On Saturday and Sunday I...

...read me [*] some articles, failed to see either of two former Boston-area people who were in town for the weekend, mowed the lawn, DMed an almost combat-free session of AD&D, failed to go to a burlesque show, and, finally, read more articles, until they began to fall from my sleep-loosened hands.

Meanwhile, J., in between pursuing her own studies or seeking adventure by means of a halfling cleric, made 21 jars' worth of two different kinds of pear jam, as the damn things (the pears, I mean, not the jars) keep falling from the tree in the backyard in large numbers and need eaten [**].

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[*] Effectively a middle voice, expressed here with the first-person pronoun as reflexive indirect object (a sort of dative of advantage), or something.

[**] This usage of "need" plus the passive participle, without "to be" (one would expect in standard English "need to be eaten"), is not uncommon in parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania, but will certainly provoke mockery from, e.g., girlfriends raised in New Hampshire (as will pronouncing "spinach" as "spinage"). Such a construction may originate from Scottish usage (and indeed, a quick search on google for "needs eaten" yields at least one Scottish arse with just such a need, although I have, regretfully, declined to pay the 15-dollar website membership fee necessary to pursue this avenue of linguistic research).

I will cheerfully admit to laziness as a grad student, but...

There's a flame war of sorts on one of the academic lists I read at work; someone wrote in asking for bibliographical guidance, but in an off-putting way: could the scholars of the list help cut through the "silly" amount of scholarship published each year on such-and-such a topic and give the person posting guidance on what from the last twenty years or so was worth reading?

While I can certainly see the problems inherent in such a request, I can't help but remember an incident (perhaps touched upon previously in these pages) from my second year of grad school (or was it my third?). At that time, the graduate students of the department had (and perhaps still have, but I'm out of touch) a certain amount of money at our disposal every year for travel to conferences, making additions to the departmental library, even socializing. In that particular year, we asked that each faculty member take a moment to recommend some key articles relevant to his or her research specialty; we would then pay to obtain and keep at hand copies of those articles for our library.

Well, possibly it would have been better to approach our professors individually, for they are usually only too glad to impart their store of wisdom to eager young minds, at least if you happen to catch them on a good day during posted office hours. But as it happened, the faculty, considering the request in a faculty meeting, chose not to encourage such "laziness." Let those slackerly grad students figure out for themselves what they should or shouldn't read!

So we used the money for a keg party, which was uncontroversial.