We have a new cat bed for upstairs, as the one in which Hans passed away last week clearly still smelt of him, and/or death, even after multiple washes, and the surviving two refused to use it. The problem is that it’s a design which Hector can get his teeth into, literally, and drag it off the bed onto the floor – and even down the stairs. We thought he had abandoned this habit, or we would have bought a different type, but clearly he was just waiting for conditions to change to resume his plan. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘research’
Shoulda Woulda Coulda
Posted in Musings, tagged research, Writing on March 1, 2024| Leave a Comment »
What A Difference A Day Makes…
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged research, Thucydides on November 17, 2023| 3 Comments »
…or at any rate a couple of days. On Monday, I gave a paper in a research seminar. A shambolic, dog’s breakfast, Frankenstein’s monster of a paper. A paper so bloody awful that the only reason I’m still walking around in public is that it was on the other side of the country – you can be sure that I’m not planning to attend any national conferences in the near future. If they charged admission for such things, there would have been riots to demand refunds, and I am still half-expecting to be sued for malicious time-wasting and/or psychological abuse. The fact that I was still bought dinner afterwards is clear evidence for my hosts’ wonderful tolerance and sense of duty. (more…)
What I Owe To The Ancients
Posted in Musings, tagged research, teaching on September 8, 2023| 2 Comments »
It can’t be the beginning of a new academic year already. After all, it’s not as if you’ve been having the nightmares. (more…)
Nothing Even Matters
Posted in Musings, tagged blogs, Receptio, research on January 14, 2023| 4 Comments »
One of the reasons I became quite invested in the #Receptiogate saga*, even before its full popcorn-munching bizarreness became fully apparent, was the phrase used in the initial response of Carla Rossi’s (quite possibly fictional) secretary to Peter Kidd’s initial enquiries about the unaccredited use of images and commentary from his blog: “I regret to inform you that blogs are not scientific texts, published by academic publishers, so their value is nil!”(1) (more…)
Was It Worth It?
Posted in Musings, Podcasts, tagged engagement, Impact, research on June 28, 2022| 2 Comments »
And so farewell then, the Thucydiocy Podcast. In seven episodes, stretched out irregularly over several years, you established in mind-numbing detail the different ways in which people have misattributed things to Thucydides, to an audience of many tens of people, two of whom once posted positive feedback… Wait a minute! There is a faint pulse! It lives, to be largely ignored for another day! (more…)
Working in a Coalmine
Posted in Musings, tagged higher education, money, research on November 16, 2020| Leave a Comment »
My email inbox this morning contained one of the oddest invitations I’ve received in a long time – odd, to the degree that I’ve just spent ten minutes trying to check whether it’s actually an elaborate bit of phishing, or a practical joke on the part of whoever suggested my name. The message offers the opportunity to become a Detailed Assessor for the Australian Research Council – to write extensive peer review reports on, say, 5-20 applications per year, term unspecified. This is of the order of being asked to pay £20 to secure my fabulous First Prize of unscheduled pancreas removal. (more…)
Nothing But Flowers
Posted in Musings, tagged coronavirus, Eidolon, publishing, research on October 26, 2020| 3 Comments »
It’s Reading Week – or, as various people have sagely commented on the Twitter, At Last I Can Catch Up On Sleep Get Ahead With My Teaching Prep Write Those Reviews Comment On Postgrad Drafts Spend Some Time With Family Do A Bit Of Reading Finally Get Some Research Done Hey Where Did That Go Week. And that’s in a normal year. This autumn, I imagine I’m not the only person who has found the switch to online teaching and the constant worrying about students thoroughly draining, absorbing every minute of the working day and disturbing every night – with the result that I both need to sleep for a week and have a list of overdue commitments that is at least twice as long as usual. (more…)
Chasing Cars
Posted in Musings, tagged academia, research, work on January 16, 2020| 7 Comments »
Remarkably, the results of a search for “ancient history” on the jobs.ac.uk website currently include an advert for a Demi Chef de Parti. I cannot help but interpret this as a personal Sign. Back when I had finished my final undergraduate exams, and for various reasons was pretty sure that I’d messed things up to a degree that would preclude any hope of funding for a PhD, I had to think seriously about what I should do instead, and came to the conclusion that I would really like to be some sort of chef. Of course, I had no relevant qualifications or experience, so it was fortunate that the PhD funding did turn up after all, but it’s a salutary reminder of how rarely in my life I have had any sort of career plan. (more…)
Wasting Away the Moments…
Posted in Musings, Publications, tagged Impact, research, Thucydides on August 8, 2019| 5 Comments »
Time, and Money. One of my most concrete achievements so far this summer – besides winning first prize for ‘a truss of cherry tomatoes’ at the local garden show – has been getting the front of the house painted. Does the money saved by doing it myself, and the sense of satisfaction, actually balance out the fact that a professional would have done it at a much lower hourly rate than one might calculate mine to be, so I could instead have devoted more time to working on all the chapters and articles I’m supposed to be writing / have written – with substantially less potential satisfaction? I do tend to revert to an autarkic ‘why pay someone if you can do it yourself?’ attitude, especially as I like doing practical things, rather than spending money to make everything but the research go away? (more…)
Free Range
Posted in Musings, tagged higher education, research on February 7, 2016| 1 Comment »
As Abraham Lincoln once remarked, Thucydides is not the only historical figure to get regularly misquoted. One interesting example is the line that “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country”, regularly trotted out to epitomise a certain attitude prevalent within big business. At least in the UK, there is at best only a fuzzy sense of the original context – it was said by Charles Erwin Wilson in 1953, during confirmation hearings for his appointment as Secretary of Defense after being Head of General Motors – and little idea that it’s not completely accurate. What Wilson actually said, when asked whether he would be able to make a decision as Secretary of Defense that would be adverse to General Motors, was that he would, but that he couldn’t actually conceive of such a situation “because for years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa”. That’s a great deal more reciprocal, and less dubious – and hence less useful – than the usual version.
In universities – yes, I am going somewhere with this – there has traditionally been a similar assumption, all the way down to the individual level: (more…)
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