Including this question which, apparently, led a popular search engine to direct someone to this very blog:
Is philosophy tested on animals?
No. No, it isn’t.
(Actually, it’s not clear to me that all of it is tested on humans, either.)
Category Archives: Passing thoughts
A bit peckish.
Is it too soon to dip into that bowl of “fun-size” candy bars while we wait for it to get dark?
Signs of the times.
The times in question being, in this case, the last days of October.
Once upon a Tuesday morning, while I wandered, cold and yawning,
Up the grimy stair steps winding skyward toward my office door,
On the wall’s bile-greenish surface, noticed I a note whose purpose
Took more consciousness to process than I’d had the step before.
“English majors strike,” I murmured, “with tactics I’ve not seen before,
Reciting Poe and nothing more.”
‘I’m not even supposed to be here today!’
Since being tenured, I’ve tried to shift to a pattern of only coming in to campus three days a week, working from home on Mondays and Wednesdays (and giving the earth a little break by not doing my freeway commute on those days).
However, today, a Wednesday, I figured I should go in to campus to catch up on committee-related work. I envisioned a day where I’d make good progress on some things that needed doing, plus maybe get a chance to go out to lunch at a local eatery (something that never seems to fit in my teaching-days schedule).
Suffice it to say that there was barely enough time to grab a cup of decaf and a muffin, let alone to sit down and enjoy a burrito.
My thoughts on an event probably not aimed at me.
From my friend Vance, on Facebook, a link that announces an option for your Hallowe’en entertainment:
Halloween Book Burning

Burning Perversions of God’s Word

October 31, 2009
Why I’m not grading papers tonight.
After my last class today, I participated in a Future Faculty Seminar at Stanford. I was on a panel about negotiating faculty jobs, dealing with the two-body problem while on the academic job market, balancing work and life once you have a faculty job, and so forth. It was a fun panel, and lots of good questions were asked.
But then I had to race home through a bunch of really slow traffic so I could play the sprog zone and let my better half out of the house for a Thursday night class.
And, not surprisingly, the stress of trying to get home in time while traffic was stop and go done wore me out, leaving me with next to no will to plow through the ten to fifteen papers I had hoped to grade tonight.
My eldest offspring expressed skepticism about my fatigue thusly:
“Come on! How much energy does it take to work a steering wheel and yell?”
The sprogs raise an important scientific question.
Actually, it might be a philosophical question.
Younger offspring: One of my classmates told me that you fart every second.
The best laid plans.
Imagine you are looking ahead to a furlough day and taking seriously the piece of the agreement that specifies that you won’t actually do any work on that furlough day. To prevent yourself from backsliding by doing work to pass the time, do you:
A concise synopsis of a comment thread exchange.
Yesterday Dr. Isis put up a post that seems to have bugged many of the people who subsequently posted comments on it.
I have no idea whether the commenters on the post intended to convey it, but here’s what’s coming across to me as a reader of the exchange:
Great moments in parent-teacher relations: back to school edition.
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half went to the Free-Ride offspring’s school for Back to School Night earlier this week. (I stayed at home with the sprogs to oversee dinner and baths.)
Dr. Free-Ride’s better half reported back that the younger Free-Ride offspring’s third grade teacher “doesn’t believe in too much homework”. (“She doesn’t believe it’s possible to assign too much homework?” I asked cautiously. “No, she doesn’t believe an excess of homework is a good thing,” my better half replied.)
And, she supported her stance with a page she distributed to parents summarizing recent educational research on the question of homework and student achievement.
I think we’re going to like this teacher.