Is it ever a good thing when the really big boss flies in unexpectedly and unannounced? (And we are fed. gov.

Shrub is in Puerto Rico?

I thought I was craving garlic mashed potatoes on the weekend, but it seems I am craving them from a specific restaurant. Must go there soon.

ION, I am so tired that I am sure I am coming down with something. I mean, I just had a three day weekend, and I slept in everyone of those days. So how can I be this tired?

My theory? Management coup d'eta.

I'm thinking something like this, although it's hard to believe. But...we had a training on Friday related to some things that have been wrong around here and people made it very clear that most of those ideas/policies came from crazy!boss. The trainer/attorney made crazy!boss look really bad in the training and then crazy!boss stormed out of here on Friday after yelling at us for "sabotaging her."

I could do that. But that would entail borrowing the company car and driving to downtown Evanston.

I got completely soaked going to get my pad see eiw. Sometimes the pursuit of noodles requires great sacrifice.

I hope crazy!boss is getting fired!

I just saw a student's name: Crystan. Presumably pronounced "Kristin." Yoiks!

Body image LOLcat: [link]

This book looks awesome, if depressing: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Psychologist Zimbardo masterminded the famous Stanford Prison Experiment, in which college students randomly assigned to be guards or inmates found themselves enacting sadistic abuse or abject submissiveness. In this penetrating investigation, he revisits—at great length and with much hand-wringing—the SPE study and applies it to historical examples of injustice and atrocity, especially the Abu Ghraib outrages by the U.S. military. His troubling finding is that almost anyone, given the right "situational" influences, can be made to abandon moral scruples and cooperate in violence and oppression. (He tacks on a feel-good chapter about "the banality of heroism," with tips on how to resist malign situational pressures.) The author, who was an expert defense witness at the court-martial of an Abu Ghraib guard, argues against focusing on the dispositions of perpetrators of abuse; he insists that we blame the situation and the "system" that constructed it, and mounts an extended indictment of the architects of the Abu Ghraib system, including President Bush.

eta: Discussed in this excellent Cocktail Party Physics post: [link]

Ooof. Now full with potato.

And eyeing cookies.

The year in corrections and regrets the errors.

t skip skip skip

I'm using the Chicago Manual and can't find how to handle the following type of in-text citation:

Thompson (2005) also feels that book readers “skim and skip around, only rarely reading entire monographs from beginning to end” (as quoted in Borgman, 2007).

Is that right?

Will this paper ever be done????