Sunday Sunday

2011.02.06
113 Days Remaining

01. First, a correction. If you look at the preceding post, you'll note that I made a calender mistake: my brother Decius' birthday was 01 February, not 02 February. I wrote "today" for "yesterday," which is why it gets confusing when I used the past tense when talking about his birthday despite suggesting that I was writing in the afternoon of his birthday. I think this was due to the deleted posts snafu, but anyway, the wishes were belated when I posted them. So, Decius, I hope you had a good birthday on February 1st. And, generally, a nice day on the 2nd, for good measure.

02. Today, of course, is Superbowl Day, and as per my usual mode of celebrating, I don't particularly care, except that there definitely won't be a new Simpsons or Family Guy to watch tomorrow on Hulu.com. I was invited to participate in a pool-playing tournament with another professor, but I don't actually like hanging out with said professor (I knew her before I worked here, and she's very disturbed, though a nice woman). So instead I'm here working. Or, pretending to, anyway.

03. Last night I went onto campus and did a bunch of photocopying and file-sorting so as to be a less presumptuous office user (as a Visiting Faculty member I don't have my own office, and am sharing an office with someone who is in residence but on sabbatical, so he's not usually in on the days I teach). I was in my building for somewhere around 5 hours, working and monkeying about. In the final hour and a half, however, I repeatedly had the feeling that I was Not Alone. I've heard stories (one, exactly) that this building has had at least one ghost sighting, but I've worked late several times (including one all-nighter two years ago when I wanted to get a lot of grading finished up) and have never had anything odd occur. Last night I heard a door slam when I was the only person in the building, and I had the impression (at least once definitely triggered by visual stimuli - if the other times were also so triggered I was not consciously aware of it) that there was someone else walking around in the area of the foyer where the copy machine is located on the 3rd floor. This was both intriguing but also a bit disorienting, and at one point I actually sort of looked around to see if a student had gotten into the building. When I left I ran into a Campus Safety officer and actually told him that they might want to sweep the building to make sure there wasn't someone who had sneaked in.

04. As I'm working this evening I've been playing a documentary (via Netflix) about wolverines. The voice-overs are somewhat annoyingly "awed and cheerful" (ex: "Dr. X has written over 100 scientific articles" and the narrator clearly wants to have Dr. X's baby). I mention that only to get it out of the way; the visual footage is astonishing, and various researchers who are studying wolverines are alternatively charming, bittersweet, or adorable in their enthusiasm (one group, working in Glacier National Park, continued to do their work for years after funding ran out because they loved it). I'm particularly struck by how differently wolverines behave when studied at length than the way that people had previously assumed. Among the neat discoveries: wolverine males have multiple mates at one time, each of whom will have her own litter and den; unexpectedly, the fathers travel from den to den while there are pups and help raise each litter, and when the pups are old enough to travel, the different litters will sometimes travel together around the territory with their father, learning wilderness skills. Also, wolverines are so well insulated by their fur that they don't melt snow when they lay down on it. They're very neat animals, to my mind especially as examples of evolutionary change: wolverines are descended from weasels, but have clearly begun evolving into a different niche, and their bodies are shaped much more like canines and bears than like weasels now.

05. Tomorrow night my Supernatural in American Popular Culture is having our first movie watching, to see the film Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which I prefer over the television series). I'm looking forward to it, as it'll be my first chance to see the students interacting directly with the material (as opposed to reading it outside of class and then having a chance to think about it before class). Also, from past experience, out-of-class movie watching is a good way to generate (or encourage) group building.

06. And that's about it for now. Decius, I'm sorry for screwing up your birthday wish.