Night Stalker

 Somehow neither Janet nor her friend Erin had ever seen Kolchak: The Night Stalker. It's like they were raised in a nunnery or something.

Luckily, and obviously, I have the entire series on DVD.

Gabinete das Curiosidades

 I mentioned previously how visiting the famous library at the University of Coimbra was a bit of a letdown (five hour + wait, only twenty minutes total in the entire museum, ten minutes in the historic library itself, no pictures; if I could have had fifteen minutes in the actual library to take pictures I'd have a very different opinion on the experience). That said, the ticket did allow you to stroll around several different cool places at the University, including the Gabinete das Curiosidades (the Cabinet of Curiosities), which is a collection of truly odd artifacts that University of Coimbra professors had brought back from around the world. It helped that it was an appropriately dark and creepy room. If I lived in Coimbra (and Coimbra would make our shortlist) I'd drop into the Gabinete several times a year.

Highly recommended.

 

I loved this guy, and he sort of reminds me of the Banff Merman.

This is the first picture that I sent to my friends Mike and Cyndi, which inspired MK to respond that he wasn't really expecting my first picture of the day to be of a Siamese calf (it's like he doesn't even know me).

I needed to have brought my friend Steve on the trip to the Gabinete das Curiosidades. As a folklorist, he would have seriously nerded out.

I remember years ago visiting a display on Pre-Columbian civilizations in Memphis, and my friend Dave opined that the room with the mummies was where all nightmares were born - I may have an alternate theory.

Hopefully they dispatched this monster before he gobbled down too many members of the expedition.

OK, some are just naughty, and speak to the generally perverse nature of college professors.

Fascismo Nunca Mais

 Here's a picture I snapped in Coimbra on the Portugal trip last month. It seemed particularly meaningful as my own country is sliding into an authoritarian regime (which apparently makes around a hundred million people really happy). All of this is convincing me that my idea to teach a class on Fascism next spring is a great idea.

One of the few things that gives me hope in these dark days is that Portugal went through it's own authoritarian days, and somehow came out the other end as a healthy state.

Monday Morning Philosophy

 This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but it was a strange thought I had this morning. When you're in that intensely physical stage of an early relationship (what Janet and I jokingly/lovingly refer to as the "cheesecake & sex" stage), the first day that you actually don't have sex is either the true beginning of your relationship or the beginning of the end of your temporary relationship. I think this is an observation that will launch a thousand Rom-Coms.

2025 Readings 63

Every "scholarly" piece I've ever written:

"It was a perfect title, in that it crystallized the article's niggling mindlessness, its funereal parade of yawn-enforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems."

Every conference presentation I've ever given:

"Nobody outside a madhouse, he tried to imply, could take seriously a single phrase of this conjectural, nugatory, deluded, tedious rubbish."

This morning I finished rereading Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim for the first time in over thirty years. I remember reading it for the first time in my first year of graduate school and thinking it was the funniest thing I had ever read, and then reading it again as I was finishing my dissertation and still liking it, but thinking that it was not as funny as I remembered. And here we are three and a half decades later, and I thought it was funnier than on the first reread, but that I think, overall, I liked it better than on my two previous readings (such is our changing perception). It is one of the great "campus novels," so it helps if you're in graduate school or on the uphill side of the lectern. 

Shadows

 Over the years I've stumbled across some odd art exhibits (I always default to permanent catacombs above Budapest), and I did it again on last month's trip to Portugal. One my last full day in Coimbra I checked out a couple monasteries on the other side of the river, both of which I'll get around to discussing down the road. The second one I visited, which is the "new" monastery, was the Monastery of Santa Clara-a-Nova. The Portuguese are not strong on signage under the best of circumstances, and so, typically, I wandered into the wrong door when I visited the new monastery. The door was shielded with some black cloth, which left the inside very dark, which seemed like a very unusual - or maybe not so unusual - monastery. As it turns out it was an extra space which was occasionally given over to exhibits, and in this case it was a series of artists which dealt with shadows. Once I figured out what the hell was going on, I decided to stay and enjoyed myself quite a bit. 

This particular one was very disturbing and oddly beautiful. At the end of the hallway a screen was set up, and on a loop there a video of a housing burning down. That was the entire performance.

I sat and watched this one for quite a bit. On the mismatched screens there were two hands flapping, and hanging down was a lightbulb that swung back and forth.  I felt the artist was channeling David Lynch.

More Mountains

 Like I said, eventually when I have more time - or when I've written enough that I can suppress my self-loathing sufficiently - I'll get into the recent trips more fully. In the meantime, we'll have to settle for dribs and drabs. Here's another picture of the Canadian Rockies up around Banff.

And I haven't even begun to look at the pictures on my camera yet.