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It's that most wonderful time of year, by which I mean Dave Barry's
Gift Guide for 2013 is available on the web.
The holidays are a wonderful time of year, but too often, in all the excitement and craziness, we forget the real “reason for the season.” The holidays are not about parties, or decorations, or Frosty the Snowperson. Those things are fun, but they are not the true purpose of the holidays. The true purpose of the holidays is to purchase consumer electronics.
So you should go check it out, knowing that any purchase you make is "backed by our Personal Gift Guide Guarantee, as follows: If you purchase one of these items and for any reason are not completely satisfied, you have our personal guarantee that there is nothing that we, personally, can do about it."
Pictured at right—no, your right—is one of the items, available at Amazon: the Cat Lady Action Figure. What youngster wouldn't want one?
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As a longtime employee of the University Near Here, I sometimes
run across articles that do a particularly good job of capturing
some of that special atmosphere that is American Higher Education today.
And so let me share with you: "How Academia Resembles a Drug
Gang".
Specifically, both operations have come to rely on a mass of poorly-paid, disrespected minions (low-level drug runners/adjunct faculty), doing the unpleasant scutwork that the elite members (drug lords/tenured faculty) would prefer to avoid. In both cases, the minions put up with their lousy positions in the hope they'll break into the upper echelons someday. And in both cases, the probability of that happening is low.
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Although I think Tom Zhang,
currently a mere "lecturer" here in math, has a pretty good shot at tenure, if
he wants it.
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Although I (and Professor Greg Mankiw) didn't think much of
Pope Francis's recent apostolic exhortation, in the
interest of equal time, you might want to check out
James Pethokoukis's attempted defense
at the NR site. And you might also check out this
article by Kate O'Hare at Breitbart, which at least raises the
possibility that we may have been misled by lefty translators of
the document into English.