orichalcum

Has anyone else noticed how, after the Madrid train bombings, the response was "oh, how sad for those Spaniards," but no worries here, but after London got bombed, subway systems and other modes of public transportation in the U.S. suddenly went into panicked security overdrive? Is it that it seems more real cuz they're English-speaking?

Sorry, I'm feeling a bit bitter because as it turns out, in a history dissertation introduction you are supposed to:

A. Talk about how original you are and why people should care about what you do,

B. Exhaustively discuss anyone else who's ever mentioned your topic in passing while drunk in an Oxford pub. The first sentence of my dissertation now has a page-long footnote accompanying it. (Well, technically, 2 halves of 2 pages.)

This is, as they say, a neat trick. More updates from the frontlines later.

Harrison, J. Park. (1884) “On the Relative Length of the First Three Toes of the Human Foot,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 13: 258-269.

For the record, the diss. just broke 350 pages. Yes, the same diss. that was 271 a week ago (though a lot of the new stuff is images.)