Nice clothes, suitable for teaching:

I know it's just terrible that I think this is funny:

I'm big on money-saving tips, but I still thought this was funny (via). My favorites include these two, for their silly, imaginative, David Sedaris-like humor:

4. Foil pick-pockets by placing a freshly toasted "pop tart" in each pocket. Would-be thieves will quickly rupture the fragile pastry and receive nasty finger burns from the steaming hot jam inside.

5. A length of plastic drainpipe with a roller skate at each end makes an ideal home-made "car" for snakes.

And these, for their merciless skewering of the whole money-saving-tips-list genre and the tasks that can seem unnecessarily labor-intensive and counterintuitive:

10. Put a stop to car thieves by siphoning off all your gas whenever you park your car, and carrying it round with you in one or two plastic buckets.

19. When reading a book try tearing out the pages as you read them. This saves the expense of buying a bookmark.

And of course, how could I help but think about this tip from pops over at Derek's place a while back:

Carry a can of beans and a loaf of bread with you and savour a delightful veggie sandwich anytime you wish. They're hardy too :)

1. What are the perceptions, advantages, disadvantages, etc. involved in putting ", PhD" after your name? I know some people do it and others don't, but why? I get the sense that Bitch PhD's pseudonym is intended to have a dramatic pause before the "PhD" part. I believe that when she started her blog, she had a period after "Bitch," and the "PhD" part is added (if you're reading it out loud) as a "Ms. Jackson if you're nasty"-style afterthought.

I ask because I just received business cards with my contact information. When ordering them, I looked at some samples from other professors in my department, and they had the ", PhD" after the names. I went ahead and put it on there, too, but I don't put the ", PhD" part on any other correspondence. I'm not sure why. I guess for some reason it seems more suited to an industry context, and I've also wondered in passing if putting the ", PhD" after the name carries a certain hint of insecurity -- like "I have a PhD, see?"

2. I've been thinking about job placement rate statistics. Let's say you have a graduate program, and they claim to have a 100% placement rate (as many in my field do). What would you need to know in order for that number to be really meaningful? I submit the following; anything else?

1. Number of years searching: Say that 100% of the graduate students get jobs the first year on the market, or that 100% of the graduate students get jobs, but 80% of them have to search for five years or more -- two very different situations.
2. Number of jobs applied for by candidates in the program: Are those 100% of the graduate students who are getting positions applying for ~140 jobs? Or is the program still able to claim a 100% placement rate even though some (or all) graduate students are being a little more selective -- doing regional searches, or only applying to certain kinds of schools?
3. Kinds of institutions where the program is placing students: I'm not saying that some categories of institutions are automatically or necessarily better than others, and I suppose this question doesn't much matter from an administrative standpoint, but as a prospective graduate student trying to decide on a program, I'd want to know that. Are the students coming out of a given program successful in getting jobs at the kinds of institutions they want? For example, if they're interested in positions at small liberal arts colleges, HBCUs, schools overseas, schools in urban areas, etc., are they able to get those?
4. Kinds of jobs: This is a pretty obvious one, but are all of these tenure-track jobs? Does a non-tenure-track or administrative job warrant a +1 in the placement category? That's fine as long as those are the jobs that the candidates wanted, but if not, it would be kind of misleading to put those as positives in the placement category. It would amount to saying, "We have a 100% placement rate! Not one of our graduates is unemployed *cough!--but some of them are underemployed--cough!*"
5. Job candidates' options: I know there's the "you only need one job" argument, but as a prospective student, I'd also want to know if most folks coming out of a given program had multiple offers, or if they barely managed to get one.

I know there are all kinds of individual complexities and good reasons that some people coming out of the program should not be counted in either category: "successfully placed" or "unsuccessfully placed." Still, though, I think directors of graduate studies should always tell prospective students the whole story when it comes to placement. I'm sure most of them do, anyway; I only mention it because in my field, which is much less competitive than others when it comes to getting tenure-track jobs, many -- if not most -- of the PhD programs claim to have a 100% placement rate (jobs are so plentiful, in fact, that it's sort of bad if a program doesn't have 100% placement).

I am more than ready for a vacation, believe me. However, I don't know about this travel schedule I've gotten myself into for March:

March 9-16: Home (Florence, AL) for spring break

March 18-19: Washington, DC for a special trip funded by the UNC system so that selected ECU faculty can meet with program officers with NEH and the Department of Education

March 20-24: New York City for CCCC

March 26-28: New Jersey for a meeting with MediaCommons

Yikes!

On another note, I just want to express how frustrating and irritating it is when I send stuff to people a couple of weeks or a month early, they forget all about it, then they snipe about my tardiness. What does one do about this? I want to send items out as soon as I have them done; do I also have to send reminders that I sent the items?

I feel that all these petitions pleading networks to release XYZ TV show on DVD are futile. While iTunes is nice, I'd rather be able to make a custom DVD set. On mine, I think I'd have:

• The State, the complete series
• Night Stand, the complete series
• All the Winter Steele episodes on Liquid Television
• All the Chapi Chapo episodes (downloads!)
• Those tabloid news shows, like A Current Affair and Hard Copy. Jonathan and I recently watched the Simpsons episode with the Venus de Milo gummi, in which Homer is accused of sexual harassment, and the story appears on Rock Bottom. I got all nostalgic for those outrageous shows.
• I'd also like to have some of the more short-lived dating shows, like Change of Heart and Studs-- remember those?

What would be on your own obscure, idiosyncratic, guilty pleasure DVD set?

During my senior year of college, I took an independent study in advanced photography to complete my photography minor. The professor and I brainstormed project ideas, and the one we settled on was that I would spend the semester photographing diners: the staff, the food, and the regulars. He was convinced that little hole in the wall diners were becoming relics and that this would be an interesting project. He wanted me to photograph them in color, not black and white. The project was fun despite the fact that I gained about twenty pounds eating all that diner food. I met with him a few times over the course of the semester, and the last meeting, he suggested that I "embody the project" by dressing up like a waitress and doing some self portraits, after the style of Cindy Sherman. So I went to the Salvation Army Thrift Store in downtown Florence, AL, bought some polyester uniforms, got some hairnets, and did just that. Here are the results -- the ones I selected to go into the collection:

I feel compelled to say that while yes, I'm smoking in one of these pictures, it's something I haven't done or had any desire to do since January 1, 2002.

Lori over at Sand gets in your eyes asks what my opinion is of virginity soap. Lori lives in Saudi Arabia, and that's where she saw it. When I read her post, I thought, hey, we have virgin soap here; what's the difference?

Oh, and we have slut soap too, for that Madonna/whore dichotomy. But while the Dirty Girl brand soaps above are presumably campy and not to be taken seriously, virginity soap is a different story:

The idea is that the soap’s astringents “constrict and tighten" , creating that coveted "look and feel" of virginity.

One manufacturer boasts their product is...."Used and enjoyed by hundreds of thousands of women in the Middle East and Asia, it has brought back youthful passions, rekindled sensual yearnings, and completely intensified sexual experience.”

Well, okay. But again, this is by no means just a Middle East thing. I first heard of China Shrink cream when I was, I believe, a sophomore in high school (1991!):

China Shrink Cream can be used to tighten vaginal muscles. Five minutes after application, the vagina will tighten and maintain its tightness for a period of 24 hours.

Each tube contains 1/2 ounce of cream. The active ingredient is Potassium Alum. Potassium Alum is usually used in cheese preparation and to make foods sour.

Important Note; Do not use China Shrink Cream if you are pregnant.

Anyway, Lori's central concern is that women's chastity is a very high-stakes issue in the Middle East, and that desperate might take virginity soap too seriously. While virginity soap doesn't seem to be harmful, I agree with Lori that the whole situation is sad, particularly the placement of the responsibility of chastity on women. But again, here in the USA we have father/daughter purity balls.

I guess my opinion is that the distinction, to me, is blurred somewhat, though the consequences of first-time sex for women may be more severe in Saudi Arabia than they are in western countries -- but hey, what do I know? What exactly are the consequences, anyway?