Blog Salad (now with added cats!)

You know how a Chef's salad is just leftovers mixed with mayo? Well, here's scraps of unposted bloggery, mixed with mayo. Blog mayo, that is: pictures of my cat.

WHAT?!

A Quick Midnight Post

Okay, for realsies, how hard is it to find a line-by-line, amateurish-looking translation of a seemingly un-mind-blowing section of Beowulf online?

Impossible, apparently!

And now, on a totally separate note, I don't think I'll be going to my Medieval class tomorrow, because I've spent the last gajillion hours procrastinating and I'm too grumpy to translate this thing myself.

[Note: I'm pretty sure I didn't cheat on my Medieval Lit homework.... but I probably did. Just the once.]


You're Making A Scene

Quote of the day:

Maybe for once, someone will call me "Sir" without adding, "you're making a scene."
-Homer Simpson

I've never had someone call me Sir, not even on the phone. Usually when I answer the phone, the caller asks if my mommy or daddy is home. While you'd think I'd be a Miss, nobody calls me that either. Maybe South Africans don't say Miss or maybe I just don't look like one. What I do get now and then is Ma'am, usually by women older than I am who happen to be shop assistants.

I'm a shop assistant.

At least I would be if I had a shop.

[I wonder if this was going anywhere? To the shops, perhaps?]

More mayo.

 Portrait of the Artist as a Series of Pixels

I had a dream that I went back to Wits for Masters in Renaissance Poetry.

I'm pretty sure that qualifies as a nightmare. (For me, at least. After four years of studying it, I still fucking struggle to spell "Renaissance" right the first time.)

I've been thinking about graphic novels. Specifically, that graphic novels continue to be more widely published and read. Web comics are a huge contributor to the upwardly mobile trajectory of the medium (thus being taken a lot more "seriously" than, say, in the 80's). But there is comparatively sparse academic coverage of graphic novels as literature rather than simply an aspect of pop culture. We study movies as literature, so why not graphic novels?

I've just gotten hold of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art and I'm really impressed with the depth of thought put into it. Also, it's a treatise on comics made in comic form - how freakin' cute is that?

Not as cute as this.

 Do you have scraps of half-written blog posts, stories and unsent tweets lying around? I'm so bad at finishing stuff. Would a novel-length story salad be too postmodern an attempt? It could be a comment on the short attention span of this media-soaked society. And everybody loves pictures of cats!

A spot of chicktea!

I really couldn't live with myself if I didn't post this picture:


From CuteOverload (Photo by Jerry Schexnayder)

I believe that sharing such fluffy cuteness is one of the noblest uses of the internet! True story. On the list of The Glories Of The Internet, "fluffy cuteness" is right below Engrish.com and right above My Immortal.

Speaking of chicks in teacups - well, not really, but anyway - the other day, I had an experience that made me realise the greatness of being a tutor. Not in the bestowing of knowledge, silly. See, since it's the end of the quarter, my tutlings had a test on how much (or rather, how little) they've read for their course. So on Wednesday I proceeded to sit in a room full of anxious people writing a tricky test... and I wasn't one of them.

I was almost giddy! Um, not in a sadistic way, but in a dodged-a-bullet kind of way. Like: HA! I don't have to worry and stress about this test! It's not my problem, woohoo! I'm above it all, I'm safe, I'm FREE!

Yeah... that probably means I'm not grown up enough to be a tutor. Oh well! At least I've got a really adorable pic of squishy cutey fluffy wuffy shnuggly chickies in-a-teacup! Aaaw!