding the small animals.  And the genius of Barn Babies, which they should patent, was that each animal to be held was wrapped up in a baby blanket.  That meant that the rabbits, chickens, kittens, rooster (really), didn't squirm or kick.  There were some great moments when I looked around to see every kid sitting and gently petting an animal. 

So Mitchell had a good party.  Then the next day we went to see the PawSox play.  I have been at football games in January where I was less cold than we were for that baseball game, and I wore a ski mask and winter gloves.  But we all got our pictures taken with the two Red Sox World Series trophies, so it was worth it.  

(Medieval content will return when I get over my latest miserable illness and get the proofs for Tolkien Studies volume 5 to the printer and catch up on grading).

P.S.:  Recorded a new Recorded Books course last week, on Grammar (and the producers loved it -- go figure).  

Request for Supernatural Intercession

In less than two hours there will be 16 four-year-olds and a live goat in my house.