Many thanks for taking the important step: you have chosen to receive email alerts each time a new blog entry is published. As you may be aware, our productivity has been a little irregular as of late. At this moment, it appears nearly two and half months have passed since the previous posting. While some might suffer guilt for not writing over the time frame, our production team is pleased to report progress on other fronts during that time. These include:
- Our sources indicate that over this brief timespan, nearly 15,728,924 new human souls have been added to the planetwide tally. While we are not about to take credit (nor blame) for this increase, this is a trivial piece of information. Whether 15.7 million births is an outside limit for time between blog entries is an open question. There is the assumption that this escalating rate at which people hump and squirt babies out of their private parts will only increase in frequency. Frankly, we don’t have the energy to do the math so if this intrigues you, have at it.
- The second edition of our textbook has just been released. Our company sent us a half dozen examination copies and we have received a report from Chicago that a colleague’s bookstore has assured her there will be a supply available for her students in early 2012. Interestingly, one can order a used copy for 20¢ less than the listed price for a new copy. I wonder if used versions will extend their price difference by an additional 10¢ per day as time marches on. Quite amazingly, a request posted this summer asked us to send a free instructor copy to an adjunct instructor – with the plea to also autograph the book. Audacious!
- Two highly botched graduate level education courses have been unraveling. The first is loosely based on the material embedded in the above-mentioned text. But with a ragged start (i.e., just one class meeting in September) we have yet to establish any momentum. Five students were missing this past week because of food poisoning, feeling ill, traveling back from ROTC training, another stranded by the snowstorm – and the fifth for reasons that are still unknown. The other course is a weekly seminar associated with student teaching. There is a hodge-podge of reading materials (including an educational graphic novel) and a loosely structured set of requirements: open-ended reflections and lesson plan outlines. The reason this week’s class will not go badly is because that regional campus has now been closed for the remainder of this week due to power problems and downed trees.
It is feasible that few of these things would have been accomplished has there been more attention given to this blog. If we are able to kick-start the writing machine, it may well be that fewer books will be written, fewer children will be born, and a smaller fraction of graduates will sustain class meetings where the professor is so distracted that they aren’t sure he knows where he is. Time will tell. If this all sounds interesting, then the subscription service will suit you well. If you want to unsubscribe, you’ll have to figure that out on your own.
