What does a mangina look like?

I’ve kind of wondered, since I’m always getting called one — and while not really thinking hard about it, I’m aware of the homologies in male and female genitalia and mentally pictured something discrete and reasonably placed. I guess I must have low self-esteem or something, because science fiction authors imagine something grand and huge and dangerous, instead.

John Scalzi has a sketch of the Kaiju Mangina, and it is awesome and terrifying and silly. And then Howard Tayler drew the Brobot reaction, and it is perfect.

By the way, the drawing is by KB Spangler.

Please, please people: stop using the naive dictionary meaning of words in place of context

I know I’m notorious for complaining about those goofy definitions of atheism (“it just means “not believing in god”, nothing more!”, the superficial mob will say) because the word has acquired much deeper resonances that we ignore at our peril, and has implications far greater than simple rejection of one assertion. But the other word that people love to abuse is “freethought”. The same superficial twits all think it means simply that you’re allowed to think whatever you want (which, it turns out, you can do even in a theocracy) and that it’s a kind of hedonism of the mind in which all things are permissible.

It’s not. It’s a word with a long history, a real meaning, and a greater substance than the poseurs know of. Alex Gabriel does a marvelous job scouring the ignoramuses on the meaning of freethought.

Objections to Freethought‘s place in our masthead are among the laziest, glibbest soundbites our critics have, but more than that display a failure to grasp even the term’s most basic history. Freethought is not ‘free thought’ or uninhibited inquiry – to think so boasts the same green literalism as thinking a Friends’ Meeting House is a shared beach hut or that Scotch pancakes contain Scotch  – though even if it were, it’s silly and inane to assume one’s critics are automatons or say loose collective viewpoints mean dictatorship. Freethought is a specified tradition, European in the main, whose constituents have by and large been countercultural, radical and leftist, everything Condell and cohorts viscerally despise.

I am so fed up with people who say that they understand the meaning of the word “free” and the meaning of the word “thought”, and therefore they understand everything they need to know about “freethought”. And these are often the same people who claim that their tradition is one of knowledge and learning and skepticism, yet they want to replace the complex world of knowledge with a kind of naive literalism.

Heh, “Colonial Colleges”

I like that title so much better than “Ivy League”. Here’s a brief and amusing history of American higher education that focuses almost entirely on those revered and over-rated East coast places (says the guy at a land grant college, a program which only gets a quick mention).

Other things that get only the most cursory but tantalizing mention: a tradition of rioting and dueling. I think, however, we can do without the tale of the student coming back to Princeton to beat up one of his teachers.

I’m holding this excuse in reserve

You know how, as the work piles up and the grading becomes onerous and the students get more demanding and critical, you sometimes need a day off? I wonder if my division secretary would be sympathetic if I called in and said I had the brain whispers really bad one day.

Sick-Day

Actually, the secretaries sometimes look a little fed up with us faculty around the time we’re failing to meet all our deadlines…they might reply that they’re feeling it too, and then I’d be terrified.